W.J.T. Mitchell's Image Theory: Living Pictures 9781138185562, 9781315644400

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
Part I Toward a Critical Iconology
1 The Changing Patterns of Iconology: Seven Questions to Mitchell from the Twentieth Century
I
II
III
Notes
2 What is an Image?: W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picturing Theory
The Image at the Crossroads between Semiotics and Aesthetics
Mitchell’s “Pictured Theory” of the Signs and the Senses
The Aesthetic of Images at the Threshold between Nature and Culture
Toward an Animism of Images, or How Images Become “Alive”
Notes
3 Poststructuralist Iconology: The Genealogical and Historical Concerns of Mitchell’s Image Science
Setting a Path toward a New Iconology
Nelson Goodman and the Image/Word Taxonomy
The Genesis of Mitchell’s Image/Word Theory
Belting and Mitchell on the Ideology of Art History
Toward the “iconology of cultural representations”
Notes
4 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology: Dinosaurs, Clones and the Golden Calf in Mitchell’s Image Theory
The Dinosaur as a Symbolic Animal of the Pictorial Turn
Dolly the Sheep: From Living Clone to Living Picture
The Golden Calf as a Metapicture of Image Theory
Notes
5 Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell
Part II (Post)Disciplinary Context
6 From Image/Text to Biopictures: Key Concepts in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory
The Origins of Visual Culture: Definition and Scope
The Question of Turns: Texts and Images
Visual Literacy: Beyond an Ontology of Images
Prolegomena to an Image Science: Living Pictures
Notes
7 The Birth of the Discipline: W.J.T. Mitchell and the Chicago School of Visual Studies
Visual Studies as a De-discipline of Disavowal
Toward a Postmodern Nominalism
Media Hybridity or the Radical Media Critique
Antifoundationalism, or What Do Images Want?
A Concluding Assessment: Are All Images Created Equal?
Notes
8 What Discipline?: On Mitchell’s “Interdisciplinarity” and German Medienwissenschaft
Mitchell’s Concept of the “Indiscipline”
Media Studies in Germany
On the History of Medienwissenschaft and Its Self-description
Medienwissenschaft: Internal Structure, Institutionality and Mediality
Notes
9 Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue: Image Science in the European Context
Notes
10 Images and their Incarnations: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell
Notes
Part III Interpretive Readings
11 What Do Photographs Want?: Mitchell’s Theory of Photography from the Camera Obscura to the Networked Lens
The Camera Obscura as Metaphor and Medium
Digital Photography, Realism and Anachronism
Conclusion: Circulation, Rematerialization and the Networked Lens
Notes
12 The Eyes Have Ears: Sound in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Pictures from Paragone to Occupy Wall Street
Eye and Ear: Intensifying the Effect of an Image
The Listening Eye: A Dialectical Evolution
Making the Invisible Visible
A City of Music: Toward Sonic Images
Notes
13 Living Pictures of Democracy: W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology as Political Philosophy
Populism Revisited: An Iconological Account
The Empty Signifier and the Golden Calf: Two Metapictures
A Matter of Knowledge: Deconstruction of a Founding Picture
Populism and Totemism: New Visions
Notes
14 Showing Showing: Reading Mitchell’s “Queer” Metapictures
Notes
15 After the Pictorial Turn: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell
Notes
Resources
Books Authored or Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell
Special Issues of Critical Inquiry Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell
Other Special Issues of Critical Inquiry
Essays by W.J.T. Mitchell
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory

W.J.T. Mitchell – one of the founders of visual studies – has been at the forefront of many disciplines such as iconology, art history and media studies. His concept of the pictorial turn is known worldwide for having set new philosophical paradigms in dealing with our vernacular visual world. This book will help both students and seasoned scholars to understand key terms in visual studies – pictorial turn, metapictures, literary iconology, image/text, biopictures or living pictures, among many others – while systematically presenting the work of Mitchell as one of the discipline’s founders and most prominent figures. As a special feature, the book includes three comprehensive, authoritative and theoretically relevant interviews with Mitchell that focus on different stages of development of visual studies and critical iconology. Krešimir Purgar is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Among his recent titles is the co-edited volume Theorizing Images (2016), as well as the articles “Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond” (2016) and “What is not an Image (Anymore)? Iconic Difference, Immersion, and Iconic Simultaneity in the Age of Screens” (2015).

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

1 Ethics and Images of Pain Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson 2 Meanings of Abstract Art Between Nature and Theory Edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche 3 Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and its Digital Future John Lechte 4 Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture Edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins 5 Manga’s Cultural Crossroads Edited by Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer 6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture Edited by Lewis Johnson 7 Spiritual Art and Art Education Janis Lander 8 Art in the Asia-Pacific Intimate Publics Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, and Mami Kataoka 9 Performing Beauty in Participatory Art and Culture Falk Heinrich 10 The Uses of Art in Public Space Edited by Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens 11 On Not Looking The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture Edited by Frances Guerin 12 Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices Tim Stott

13 Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art Meiqin Wang 14 Photography and Place Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 Donna West Brett 15 How Folklore Shaped Modern Art A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics Wes Hill 16 Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism David Houston Jones 17 Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth and Siv B. Fjærstad 18 Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes 19 Looking Beyond Borderlines North America’s Frontier Imagination Lee Rodney 20 Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice Techne/Technique/Technology Edited by Camille C Baker and Kate Sicchio 21 Wonder in Contemporary Art Practice Edited by Christian Mieves and Irene Brown 22 W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory Living Pictures Edited by Krešimir Purgar

W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory Living Pictures Edited by Krešimir Purgar

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-18556-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64440-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Out of House Publishing

Dedicated to my dear colleague, Žarko Paić

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

xi xii 1

K R E Š I M I R   P U RGAR

PART I

Toward a Critical Iconology 1

The Changing Patterns of Iconology: Seven Questions to Mitchell from the Twentieth Century

25 27

TI M OTH Y   E RWIN

2

What is an Image? W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picturing Theory

40

F R A N C E S C O  GO RI

3

Poststructuralist Iconology: The Genealogical and Historical Concerns of Mitchell’s Image Science

61

G YÖ R G Y E .   SZ Ő N YI

4

Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology: Dinosaurs, Clones and the Golden Calf in Mitchell’s Image Theory

82

K R E Š I M I R   P U RGAR

5

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell

100

A N D R E W M CN A MA RA

PART II

(Post)Disciplinary Context 6

From Image/Text to Biopictures: Key Concepts in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory M I C H E L E   C OME TA

115 117

x

Contents

7 The Birth of the Discipline: W.J.T. Mitchell and the Chicago School of Visual Studiesᇫ

138

I A N V E RS TE GE N

8 What Discipline? On Mitchell’s “Interdisciplinarity” and German Medienwissenschaft

152

J E N S S C H RÖTE R

9 Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue: Image Science in the European Context

171

L U CA   VA R G IU

10 Images and their Incarnations: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell

182

A S B J Ø R N G RØ N STAD, ØYVIN D VÅGN E S

PART III

Interpretive Readings

195

11 What Do Photographs Want? Mitchell’s Theory of Photography from the Camera Obscura to the Networked Lens

197

TH O M A S S TUB B L E FIE L D

12 The Eyes Have Ears: Sound in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Pictures from Paragone to Occupy Wall Street

213

H A N N A H B   H IGGIN S

13 Living Pictures of Democracy: W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology as Political Philosophy

235

M A X I M E   B O IDY

14 Showing Showing: Reading Mitchell’s “Queer” Metapictures

251

J O H N PAU L   RICCO

15 After the Pictorial Turn: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell

264

K R E Š I M I R   P U RGA R

Resources List of Contributors Index

272 283 287

List of Illustrations

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 11.1 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2

“Family Tree of Images” “The Diagram Image X Text” “Structure of the linguistic sign” “Table of tripartitions” Paolo Chiasera, Choreography of Species: Rosa Tannenzapfen, 2013 Dinosaurs fighting in prehistoric landscape A close-up of Dolly in her stuffed form Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf Moyra Davey, Copperhead Grid, 1990 “Hooded man from Abu Ghraib” Hildegard von Bingen, Imago Mundi; Latin codex, eleventh–twelfth century Guy Fawkes mask, from the film V for Vendetta; Musée des miniatures et décors de cinéma, Lyon, France Movie still from V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, 2005

42 43 45 46 56 85 88 94 209 225 227 245 246

Table 8.1 Core areas of media studies

161

Acknowledgments

Among all the people to whom I should be grateful for the appearance of this book, some of them obviously I cannot thank enough. Tom Mitchell is not just the subject of this book, and he is not only the major topic of all the articles in this volume; he was, and still is, the spiritus movens of my whole intellectual enterprise and scholarly career. When we first met in person, at the Visual Culture Now conference at New York University in 2012, my main task there was to “clear the ground” for him to come to the Visual Studies as Academic Discipline conference, which I  was co-organizing in Zagreb in the fall of 2013. We met again several times between these two occasions, as well as a few times after he had come to Croatia. Although I  had been following his books and articles long before we met, it was only after I knew him personally that the idea for this book came forth. On any other occasion I would always try to keep strictly separate my professional interests from personal preferences, but in this case that pattern changed radically. When I  met Tom, not only did it occur to me that he deserved a book like this, but I realized that I wanted to be the one to put this book together. Aside from everything else that usually comes to mind, I thank Tom primarily for that. It is an honor for me to have had the opportunity to work on this volume. Fourteen people to whom I am also extremely grateful are, of course, the authors and contributors to this book, without whose commitment none of this would have been possible. I thank them not only for having contributed to our mutual endeavor, but also for showing me that there are always so many things to be discovered anew, that so many new readings of topics that have seemingly been exhausted are always possible, and for reassuring me that we are on the right path. I also thank my publisher, Routledge, as well as my editors, Felisa Salvago-Keyes and Christina Kowalski, for having accepted my proposal and for making the publishing process run as smoothly as possible. Three anonymous referees gave very positive assessments of the initial concept of the book, and I am grateful to them for having given the green light.

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Acknowledgments

xiii

Time-consuming and challenging projects like this, where so many people are involved on so many sides, always come down eventually to people who probably provide the most important help but whose names are not supposed to appear on the pages of the book in any other way but this. The role of these caring persons is much more than just giving moral support in everyday routines or dispelling the doubts that every author sooner or later has to face. One such person for me is my wife, Mirela, to whom I am immensely grateful for being my primary purpose in life. Finally, I wish to thank my dear colleague Žarko Paić, who has always had the right words to help me realize what my professional career should look like, and I  am grateful for his continued support over the more than fifteen years of our professional comradeship; and, especially, for providing me with advice and encouragement on the exact occasions when I needed them most, whether I was aware of it or not. Therefore, I dedicate this book to him. K.P.

Introduction Krešimir Purgar

If anyone is hardcore visual studies, it’s me. W.J.T. Mitchell

At the very end of his most recent book – Image Science – W.J.T. Mitchell poses a question in a somewhat rhetorical vein asking what, in the end, image science is, and whether something like that can exist after all – that is, after all the books, articles, lectures and graduate students to which he dedicated himself over the forty years of his career. He readily confesses that, if the answer could make any sense, then it would have to do with something of a decidedly hybrid nature, between “hard” and “soft” sciences, nature and culture. Drawing comparisons with boxing and a wrench, he describes image science not only as a tool for understanding or analyzing images (the “wrench” metaphor), but also as a way of interfering with them, making contact with them and ultimately fighting them (the “boxing” metaphor). According to Mitchell, images are always already responsible for two basic types of relation that exist in the world and are practically unavoidable in two crucial ways: intersubjective and interobjective. In the first case, images serve to instigate communicative action in order to tighten relations between sender and receiver, leading eventually to emotionally charged responses, as in iconoclastic gestures, pornography or other kinds of “undesirable” pictures. In the second case, images serve to establish a representational bond among objects, between images themselves and the objects they represent. Seen in this way, the science of images does not have to deal only with the objects of its enquiry proper but is always itself put under scrutiny by the very objects with which it is striving to come to terms. The objective of the present volume is to show how this paradoxical intertwining of images and their science came into being – not only how it developed in time through many of Mitchell’s writings, but also how it influenced major shifts in contemporary theorizing on images and their impact on culture, politics and media. As with every influential author, these two aspects  – personal achievements and general disciplinary

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advances – will prove inseparable. However, it should be mentioned that when disciplinary questions of image science are concerned, it is not normal to receive the credit for one and the other at the same time. The reason for this can be sought in precisely what Mitchell sees as fundamental to image science:  the way in which contemporary visual disciplines, like visual studies or Bildwissenschaft, “attack” both images and their beholders, as in a boxing match, while at the same time trying to “make peace” with both images and beholders in a kind of mutually acceptable disciplinary discourse. The main problem with visual studies – the discipline with which Thomas Mitchell is mainly associated – is, according to its most prominent antagonists, twofold: the lack of disciplinary rigour in analyzing (art) images, on the one hand, and excessive inclusivity that renders the difference between art and nonart objects invisible or even obsolete, on the other. I will discuss this a little later. The first aim of this book is to show that these “problems with visual studies” are exactly what Mitchell considers its principal accomplishments: the creation of turbulences on the borders of various established disciplines and its efforts to address the issue of their purported selfsufficiency. The second aim is to show that image science cannot base itself on a set of premises, no matter how reliable or trustworthy, in the expectation that it will remain intact over the course of time. It is not that Mitchell’s various interventions in the humanities and social sciences ever implied shortcomings in semiotics, psychoanalytical theory or gender studies per se, or that when these disciplines were applied to different objects he ever found them unworthy of enquiry; it is just that Mitchell never believed any of them could stringently define what images are, what they do, let alone “what they want”. The third aim of the book is, therefore, to show how such a precarious discipline – as visual studies may probably be called – is in fact the least ideologically biased way that we have today to engage with images and with their multifaceted incarnations. But none of these aims would be possible had there been no Tom Mitchell and his intellectually provoking ideas, clearly presented in his twenty-three books (to date) and innumerable articles and translations (to all of which the “Resources” section at the end of this volume makes due reference). If a wider scope is more important than any of these individual aims, then the foremost purpose of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory:  Living Pictures is to situate Mitchell’s work in the relatively short history of visual studies while demonstrating how several of his key terms have helped not just to rearticulate our familiar notions of image analysis, but also to point to some of the directions that contemporary scholarship on images might or should take. A reading of the chapters in this book – many of which have been written by former students of Mitchell – should prove that it is not only the extremely wide scope of knowledge about different kinds of images and a jargon-free writing style that he has passed on

Introduction

3

to his students and readers, which should in some way be transferred to the pages of this volume. Much more important is the specific way that Mitchell has with pictures and their disciplinary or indisciplinary theories. In my opinion, his first well-known book, Iconology (1986), brings onto the intellectual market not just provocative insights about image/ text relations but, more importantly, a sort of “disciplinary relaxation”, one that would soften disciplinary borders in the following decades and mitigate the strict divisions that existed between art history, literary theory, Marxism and gender studies. One might say that this process of permissiveness of intellectual ideas was already under way, especially after Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the end of “the great narratives” of the past in his La Condition postmoderne (1979) and after the publication of some influential books of the early 1980s, such as The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983), edited by Hal Foster.1 All this undoubtedly created a cultural climate in which it became much easier to perform any kind of interdisciplinary work, and not just in the humanities. It comes as no surprise that processes associated with “the postmodern turn” have been closely linked to culture, and particularly visual culture. The postmodern turn can be understood as a set of practices that existed and was performed during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and which was also concerned with the nascent methodology of visual studies which was gradually taking its (in) disciplinary shape during these three decades. In my opinion, the importance of yet another book from the 1980s in shaping the context of what would become known as visual studies should not be overlooked: L’età neobarocca written by the Italian semiotician Omar Calabrese in 1987.2 There is one recurrent trope in Calabrese that reminds me irresistibly of the pictorial turn:  the notion of excess. The neo-baroque paradigm might be compared to the pictorial turn inasmuch as the excess of which Calabrese is speaking is “transformed from a representation of excess into an excess of representation”.3 The pictorial turn is to an important extent a philosophical and theoretical coming-to-terms with the excess of images. Mitchell explains it in a very similar way to the Italian semiotician: as a sort of anxiety and unrest that predicts an imminent change in the cultural universe. Calabrese contends that the baroque spirit in any given era precedes the actual baroque representations in art and culture; only then does it take some kind of excessive form in order finally to become naturalized or normalized in terms of recurrent visual paradigms or styles. Similarly, Mitchell discerns the first symptoms of the pictorial turn neither in some clearly visible, excessive quantity of images nor in significant changes in their formal structure.4 He sees the first symptoms of it where there should be no images at all: in language and philosophy. An important role in the constructive complicating of the visual theory of the time was therefore played by scholars of literary theory – of which Mitchell himself was one, along with Norman Bryson and Mieke

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Bal, among others – who turned to visual topics. Although Bryson and Bal have authored some extremely influential texts that have opened up radically new paths for the so-called new or critical art history (the best example of which is their article “Semiotics and Art History”), this accomplishment had greater impact on the broadening of the theoreticalmethodological scope of art history than on the establishment of some new, more general and more inclusive science of images. They introduced to the old discipline what was considered to be a new set of tools (semiotics, psychoanalysis, gender studies) in order to explain artworks of the past from a radically modern perspective, more adjusted to the needs of the contemporary audience and contemporary theory.5 However, as Mitchell suggested, this new perspective was still not new enough compared to the essentially changed paradigm of the ways in which people make sense of the world: in other words, any radically new approach had to take into account the pictorial turn. His interventions in Iconology and Picture Theory were in direct opposition to what Bal and Bryson were doing at the time; that is, Mitchell forcefully rejected the attempt to “linguistify” art history because he thought that “the linguistic turn” and its methods based on language as a master-narrative for theory could no longer hold. As we will see later in this Introduction, as well throughout the whole book, “rather than colonize art history with methods derived from textual disciplines”, Mitchell wanted to “strike back at the empire of language”.6 Basically, this was his Weltanschauung, which served as a firm ground for him to bring into the discussion three important things: (1) a new theoretical apparatus as a sort of modulation of reality itself; (2) a rereading of existing literature in order to reconceptualize seemingly neutral notions such as image, text or media; and (3) bringing back images to the position that Charles Sanders Peirce called “the firstness” of the image in the production of meaning and emotion. Another example that proves that changes within the discipline of art history alone could not have led to putting the question of pictures as such to the forefront of intellectual debate, and that divergent interests between art history and a general science of images were increasingly apparent, is the above-mentioned collection of essays, The Anti-Aesthetic. One of the contributors to Foster’s volume was a renowned theorist of modern and contemporary art, Rosalind Krauss, whose article was titled “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”. With this article she definitively joined the not so large community of scholars (to which Bal and Bryson also belonged) who had opened up a new and different kind of discourse. She showed, for instance, that the existing historical telos that linked – to follow her example – the classic equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius set in the middle of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome with spatial interventions in Yucatán in 1969 by Robert Smithson had become highly improbable. What was earlier considered by art historians to be the natural state of a sculpture – its site, its home and its place – in the late nineteenth century

Introduction

5

in Rodin’s Balzac and Gates of Hell already “crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative condition – a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place”.7 According to Krauss, during the 1950s this “sitelessness” exhausted its epistemological ground and was eventually replaced by complex systems of intervention that reckoned with the sculpture in the expanded field of landscape/not-landscape and architecture/notarchitecture. This practice was especially evident in works by Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim and others.8 The notion of expansion, however, which Krauss used in her essay, was referring to the expanded field of modernism, not of culture at large. The expansion that she envisioned for art was meant only in terms of new formal and spatial acquisitions in order for sculpture to appropriate an expanded field of artistic vision and not an expanded field of cultural reception.9 The telos of art history was therefore conveniently adapted in order to accommodate new sources of inspiration following two “analytical lines of modern art” – as had been masterfully presented by Filiberto Menna in the 1970s10 – and not in order to question any of the naturalized notions of the “artistic sublime”. I mention Krauss’s intervention in Foster’s volume not because I  essentially disagree with her assessment of how the “expanded field of sculpture” had to be understood within the trajectory of contemporary art (since in part I  do agree with her), but because I do not quite follow the belief that the kind of art and cultural theory presented in The Anti-Aesthetic may have led to anything similar to the contemporary science of images. Notwithstanding the great importance and invaluable merits of the book, which I bought and read during one of my summer trips as an undergraduate student of art history in Amsterdam in 1985, it is important to underscore that the type of inter- or nondisciplinary discourse that we today call “visual studies” is not primarily indebted to the tradition of scholarship that this book was promoting. I mention The Anti-Aesthetic also because those who do not share the opinion I  have just expressed may help us to better situate Mitchell’s role in establishing the discipline of visual studies. One of them is the Australian scholar Ross Woodrow, who a few years ago said: the importance of Mitchell’s Iconology does not match his own recent assessment of it as the launching text for the study of “visual culture, visual literacy, image science and iconology” and certainly his claim that it was written in the mid-1980s at a time when “notions such as visual culture and a new art history were nothing more than rumors”.11 Woodrow contends that Mitchell’s statement “does not ring true considering every art student in progressive art schools in Australia, if not elsewhere,

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had read … Hal Foster’s anthology The Anti-Aesthetic (1983) long before approaching Mitchell’s Iconology in the library”.12 Acknowledging, somewhat ironically, Mitchell’s accomplishments in subverting the twentieth-century methodological meaning of iconology, Woodrow says that the book in question – Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology – depended so heavily on language, history and allusions that it practically needed no illustrations, apart from a few line diagrams.13 The Australian author says that during the 1980s two of the most significantly scrutinized essays in art schools were those by Louis Marin on Nicolas Poussin and by Michel Foucault on Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, implying probably that certain other texts (and not Mitchell’s Iconology) should be credited with the primacy of influence in what was already under way under the term “new art history”. If that is, more or less, what Woodrow ultimately thinks, then he and Rosalind Krauss on the one hand and Tom Mitchell on the other are not talking about the same thing. Although I  agree that in Mitchell’s Iconology one did not necessarily have to grasp the contours of the nascent discipline of visual studies, the book was not, nevertheless, offered by its author as an advance in art history. Whether art historians felt particularly addressed by its spirit is completely another story, which has to do with the intellectual climate of the early 1980s in which art historians, among others, were “interpellated” by the radically changing disciplinary foundations of the contemporary world. The change was brought about by the tremendous proliferation of images produced outside of the consecrated realm of art, and the understanding of that process was in one way or another already present in authors like Michael Baxandall, Norman Bryson, Svetlana Alpers and Keith Moxey.14 Mitchell’s Iconology, and even more so his Picture Theory (1994), should therefore be credited with having encouraged a change of disciplinary formations in all disciplines within the humanities that felt that the primacy and exclusivity of “pure” or “high” art was giving way before the vernacular visuality of everyday culture. What ensued was a collision of political and ideological interests on a much larger scale, which has been succinctly formulated by Margaret Dikovitskaya: The scholarship that rejects the primacy of art in relation to other discursive practices and yet focuses on the sensuous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual can no longer be called art history – it deserves the name of visual studies.15 Ironic as it may sound, the visual studies that flourished in the AngloAmerican world (as well as the Bildwissenschaft that was rooted in the German-speaking countries), found just as firm ground in the methodology of the most prominent European art historians as in the deconstructivist methods of poststructuralism; but in spite of that, visual studies was

Introduction

7

in the beginning largely seen as alien formation. Horst Bredekamp convincingly demonstrated how deeply German image science was indebted to art historians like Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky; this debt was obviously defined not so much in terms of interdisciplinary scope but primarily by their demonstration of a general interest in the functions of all images (Warburg), a very structured methodology (Wölfflin), and a sincere interest in the nascent technology of moving images (Panofsky). It seems that the fate of the seminal Bredekamp article “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft” was twofold:  first, it succeeded in providing a different genealogy of modern art history in such a way that would present its progenitors as very serious in their efforts to make of art history a more inclusive “science” known today as Bildgeschichte or Bildwissenschaft; but second, and even more importantly, it proved less successful in backing up all the efforts of contemporary visual studies scholars, whose attempts to follow (in one way or the other) the paths of their illustrious predecessors were largely disregarded. Bredekamp sees this oversight as a tremendous failure, particularly because American art historians have introduced numerous different kinds of insight into the European scholarly context and vice versa.16 He regrets that although in the English-speaking world there are of course many art historians like David Freedberg who represent art history as Bildwissenschaft, one has the impression that, for example, Barbara Stafford and James Elkins are perceived not as regular art historians any more, but as heretical “visual studyists” and that W.J.T. Mitchell is seen not as a builder, but as a burner of bridges. This kind of camp thinking is disastrous for both sides  – and for art history on both sides of the Atlantic. The separation of visual studies from art history and the retreat of the more conservative members of this discipline onto precious little islands would put an end to art history as Bildgeschichte.17 The idea that art should not interfere with rapidly growing areas of visual-cultural (nonart) experiences became particularly obvious when the concurrent process of various “interfering” theories apparently went out of control after the “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” was published in issue 77 of the famous October journal in 1996. As stated in an interview with Hal Foster given to Marquard Smith in 2008, this questionnaire was “cooked up” by Rosalind Krauss and Foster himself and was meant as a provocation inspired, as the story goes, by the suspicion that Krauss and Foster had “about certain aspects of visual studies as it was framed at the time (1996)”. It is now generally known that the editors of October used the “questionnaire” in order to (dis)qualify the emerging discipline of visual studies as a threat to people’s ability to learn, to appreciate and to

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understand art in the society of spectacle in which they are overwhelmed by the simplicity of choices that are offered to them indiscriminately every day. In the interview with Smith, held twelve years after the questionnaire, Hal Foster admits that much more than just an intellectual quarrel was at stake then, as it is today: There is a dialectic of Art History and Visual Studies, too, in which the latter term opens up the former, while the former term keeps the latter rigorous. Isn’t that what interdisciplinary work does, that is, if it is truly “inter” and “disciplinary”? In any case I  don’t see Art History and Visual Studies as quite as antagonistic as they were presented then; and even then I felt there were resources for Visual Studies within Art History and vice versa. The October issue was driven by two primary concerns. The first was the way in which Visual Studies was too taken by the visual, by a fixation on the image, a fixation long questioned in advanced art. (Maybe we drew the line too quickly from “the visual” to “the virtual”, but it seemed Visual Studies had done so for us.) The second had to do with the anthropological turn … and the atrophying of the mnemonic dimension of art as a potential result.18 Perhaps it is still too soon to grasp whether the misunderstandings between art history – as the “master-discipline” that was the first to deal systematically with visual artifacts, a status it has been claiming for a couple of centuries – on the one hand, and visual studies – a much newer “indiscipline” – on the other, were actually provoked by “turf policing” of the visual areas of culture, or whether these misunderstandings are predominantly ideological in nature. Should the former be the case, then Mieke Bal is probably right when she claims that visual studies may be accused of considering the contemporary culture as “primarily visual”, thus isolating its pictorial aspects and somehow denigrating all other ways in which culture is being created every day. Mieke Bal refers to this primacy of the pictoriality as “visual essentialism”, and remarks that visual studies paradoxically stumbled upon this kind of essentialism “in the paranoid corners of the art history” to which visual studies should have offered an alternative in the first place.19 If it were a question only of which particular discipline is responsible for overseeing the realm of the visual, then it would probably not be so important which discipline that might be, as Bal herself contends, because disciplinary boundaries or turf policing are today so dependent on individual understandings of terms such as discipline, art and the visual that the meaning of essentialism in this context becomes practically useless. Let me explain this a little more. Essentialism does not seem to be the problem when one essentially deals with images or with animals or with the human brain or with any other aspect of human

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activity provided the concrete activity leads to a better understanding of any one of them. A  “bad” kind of essentialism occurs when one’s approach is based on an unquestionable set of premises that always lead to results that could have been predicted even before the analysis started and not, as Mieke Bal has it, when one focuses on that “purityassuming cut between what is visual and what is not”.20 This “bad” kind of essentialism should be more appropriately called ideology, and I believe that visual studies might easily be credited with a deliberate lack of any political, disciplinary or identitarian preference. But visual studies is indeed essentially interested in the visual, although some new interventions disclose that this does not seem to be its most contested feature. Nicholas Davey, for instance, has recently noted in visual studies a kind of reverse side of essentialism that he calls “the ontogenetic fallacy”. With that he refers to a set of founding principles of visual studies that lead this discipline to a neglect of a fundamental distinction that exists between the ontogenetic characteristics of the designed object and the artwork, which is a failure that “not only threatens the variety of study within visual culture but also disrupts the possibility of radical critique within aesthetic experience”. On the other hand, as he puts it, “hermeneutical aesthetics is of strategic importance for bringing to light what is at stake within the study of visual culture” because “hermeneutical aesthetics insists on making an important ontological distinction within visual discourse between a designed object and an artwork”.21 Davey thinks that visual studies as a discipline overrides this essential distinction, which eventually and regrettably leads to a dissolution of the very concept of art. With this assertion Davey very succinctly encompasses and expresses once again all the previous “fears and fallacies” that existed around the study of visual culture to which Mitchell refers in his seminal article “Showing Seeing:  A  Critique of Visual Culture”, which appeared in 2002.22 While in this article he was not directly polemicizing with October’s “Questionnaire on Visual Culture”, it is clear that Mitchell felt the need to bring art historians and other members of the concerned community face to face with their most latent and most paradoxical anxiety of all – the fear of images. Clearly, we are not talking here about the fear of pictures as works of art but about the fear of “the liquidation of art as we have known it”,23 once all images, artistic or not, are drowned in the swamp of the indiscriminate field of visual studies. It is interesting that all the myths and fallacies about the new image science that Mitchell enlists relate to the anxiety at breaking the boundaries between traditionally distinct areas of life and scholarly interest – such as those that separate high art from popular art, single medium from mixed media, history from anthropology – which brings to mind the discussion on essentialism and how deeply the radically antiessentialist and indisciplinary attitudes of visual studies have permeated the contemporary theory.

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Does it come as a surprise, then, when in one of his subsequent articles Mitchell claims that “there are no visual media and that all media are mixed media”? It surely does not, as this assertion deserves to be anthologized as yet another of the many disciplinary extensions inherent to visual studies to which this book gives due tribute. In “There Are No Visual Media”, Mitchell asserts that, in the wake of postmodernism, any idea of a pure visual art, let alone a pure medium, should be abandoned. Mitchell was referring here to the high-modernist battle that Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, among others, fought, “insisting on the purity and specificity of media, rejecting hybrid forms, mixed media and anything that lies ‘between the arts’ as a form of ‘theater’ or rhetoric that is doomed to inauthenticity and second-rate aesthetic status”.24 If one wants to come to terms with theoretical claims that not so long ago ruled (neo-)avant-garde essentialism  – which today seem utterly outdated – Mitchell proposes a solution: “for art historians today, the safest conclusion would be that the notion of a purely visual work of art was a temporary anomaly, a deviation from the much more durable tradition of mixed and hybrid media”.25 But then a logical question ensues: what was this battle fought over; why would we need a pure medium, after all? Do we really need to “deconstruct” art theory or art history in order to unveil their meaninggenerating processes and, more importantly, is visual studies the best candidate for the assignment? It is my understanding, and hopefully this book will prove it, that Mitchell has in fact never cared about disciplinarity, visuality or media, for that matter; what he cares about are objects, phenomena and events. To put it differently, Mitchell’s “image theory”, if we come to agree that there is one after all, consists of a much more complex system of individual cases that may help in structuring our helplessly unstructured picture of the contemporary world. Mitchell’s proposal for visual studies is exactly the opposite of the methodology used by all other branches of the humanities, insofar as he always starts his analysis from the concrete phenomenon to be unveiled, only after which does some kind of systematic structuring (or deliberate lack thereof) arise. For example, the famous “pictorial turn” that he announced in the article published in ArtForum in 1992 had been embedded in his critical assessment of two important books that appeared just at that time: one was the English translation Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form, published in 1991, and the other was Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, published one year earlier. At the very beginning of his article, Mitchell mentions that although various models of textuality and discourse that emerged during the twentieth century were already classified by Richard Rorty as a “linguistic turn”, “it does seem clear that another shift in what philosophers talk about is happening, and that once again a complexly related

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transformation is occurring in other disciplines of the human sciences and in the sphere of public culture”, a shift that he wants to call the “pictorial turn”.26 But where exactly did he see the pictorial turn taking place, and is there any systematic interpretation of what it means, how it works, what its main characteristics are? If Mitchell had offered answers to all these questions (which a reader would normally have looked for), then visual studies probably would have become just another discipline with its theoretical apparatuses and ideological agenda – the kind of discipline that creates its object of study according to the discipline’s “rules of engagement” and not according to the object itself. More to the point, the particular symptom or object of the pictorial turn resided specifically in these two books, which Mitchell saw at the time as an allegory of the entire epoch – as a symbol of a renewed interest in visuality. One could argue that the publication of these two books (one of which was an English translation from the German of a half-century-old essay) is everything but paradigmatic, and that no theory can be based on that fact alone. To such an opinion I  counter the following thesis:  the purpose of the pictorial turn as a conceptual matter was never to become a theory proper, to organize a body of knowledge or to represent somebody’s point of view. Instead, as theory, it should be regarded – together with Mitchell’s whole project of critical iconology – as a sort of “cultural symptomatology”, as I  will propose later in the book. The purpose of the pictorial turn was “only” to mark a shift in people’s behavior by looking for both huge technological changes and imperceptible cultural symptoms, no matter which area of culture those happened to be found in. The “theory” and “discipline” came much later, but, again, not in the guise of textbook knowledge with a fixed set of references that can be applied following general instructions for use, and rather in the form of nondisciplinary tactics of explanatory seeing  – which is basically what visual studies is now. This kind of programmatic de-disciplinarization is paradoxically visible in what turned out to be Mitchell’s most programmatic text: “The Pictorial Turn”. The most frequently quoted passage from that article states: Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of a picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality.27 The concept of the “picture as a complex interplay” between very disparate fields of enquiry, artistic expressions, media platforms, ideologies and disciplines is both Mitchell’s “political” statement on the nature of his

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own theoretical work and on the nature of a discipline that should be indulgent enough to accommodate whatever needs to be assessed from the specific viewpoint of pictorial analysis. Therefore, instead of applying a set of historically established and methodologically “approved” disciplinary rules, Mitchell’s method consists in thorough observation of various artistic, media, political and social phenomena and then in putting them under the scrutiny of a sort of methodology “on demand”. Through his consistent antidisciplinary procedures, and after numerous objects and cases have been analyzed in such a way, a “reversed” kind of theory ensues:  one that is based on observations and assessments instead of a priori theoretical premises. The best reconstruction of such a method is offered by Mitchell himself in the article titled “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, in which he sums up what he considers to be the most important terms frequently associated with his work and, as he puts it, “four basic ideas [that] have continually asserted themselves”.28 These terms are: the pictorial turn, image/picture, metapictures and biopictures. The reader will find numerous references to all of them in this book, as well as explanations of the different uses that Mitchell makes of them. However, for the sake of methodological concerns it is important to realize that these concepts are for Mitchell just indications of various processes of looking, reading and writing that have only eventually – after several years of practical use – deserved to be categorized as “fundamental concepts”. They were not based on a fully developed theoretical overview, but should be regarded as models of reconstruction of verified field evidence. In addition to these four, many more have appeared over the years and become available as appropriate tools of image analysis: for example, the concept of totemism/fetishism/ idolatry, then image x text, or living pictures, not to mention Mitchell’s conspicuous insistence on calling his own practice “critical iconology”, which points directly toward a constitution of a new, general science of images. To deal properly with what appears to be the ontological ground of image science, we must recall the already foundational indisciplinarity of visual studies that Tom Mitchell opted for in his text “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, where he stated that we must make a distinction between “top-down” interdisciplinarity, a “comparative, structural formation that aims to know the overarching system or conceptual totality within which all the disciplines are related”, and the kind of “compulsory” interdisciplinarity characteristic of studies in gender, sexuality and ethnicity “improvised out of a new theoretical object and a political project with its attendant urgencies. They are knowledge projects, but they also have more or less explicit moral and political agendas”.29 In his more recent, reassessed ideas on this topic, he has stated that, no matter which of the above categories one falls into, “interdisciplinarity turns out to be as nonthreatening to the disciplines as it is to corporate capitalism. It

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just reinstalls the same old disciplinary values of rigorous normativity, productivity, originality, and explanatory power at a higher level”.30 The latter assertion betrays Mitchell’s general reluctance to take any very firm position in one or another disciplinary trench, which was already visible in his somewhat ambiguous statement in 2002, when he first clearly stated that “visual studies is the study of visual culture”, immediately continuing that this avoids the ambiguity that plagues subjects like history, in which the field and the things covered by the field bear the same name. In practice, of course, we often confuse the two, and I prefer to let visual culture stand for both the field and its content, and to let the context clarify the meaning.31 I would propose, therefore, following Ian Verstegen’s insights in Chapter 7 of the current volume, that these statements be read as Mitchell’s “surprising disavowals” that characterize visual studies as a general (in)disciplinary enterprise. Notwithstanding the fair number of theoretical concepts with which he should be credited, as authors in this collection will show, Mitchell’s image science or iconology is based not on any number of preset key terms, but on the constantly shifting ontologies of the concept of image as such. It goes without saying that the lack of the founding ontological basis for the concept of image has widened enormously the scope of both individual research projects and theoretical overviews within visual studies. The paradoxical nature of the discipline is particularly visible in the twofold parallel process developed out of the attempts of visual studies scholars to demarcate the area of study, on the one hand, and to define the principal objects of study, on the other. It was argued during the Stone Summer Seminar, organized by James Elkins in Chicago in 2008, that, in order to resolve this parallelism, in which the discipline and its object may never come to terms with each other and may continue to deal with strictly separate sets of problems, it would be necessary – if not to answer the essential or essentialist questions about images – at least to create a sort of taxonomical grid in which different kinds of image would strive to find their ontological ground. The reason why visual studies will probably never be able to make its parallel tasks intersect is precisely its radically antiessentialist stance. During the Stone Summer Seminar, one of the interlocutors, Gottfried Boehm, asked a very direct question: “How much history is needed to understand our question – What is an image?”. The response that Mitchell gave somehow simultaneously unmasked the whole project of his iconology as a general image science and his personal, fundamental antiontological position:  he said that if iconology were to answer questions on the ontology of images, then the best way to approach it would be

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to always historicize, always decontextualize and always anachronize.32 These words clearly recall – at least in spirit, if not verbatim – the first bildwissenschaftliche attempts made by Aby Warburg in his Mnemosyne Atlas. My sense of them is that we cannot grasp the ultimate meaning of any visual artifact, be it a timeless work of art or a simple, seemingly worthless cutout from a magazine, unless we constantly negotiate with a “picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality”, as Mitchell programmatically stated almost a quarter of a century ago. *** In trying to approach both the enviable time span of Mitchell’s professional career and his disciplinary scope, but also in trying to determine an approach that would do justice to some of the most important of his accomplishments, I  decided, with few exceptions, to commission for this volume original essays from both younger and experienced scholars who were in most cases already deeply involved with Mitchell’s work, either by having been his graduate students or by having translated his major works into their mother tongue. I am talking here about scholars who have spent many hours and days with Mitchell not just discussing his concepts in direct conversation but also probing them, disputing them and thus helping these concepts  – once they were published  – to be clearer and more theoretically relevant. Virtually all the contributors to this book have had an intellectual relationship with the American scholar and, as readers will see, not all of them always go along his line of argumentation. In a few cases the rule that articles must not have appeared in English prior to being published in this book was deliberately broken, but hopefully for good reason. In this category are two interviews with Mitchell: one was conducted by Andrew McNamara in 1996 (Chapter 5), and the other was given to Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes ten years later (Chapter  10). Both interviews prove that conversation is a completely different form of communication that lets a partner in the dialogue face his own previous assessments and perhaps deal with them more critically from a different angle altogether. A third interview was conducted by Krešimir Purgar on several occasions and during the lunch breaks of various conferences which Mitchell attended between 2013 and 2016. Apart from the above-mentioned scholarly arguments that justify the inclusion of these three interviews, they bring to this volume a particular flavor of intimacy and proximity that is uncharacteristic of scholarly books. Furthermore, they provide an invaluable opportunity for readers to assess the development of Mitchell’s thinking and argumentation as developed and (auto)criticized over time.

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The only critical text in this book that has appeared in English prior to its publication here is Timothy Erwin’s chapter, “The Changing Patterns of Iconology: Seven Questions to Mitchell from the Twentieth Century” (Chapter 1 of this volume). As a matter of fact, the text originally appeared under a different title in 1988 in the journal Works and Days.33 The reason for including it here is that it is one of the first assessments to deal more seriously with what would eventually become known as Mitchell’s version of critical iconology, or visual studies, if you like. It occurred to me that Timothy Erwin was not just one of the first critical readers of Mitchell to have grasped the radical novelty of his thinking, which thirty years ago challenged existing disciplinary and interartistic studies. What I  found particularly appropriate for this book are the seven questions that Erwin posed to Mitchell at the end of his text, thus having initiated a sort of parallel interlocutory dimension that is present throughout the current volume. Although Mitchell answered the questions in the same issue, posing them again today and reassessing them from the radically changed perspective that digital culture, biopolitics and globalization have brought about, will inevitably bring unexpected insights without the need for them to be answered directly this time. W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory is divided into three main parts, following the traces that the American scholar has left in: (1) developing critical iconology as a general science of images; (2) creating a sort of postdisciplinary or indisciplinary context that has developed as a corollary of the intertwining of visual, image and media studies; and (3) instigating theoretical discourses in fields and about topics contiguous to the purely visual. In Part I, four authors try to delineate the contours of Mitchell’s image theory, discussing it, confronting it and relating it to a much broader context than that claimed by “iconology proper”. For instance, at the very beginning of Chapter 2, Francesco Gori in “What is an Image? W.J.T. Mitchell's Picturing Theory”, states that the general science of images is what Mitchell calls critical iconology. The adjective ‘critical’ is meant to distinguish it from ‘iconology’ in the strict sense – the philological study of the literary influences in painting and sculpture, and vice versa. Critical iconology, in fact, not only takes into account artistic images and literary oeuvres, but opens up the research to … all kinds of images and discourses. It does so in order to create a discipline that would go “beyond the sole relations between images and language, studying their migrations across all media”. Gori particularly takes into account Mitchell’s very concept of image – not so much its ontological but its relational ground – and eventually focuses on strategies that Mitchell uses to show how disciplinary questions are transformed, by way of theory, into the specific

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kind of life and animism of pictures; or, the other way round, how Mitchell “pictures” his theory, instead of creating a theory of pictures. In Chapters 3 and 4 György E. Szőnyi and Krešimir Purgar approach the formation of Mitchell’s critical iconology from different perspectives – genealogical in Szőnyi’s essay, cultural in Purgar’s. They give readers the opportunity to construct a trajectory from his first collection of essays “The Language of Images”, the title of which “still bore the ‘linguistic turn’ paradigm”, but whose content was already questioning this paradigm, all the way to iconology as “cultural representations” (Szőnyi) or “cultural symptomatology” (Purgar), in which very few of the key terms of the older discipline have survived. Szőnyi meticulously shows the development, and he points to particular instances in and through which the dissolution of the methodologies of the traditional disciplines was taking place, not just iconology but art history and semiotics, as well as in all other disciplines that insisted on maintaining the metaphysical divide between different sign systems and between art and nonart pictures. Purgar’s chapter concludes that Mitchell definitively overcomes this metaphysical divide by offering even “dinosaurs”, “sheep” and “the Golden Calf” as theoretical tools of a critical iconology. These tools are systematically employed in several of Mitchell’s books to represent one possible way in which iconology (or visual studies) as a flexible (in)discipline can be translated into a visual theory composed of different sets of working methodologies developed “on demand”. In Part II, the authors consider disciplinary and institutional concerns in relation to visual studies. During the 1990s, the establishment of a new critical practice proved to be highly context-dependent, in terms of both its place within the general academic community and the specific methodologies that in the following years started to differentiate one “school” from the other. Mitchell’s role in these processes cannot be highlighted enough. Nonetheless, we can isolate three principal axes along which image science was gradually taking shape; or, to put it sharply, there are three main points of confrontation that marked the early years of a new visual theory that was named and treated in different ways depending not only on the continent but even the occasion. The first point is the disciplinary establishment of visual studies within the Anglo-American academic world; the second is its disciplinary relation to what was happening elsewhere, primarily in Europe within German Bildwissenschaft, which included Mitchell’s continued communication with Gottfried Boehm and Jacques Rancière; the third point deals with the long-lasting process through which Mitchell gained himself a specific position on both sides of the Atlantic, both affirmed and contested. All three aspects are given extremely informative contextualization in Chapter 6, by Michele Cometa. From his insights we learn not just that the three aforementioned processes are all to be traced as parallel events in the history of visual studies, but also that only if seen together can they reveal a fourth

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important point: the open terminology of Mitchell’s image science that would gradually be composed over the course of years, from image/text to pictorial turn to biopictures and onward. Cometa’s overview shows that visual studies is unique as a discipline in having gained prominence institutionally, in having developed methodologically and in having grown terminologically in mutually interdependent processes. In Chapter  7 Ian Verstegen gives a sort of “archeology” of visual studies, noting that traces of the discipline could already be detected during the 1980s in various activities at the University of Chicago. He states that although no formal Chicago school existed for visual studies, a more informal arrangement existed for a time in the so-called Laocoön group, and then the Chicago School of Media Theory (CSMT), which was centered on Mitchell’s seminar on media theory and included, among others, [Joel] Snyder, [James] Elkins and Hans Belting (then teaching in Chicago), not to mention the dynamics of the Critical Inquiry editorial board. This alone would be more than enough to sense that as early as the 1970s one was witnessing a peculiar friction among many different individuals, even if it is impossible to find commonalities among such a diverse group of people. Verstegen develops the argument that, in the academic context of the University of Chicago, Mitchell became famous for his consistent “antifoundationalism” and strong “relativism”, which he carefully nurtured in all phases of his career. However, in order to find out what images really want, Verstegen contends, we need a more direct approach than the one in which “all images are created equal”. In his view, one has to choose whether to go for a theory that does not presuppose any possible meaning of its object of enquiry – and to follow Mitchell – or to accept a less pluralist and more confined sense of image – the road not taken by Mitchell. This is by all means one of the crucial dilemmas connecting visual studies to its “neighboring” phenomenon of Bildwissenschaft, which flourished in German-speaking countries or, with perhaps less apparent similarities, to Medienwissenschaft, as Jens Schröter discusses in Chapter  8. On the other hand, as Luca Vargiu explains in Chapter  9, the high-profile debate between the most prominent exponents of visual studies and image science – which Tom Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm definitely are – marks just the tip of an iceberg that included some very competent interlocutors in Italy, France and elsewhere who shared the same sensitivity to visual phenomena but who discerned the shifts in image scholarship not in contemporary media, nor in studies on the word/image relationship or vernacular images, but in places where these changes were not so likely to appear – medieval studies, for a start. It

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is extremely interesting throughout all of Part II to read how Mitchell’s variant of iconology has shaken up the complacency (to put it in Michael Ann Holly’s terms) in various disciplines that were not normally affected by his broad range of themes but nevertheless felt addressed by them. Although Luca Vargiu makes a reference to the important role Hans Belting played in the shaping of Bildwissenschaft as a more objectoriented discipline – as opposed to visual studies, which was considered to be more aware of the ideological context of images – he admits that progress in medieval studies “has its stronger and more meaningful motivations within this discipline, beyond parallelisms, similarities, and any exchanges with other fields of knowledge”, that is to say, beyond what was happening in visual studies. Seen in this way, in spite of the tremendous influence that Hans Belting had in establishing an agenda for Bildwissenschaft, his anthropology of images should not be aligned with what Mitchell was doing on the other side of the Atlantic. Then, perhaps, we would be more ready to follow Schröter’s line of argumentation that Mitchell’s types of interdisciplinarity are not “clear-cut options existing side by side”, but are “aspects or phases of the performative process of the destabilization and restabilization of disciplinary regimes”, a phenomenon clearly visible in German Medienwissenschaft, which was taking shape at about the same time. Schröter confirms that the German version is “similar to visual culture, because its defining term, “media”, “names a problematic rather than a well-defined theoretical object” (as Mitchell puts it in “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”). Part III provides four case studies from fields as diverse as theory of photography, cultural history, political science and queer studies, showing a sort of legacy of Mitchell’s methodology (a methodology that was not always “gentle” in relation to its objects of study) and thus revealing both processes of dissolution of the existing knowledge and clear pathways for new epistemic practices. Moreover, the contributions in Part III all testify to the particular sensitivity not just to specific themes covered by Mitchell himself, but to a much broader spectrum of cultural phenomena that a general science of images and its proponents have identified and analyzed over time. This is perhaps the most important aspect of this book: how to use knowledge to gather new insights and at the same time let methodology challenge its own knowledge-making procedures. This strategy is clearly visible in Chapter 11, by Thomas Stubblefield, when he explains how Mitchell’s reluctance to accept any kind of essentialism may lead to a sort of reversed essentialism, or antideterminism, which falls victim to its own sincere belief in the power of subjectivity. He says that for Mitchell, granting a distinct technical identity to the particular medium (photography, in this case), is like isolating the “being” of a given medium from the social world in which it operates, thus overemphasizing a single aspect of its technical determination. Stubblefield argues that sometimes – and especially when it comes to digital culture and digital

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photography  – the power of subjectivity is inevitably contingent upon the very same set of rules that it wishes to come to terms with: namely, the digital. Based on a somewhat “iconoclastic” premise, yet with the same deep sense of understanding the essence of the finest nuances of Mitchell’s writing, is Chapter 12, in which Hannah Higgins discerns a sonic alternative to our overwhelming infatuation with pictures and the spectacle of visuality. Following Mitchell’s metaphor of sound, she proposes that, exactly because images in our societies can be neither avoided nor smashed, we should all become more sensitive to other levels of their communicative agency, not primarily the visual level. Thankfully, it is Mitchell himself who offers the reader an alternative that locates sound at the center of his notion of image, when he writes: I propose, then, that we treat these … idols in the Nietzschean sense, as icons that can be sounded but not smashed with the hammer – or better, the tuning fork of critical reflection … In my view we must sound the images of the spectacle, not dream of smashing them.34 Higgins points out that this image of Nietzsche’s tuning fork is our alternative, if there is one after all, to the almighty power of images. The book’s two final interpretations originate from one premise from which the branching of Mitchell’s image theory is clearly visible in different aspects of culture where images are not necessarily in the core interest. In Chapter  13, Maxime Boidy states that although Mitchell is not a political philosopher, there is political philosophy in his iconology. Tacking between insights by Ernesto Laclau, Gustave Le Bon and Jacques Rancière, Boidy draws an original contour of the political body in Mitchell’s image theory claiming, among other things, that Poussin’s painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf to some extent establishes a visual rendering of “populist democracy”. Because populism as a sin can be regarded as the perfect modern example of classical idolatry, which describes people’s veneration of a wrong image instead of the true (word of) God, Boidy endeavors to discover whether we can view the famous Mitchell metapicture as a positive description of the “populist” democratic impulse. John Paul Ricco’s contribution in Chapter  14 can be understood in the same metatheoretical manner: Mitchell is not a queer studies scholar but his image science is, in a way, queer. Ricco writes that Mitchell’s theory is essentially concerned with the nakedness of any image and is constantly pointing to the ways in which an image can function as “showing seeing” and “showing showing”. Image science, then, would be a “science of exhibitionism”. I  certainly agree with Ricco that “it is precisely this ‘wildness’ and madness of images that Mitchell has called our attention to, again and again, over the past thirty years”.

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Krešimir Purgar

Notes 1 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 31–42. 2 Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque:  A  Sign of the Times, translated by Charles Lambert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Italian edition: L’età neobarocca (Bari: Laterza, 1987). 3 Ibid., 62. 4 Another important characteristic of the neo-baroque that makes it somewhat similar to the concept of the pictorial turn is that it rejects normative discourses that try to normalize what may have once been regarded as abnormal or unacceptable and thus make of abnormality a new norm. Calabrese contends that “static epochs” revolve around their systemic center, while “dynamic epochs” favor periphery and boundary, but he is ready to admit that in the era of contemporary baroque these differences are not so sharply visible. On the contrary, as he says, neo-baroque “adopts a limit and yet makes it seem excessive by trespassing on a purely formal level; or, alternatively, [neo-baroque] produces excess and yet refers to it as a limit in order to render acceptable a revolution in terms of content; or, finally, it confuses or renders indistinguishable the two procedures” (ibid., 66). In my opinion, the concept of metapicture that Tom Mitchell proposed in his Picture Theory is paradigmatic of the neo-baroque dynamics between limit and excess. Following the terminology proposed by Omar Calabrese, metapictures might be considered artifacts that posses “unstable uses”. Calabrese argues that “the phenomenon of instability appears in ‘neobaroque’ objects on at least three levels. One, that of the themes and figures represented. Two, that of the textual structures that contain the representations. Three, that of the relation between figures and texts, and the way in which these are received. The three levels can be more or less concurrent” (ibid., 105). It is precisely here that the neo-baroque and the metapictures of the pictorial turn meet: in the moment of reception and understanding of images. 5 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2, 1991, 174–208. 6 Mitchell, “Media Aesthetics”; first appeared as the foreword to Liv Hauskend (ed.), Thinking Media Aesthetics (New York: Peter Lang, 2013). Quoted from Image Science, 118. 7 Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, 35. 8 Ibid., 40. 9 This new space of expanded sculptural intervention is in fact what has been left free from landscape and architecture  – not-landscape and not-architecture  – as she calls it. She explains: “Another way of saying this is that even though sculpture may be reduced to … the not-landscape plus the not-architecture, there is no reason not to imagine an opposite term – one that would be both landscape and architecture – which within this schema is called the complex. But to think the complex is to admit into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibited from it: landscape and architecture – terms that could function to define the sculptural (as they had begun to do in modernism) only in their negative or neuter condition” (ibid., 37–38). The reason why one might see Krauss’s notion of “expansion” as elitist and exclusivist is because from the explanation she gives one can basically understand the following: the artists in question were really only concerned with problems of form in relation to landscape because they were treating landscape as an inverse shape of their sculptures, and not as environment with all its geopolitical, ecological and historical implications. Therefore, although the expansion of sculpture into previously unoccupied territories is undeniable art-historical fact, an explanation of this

Introduction

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

21

fact resides outside of art proper: namely, in the ideological position (or lack thereof) of a single art historian. Filiberto Menna defines the aniconic line as being focused on the pictoriality of the surface, while the iconic line is addressed to tableau and representation (Filiberto Menna, La linea analitica dell’arte moderna. Le figure e le icone, terza edizione (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1975), 10–13 and 64). Although it is neither illusionist nor mimetic, the iconic line in avant-garde art deals with the problem of visual phenomena that stem from outside the image but are within it reinterpreted and redefined, setting up the ontology of the artistic image through a dialectical relation with extra-image reality. We can put within the styles of the iconic line, accordingly, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and all those that have what Menna calls a fondamento mimetico. The aniconic line, on the other hand, covers the radical abstract styles that consciously relinquish complex syntactic structures so as to examine the conditions of the creation, reception and visibility of art objects in themselves. Menna, however, provocatively observes that even the bestknown “anti-image” of the aniconic line of modern art, the Black Square on a White Background by Kazimir Malevich, is not a “symbolic form” but a “primary structure” that “has no intention of representing even itself” but only of prompting the mind of the viewer to engage in a debate about the nature of art (p. 67). For more about this concept, see also Krešimir Purgar, “Anti-Image or Absolute Image: The Painting by Julije Knifer in the Age of Digital Reproduction”, Art Magazin Kontura, No. 127, Zagreb, 2015, 90–95. The quotation given by Woodrow refers to Mitchell’s “Four Fundamental Principles of Image Science”, in James Elkins (ed.), Visual Literacy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 14. Ross Woodrow, “Reading Pictures: The Impossible Dream?”, Analysis and Metaphysics, Vol. 9, 2010, 64. Ibid., 63. To get an idea of how art history started to gradually modify its approach from object-centered discipline to the understanding of processes and mechanisms in a culture as a whole, see the very early study made by Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985); as well as Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Very important accomplishments in this direction also include an early work by Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and the reader compiled by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1994). In order to understand processes within the discipline of art history, Jonathan Harris’s overview, which focuses on its social-critical role, is very instructive: Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture:  The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 49. It is worth mentioning that Moxey has been credited with having conveyed the first ever comparison between Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaft in Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn”; Journal for Visual Culture, Vol. 7, No. 2 (August 2008): 131–146. This already seminal piece was a revised version of the presentation he gave at the international

22

17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Krešimir Purgar Visual Construction of Culture conference, organized by the Center for Visual Studies in Zagreb, 2007. This and other related disciplinary questions raised by him on these occasions were eventually developed in different directions by Matthew Rampley and Jason Gaiger, for instance. Rampley states that there is a difference between Bildwissenschaft “proper”, like that practiced by Klaus Sachs-Hombach, and the stream represented by authors like Gottfried Boehm and Gernot Böhme, whereby the latter “comes to a conclusion strikingly similar to those of writers such as Nicholas Mirzoeff or Guy Debord”, although “Böhme avoids taking up such socio-political threads” (see Matthew Rampley, “Bildwissenschaft:  Theories of the Image in German-Language Scholarship”, in Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Kitty Zijlmans (eds.), Art History and Visual Studies in Europe (Leiden and Boston:  Brill, 2012), 125–126. Moreover, Jason Gaiger asks whether we even need something like a universal science of images to which Bildwissenschaft apparently makes a claim (Jason Gaiger, “The Idea of a Universal Bildwissenschaft”, Estetika:  The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. LI/VII, No. 2/50, 2014, 208) and concludes somewhat ambiguously that “the permissive conception of universality that underpins the project of a universal Bildwissenschaft falls short of the more demanding, normative conception of universality required by philosophy, but it has the advantage of keeping the question open” (ibid., 227). Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Spring 2003): 428. The list of the “outcast” art historians that Bredekamp mentions can be enlarged to those who still “count” as art historians but who nevertheless significantly changed the face of American art history: such as Keith Moxey, Michael Ann Holly, Norman Bryson, Whitney Davies and many others. Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Studies:  Interviews with Key Thinkers (London: SAGE, 2008), 200–201. Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2003), 6. Ibid. Nicholas Davey, “Hermeneutical Aesthetics and an Ontogeny of the Visual”, in Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (eds.), A Handbook of Visual Culture (London: Berg, 2013), 132–133. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture”, in Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2002). Quoted from W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 336–356. Ibid., 342–343. W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2005), 258. Ibid., 260. The article originally published in ArtForum was later republished as an opening chapter in W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11. Ibid., 16. Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Principles of Image Science”; here quoted as the text appears in W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 13. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, Art Bulletin, Vol. 77, No. 4 (December 1995): 540–544.

Introduction

23

30 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Art, Fate, and the Disciplines:  Some Indicators”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4, The Fate of Disciplines, edited by James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson (2009), 1023–1031, 1026. 31 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 166. 32 See all of Mitchell’s contributions to the seminar discussions in James Elkins and Maja Naef (eds.), What Is an Image? (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 40. 33 The original title of the article was “Modern Iconology and Postmodern Iconologies” and it was conceived as an essay responding to W.J.T. Mitchell’s 1986 book Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. A reply by Mitchell was also included in the journal. See Works and Days, Vol. 6 (Spring/Fall 1988), 217–229. A  later version was reprinted as chapter  16 of David Downing and Susan Bazargan (eds.), Image and Ideology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 309–320. 34 Mitchell, Image Science, 213.

Part I

Toward a Critical Iconology

1

The Changing Patterns of Iconology1 Seven Questions to Mitchell from the Twentieth Century2 Timothy Erwin

The appearance of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology (1986) brings new interest to the study of the pictura-poesis relation for literary critics and art historians who advocate a more critically informed approach to their shared subject. Author of the well-received Blake’s Composite Art (1978), Mitchell comes naturally to the study of the sister arts, yet little in the Blake study prepares readers for the ideological reach of Iconology. Apart from the occasional glance at Milton or Wordsworth the book includes no readings of ekphrastic verse or narrative images. Instead of offering the expected reflexive views of poetry and painting, it comments on the possibility of ideological critique in contemporary and traditional readings in the interdisciplinary analogy. In taking up with analytic precision a topic that typically invites the prose of soft focus, Iconology is determinedly theoretical (more than most studies that claim the epithet, it can be called metatheoretical). In brief, the method is to compare different approaches to the sister-arts relation in comparative commentary ranging from contemporary figures like E.  H. Gombrich and Nelson Goodman back to the classic texts of Edmund Burke and G.  E. Lessing in order to argue against the nineteenth-century notion, still widely held among comparatists, that there exists a single essential difference between poetry and painting. As argumentative first moves go, the premise is little short of breathtaking. To say that the experiential difference between space and time is not at all great when compared to the cultural difference invested in those opposed categories is to argue against a commonplace of intellectual history reified by disciplinary division. Little in contemporary culture or the academy will have prepared readers to accept the argument. One useful way of taking up Mitchell’s revisionism is by way of a lexical overview of the title term, a term now asked to perform interdisciplinary double duty. In art history the formidable notion of an iconological practice approaches the half-century mark even as the discipline which gave it voice enjoys its centenary. In literary studies the term is just now broached to define an evaluative approach to a new area of interest. What

28 Timothy Erwin can we expect iconology in both senses to mean to the future of interartistic study? We might begin with a narrative scene of introduction. Like the ancient histories of Dibutade and Polemon, of Zeuxis and the painted grapes, Panofsky’s story of the greeting is perhaps the ur-narrative of modern visual theory, celebrating not the beginnings of representation or ancient standards of excellence but the origin of a totalizing mode of interpretation, the myth of modern iconology.

I Somewhere in Europe, between the world wars, a man is strolling pensively down a city street. From the other direction another man steps out of the crowd and begins to perform a vague gesture. Approaching nearer, the second man raises his hand toward his hat. Before passing by he gently lifts the brim and in nearly the same motion returns the hat to its former position. What strikes the first man most forcibly is that the meaning of the gesture depends upon a host of contingencies, most of which, like the state of mind of his acquaintance, he can never know firsthand. He recognizes that the gesture would likely become invisible for him once it left the path of social significance, and he also senses that the gesture registers the expression of an attitude or emotion almost as soon as it registers a physical fact. While the man knows that the gesture is significant he is unsure of its meaning. Does the greeting express simple recognition? like or dislike? indifference? A student of conventional signs, our observer associates the greeting with the medieval doffing of helmets as a sign of courtesy. And as he looks into the matter he makes several preliminary distinctions. For purposes of setting out an interpretive practice he decides to separate the motif of the gesture (the actual lifting of the hat) from its traditional conventional meaning or theme (politeness). He calls his first impressions of the gesture primary, factual, and expressional, and distinguishes them from his second thoughts on the matter, which he terms secondary and conventional. Borrowing a familiar dichotomy he calls the object of his first impressions the form and the object of his second thoughts the subject matter of the event. Neither of these, he decides, should be considered the content of the gesture. Instead he’ll understand the intrinsic meaning or content to be the historically constituted composite of all three things taken together – of formal event, of the primary and secondary aspects of the subject matter, and of the symbolic value of the gesture. For Panofsky, who tells the story in his famous essay on iconography and iconology and whom art historians will recognize as its young protagonist strolling the avenues of Freibourg, is the last of these which almost alone brings point to the anecdote. In taking the gesture as a metonymy for the Kunstwollen, Panofsky wants to view the artwork as the historical

The Changing Patterns of Iconology 29 expression of the symbolic human dimensions which lend art its greatest value. Where the descriptive practice of iconography had analyzed the allegories of the settecento in terms of emblem literature, noting with a Émile Mâle, for example, how the mysteries of Bernini’s Truth could be decoded in Ripa, Panofsky’s new science of iconology would take formal interpretation into the more intuitive and idealizing sphere of the symbolic form.3 To understand the basic principles of iconographic production and interpretation, Panofsky goes on to explain, “we need a mental faculty comparable to that of a diagnostician – a faculty which I cannot describe better than by the rather discredited term ‘synthetic intuition’ ”.4 In theory the intuited synthesis of the art historian will open onto both history and politics. Ideally the all-encompassing gaze of iconology will be corrected by an insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, the general and essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts. This means what may be called a history of cultural symptoms  – or “symbols” in Ernst Cassirer’s sense  – in general. The art historian will have to check what he thinks is the intrinsic meaning of a work … against … the intrinsic meaning of as many other documents … historically related to that work … as he can master: of documents bearing witness to the political, poetical, religious, philosophical, and social tendencies of the personality, period, or country under investigation. Needless to say that, conversely, the historian of political life … should make analogous use of works of art.5 In practice the iconology of Panofsky proves political and historical in only the broad-brush sense though, and for a couple of reasons. Generally speaking, the artwork is seen to mediate between the informing cultural epistemology bracketed by history and some more essential tendency of the human mind, the symbolic form. As is often remarked, iconology thus presupposes the neo-Kantian epistemology of Panofsky’s Hamburg colleague Cassirer. Panofsky wants to lead us to a truth writ large by both the objective hand of the event and by the subjective impulse to grasp it whole, and so raises early the methodological problem of distinguishing between the subjective and objective elements of the inquiry. In Michael Podro’s astute account of the essay, the problem of the mind-world relation locates itself at once within and without the artwork so that the expressive features of the work are made available with other features for the emotional response of the viewer. Yet Podro also points that for two related reasons the mind-world problem rests unresolved:  for one thing, every aspect of the artwork is implausibly expected to reveal the same a priori regulative idea, and for another the regulative idea rejects in advance the social facts of history.6

30 Timothy Erwin As a result, modern iconology will tend to confuse the inevitable bias of the inquirer with the subjective dimension of the object of inquiry, using the former as its rationale for rarely exploring the latter. Rather than assume that the two stand in reciprocal relation and that together they might be used to plot an Archimedean point of engaged objectivity for the inquirer, iconology keeps its distance from the ideology of cultural history, a distancing evidence even at the level of the anecdote. In part because the affect latent in the story Panofsky tells is so unpromising, the narrative only separates further the local meaning of the gesture from the reaches of figurative art. As a result, the movement of the hand toward the head in greeting finally seems alien to the movement of the mind toward representational and cultural truth. Surely the mind wants to know more about the gesture than its summary implication presented in the intellectual shorthand of epistemological cipher. Other questions inevitably suggest themselves. In order to recognize the event as a gesture, the mind would first need to know when the event loses consciousness, as it were, and becomes conventional. Another moment worth knowing would be when the behavioral convention begins to be represented, since that would tell us something about the local relation of behavioral to representational convention. And as the inquiry of Panofsky turns back upon itself, it leaves us to wonder whether the lasting effect of the story of the greeting as modernist narrative is not in fact to discount gesture as a sign of the particular urgency of any historical moment. The iconology of Panofsky, it seems fair to say, is easily inserted into the modernist narrative of a sleek and immediate representation and shares a modernist potential noted by Linda Hutcheon, isolationism that would separate the artwork from the world.7 In Panofsky’s own writings the subjective dimension of the artwork remains locked within the realm of the formal event, relatively inaccessible to historical synthesis. In Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky contrasts the haptic, aggregate space of ancient axial perspective to the systematic Renaissance world of the central vanishing point.8 The central perspective of Alberti is for Panofsky largely an artificial construct, one that suppresses the curvilinear vision of the ancients at the expense of the new rectilinear vision. Since painting shares its new vision with other aspects of epistemology – or since in the words of Michael Ann Holly, on whose excellent analysis of the essay I rely, “everything becomes symptomatic of everything else”9 – through linear perspective the Renaissance is restructured as a radically different psycho-physiological space. The essay is a uniquely complex contribution to perspective theory and offers a kaleidoscope of shifting cultural relations between representation and the epoch that shapes it. At the same time, Panofsky excludes the hapless human procedures of trial and error that other writers treating the discovery of linear perspective have described, the struggles of Brunelleschi with mirror and compass in the parallel account of Samuel Edgerton, to take

The Changing Patterns of Iconology 31 one example, as well as the differentiated aims of the artists themselves, the quattrocento formulation through perspective of the several quite different metaphysical views of time distinguished by Yves Bonnefoy, to take another.10 In a universe where perspective is a metaphor for reshaping the world according to symbolic form, little place will be found for ordinary men and women, no matter how extraordinarily gifted or temporally attuned.11 As powerful as Panofsky’s critical program undeniably is, his notion of iconology turns its back on social history in a way that the deeper contextualism of Aby Warburg could never have done. Yet interesting recent work reveals how the social fact may be incorporated into the social gesture. In Looking into Degas Eunice Lipton foregrounds the image of the laundress in Degas to show how the sublimated eroticism of the pose reflects social conditions during the 1870s.12 Among the determining factors she brings to bear on Degas are these: during this decade more workers resided in Paris than ever before; workers imagined for the first time in the popular mind to exhibit not sickliness but robust animal spirits. The laundry industry employed fully a quarter of the metropolitan population, a work force predominantly female. Because of their working-class status and intimate access to the bourgeois household, these working women became associated with a careless sexuality, and their long days and short wages made alcoholism and prostitution real dangers. Perhaps most important in stressing the historical contemporaneity of the image is the fact that laundresses were available subjects for painting mainly because they bent to their tasks in overheated groundfloor shops opening onto the street. In the ephemeral popular imagery of the day the women represented a source of mild titillation, yet when we look at them in retrospect through Lipton’s eyes their boredom and fatigue is almost palpable. Degas paints the laundress from a perspective more frontal than that of the ballerina and without the diminuendo of recessional space the dancer enjoys as class privilege, though the two women are otherwise filtered through much the same minor-key palette. Drawn from the substrata of the social discourse, the conditions of the laundress invest her casual portrait with an air so highly charged and ambiguous that until Degas she seems invisible as a social being. It is by stooping to detail in this way, Keith Moxey suggests, that iconology will become as flexible as the other master theories of Kunstgeschichte. By way of introducing a groundbreaking recent study of popular late medieval woodcuts, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives, Moxey says that a critic may rely on Panofsky and at the same time study the artwork as an ideological construct or system of cultural semiotics. “If ideology is equated with cultural sign systems”, Moxey writes, “and sign systems are regarded as projections of consciousness that are intended to make the world of phenomena intelligible, then it follows that all aspects of social life are ideologically meaningful”.13 So it

32 Timothy Erwin may be that the legacy of Panofsky is only in its purest state indifferent to ideological analysis, and that the idealizing abstraction which Hans Belting identifies as its major limitation has already found its practical transformation. Iconology failed to construct an adequate synthetic method, according to Belting, because it never came to grips with its historical subject. Only against its will, he writes, would iconology have been able to “lift the restrictions on the classical genres of ‘high art’ and to broaden the field of questioning to other sorts of images and texts”.14 His diagnosis is also a prognosis, of course. It looks forward to a postmodernism that would maintain the innovative rigor of modernism, though not its austerity, and at the same time allow history its full range of different voices.

II Where Mitchell broadens the inquiry is in asking us to a reimagine the study of iconology from a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective, a critical stance that would take the narrative force of the story of the greeting into full account. Gesture is the archetypal action for the art historian, of course, comparable to both the trope and the event of the literary critic; academic tradition likens gesture in history painting to the spoken monologue of drama and, less directly, to the suspenseful sequencing of narrative episode. Unlike Panofsky, Mitchell is not concerned to sketch out a working method based in a central trope or narrative moment, and rather than construct a grammar of the written gesture, Mitchell means to point to some problems in the history of pictorial theory and in their possible solution to the inevitability of ideological critique. If we can speak with Jean Starobinski of the fundamental theoretical gesture  – of the evaluative, philological, allegorical, and canonizing movements that a pluralistic criticism makes toward the object of study and that an everpresent “polyvalence of meaning” answers  – we can trace in Iconology a basic gesture of three main movements.15 We should imagine an ongoing conversation between Urania and Calliope, muses of painting and poetry. For the sake of sorting out various local interests, let’s imagine that the colloquy takes place in an ideal superlunary domain where earthly disputes are adjudicated, and that below the conversation is usually monitored by misunderstanding. Although the muses discourse easily in the way of loving sisters, one in “natural” images and the other in a “conventional” language, their dialogue is often taken to be contentious. Throughout the centuries (particularly during the ninth and seventeenth) there are several occasions when the somewhat opposed accents of the sister arts are misconstrued as different aesthetic dialects. In the mid-nineteenth century G.  E. Lessing goes so far as to hear in their differing vocabularies of time and space reason enough to suspend the interdisciplinary dialogue

The Changing Patterns of Iconology 33 altogether. A first theoretical movement on the part of Iconology is professional. Mitchell wants to bring the figure and ground of word and image into a more equivalent relation for art historians and literary critics, despite the long romantic wake that threatens still to keep them apart. Mitchell prefers that the discussion remain contestatory enough to be kept alive as conversation but no more quarrelsome than need be, especially since what is at stake is extrinsic to the basic terms of analogy. Most of all, his study asks students of both disciplines to return to their images and texts with a more thoughtful sense of the various pressures, many of them political, which have determined historical relations among the arts. The aesthetic separation of the temporal from the spatial, he reminds us, is at best an unexamined assumption. What we tend to regard as a solid theoretical distinction was for centuries unheard of and is probably better understood as the result of a series of passing ideological differences. On the whole, the affect of the study tends for the sake of an ongoing dialogue toward the reduction of critical conflict, and the corollary hope is that other, more hidden sorts of conflict may emerge. If our critical quarrels are not those of the muses, then how do they arise? A second, related movement of Iconology is to redefine the terms of the analogy. Mitchell remarks how thoroughly temporal and spatial discourse have come to permeate each other, so that it’s nearly impossible to imagine one dimension without thinking in terms of the other. When we speak of a long time or an early arrival our very language affirms the illusionary character of any basic dimensional difference. Since his first concern is to clarify “the idea of imagery”, Mitchell grants mental imagery foundational status by turning to the philosophical tradition of the younger Wittgenstein, who occupies a position in Mitchell roughly comparable to that of Cassirer in Panofsky.16 The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus developed a picture theory of meaning where mental imagery plays a large role; in brief, he argued that reality consists of simple objects that can be named, and that their names can then be combined to form elementary propositions. Each proposition is logically independent and positive and depicts what Wittgenstein calls “states of affairs”. As A. J. Ayer describes the situation, “These pictures themselves are facts and share a logical and pictorial form with what they represent”.17 Reality, in other words, is made up of the truth or falsity of the sum total of all pictured states of affairs. After the manner of ordinary language philosophy, Mitchell next asks how we think of a concept so central to reality as the image in consciousness. His answer is literally more images: two schematic diagrams of the taxonomic scale of the image as discursive practice, a sliding scale not so much perceptual as professional,18 and of the material object reflected in the mind.19 The preliminary discussion is lexical in the usual way of clearing argumentative space, and also by way of calling into question

34 Timothy Erwin aspects of the traditional theory of representation. To clarify the difference between the mental image and verbal imagery, Mitchell rehearses the status of the image during the eighteenth century, since it is the discussions of Hobbes and Locke, of Hume and Reid, which even today determine the intellectual and affective contours of the phrase verbal imagery in its professional sense. After the verbal image is joined to the visual image in a third diagram where the ideogram “man” joins the trio of picture, pictogram, and phonetic sign20 – the point is to inscribe within different notational systems a cultural development that maintains the visual dimension of language in the very practice of being human – the argument is off and running. The larger formal movement of the study is to structure itself as a dual dialectic in which several theoreticians of the pictura-poesis debate, each with his own internal paragone or contest, are paired off in successive consideration of individual argument and undisclosed interest. In the course of a chapter-by-chapter regress readers are asked to recognize in the preconceptions of current theory unresolved historical debates. The visual-verbal distinctions of Nelson Goodman may look like a semiotic system, for instance, but turn on the notational matter of density, not on the slippery difference of sign and signified. And though he steers clear of them himself, Goodman allows us to ask, and to answer, cultural questions of interartistic value. The unstable mixture of the natural and the conventional in Gombrich’s notion of representation, on the other hand, prevents a strong ideological critique. Internal and external oppositions like these chart the history of the division of word and image and at the same time query its logic. The logic of Iconology itself, it should be said, is not the negative logic of division. It is not the essentialist Panofsky who is set against the nominalist Goodman, for instance. Instead, Gombrich and Lessing, proponents of a natural visual purity, are engaged by Goodman and Burke, spokespersons for the primary of the verbal. Although the argument shares with deconstruction a binary opposition, what is revealed by the dual structure of collapsing oppositions is not merely a verbal bias against the visual but the relative unity of word and image within the various historical interests which kept them apart – a deconstruction, if you like, of representational difference itself. A last chapter looks at subjective distortions of the visual model in the greatest modern proponent of ideology, a proponent no less ideological for all that, Marx. Even the best of dialecticians, Mitchell suggests, may have some hidden personal stake in misreading the dialectic of the muses.

III When the lines of iconological difference are drawn, the more novel aspect of Mitchell’s approach, I think, is the concern for the affect of the

The Changing Patterns of Iconology 35 image, for retrieving the subjective dimension in image-text relations. Where Panofsky inscribes a powerful myth of cultural unity in a banal narrative, Mitchell charges that contemporary ideologies of sexism, insularity, and conservative thought are implicated in the long-standing separation of aesthetic spheres. Panofsky recommends an idealist praxis that is open to other disciplines but not to social history, not at least without some serious tinkering. Mitchell suggests ways in which a partial, pragmatic treatment of the pictura-poesis analogy discloses ideology both as the false consciousness of the other and as the inevitable investment of the writing self. More important, he quite persuasively indicts professional literary study for an unfeeling blindness. While the New Critics were able and enabling pioneers in the technique of metaphysical and romantic poetry, their loose talk of verbal imagery now seems almost willfully imprecise. To discuss Donne’s famous metaphor of affection leaning like the arm of the compass across distance in the same interpretive terms as the urn we walk around in Keats’s ode, for instance, is to elide the development of pictorial difference in English literature. To name all figurative language imagery, as practical criticism does, is to deny poetry a specifically visual interest and to obscure the politics of the visual metaphor. These politics emerge in the seventeenth-century loss of a local, figurative rhetoric, the eighteenth-century appropriation of the visual dimension to a masculine enargeia in language, and the complete separation of the basic terms of analysis during the nineteenth century. Hence for Mitchell the importance of defining what image actually means:  undefined, the term condemns us to wander aimlessly, beyond sight of the historical interests of a visual rhetoric. In its totalizing ambition verbal imagery blinds us to the fearful iconoclasm of such ostensibly visual poems as Marvell’s “Gallery” or Browning’s “Last Duchess”. Where art history could benefit well before the war from Rensselaer Lee’s groundbreaking Ut Pictura Poesis,21 it wasn’t until 1958 that Jean Hagstrum sketched out the historical relations of painting and poetry for literary criticism.22 Only by the time of Mario Praz’s 1970 Mnemosyne was a field of study charted, if one with very diffuse borders still.23 And although Mitchell remarks that the seventies and eighties have brought interesting new perspectives, the pictorial analogy is probably still most often discussed in impressionistic touchstone fashion. Yet there are signs that interdisciplinary criticism is coming to its senses. A lasting influence of Iconology, I  suspect, will be to make it more difficult to speak in an unexamined way about figures and images, as if theory already understood all that imagery entails and were somehow beyond the deceptive workings of culture. When Mitchell encourages us to listen for the distinct feeling each poem brings to its visual imagery, most readers will want to catch the interested inflection. Another will be to reveal how the English ideology structures within literary history

36 Timothy Erwin rival canons for the iconoclast and iconophile in every reader, and here each critic will play the game a little differently, forcing a change in the rules only gradually. Until the pictorial aspect of English verse is fully acknowledged it will still be Milton, Collins, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens who form the winning roster, the one that shapes visual tradition. Dryden, Pope, Byron, Marianne Moore, and Auden will form the second team. Eventually, with his allies the feminist critic and the political critic proper, the pictorialist critic will help to reshape the canon, and the general reader that forms the larger part of the critical audience will be moved to recognize another sphere of interest. It is in this sense that the aims of Iconology, so strikingly original, might also be aligned with the oppositional postmodernism of the October group, with what Hal Foster has called “a postmodernism of resistance”.24 My questions are asked on behalf of the smaller audience already engaged in political and pictorial critique. It is only with the recent work of semiotic critics and of critics of spatial form in literature that one can say that the powers and limits of the pictorial analogy have been tested by theory.25 While Iconology takes these recent gains into account and makes its own advances, it also envisions three different kinds of further study: (1) more investigation into the roots of resistance to the interartistic analogy, particularly in mixed media where the arts have already joined forces, as in film and theater; (2) more sociohistorical work aimed at the local context of the paragone, quite possibly irrespective of any master theory adduced to explain the relation; and (3) a theoretical probing of the emotional and psychological determinants of ekphrastic fear.26 I would end my survey by asking Tom Mitchell whether he would care to say more about any of these approaches, perhaps by pointing to recent examples. Secondly, other theoretical places either discount the contemporary importance of the analogy or else view the two sorts of practice which a sociohistorical approach might adopt, historical scholarship and theoretically informed intuition, as embodying antipodal interests. What would you say in response to the postmodern claim of Baudrillard that in the multiplicity of simulacra the opposing ideologies of iconoclast and iconophile amount to the same thing, the disappearance of God?27 Or to the claim of Derrida that in the parergone between Meyer Schapiro and Heidegger on Van Gogh’s painting of peasants shoes, the scholarly lacing up the reference to Van Gogh, on one hand, and putting the truth of the painting to work on the other, are two very different things? What sorts of felt critical investments initially made it important to write a book like Iconology? And does iconological practice necessarily lead one down a path wholly divergent from parallel disciplinary routes, or is it more a matter of pointing out ideological pitfalls along the way?

The Changing Patterns of Iconology 37

Notes 1 This chapter was first published as “Modern Iconology and Postmodern Iconologies”, in Works and Days, No. 6 (Spring/Fall 1988): 217–229. A later version of the text was published as chapter  16 of David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan (eds.), Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 309–320. 2 For inspiring conversation and sustaining friendships I’m grateful to NEH Summer Institutes on Theory and Interpretation in the Visual Arts held at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the University of Rochester in 1987 and 1989. 3 Panofsky’s  “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art” first appeared as the introduction to Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939), and offered a sharp departure from the Stilfragen of Alois Riegl and the binary categories of Heinrich Wölfflin. The sharp distinction Panofsky draws between iconography and iconology would seem to owe something to the iconographic work of Emil Mâle on post-tridentine Europe. When Mâle tells us that the allegories of Versailles represent aspect of the French mind of the seventeenth century, or that the allegories of the middle ages are more profound than those of Ripa for freezing medieval thought in stone, iconography already takes on iconological proportions. Mâle more than anyone, moreover, made iconography widely available for theoretical analysis. As D. J. Gordon puts it, “it was Mâle who … made Ripa inescapable for anyone concerned with the art of the Renaissance” (54). As Michael Ann Holly points out (200 n. 48), Panofsky doesn’t use the term iconology in the first version of his essay but speaks instead of levels of iconographical analysis. The point is to diminish neither the achievement of Panofsky nor the importance of his break with formalism but simply to note that the emphasis on the symbolic as an inevitably subjective realm turns away from the prior historical and thematic iconography of Mâle. See:  D. J. Gordon, “Ripa’s Fate”, in Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Renaissance Imagination:  Essays and Lectures by D.  J. Gordon (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1975), 51–74; Émile Mâle, L’art Religieux après le Concile de Trente (A. Colin, 1932); and Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1984), 200, note 48. 4 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1982), 38. 5 Ibid., 39. 6 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1982), 182. Podro argues that Panofsky actually follows Riegl rather than Cassirer in his understanding of the subjective and objective basis of the mind-world relation. 7 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism:  History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 140. 8 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New  York:  Zone Books, 1991), 130–157. 9 Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1984). Holly’s discussion of the perspective essay (130–57) is authoritative. Her admiration for Panofsky stems from a belief that the most promising aspects of the iconological legacy are already well-founded in his work. 10 See Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975); and Yves Bonnefoy, “Time and the Timeless in

38 Timothy Erwin

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

the Quattrocento”, in Norman Bryson (ed.), Calligram: Essays in the New Art History from France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8–26. Ernst Gombrich remarks that Panofsky “never renounced the desire to demonstrate the organic unity of all aspects of a period” (28) and situates him in the Hegelian tradition of Jacob Burkhardt. In noting that “no culture can be mapped out in its entirety” but that at the same time “no element … can be understood in isolation” (41), Gombrich demurs from the iconological project, preferring to reduce the cultural symptom to the scale of the aberrant syndrome offering the individual multiple roles rather than a single unique one. (Interestingly, the aberrant syndrome that informs his demurral is the sixties counterculture; his example of a time offering the individual multiple roles is 1968; and these phenomena are often cited as midwives of postmodernism.) Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Philip Maurice Deneke Lecture) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 20. Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives:  Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 8. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1987), 19. Jean Starobinski, “On the Fundamental Gestures of Criticism”, New Literary History, Vol. 5 (1974): 491–514, 514. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1. A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (New York: Random House, 1985), 17. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 16. Mitchell, Iconology, 27. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis:  The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967). Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts:  The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1958). Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic:  Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), xii. Several poststructuralist theories of the sister-arts relation compare the visual image to verbal coloring in the tradition of rhetorical elocutio, the semiotic work of Norman Bryson and Wendy Steiner probably being best known. Spatial form is a quasi-visual approach to narrative first developed in response to the simultaneous topography of high modernism. The theory tracks the temporal movement of narrative through representational space and may itself be traced in art back to the analogy of dispositio to fable. See Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Thinking (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1982). In “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory” Mitchell extends the theory beyond modernist boundaries and offers a fourfold definition of narrative space. See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Towards a General Theory”, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 271–299. Mitchell, Iconology, 156–158.

The Changing Patterns of Iconology 39 27 “It can be seen that the iconoclasts”, writes Baudrillard of the seventeenthcentury version of the dispute, “who are often accused of denying and despising images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth” as signs of a divine absence. “But the converse can also be said”, he goes on, that it was the iconophiles who through the making of images ritually enacted the death of God. See Jean Baudrillard “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art after Modernism:  Rethinking Representation (New  York:  New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 253–81, 256.

2

What is an Image? W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picturing Theory Francesco Gori

The Image at the Crossroads between Semiotics and Aesthetics The general science of images is what Mitchell calls critical iconology. The adjective “critical” is meant to distinguish it from “iconology” in the strict sense  – the philological study of the literary influences in painting and sculpture, and vice versa. Critical iconology, in fact, not only takes into account artistic images and literary oeuvres, but opens up the research to “the general field of images and their relation to discourse”1 – all kinds of images and discourses, woven together to create our representation of the world. But critical iconology goes beyond the sole relations between images and language, studying their migrations across all media. As a science in its own right, iconology is based on “four fundamental concepts”:  (1)  the pictorial turn; (2)  the image/ picture distinction; (3) metapicture; and (4) biopicture.2 The foundations of critical iconology, as a distinct discipline from art history, as well as the pictorial turn and the concepts of metapicture and biopicture, are discussed at length elsewhere in this volume; in this chapter, then, I will leave them in the background, focusing on point 2:  the image/picture distinction and the theoretical definition of the image. The image is the “iconologic unit”, like the linguistic sign is the basic unit of Ferdinand de Saussure’s general linguistics. The image is the quid that interacts with language in our cultural representation of the world and circulates across the media, but what is it? Is it just the object of any visual perception? Of course not: the tree I see outside my window is not an image of a tree, but precisely that tree, “in flesh and bones”, as Husserl would have it. Not all images are visual objects, nor is all that we see an image, and nor is all that we hear language or music. The simple observation that the iconological unit is not (necessarily) visual is at odds with one of the most deep-seated commonplaces on images: their correspondence with visuality. But this is not the only contradiction of image science with common sense: the iconological unit, in fact, is not even a unit, but a double thing, like the Saussurean linguistic sign. Such duplicity of images is well expressed in the English language, which differentiates

What is an Image?

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images from pictures:  the image “is a perception of likeness or resemblance or analogous form – what C.S. Peirce defined as the ‘iconic sign’, a sign whose intrinsic sensuous qualities resemble those of some other object”,3 while “the picture is the material support, the physical medium in which the image appears”, so that “you can hang a picture but you can’t hang an image”.4 What is striking in Mitchell’s definition is that images seem to live in a sort of no man’s land between semiotics and aesthetics, somewhere in between the conceptual realm of the signs and the aesthetic domain of the senses. Indeed, like the linguistic unit, the iconological unit is a sign too, but a sign whose specificity appears not to be given by its cultural meaning, but rather by some natural “intrinsic sensuous qualities”. Why is this so? According to Saussure: The linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the associating … not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. … I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifié] and signifier [significant].5 The linguistic sign, continues Saussure, has two “primordial” characteristics, which constitute the two fundamental principles of general linguistics: it is arbitrary – the bond between the signifier and the signified is conventional – and linear – “in contrast to visual signifiers (nautical signals, etc.) which can offer simultaneous groupings in several dimensions, auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession; they form a chain”.6 For Saussure, then, the picture – or “visual signifier”, as he calls it – differentiates itself from the “auditory signifier” in being spatial instead of temporal, and simultaneous instead of linear:  we see images at glance in space, while we hear (or read) language in time in a linear succession. Saussure does not mention anything about the image (what we suppose he would have called the “visual signified” as distinct from the “verbal signified”), but we can extrapolate from his definition of the first primordial characteristic of the linguistic sign, its conventionality. Unlike the linguistic sign, the iconic sign is not the arbitrary product of a cultural convention but, as Peirce states, a “perception of likeness or resemblance or analogous form” that goes beyond cultural conventions and is directly grounded in our senses.7 To understand a speech, read a text or comprehend an algebraic formula, the knowledge of a code is required; the same rule does not apply to images, which are directly perceived as such, as likenesses, resemblances and analogies. The primordial characteristic of iconic signs, as distinct from language, then, is that we do not need to learn a code to understand them, but we directly perceive them as such. This is what Peirce called “the firstness of

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images”:8 unlike language, whereby we first perceive a series of sounds that we subsequently interpret according to a code, before a picture we perceive “first” the image (e.g., a portrait) and then we became conscious of the medium (e.g., oil painting on canvas). This is why iconology is situated at the point of intersection between semiotics – the study of the signs and their messages – and aesthetics – “the study of the senses and the arts that ‘massage’ them”.9 Because the semiotic “sense” of images is one with their aesthetic effect on our “senses”, we perceive them immediately as images. However, images are not just the subject of physical graphic pictures, but rather any perception of likeness. In fact, as far as the semiotics of the image is concerned, Mitchell takes as axiomatic the intuition of C. S. Peirce that an image is an icon, that is, a sign of resemblance. This means that … the first step is to release [them] from the tyranny of the physical eye … and understand that images circulate through many domains: there are mental and mathematical and verbal images, as well as pictorial and visual images.10 Like the Saussurean “verbal signifier”  – which is not a “purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses”11 – the “visual signifier” must not be confused with a material object:  images are not things but relations of similarity and resemblance. For this reason their domain extends far beyond so-called visual images (paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, etc.), and we find images – that is, relations of similarity – in the natural landscape, language, geometry and mathematics. In his 1984 essay by the same title as the present chapter (“What Is an Image?”), Mitchell collects many declinations of the concept of image into a family tree. As shown in Fig. 2.1, “physical”

Fig.  2.1. “Family Tree of Images”; adapted from W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, 198656

What is an Image?

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graphic images occupy just one of the branches of the tree; the branches’ common denominator is the Peircean iconic sign of resemblance, and they span from optical projections, to sensory appearances, to reveries, to verbal imagery.

Mitchell’s “Pictured Theory” of the Signs and the Senses Neither purely semiotic nor merely aesthetic, the concept of image seems to float in a blank space between visual and verbal representation. In the short essay “Image X Text”, Mitchell gives a graphic representation of such “traumatic gap of the unrepresentable space between words and images”.12 While in Picture Theory he employed “the typographic convention of the slash to designate ‘image/text’ as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation”,13 in “Image X Text” he substitutes the conventional slash with an ideographic “X”, to “picture” both the void of the unrepresentable and the intersection between signs and senses at the core of his conception of the image. Indeed, the “clash” between visual and verbal representation hides a rupture in its own conceptualization:  the asymmetry between a semiotic register (“the verbal”) and a sensory channel (“the visible”), which generates what Mitchell calls “a productive confusion of signs and senses, ways of producing meaning and ways of inhabiting perceptual experience”.14 The ideogram “X” of the “image X text” calligram, then, can be expanded as a fractal and take up space on the page to become a diagram, revealing the complex intersection between signs and senses.

Fig. 2.2. “The Diagram Image X Text”; adapted from W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science, 2015

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As the “X-diagram” in Fig.  2.2 shows, the two orders of the verbal and the visible are haunted by a third element, something “invisible” and “unspeakable”, but nonetheless existent, related to the sensory channel of hearing, on the bottom right of the diagonal line of the “senses”. It is the sound, with its two articulated forms: speech (along the sensorysemiotic “ear–symbol” axis, on the right side of the square) and music (on the lower side of the square, along the sensory-semiotic “ear–icon” axis). When articulated in the direction of the symbolic, the sound takes the form of the spoken word; when it enters the order of the imaginary, it becomes music (singing, of course, is articulated along both axes). The sound, then  – and by extension the whole domain of bodily and performative “immediate” expressions – is the true “X-Factor” that persists in all our representation of the world, both visual and verbal. Leafing through the history of semiotics and aesthetics, we encounter everywhere the presence of such a third element at the crossroads between iconic and linguistic representation, the senses of hearing and sight, aesthetics and semiotics. From Aristotle’s Poetics, where tragedy is presented as the supreme art because it is able to synthesize texis (the text recited by the actors), opsis (the staging) and melos (the choir), to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, composed of Bild-Musik-Wort, right up to Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, a sort of sum of analog technology of the twentieth century at the threshold of the digital revolution, in which the three titular devices are presented as the embodied epitomes of the three basic media of culture. The same structure can be also found in Barthes’s studies on Image, Music, Text, and in Lacan’s triad of psychoanalytic orders: symbolic, imaginary and real. Among the many triadic models of culture, Peirce’s tripartition of the sign-functions in icon, index and symbol can rightfully be considered the philosophical Grund of Mitchell’s theory: (1) The icon “is not restricted to the sphere of visual imagery but covers all sign-function of likeness, similitude, resemblance and analogy. So, a metaphor, a simile, or an algebraic expression of equivalence or congruence can be an icon as well as a picture”.15 (2) The symbol “is an artificial, arbitrary, and conventional sign, … what Peirce calls a ‘legisign’, a sign produced by law or code”.16 Symbols are not only “words” and “texts”, but each sign has meaning “by convention”, according to an established rule. (3) The index is the aniconic and anidiomatic “third element” of communication. Indexes do not signify by resemblance or by law; they do not re-present anything, but rather present immediately their meaning by indication, like a pointing finger. Indexes are all kind of clues (indices in French) – tracks, footprints, symptoms – which have meaning by “cause and effect”: from the footprints to the hunted animal, from the smoke to the fire, from the symptom to the disease, etc.

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The same tripartite division of Peirce’s semiotics can be also found in Hume’s empiricist epistemology  – which defines three principles of “association of ideas”: similarity (corresponding to the icon), convention (symbol) and cause–effect (index) – and in Nelson Goodman’s theory of notation, which brings us back to Mitchell’s main concern: how to “picture theory” on the surface of the written page. Goodman, in fact, has associated the graphic notations of “sketch/score/script” with the sign functions of “icon/index/symbol”. A  keen observation will reveal that the same triadic structure is also at work in the Saussurean, allegedly “binary”, model of the linguistic sign; indeed, between the iconic signified (the picture of the tree in Saussure’s classic representation, Fig. 2.3) and the conventional signifier (the word “arbor”, written or pronounced), there is a third element, represented by the “bar”, the oval and the arrows (or, in the short notation “S/s”, by the bar alone). Halfway between Goodman’s “score” and the Peircean “index”, Saussure’s “third element” is both an image of the vacuum of representation, the unbridgeable gap between images and words, and a sign of their close relationship and co-implication. No wonder, then, that Saussure, like Mitchell, has sought different notational resources to “picture” his concept of the linguistic sign:  the iconic use of the “script” (the calligram “S/s”), and the complete diagram of the sign, in which the disjunctive bar is not the sole “score” between the “sketch” of the acoustic image (the signified) and the “script” of the conventional symbol (the signifier), since there is also an oval enclosing them and two arrows representing their mutual exchange.

Fig. 2.3. “Structure of the linguistic sign”; adapted from Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale, 1912

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All these triadic systems can be represented in a “table of tripartitions” that holds together by morphological similarity the traditionally distinct domains of aesthetics (Aristotle and Barthes), semiotics (Peirce), theory of the regimes of representation (Foucault), media theory (Kittler), psychoanalytic theory (Lacan), epistemology (Hume), notation theory (Goodman) and linguistics (Saussure). Mitchell discourages any “orthodox” reading of his scheme, warning against any attempt of rigid translation along the columns, which are to be considered “merely iconic”,17 suggesting a structural analogy between the ideas of radically different thinkers: the whole point of this table is to produce a set of diagonal, X-shaped reflections that would slash across the rigid order of the columns: the arrows in Saussure’s picture of the sign are indices, for sure. But are they not also icons in that they resemble arrows, and symbols in that we have to know the convention of pointing? Point at an object to the average dog, and he will sniff your finger.18 Not only the columns, then, but the whole table should be read “iconically”  – that is, as a graphic, a drawing, a picture. Indeed, the entire development of Mitchell’s argument can be traced iconically:  from the ideogram “X”, to the calligram “image X text”, to “X-diagram”, to the hologram of the “table of tripartitions”, where the unrepresentable void – the “unsayable” and “unimaginable” “X” – expands, “making visible”, as Klee would say, the “third dimension” of semiotics and aesthetics, their vanishing point or their meeting point (which are the same thing), at the intersection of their aXes. Geometrically, these steps of fractal expansion

Image

x

Text

Aristotle

Opsis

Melos

Texis

Barthes

Image

Music

Text

Kittler

Film

Gramophone

Typewriter

Lacan

Imaginary

Real

Symbolic

Goodman

Sketch

Score

Script

Peirce

Icon

Index

Sign

Foucault

Seeable

[X]

Sayable

Hume Saussure

Similarity Signified

Cause–effect Bar

Convention Signifler

Fig. 2.4. “Table of tripartitions”; adapted from W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science, 2015

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can be displayed as the dynamic evolution from the a-dimensional timeless and placeless point (the ideogram “X”), to the one-dimensional line (calligram), to the two-dimensional figure (diagram), to the solid (hologram). This progression from the ideogram to the hologram is a master example – a “metapicture” as he would say – of Mitchell’s picture theory: “my aim is not to produce a ‘picture theory’ (much less a theory of pictures), but to picture theory as a practical activity in the formation of representations”.19 Such a definition of theory is much closer to the Greek conception of philosophy as a practice and a way of being than to the modern rationalism based on the rigid subject/object segregation. Indeed, as paradoxical as it may sound, Mitchell’s picture theory is what we are accustomed to thinking of as the opposite of theory: a practice or, better, a “visual art”, like drawing or painting. Theory, as opposed to practice, is widely considered a synonym of abstraction, as opposed to concreteness; and yet Greek theoría was not a theory, but precisely a practice: the practice of observing the spectacle of the self and the world (from thea, spectacle, and orao, to observe). Since the beginning, then, theory has been intimately connected with the practice of observing and depicting, looking at phenomena and representing them graphically: to some extent, theoría has always been picture theory. Peirce’s triad can be used as a compass to find an orientation among the connections suggested by Mitchell’s pictorial rendering of theories of the media, the signs and the arts. No medium can be a pure medium inasmuch as, according to Peirce, no sign is a pure sign:  signs are not ontological entities (like words, pictures, pointing fingers and arrows), but communication functions we attribute to things and events. To put it in Wittgenstein’s terms: signs are facts, not things, or better, states of affairs, that is, configurations of things.20 Accordingly, there are no pure icons either: all icons are full of discourse and textuality, and some icons can be words in their own right (like metaphors and similes). But icons can be also indexes, like the mathematic signs of equivalence and diagrams, or traffic signals. The same applies to symbols: all in all, writing is a picture of language, and language itself is full of images (figures of speech, etc.) and indexical signs (pronouns, deictics, time and place indicators, etc.). Moreover, as we have seen, “a Peircean reading of Saussure’s famous diagram of the linguistic sign, then, would reveal that language itself is a mixed medium, constructed out of the three elements of all possible signs”.21 Indexes, in turn, do not exist in pure form, but only as “word-indexes” (such as deictics or pronouns), or “imageindexes” (such as arrows, signals or signs). To some extent, any sign, regardless of its manner of “making sense” – either by resemblance or by convention – is also an index, by the mere fact of being a sign, that is, of indicating something outside itself, evoking the presence of an absence, like the face of a man evoked by his name or his portrait. And yet, any

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sign can also be interpreted as an icon by the very fact of its being visible (like the written language or a depicted arrow), or as a symbol, for achieving its meaning within the framework of cultural conventions. In conclusion, the X-shaped relations among the Peircean semiotic registers are a “picture” of the mixed nature of all media: while all signs are mixed signs, all media are also mixed media, and, accordingly, all arts are mixed arts.22

The Aesthetic of Images at the Threshold between Nature and Culture The X-diagram has helped us to understand the sensory-semiotic specificity of the image with respect to the text. From a semiotic point of view, we can identify the image with the iconic sign, which signifies through its formal resemblance to its meaning, like Saussure’s drawing of the tree, which indicates a tree because it reproduces morphologically its shape. And yet, the question remains open as far as the senses are concerned: not all that is visible is in fact an image, just as not all that is audible is a language. The issue is further complicated if we cross the sensory channels and the semiotic registers along the diagonal lines of the X-diagram:  not everything we hear evokes in us an acoustic image (i.e., a concept, like Saussure’s tree), and nor do we interpret everything we see as a text in a strict sense, that is, composed by symbolic characters, which signify by convention. From the standpoint of sensorium, the “sense” does not correspond to meaning, like in semiotics, but emerges from the magma of our vegetative life, where our receptor organs are constantly pervaded by stimuli, of which only a small part is selected as the bearer of meaning. The semiotic order of the “sense” stems directly from the biological (dis)order of the “senses”, defining entities, concepts, meanings. Such an explanation, however, leaves the problem almost unsolved, pushing it just a little further, up to the threshold between man and animal, culture and nature. The word “sense” itself expresses iconically such a “threshold of indistinction”, as Giorgio Agamben has called it,23 between men and other living beings. First, it expresses the vegetative life of the body and the senses that we share with every other creature on this planet: not just with animals, but also with plants, lichens, bacteria, etc. Indeed, as Bateson and Canguilhem have pointed out, the living being can be identified with the sentient, that is, with all beings responding to stimuli. Even a lichen, then, is all in all a living creature, insofar as it perceives differences24 and selects which values are functional to its existence25 (growing on a stone rather than on anything else, according to its chemical composition and pH, etc.). And yet, the “sense” is also the unique human ability to attribute to things a “sense”, that is, a meaning, or semiotic value. In other words, the

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cultural sense that we humans give to things is grounded in our senses, since we too are sentient beings that select the values necessary for our lives from the magma of stimuli crossing our sensory channels. From a biological standpoint, then, there is no solution of continuity between the lichen, which selects from the ocean of stimuli the very few life-values it needs, and the civilized man, who defines his identity by establishing (or adapting to) the political values underpinning his state constitution, the ethical values guiding his behavior and the aesthetic values underlying his judgment. That said, we can attempt to see how, in people, the semiosis of the “sense” is rooted in the perception of the “senses”. As we know, iconic signs make meaning through similarity, but how do we perceive such similarity, selecting it among the infinite possible interpretations of things and phenomena? Such a question requires an answer upstream of semiotics, an immersion in the bare life of the senses. And yet, by more closely analyzing this act of selection that allows us to recognize an image as an image (that is, our capacity to separate the image from its medium, as Belting points out26) we will also find ourselves downstream of semiotics, recognizing that the persistent element in our orientation in the world is always what Agamben and Foucault call “signature”27 and Peirce refers to as “index”:  the capacity to read tracks and symptoms, to recognize cause–effect relations, to give a “surplus value” to things and phenomena, and to transform them into meaningful signs. In our sensory perception of images, sight and touch are deeply connected. In principle, we can always touch what we see, be it an inanimate object, a landscape, a person, a plant, a text or a picture. Of course, a computer screen can host all kind of texts and images, but if I reach out my hand I will always touch the cold surface of the screen, the medium onto which text and images are projected. Contemporary technology, with the large-scale diffusion of touchscreen devices, has unequivocally “made visible”, in Klee’s sense,28 the primal connection of sight and touch in our perception of images. Seeing and touching are connected on the axis of the senses, yet are separated on the axis of signs. We can recognize signs by sight (read a text, observe a picture, interpret a signal), but not by touch (the stimuli we receive from the fingertips do not tell us what is written in a text, represented in a picture, indicated by a signal).29 Sight and hearing, on the contrary, are connected on the semiotic level (as shown in the Saussurean acoustic image of the tree (Fig. 2.3), corresponding to the word “arbor”) but not on the sensory level: we cannot see everything that we hear, and nor, above all, can we hear everything that we see. The intersection of the axis of the signs and the senses in the X-diagram shows why we cannot recognize an image or a text without seeing it:  although spoken words and music can also evoke mental images (memories, scenes of our past, desires, fears, etc.), we cannot

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strictly speaking hear or touch images, only pictures. On the southern sensory-semiotic axis of the diagram (iconic sign ļ sense of hearing), the word “image” means “acoustic image” in Saussure’s sense, while on the western sensory-semiotic axis (iconic sign ļ sense of sight), image means “picture”, that is, image embodied in a medium. The X-diagram permits us to visualize the difference between pictures and images at the core of Mitchell’s image science: the picture is located between the sense of sight and the iconic sign; it is the physical image, embodied in a material medium, which one can “touch, kiss or destroy”. The image, instead, is what lies between the sense of hearing and the iconic sign, namely the acoustic image, the figuration (or the abstract configuration) evoked not only by words, music and sounds, but also by a scent or a taste. We can observe how the senses “missing” from the X-diagram – touch, taste and smell  – are related, respectively, to sight (touch) and hearing (taste and smell). The reason why they do not appear in the diagram is that they are not directly connected to the order of signs, but are indirectly linked by way of sight and hearing. This does not mean, of course, that they are “lower” senses, and that people have not developed superfine arts for their “massage”  – from gastronomy, to perfumery, to the innumerable tactile pleasures that necessitate no explanation. Although they also contribute, with their related arts, to shape the overall horizon of our cultures (which are just as culinary, olfactory and tactile as they are literary or visual), these senses do not provide direct access to the selfrepresentations of culture:  we represent and communicate things, facts and events by means of pictures and discourses, but rarely with smells, tastes or tactile perceptions. Unlike the “theoretic senses” of sight and hearing, as Hegel called them,30 the other three senses directly present their content without representing anything other than themselves.31 The sweet flavor of a cake or the bitter taste of a medicine, the scent of a rose or an unpleasant stench, tactile pleasure or the pain of a punch – none of these “signify” anything but themselves, and this is why we do not use them as media for communication. In fact, while the representative capacity of words and images (interlaced with the senses of sight and hearing) can also be reflexive (we can create metalanguages, or metapictures – pictures depicting other pictures – or epitomize the essence of an image), it is hard even to imagine metasmells, metaflavors or meta-tactile sensations capable of making us reflect on smell, taste and touch. Of course, this does not mean that we do not also interpret our tactile, taste and olfactory experiences as signs, referring them to something else. The nexuses evoked, however, are never strictly semiotic, but occur on the intimate level of the reverie: they stir up memories, fantasies, desires and all kinds of mental images related to the personal life of each one of us – the fourth branch from the left of Mitchell’s “Family Tree of Images” (see Fig.  2.1). To be communicated, however, these emotional images need to be translated into some form of representation, either linguistic

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or iconic, or, at most, musical. Indeed, Proust wrote À la recherche du temps perdu to communicate the memories of lost time evoked in him by the taste of his beloved madeleines. The sense we can give to a word, however ambiguous, is infinitely more defined than the sense we can give to a madeleine, beyond the immediate sensorial pleasure that it gives us. We can read a text and understand it, without knowing anything about the author, but we cannot “read” a scent or taste in the same way: their sense is opaque – “obtuse”, as Barthes would have it – since they do not represent anything outside of themselves. Unlike the content of touch, smell and taste, linguistic and iconic signs are not private but universally recognizable. This is most true for icons, since they do not seem to require the knowledge of any code to be understood. And yet, within a cultural system, images are also very “literate”, that is, coded. For example, we could not interpret a monochrome painting by Yves Klein as a picture without a series of cultural assumptions that lead us to acknowledge a canvas painted in blue as a picture even though it seems not to resemble anything but itself. Such was the dream of abstract modernist painting: to purify the medium of painting from any possible relation to something else, making it perfectly self-referential. And yet, what modernist theoreticians like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried did not (or did not want to) notice, is that although nonfigurative painting does not represent anything outside itself, it remains an image insofar as it resembles any other painting, in terms of its material support (color on canvas), the institutions in which it is displayed (museums, art galleries, private residences) and the discourses of which it is the subject (critical and curatorship essays, beholders’ comments, etc.).32 Such considerations belong to the jurisdiction of “visual culture”, the third branch of Mitchell’s image science, along with iconology and media aesthetics: “the study of … the social construction of the visual field and (equally important) the visual construction of the social field”.33 In particular, visual culture is aimed at bringing to light the linguistic layers embedded in images, to the point that the art of the last century has gradually moved away from the production of images in a strict sense (that is, “resembling” figures and depictions) toward speech, making the so-called visual arts and painting itself a strictly coded language, inseparable from the discourse of critique, curatorship, art history, etc. The iconic signs range from a maximum of generality  – the icon of the tree, almost universally recognizable  – to a maximum of coding  – such as mathematical equations, which require scientific training, or esoteric diagrams, like Gurdjieff’s “enneagram”, which to be comprehended demands a lifelong initiation. At any rate, in the actual praxis of communication the extremes are not given: there are no languages whose rules are so complicated that no one, or just one person, can understand them (as Wittgenstein has shown, to follow a rule is a praxis, and one cannot do it privatim), and nor are there perfect images that require no symbolic

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knowledge, like Plato’s hyperuranical ideas, or the fabulous “tableaux” of the classical age,34 but only pictures, images “incarnated” in the matter and “written” with cultural codes. A photograph of a tree might look like a pure representation, but the technology behind it is the result of thousands of years of development. Moreover, the alleged realism of photography is no less a cultural myth than modernist painting’s ideal of medium purity. Even the most “faithful” photograph has no relation with its subject in terms of material, texture and scale, and this is not to mention the frame, which is an ontological characteristic of any photograph, analog or digital (and of any picture in general), and does not exist “out there” in the “real” world.35

Toward an Animism of Images, or How Images Become “Alive” Iconic signs, as all signs, are not things, but functions, relationships or, as Wittgenstein would have it, “states of affairs”. No image is medium-specific:  images are interpretations, more or less “literate”, of things, and can migrate from one support to another. But if not in things, where, then, is this interpretive function to be found? Mitchell introduces this problem when discussing the “firstness” of images: An image or “icon”, as the philosopher C. S. Peirce defined it, cannot merely signify or represent something; it must also possess what he called “firstnesses” – inherent qualities such as color, texture, or shape that are the first things to strike our senses. … These qualities must elicit a perception of resemblance to something else, so that the object produces a double take: it is what it is (say, a piece of painted canvas), and it is like another thing (a view of an English landscape). Where this likeness or resemblance is to be found, and what exactly it consists in, is often a matter of dispute. Some locate it in specific properties of the object, others in the mind of the beholder, while others look for a compromise.36 To see an image implies a double perception: to see something (the canvas) and something else (the view of an English landscape) at once. When we see a picture, what strikes us in the first place is what it resembles, not what it is: the image comes first, and then the medium, the material support of the picture. But as Mitchell observes, where this “firstness” of resemblance is to be found – whether in the eye, in the medium or in the image – is a matter of dispute. To shed some light on this problem, we have to step back to Peirce’s definition of the indexical sign, which is a sort of metasign, insomuch as it insists in the other two semiotic registers. What makes a sign a sign, in fact, is precisely that it “signs” – that is, it indicates, referring to something else like a pointing index finger. This general rule applies not only for sign production (the writing of a

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text, the oral enunciation of a word, the drawing of a picture, etc.), but also for sign reception (reading, hearing, observing, etc.). In the praxis of communication, in fact, signs and senses are intertwined: if making a sign is an action,37 a concrete act of communication, receiving a sign is first and foremost a perception of the senses – we cannot read a text without seeing it, or listen to a speech without hearing it, or contemplate a picture without seeing it. In the empty space between signs and their media stands our bodily “being there” in the world, where action and perception, meaning and feeling, sense and sensibility are one. It is in our body, and namely in our eye, that the coordination of images and their supports takes place; it is our eye that decodes a page of a book to read a text, distinguishing texts from images, or that recognizes in the drawing of a tree a morphological resemblance to a real tree, or that interprets an artwork referring it to its cultural framework. In short: in our eye the “things” become “signs”, just as in our ear sounds become music, or words, passing from babbling to meaning, from disorder to order. In general, it is in our body that, as in Renaissance epistemology, we perceive the “signatures of all things”;38 but unlike in the Renaissance, such signatures are not to be thought of as divine engrams, arcane graphemes imprinted by the Creator onto the bodies of his creatures. Rather, following Bateson and Canguilhem, they are the “differences”, or “values”, that we select from the multitude of events and to which we attribute a meaning for our own lives.39 In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell argues that images, like all signs, are endowed with what Derrida calls a “surplus value”, an excess meaning we irresistibly tend to superimpose to things.40 Such a surplus value (or “dangerous supplement”), though, is not something we add to images but an originary feature of them, something constitutive of their very nature. Indeed, like the sacred objects of the animistic religions, an image is something that evokes by similarity some other thing, being itself and something else, here and there, “a presence of an absence”.41 All kinds of likeness, then, or anything that refers by similarity to something else, are “technically” an image. What we see in the mirror is nothing but our face, but somebody could recognize in it the features of a friend, or a relative, or a public figure: even our bare face can be an image. Image, then, is an originary surplus we see in things and phenomena. It is “originary” in the sense that we first see the image (the subject of the painting) and then the support (the painted canvas). For this reason, the family tree of images ranges from material artifacts (statues, photographs), to natural objects (plants, animals, landscapes, mountains, constellations, all perceptual appearances), to abstract concepts (words, mathematical equations, geometrical diagrams), to fictitious reveries (dreams, desires). Hence, images can be conceived animistically as souls (animae) that become flesh in different bodies. Like souls (and unlike pictures, their incarnations in media) images cannot be destroyed but migrate from one

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thing to another: “all images wherever still or moving are in motion … it’s impossible for us to talk about images without falling into a vitalist metapicture, which involves attributing life to them”.42 For this reason, from What Do Pictures Want? onwards Mitchell has developed what can be defined an “animistic” theory of images, which treats them “as if they were living things”.43 This does not mean slipping into fanaticism and superstition; as he has asserted more than once, Mitchell is not an animist, and images are not really alive.44 “Being alive”, again, is not an ontological feature of some mysterious objects we call “images”, but an intrinsic characteristic of the iconic sign-function. What animates pictures, the “anima”, is not a ghostly entity or a mysterious deity dwelling in them, but a semiotic surplus value that makes something (be it an object, our face, the profile of a mountain, a phrase, an equation, etc.) resemble something else, so that we tend to see first the image resembled and later its support. Mitchell’s conception of images as living things, endowed since the origin with a living surplus value – what we can call “animism of images” – gives rise to another triad, whose terms come directly from the vocabulary of anthropology:  “there are three names traditionally attached to the over/underestimation of images in Western critical discourse:  idolatry, fetishism, and totemism”.45 We tend to attribute a vitalistic supervalue to images, and this triad explores the anthropological modality of such over/underestimation. We might treat them as idols – superpowerful entities capable of decreeing our life or death – either venerating or trying to smash them (iconoclasm is the obverse-twin of idolatry); as fetishes – sacred objects of our private perversion, like Gollum’s “precious” in The Lord of the Rings; or as totems – identity symbols of community and kinship. Mitchell is the first to “put these three ideas together in historicalconceptual structure”,46 but, again, his suggestion must be read iconically, as an invitation to picture a series of morphological resemblances among different fields, and not symbolically, as an attempt to establish a scientific legality. The iconic resemblance of this new triad to the three semiotic registers of icon (idol), index (fetish) and symbol (totem) has led Mitchell to compose another “table of tripartitions” pivoted on the anthropological triad and including the Peircean semiotic triplet.47 Our capacity to recognize the resemblances on which the sign-function of the icon is grounded is much more archaic than the logical skills required by the symbolic sign-function: analogical thought (iconic) comes before logical thought (symbolic). Before developing coded systems with which to represent phenomena, we must have been able to observe in them resemblances and patterns, echoes and similarities. Such is the peculiar “empathy” of images,48 the fact that they rely on our capacity, as mammals, to picture ourselves in somebody else’s condition, to project our sentiments onto other creatures and to feel their emotions within ourselves. On a neurological level, our sympathetic emotional center

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is located in the limbic system, the “middle brain” we share with the other mammals. Abstraction, language, coding, sense of duty are situated, instead, in the neocortex, the outer and largest part (90%) of the brain. Lastly, the most archaic layer is the reptilian brain located at the base of the spine, regulating the instinctual behaviors involved in selfpreservation and sexuality. Such is the “triune” model of the brain, as theorized by Paul D. MacLean,49 whose three centers – regulating instinct (reptilian brain), sentiment (limbic system) and thought (neocortex) – can be associated with the three sign-functions, pushing Mitchell’s picture theory a step further, into the domain of neurology: the bodily sign of the index (reptilian brain), the empathic icon (limbic system), and the intellectual symbol (neocortex). As usual, such parallelism does not claim any scientific legality: from a neurological standpoint, in fact, all three semiotic registers can be considered higher functions, to be located in the neocortex. My purpose is rather to picture a morphologic similarity between the two triadic models in order to make visible the differences between the three semiotic registers: indexes have to do with action (pointing at things), symbols with intellect (referring to things by means of a coded language) and icons with emotions (empathically feeling a living presence into inanimate things). As Aby Warburg has noted, such connection with pathos and emotion is not just an ornament but a primary feature of images, to the point that he named Pathosformeln – “formulae of pathos” – the repertoire of verbal and visual images circulating in the history of Western culture,50 which he also defined as “engrams of passions”, or “emotions in standstill”. The “firstness” of the image, in sum, is due to the fact that we do not (intellectually) interpret things, words, phenomena and organisms as images, but we actually perceive them as such: first we see the painting and then the canvas. The iconic sign is so deeply rooted in the senses that, before being a higher form of communication, it can be seen, in line with Warburg, as a true “biological necessity”.51 As we have seen, we do not need any cultural literacy to perceive images – to recognize resemblances, similarities, patterns and analogies – and we simply see them spontaneously, as if we could not resist the urge to organize our sensory experience into meaningful patterns. The ability to discern a human face in the profile of a mountain, or an animal in the silhouette of a cloud, is not a curiosity or divertissement but a primary human ability. The paleoanthropologist Matteo Meschiari has called this phenomenon apophenia, borrowing the term from the glossary of mental illness: Coined by the neurologist Klaus Conrad (1958) to define the exaggerated tendency of schizophrenics to see imaginary connections of meaning, more recently the term has been used to define “the pervasive tendency of human beings to see order in random configurations”

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Francesco Gori (Brugger [2001: 196]) or “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random data” (Petchkovsky [2008:  247]), therefore a modality of the mind that is not necessarily pathological, and is even universally characteristic of the human species (Fyfe et al. [2008]).52

We are genetically programmed and evolutionarily selected to “see things as” something else. Indeed, apophenia is not a skill that we acquire over time, after special training, but an in-built biological necessity: we do not see a sheep in a cloud because we want to see it, or because someone has taught us to see it, but because, as it were, we cannot but see it. In other words, we cannot prevent ourselves from “reading” our environment and attributing sign-functions to things – surplus values that transcend their mere facticity. As the linguist René Étiemble has provocatively affirmed, “humans learnt first to read and then to write”.53 We tend to attribute a surplus to things, interpreting them as signs, symptoms, causes (in the future) or effects (in the past) of something else, perceiving and conceiving

Fig: 2.5. Paolo Chiasera, Choreography of Species: Rosa Tannenzapfen, 2013, oil on canvas 20 x 20 cm, courtesy of the artist

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the world as a network of resemblances. This does not mean, however, that the world is not really a network of causal connections, that all we see is a ghostly projection of our imagination. Rather, it means that there is no difference between how we perceive the world and what it is, just as Bishop Berkeley claimed back in the eighteenth century: esse est percipi. As the phenomenon apophenia makes visible, the metaphysical sense is embedded in our senses, insofar as the very act of perceiving implies from the beginning the transcendence of the thing, inscribing it into a meaningful pattern of resemblances and references. Developing Carlo Ginzburg’s conjecture,54 Meschiari argues that such a tendency to overinterpret reality, far from being a pathological deviation, might have been a biological necessity, playing a crucial role in the survival of our species during millennia of Paleolithic wandering in the wilderness as hunter-gatherers: From an evolutionary standpoint, apophenia may have played an essential role in the predation and escape mechanisms – where mimicry and recognition of danger in ambiguous perceptive contexts are involved – but also in supporting a “belief-generating machine”. Connected to delusional thought and to supernatural beliefs, apophenia is the “stem cell” of human imagination.55 To conclude, images are like the clouds of Fabrizio De André’s song “Le Nuvole”: “they come and go”, and when they stop before our eyes they “take the shape of the heron, or that of sheep, or some other beast”. But artists, as well as children and our Paleolithic ancestors, “can see this better than we do”. The painter Paolo Chiasera is one of them. In a series of paintings titled Urmutter, he has captured the fleeting essence of images – that is, the fact that they are rooted in the apophenic function of the mind. The subject of Urmutter is “rosa tannenzapfen”, an ancient variety of potato whose shape recalls the features of the great goddess venerated by our nomadic progenitors. The female object of an animistic cult, an oil painting on canvas, a picture of a resemblance, a depiction of an appearance: Urmutter is the metapicture of what an image is (Fig. 2.5).

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1994), 36. 2 See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, in Image Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 13–22. 3 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Image X Text”, in Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh (eds.), The Future of the Image:  Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 2. Reprinted in Image Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17. 4 Mitchell, Image Science, 30.

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5 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Part I. General Principles: The Nature of the Linguistic Sign) (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65–67. 6 Ibid., 70. 7 C.S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs”, in Justus Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), 104. 8 Ibid. 9 Mitchell, Image Science, 112. 10 Ibid., 29–30. 11 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 65. 12 Mitchell, Image Science, 23. 13 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 89n. 14 Mitchell, Image Science, 40. 15 Ibid., 121. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 47. 18 Ibid. 19 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 6. 20 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan, 2015 (1922)), prop. 1.1, p. 12. 21 Mitchell, Image Science, 121. 22 See W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, in Image Science, 125–137. 23 G. Agamben, The Open:  Man and Animal, trans. K. Attel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 24 As Bateson writes in “The Epistemology of Cybernetics”, “a difference which makes a difference is unit of information”, for humans and every other living being. G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind:  Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1987 (1972)), 229. 25 For the most comprehensive philosophical analysis of biological value, see G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C.R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991 (1989)). 26 H. Belting, An Anthropology of Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–36. 27 G. Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. L. D’Isanto and K. Attell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 28 Paul Klee, “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar” (Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible), Schöpferische Konfession, in Kasimir Edschmid (ed.), Tribüne der Kunst und der Zeit. Eine Schriftensammlung, Band XIII (Berlin: Reiß, 1920), 28. 29 The Braille alphabet is in this sense no exception, since it is designed on the model of visual written language. 30 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1988), Vol. 2, 622. Quoted in Mitchell, Image Science, 131. 31 Actually, Hegel’s definition of the “theoretic senses” also includes the sense of touch, such that Peirce – quoted by Mitchell (Mitchell, Image Science, 131) – could connect them to his three semiotic registers. My claim, here, is that the indexical sign, by its characteristic performativity, can be connected with any of touch, sight and smell. The index “presents”  – bodily, directly, immediately – while icons and symbols “represent” things, either by resemblance or by convention. 32 For a discussion of the modernists’ attempt to cleanse painting from language, see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria:  Abstract Painting and Language”,

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

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in Picture Theory, 213–240; W.J.T. Mitchell, “Abstraction and Intimacy”, in What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media” and “Back to the Drawing Board”, in Image Science, 125–152. Mitchell, Image Science, 6. For a critique of the classic-age ideal of a perfect representation of phenomena in a “tableau”, see Foucault’s analysis in The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). On the problematic issue of realism in photography see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image”, in Image Science, 49–64. Mitchell, Image Science, 39. This may be a “speech” act, an “image” act or the “indexical” act of pointing at something. On the Renaissance concept of “signature”, see the above-mentioned Agamben, The Signature of all Things, and M. Foucault, “Signatures”, in The Order of Things, chapter 1.2.2. G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999 [1972]); G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991). See W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Surplus Value of Images”, in What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76–109. Mitchell, Image Science, 43. Ibid., 67–8. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 10. Mitchell, Image Science, 68. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 97–98. Ibid., 195. Ibid. For a further discussion on the “empathy of images”, see David Freedberg’s classic The Power of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and his many articles coauthored with the neurologist Vittorio Gallese. P.D. MacLean, A Triune Concept of the Brain and Behaviour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). As he affirmed, Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Humans and Animals, which he read aged twenty-two while writing his dissertation, was the most influential book he ever read. On Warburg’s “biology of images” see the text of his conference paper on the Hopis’ serpent ritual (A. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)), and its preparatory notes (in M. Ghelardi (ed.), Gli Hopi (Turin: Aragno, 2006)). See also Carlo Severi’s groundbreaking “Warburg the Anthropologist, or the Decoding of a Utopia: From the Biology of Images to the Anthropology of Memory”, in The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Voice and Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Vittorio Gallese’s “Aby Warburg and the Dialogue Among Aesthetics, Biology and Physiology”, pH, Vol. 2 (2012). M. Meschiari, “Roots of the Savage Mind:  Apophenia and Imagination as Cognitive Process”, Quaderni di semantica, Vol. 30 (2009): 185. Cited in C. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes:  Clues and Scientific Method”, History Workshop, No. 9 (Spring, 1980): 31. See Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes”, 12–14, 22–23. This article inspired Mitchell’s Berlin conference papers at ICI (“Madness and Montage: The Picture Atlas as Symptom and Therapy”) and ZFL (“Madness

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and Montage:  Picture Therapy in Warburg’s Mnemosyne Project”), held in April 2014. 55 Meschiari, “Roots of the Savage Mind”, 188. 56 First published in W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?”, New Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring, 1984): 503–537.

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Poststructuralist Iconology The Genealogical and Historical Concerns of Mitchell’s Image Science György E. Szőnyi

Setting a Path toward a New Iconology W.J.T. Mitchell belongs to the generation of scholars who once and for all deconstructed the optimistic belief in the possibility to the authorial intention and the ultimate meaning of artworks.1 Areas where such optimism was particularly strong included iconography and iconology as forged by eminent art historians – Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich and other members of the so-called Warburg School – and it was soon adopted by other areas of artistic creation, such as literature. Classical iconology prevailed between late Antiquity and the Baroque, and it was especially during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that symbolic expression, mythological imagery and Christian allusions were dominating artistic expressions. Already, contemporaries felt the need to give the audience guidance – in the form of dictionaries and handbooks of figurative meanings – on the hidden and sometimes obscure cultural symbols. The most famous such endeavor was Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593, 1603).2 As Jan Białostocki remarked:  “With Ripa in hand art historians  – initially Émile Mâle (in 1932)  – were able to decipher hundreds of allegorical statements in paint and stone, guided by this alphabet of personifications”.3 Émile Mâle was an important representative of “interpretive iconology”, which was founded by Aby Warburg and crystallized in his famous discovery of the decan motifs that decorate the Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes in Ferrara. His deciphering was based on interdisciplinary research into stylistic features, motifs, and archival sources that revealed the humanist-literary program behind the paintings. As he proudly claimed: I have proved, that an iconological analysis, which does not allow itself to be diverted by the rules of frontier police from considering antiquity, Middle Ages, and modern times as interconnected periods, nor from analyzing the most liberal and the most applied works of art as equally important documents of expression, that this method, endeavoring, as it does, to throw light upon one dark spot, clears up at the same time great interconnected developments.4

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Warburg’s method was systematized by Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich. The former is remembered for his differentiation between iconography and iconology as well as his complex method of thematic analysis, which identifies layers of meaning, corresponding acts of interpretation (preiconographic description  – iconographic analysis  – iconological interpretation), and correcting systems of the history of styles, types and cultural symbols.5 Although Panofsky is often called a structuralist, he put great emphasis on the act of interpretation; however, he undoubtedly tried to eliminate subjective distortions from the process of apprehension. His great rival, Ernst Gombrich, added the element of psychology and took into consideration not only the intention of the author, but also of the user. Thus, when he for example differentiated between three sources of symbolic images (experience, tradition and fantasy) he also spoke about three traditions of image usage:  didactic, revelative and magic.6 No matter how useful those systematizations appeared for a long time, the poststructuralist turn (or, as I am inclined to call it, a “pragmatic turn”) in the 1980s mercilessly stepped over them. And one of the flag-bearers was Tom Mitchell, longtime student of Gombrich. From the beginning of his career, Mitchell was interested in the relationship between words and images. His first book in 1978 analyzed Blake’s Composite Art, and in 1980 he edited a collection of essays with the provocative title The Language of Images. Here the title still bore the “linguistic turn” paradigm, according to which all areas of human creativity had to be examined using the analogy of language. But the content was already questioning this paradigm, and Mitchell himself paid tribute to his other master, Nelson Goodman, who had represented a strong conventionalist standpoint (more on this below). At this time Mitchell still praised Gombrich as a “conventionalist iconoclast”.7 In 1981, however, the elderly Gombrich published an article, “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation”, which was seen by radical conventionalists as an apostasy and betrayal of the cause of conventionalism. This paper seems to have radicalized Mitchell’s standpoints and paved the way for his first milestone monograph – Iconology (1986).8 Mitchell’s “new iconology” offered a subversive line of thought in two steps. First, he dissociated himself from Gombrich as well as from traditional semiotics; he thought that the latter, in spite of an attractive, scientific-sounding rhetoric, left vexing problems unresolved. Mitchell’s attack on Gombrich and semiotics was supported by the art-philosophy of Nelson Goodman, which he found to be the only suitable solution for differentiating between various sign-types (such as words and images) without needing to force onto them neo-Kantian, essentialist categories. Mitchell called his own standpoint “extreme conventionalism”, to which I would add “radical iconoclasm and extreme pragmatism”. I  intend to explain why in the pages

Poststructuralist Iconology 63 that follow. But this was only the first step in reconfiguring iconology. The second, having got rid of “idolatry”, was for Mitchell to turn a critical eye to Goodman’s system, too, and while appreciating its values, he pointed out some important shortcomings. To remedy these he offered his own system, which could be called the political and ideological aspect of iconology. Let us go back to step one. As for semiotics, Mitchell pointed out that Peirce and his followers could never clarify the nature of icon because their approach was always rigidly embedded in a logocentric argument. As Roland Barthes also claimed: Though working at the outset on non-linguistic substances, semiology is required, sooner or later, to find language in its path, not only as a model, but also as a component, relay or signified. … It appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language.9 Icons and iconicity, continued Mitchell, as entities incompatible with language, sooner or later appear in every semiotic argumentation, resulting in the failure of semiotics to realize its original program, that is, to explain all sign-systems on a unified conceptual basis. Following Goodman, Mitchell chided the semioticians for tring to explain the icon on the basis of some kind of similarity, resulting only in idolatry. The compromise appears even in the argumentation of such a “hard iconoclast” as Umberto Eco, who submissively wrote:  “In [some] cases the constitution of similitude, although ruled by operational conventions, seems to be more firmly linked to the basic mechanisms of perception than to explicit cultural habits”.10 Roland Barthes arrived at a similar dichotomy in the case of photographs: The photograph, by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to constitute a message without a code. Here, however, structural analysis must differentiate, for of all the kinds of image only the photograph is able to transmit the (literal) information without forming it by means of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation.11 It was also photography that lured Gombrich away from pure conventionalism. While in his 1956 Art and Illusion he did not hesitate to accept the language analogy pertaining to all artworks, in his above-mentioned article of 1981 he sharply differentiated between the purely “natural” images and the purely “conventional” words, stating that pictures can be easily recognized because they are imitations while the meaning of words is based on conventions.12 Thus, Gombrich actually arrived at a non ut pictura poesis standpoint, and here he also argued that

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the discovery of perspectival representation in the Renaissance meant a great step toward the development of “natural” perception. This evolution became complete with the invention of photography, where the machine objective achieves perfect imitation. Mitchell interpreted Gombrich’s argument as a value judgment, too, preferring “natural” seeing, the result of which is a superior “realism”. He saw this judgment as not only unjust and unfounded but as proof of the failure of conventionalism-based semiotics. Naturally, he had no problem with conventionalism, since he himself called for a “hard, rigorous relativism that regards the proliferation of signs, versions, and systems with skepticism, and yet which recognizes that they are the materials we have to work with”.13 His grievance was that semiotics did not successfully employ the principle of total conventionalism. At that time he hoped to resolve this semiotic paradox with the help of Nelson Goodman’s pragmatist theory of the image.

Nelson Goodman and the Image/Word Taxonomy Of Goodman, Mitchell remarked that at first sight the American philosopher might have appeared to be a representative of linguistic imperialism who explained all sign-systems using the analogy of language. This is why he is often labeled as a semiotician. In fact, says Mitchell, Goodman demonstrated the failure of semiotics.14 First, he proposed that instead of the picture theory of language one should use a language theory of pictures on the grounds “that the structure of a depiction does not conform to the structure of the world”, and then he subverted this as well: But I then concluded that there is no such thing as the structure of the world for anything to conform or fail to conform to. You might say that the picture theory of language is as false and as true as the picture theory of pictures; or, in other words, that what is false is not the picture theory of language but a certain absolutistic notion concerning both pictures and language.15 The semiotic paradoxon urged Goodman to look for a theory that could interpret words and images on the basis of a single, common principle. According to his proposition in the Languages of Art (1968), this meant absolute pragmatics, considering only conventions and practices. Goodman asserted that the ut pictura poesis principle was absolutely true, since all cultural representations  – visual, verbal, or any kind of combination  – could be “read” with the help of arbitrary codes (conventions). This theory destroys the entire metaphysical divide between different sign-categories and gathers under the same theoretical umbrella any kind of text, image, map and diagram.16

Poststructuralist Iconology 65 An explanation of the grounds on which Goodman maintained the total equality and communality among the different sign-systems is beyond the scope of this chapter. With a telling metaphor he talked about the “density” of representational acts, which can be visualized – with the help of Mitchell  – as two thermometers, one showing the temperature on a continuous line and the other using a scale divided into centigrade. Goodman called the first analog and the second digital representation.17 Similarly, we could also talk about sequential or gradual, step-by-step representation. An oil paint using interlaced shades obviously employs sequential signs as opposed to the digital signs of letters or the distinctive features of phonemes. However, between the two extremes there are a lot of intermediary stages, such as the line in pictorial representations which breaks smooth sequential transitions. At first sight the above argumentation appears to be structuralist. What made Goodman’s opinion “extreme conventionalist” was his insistence that the differentiation between types of sign (that is, the digitization of the sequential scales) was never based on real structural differences, and rather was brought about by customs and conventions. This is how it can happen that by turning a non-right-aligned typed page ninety degrees left, we might “read” it to be the contours of a hilly landscape; or that letters, appearing on a painting, will be decoded according to their shape, form and size, and not according to the meaning of the text. Pondering this dilemma, Goodman formulated his famous axiom: the real question is not to ask “what is art?”, but rather “when is art?”.18 Or, in Mitchell’s paraphrase: “We need to ask of a medium, not what ‘message’ it dictates by virtue of its essential character, but what sort of functional features it employs in a particular context”.19 Although Mitchell praised Goodman’s conventionalism, he also pinpointed its drawbacks, namely the neglect of ideology and values. This shortcoming is apparent in spite of the fact that one of Goodman’s major concerns was to differentiate good “readings” from bad ones. In this respect he was on a common platform with Umberto Eco, who often said that while there may be a huge number of “good” readings of a work, the number of “bad” readings is probably even greater. The criteria for good interpretation are the same for Goodman and Eco: rigorous coherence, clarity, simplicity, that is – the greatest economy. As Eco said, it is more economic to offer a simple and coherent explanation than a complicated one with a lot of inconsistencies.20 These explanations were not fully satisfactory for Mitchell. For him (and for other poststructuralists), the main question was what to do with historicism, which in the disguise of objectivity usually tried to sell readings that were heavily biased with the ideology of the interpreter. The failure of structuralism proved that the solution is not a value-free “scientific” objectivity, and Mitchell charged the late Gombrich with this “heresy”. For Mitchell, the privileging of (natural) pictures over

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(conventional) texts is “idolatry”, camouflaging some sort of ideology. With Goodman, Mitchell passionately argued that literary “realism” as well as pictorial imitative verisimilitude are no less conventional than any other styles of representation. And with this we have arrived at the question of ideology, since it is well known that the recurring classicisms in Western cultural history always heralded that perfect (or ideal) imitation is the most superior achievement of art. Most recently, the dogma of socialist realism and its political enforcement showed the dangers of such dictatorial standpoints.21 According to Mitchell, the main task of the cultural and art historian is to unmask the ideological motivations of stylistic or generic value judgments. He seemed to discover such covert ideological motivations behind Gombrich’s preference for “value-free” photographs. In my opinion, this ideology-oriented interpretation of artworks is a direct descendant of Panofsky’s intuitive iconological readings referring to the third level of meaning in his system. The novelty in Mitchell’s approach is that he is no longer interested in the “meaning” of images or texts; rather, he focuses on those intellectual and emotional reactions that the artworks generate among certain interpretive communities. This is what could be called the politics of the usage and recycling of cultural representations. He maps this political agenda in the following pragmatical scheme: iconophobia – iconophilia and fetishism – iconoclasm – idolatry. This paradigm practically embodies the research program of the new iconology. Its theory was laid down in Mitchell’s Iconology and its practice demonstrated in his following book, Picture Theory (1994).

The Genesis of Mitchell’s Image/Word Theory In the examination of the politics of iconology, Mitchell’s starting point was the thesis according to which in Western culture pictures and texts had been continuously played against each other. The basically “logocentric” Western thought has always characterized textuality and pictoriality as radically different, and even modern semiotics has favored the former. In this context the emphasis on the importance of pictures, let alone declaring texts and pictures congenial, has always been subversive and gone against the mainstream  – one need simply think of the centuries-long debates over the ut pictura poesis principle or the nature of ekphrasis. According to Mitchell, these debates tended to attribute to pictures a special power that has to be either exploited or contained.22 Accordingly, philosophers, aestheticians, and literary and art critics have always betrayed an inclination to either iconophobia or iconophilia; however, according to Mitchell, these only served to cover value judgments or power politics.23 The following extract foregrounds Mitchell’s diagnosis and interpretation:

Poststructuralist Iconology 67 The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves around itself. What varies is the precise nature of the weave, the relation of warp and woof. The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a “nature” to which only it has access. At some moments this struggle seems to settle into a relationship of free exchange along open borders; at other times (as in Lessing’s Laocoön) the borders are closed and a separate peace is declared. Among the most interesting and complex versions of this struggle is what might be called the relationship of subversion, in which language or imagery looks into its own heart and finds lurking there its opposite number.24 Why is it, asks Mitchell, that artists and philosophers alike see the relationship of words and images to be engaged in a fierce ideological-political struggle? Each chapter in his Iconology is devoted to various aspects of this wrestling, the analysis of which he carries out via the following research tasks: 1) The examination of those critical methods that have tried to codify and maintain the demarcation between the various branches of art, especially between the textual and the pictorial. 2) The examination of those artistic practices that strived to subvert the artificial boundaries between space and time, natural and conventional, eye and ear, iconic and symbolic, with good testing grounds including theatrical performances, film, cartoons, illustrations, emblems. 3) A pragmatic program to facilitate the shift of investigation from the theory of images toward their uses. Based on empirical observation, Mitchell asserts that his program is validated by the fact that mixed pictorial-textual representations are much more common in our culture than pure, nonhybrid ones, which are in fact real exceptions.25 Picture Theory functions as a sequel to Iconology, and, in spite of its title, the book is more a collection of case studies than a systematic theoretical exposition. This is to be expected of a “hard” pragmatist, and in a wider context we see that poststructuralist theorists tend to avoid grand narratives and stick to the examination of the “rubble” that remains after the deconstruction of the large systems.26 In Picture Theory Mitchell takes for granted that picures and words are entirely equal, are furthermore inseparable from each other, and that in most cases they exist in organic unity. So one of the polemical purposes of the work is to show that

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György E. Szőnyi the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism.27

The antagonizing of images and texts has been the ideologically motivated program of Western philosophy; nowadays, however, since the “pictorial turn”, that program has become completely anachronistic. For Mitchell, one of the main concerns is this pictorial turn, which  – after Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy – has become the next great turning point in the mediality of culture. The complexities of the mediality of culture are outlined in the introduction to Picture Theory as follows: Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.28 On the basis of the above principles, Mitchell redefines the program of the new iconology. First, he pays tribute to Panofsky’s “old iconology” by praising the German art historian’s famous study on perspectival representation: This essay remains a crucial paradigm for any ambitious attempt at a general critique of pictorial representation. Panofsky’s grand synthetic history of space, visual perception, and pictorial construction remains unmatched in both its sweep and its nuanced detail. … Panofsky manages to tell a multidimensional story of Western religious, scientific, and philosophical thought entirely around the figure of the picture.29 However, Panofsky was not able to provide a perfect key to unlock pictorial culture, because the essence of his iconology was rooted in the logos, in the enforcement of discursive linguistic interpretation, in the textual appropriation of the image. Contrary to this, the new iconology resists the temptation to explain the relationship between icon and logos

Poststructuralist Iconology 69 with the help of some scientific theory. It steps beyond the practice of comparing words and images and admits that language as well as image are equal constituents of the human subject. Accordingly, two ancient maxims are also of equal importance: “Man is a speaking animal”, and “Man is created in the image of his maker”.30 Other intriguing topics Mitchell deals with include textual pictures, the questions of pictures and power, and also some important psychological aspects of iconophobia and iconophilia. Among these I  would highlight what he has to say about an important genre of textual pictures, ekphrasis, which he approaches from the direction of the “politics of description”. The description of real or imagined artworks has been an important, and usually much admired, device of textual representations since the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad. Recently, ekphrasis has enjoyed a significant career in literary theory, similar to the boom of emblem studies.31 Mitchell differentiates three phases in the working of ekphrasis. The first is indifference, deriving from reason that suggests such imitation is impossible. As Nelson Goodman said, “No amount of description adds up to depiction”.32 The second phase is ekphrastic hope. It happens when we “seem to see” in front of us the described artwork and feel that the writer is capable of painting with words. However, this moment at the same time extinguishes the peculiarity of ekphrasis as we realize that this literary device only uses the natural and paradigmatic energy of language. Thus language is able to defeat the antagonism of image/text and creates a verbal icon, or imagetext.33 But this is not the end of the story: the third phase he calls ekphrastic fear. It consists of the recognition that if ekphrasis works, the divide between words and images indeed disappears: “It is the moment in aesthetics when the difference between verbal and visual mediation becomes a moral, aesthetic imperative rather than a natural fact that can be relied on”.34 The classic demonstration of ekphrastic fear is Lessing’s Laocoön, in which the classicist philosopher did his best to demarcate the terrains of the painter and the poet. He wanted to defend the poet, and was looking for such literary examples that corroborated his view. Mitchell offers a psychoanalytical and gender-oriented reading of Lessing’s arguments, claiming, that his “fear of literary emulation of the visual arts is not only of muteness or loss of eloquence, but of castration, a threat which is re-echoed in the transformation from ‘superior being’ to ‘doll’, a mere feminine plaything”.35 The fact, that the picture appears to be “the Other” creates a dialectics of disbelief, desire and abhorrence in the text. The ekphrastic hope tries to resolve this dichotomy, but the fear prevents it. Following Fredric Jameson, Mitchell looks for the source of this fear among the “ideologems”, since he finds no proof to verify any fundamental difference between words and images. Insistence on this difference cannot have any other basis but ideological.36 These ideologems

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form the metaphors of power, constructing the dichotomy of the “seeing and speaking” subject versus the “seen and dumb” Other, completing it with gender as male and female.37 Mitchell’s fascinating case studies in Picture Theory must be neglected here, but mention should be made of his suggestion of a picture-typology – more enhanced than the one in Iconology (in chapter  1, “What Is an Image?”). This time he classifies the relationship of words and images, at the same time trying hard not to become rigid and taxonomic. His strongest message is that all representations are composite, uniting textual and visual elements. Furthermore, all representations use mixed media, combining various codes, discursive conventions, channels and cognitive platforms.38 Consequently, he registers only hybrid cases such as imagetexts, which produce a synthesis of the two media: image/text, in which the relationship between text and picture is problematized; and image–text, which consists of loosely connected, distinguishable images and words.39 A summary of his theoretical conclusions runs as follows: The “otherness” we attribute to the image–text relationship is, therefore, cerainly not exhausted by a phenomenological model (subject/object, spectator/image). It takes on the full range of possible social relations inscribed within the field of verbal and visual representations.40 I hope the above summary makes clear the distinctiveness of Mitchell’s approach concerning the mediality of culture compared with the classical iconologists, Panofsky or Gombrich. At this point, someone interested in the history of theory – like myself – ought to take a side and reveal his or her own standpoint in this complicated theoretical universe. I will do so in the final section of this chapter, but first I would like to include some more poststructuralist thinkers in this review.

Belting and Mitchell on the Ideology of Art History The most significant German art historian who can be associated with the program of new iconology is Hans Belting. Among his many books, two deserve special interest here: Bild und Kult (1990, translated as Likeness and Presence, 1994) and Bild Anthropologie (2001).41 These books’ most important arguments seem to reflect on Mitchell’s research questions, though Belting’s writing is less postmodern and bears the hallmark of legendary German philological precision. Nevertheless, even the first words of Likeness and Presence echo Mitchell’s interest in “the politics of images”: “Whenever images threatened to gain undue influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power”.42 This is an early example of what Mitchell characterizes as follows: “The fear of the image, the anxiety that the ‘power of images’ may finally destroy

Poststructuralist Iconology 71 even their creators and manipulators, is as old as image-making itself”.43 Belting introduces his book with a trivial and highy pragmatic reference that would often escape our attention: The question facing us, therefore, is how to discuss images, and which aspects of them to stress. As usual, the answer depends on the interests of the person discussing the subject. Within the specialized field of the art historian, sacred images are of interest only because they have been collected as paintings and used to formulate or illustrate rules governing art. When battles of faith were waged over images, however, the views of art critics were not sought. Only in modern times has it been argued that images should be exempt from contention on the grounds that they are works of art. Art historians, however, would fail to do justice to the subject if they confined their expertise to the analysis of painters and styles.44 The centuries-long battle over the ut pictura poesis principle, in addition to Mitchell’s investigations, disprove Belting’s assertion that pictures are freed from ideological conflicts as soon as they become artworks. However, he is perfectly right to separate “the age of pictures” from the “age of art” in the history of visual representations. With his approach Belting has unmasked how art history has appropriated everything as art and enforced its authority over pictures that were not really in its jurisdiction. In order to create a real Bildwissenschaft, Belting argues, we have to temporarily forget about art and allow theologians, historians and anthropologists to look at and interpret images. He also emphasizes that in these investigations old and contemporary opinions have to be synthesized. Belting’s historical probes are in harmony with Mitchell’s view, according to which neither pictures nor words can exist in their pure realization: each image has a verbal aspect, and each text has a visual aspect. The latter is exemplified by the adoration of the Torah, which is a text, but its scroll is looked at by the Jews as a cult image.45 The crisis of the old image, Belting explains, culminated in the negative image theology of the Reformation. Theologians have always looked at pictures with suspicion because they have believed that images potentially resist the logocentric explications of the Scriptures. They attempted to appropriate images through the rationalization and ritualization of image cults. The Reformation admitted the failure of this program: what they could not tame, they decided to destroy. What is more: The new doctrine of justification by faith alone made pious donations of or for images superfluous. The whole concept of the votive image collapsed, and with it, the Roman church’s claim to be an institution that dispensed grace and privileges visibly embodied in its

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György E. Szőnyi relics and images. What the new docrine left in place was theologians without institutional power, preachers of the word legitimated only by their superior theology.46

In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great had established the thesis that images are laymen’s books. This was paraphrased by John of Damascus as follows: “An image is to the illiterate what a book is to the literate, and what the word is to hearing, the image is to sight”.47 This notion was the foundation for the ideology of Biblia pauperum, and from this Belting concludes that in the age of Gutenberg the word of God could reach everybody in their own vernacular, so images could no longer compete with the authentic sacred text. Belting’s explanation of the ideology of Protestant iconoclasm is convincing; however, alongside this one must remember that Renaissance Neoplatonism returned to Plotinus, acknowledging with him that “it must not be thought that in the Intelligible World the gods and the blessed see propositions; everything expressed there is a beautiful image”.48 Belting also neglects other early modern tendencies, such as the humanist cult of the Antiquity or the crystallization of the Renaissance individual, which contributed to the rise of “the age of art”. Furthermore, it should also be remembered that in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries reading was only just about to become a mass activity, so pictures still played a vital role in communication. Belting is perfectly correct, however, that from this time on we see an ever stronger demarcation of words and images, and their antagonistic politics becomes increasingly apparent, a fact also demonstrated paradoxically by the efforts to put an end to this separation (see the arguments for and debates over the ut pictura poesis principle in the Renaissance period). With the dissolution of the ideological foundation, Belting concludes, the image was reduced to the symbol of an archaic worldview, a reminder of the lost harmony between the world and the individual subject. Into its place steps art, which inserts a new level of meaning between the visual appearance of the image and the understanding of the beholder. Art becomes the sphere of the artist, who assumes control of the image as proof of his or her art. The crisis of the old image and the emergence of the new concept of art are interdependent. Aesthetic mediation allows a different use of the images, about which artist and beholder can agree between themselves. Subjects seize power over the image and seek through art to apply their metaphoric concept of the world. The image, henceforth, … presents itself to the beholder as an object of reflection.49 Belting’s main topic is the story of the old image, and consequently his summary of the paradigm shift is somewhat sketchy. It reads, interestingly,

Poststructuralist Iconology 73 as though his narrative were continued in another text, having actually been written ten years earlier by Jean Baudrillard, introducing the theory of simulacra, and since then having become a cultic manifesto of postmodern interpretations.50 Many significant changes occurred before that, and many descriptions have been offered to highlight those:  an artistic and intellectual crisis (Arnold Hauser), an epistemological paradigm shift (Michel Foucault), a scientific revolution (Alexander Koyré), the simulacrum of scientific revolution (Thomas Kuhn), the revival of magic (Frances Yates), a new semiotic epoch (Yurij Lotman). Among these complex and often contradictory tendencies one cannot disregard the significance of words and images as sign systems. After having read Belting or Mitchell, one feels that it is no longer possible to interpret cultural representations as great scholars did before the postmodern revolution: with the hope that hard work and precise analysis lead to a “perfect reading”, that is their “True Meaning”. Today’s task is to carry on the interpretation work without this feeling of certainty.

Toward the “iconology of cultural representations” When assessing a significant intellectual achievement – such as the work of W.J.T. Mitchell – one is inclined to highlight the novelty and originality of that accomplishment, seeing it as a step forward from, or reaction to, preceding, already outdated views. My purpose in this essay is somewhat different. My intention is to present Mitchell’s theories about “iconology” and the “politics of images” as a logical conclusion to (as well as an inspiring milestone in) a long intellectual development aiming to understand the inter- and multimediality of culture and the logic of cultural representations. At this point, let me invite the reader back to the nineteenth century, a period that brought about the crystallization of the system of humanities. The major philosopher of this epoch was Hegel, who on the one hand shared his predecessors’ (beginning with Plato and Aristotle) opinion of artworks, in that they encapsulate and preserve some sort of eternal beauty and transcendental idea. On the other hand, he also offered a novel perspective by elaborating a historical evolutionary model of aesthetical ideals: he divided the history of art according to the “symbolic” (ancient Near East), “classical” (Greco-Roman) and “romantic” (from the Christian Middle Ages to the Enlightenment) manifestations of the transcendental beauty.51 Hegel’s double perception signals the beginning of the dichotomy – and sometimes antagonism – in establishing scholarly approaches to artworks on either an essentialist or a historicist platform. It may sound brutal, but I  argue that modern aesthetics and literary and art theory, since their birth in the nineteenth century, have been desperately retreating while

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fighting to prove that the aesthetical function is accessible for objective and academic research. In other words, literary and art theory, from the beginning, have had to stand up for their disciplinary legitimacy. And during this long struggle, their positions, one by one, have had to be given up. Hegel’s motivation in emphasizing the importance of history was to highlight that absolute aesthetical perfection manifests itself in every age, art form and artist with a different structure and dynamics. While followers of the German master accepted the notion of eternal and essential aesthetic values without problematizing it, the interpretation of the historical dimension immediately began to eat away at the possibility of a unified aesthetics. At the end of the nineteenth century, neo-Kantianism highlighted the fact that human cognition cannot fully acquire Ding-ansich noumena, only phenomena. The notion of intentionality of early phenomenology seemed to offer an escape route: according to the hopes of positivism and historicism, if we are unable to get to the true meaning of the ideas, we can at least research and reconstruct the intention of the author and thus establish the fixed, permanently coded meaning of the work. By the twentieth century even this program had become problematized, and so the importance of the author faded and with it the importance of the historical context, too. With the rise of formalism a new project emerged: dubious historical reconstructions of authorial intention were relegated; instead, the objectively available material, that is, the work itself, be it textual, pictorial or in any other media, should be analyzed. Why should we look for meaning elsewhere if it is undoubtedly coded in the texture and structure of the artwork? This program coincided with Saussure’s revolution in linguistics; it was clear that the most obvious “raw material” of culture is the human language, the examination of which quickly became the paradigm of the humanities. This is what we remember as the “linguistic turn”.52 The rise of structuralism demonstrates the neglect afforded to Wilhelm Dilthey’s early-twentieth-century warning, according to which the humanities have a specific methodology of their own, clearly distinguishable from the methodology of the hard natural sciences. While in the time of positivism the paradigm of the humanities was borrowed from biology and climatology (August Comte, Hyppolite Taine and the followers of Darwinian evolutionism), the linguistics-oriented structuralism maintained the ambition that the examination of human culture must remain strictly objective, falsifiable and scientific. Thus, linguistics became a metascience, provided a “grammar” for a wide range of subjects from art history to cultural anthropology, and the “language of the artwork” was sought in every medium. Before long this ambitious program also came to an end. By the 1970s it had become clear that artistic meaning should not be looked for in the work itself, because it is constructed in the communicative space

Poststructuralist Iconology 75 between the material (the “message”) and the audience (the “receiver”). Consequently, “meaning” cannot be considered such an objective noumenon as the objects of natural scientific research, because it constantly changes in relation to the context and cannot be unambiguously determined. In the beginning, structuralism aimed to offer a scientific methodology based on clear definitions and unambiguous explanations. It hoped to find objective criteria:  for example, how to differentiate text from image, speech from writing, poetical expression from everyday parlance. Following Saussure, these differences were to be established through the use of binary oppositions and their interactions as transformations.53 However, difficulties became apparent from the beginning. To overcome these, the movement’s representatives continually introduced modifications and refinements, which increasingly diverted from the original principles and program. The process went on  – according to the Kuhnian logic of scientific revolutions – until the system collapsed, because it was more economic to create a new system then keep on mending the old. To put it succinctly: it became clear that the historical context could not be neglected, and that it needed to be brought back into the interpretation process; however, this could not be done in the old, positivistic, reconstructionist way. A similar tendency can be seen in Mitchell’s fields of interest: iconology and the mediality of culture. Iconography and iconology started with an optimistic program, hoping to arrive at an unambiguous clarification of the meaning of artworks. The founder of modern iconology, Aby Warburg, began with an evolutionist program that still reflected the goals of the “Enlightenment project” – that is, the final victory of logical analysis and rational understanding over the dark, superstitious and atavistic pathosformeln. After his mental health crisis and his experiences in a sanatorium, he came to a radically different understanding, as demonstrated by his famous lecture on the Hopi snake ritual in which he confronted two world models and types of interpretation – the rational, analytical and discursive Western view, versus the holistic, organic and intuitive Native model  – and apparently could no longer easily choose between the two.54 Erwin Panofsky worked out a brilliant system to identify the layers of meaning in tradition-based cultural representations, especially in the visual arts. He also offered correction systems to avoid misreadings on the part of the interpreters and to provide objective, well-founded understanding.55 However, he has not been able to entirely convince the academic community about the usefulness of his system; although for decades his solutions were extremely influential and popular, since the 1990s he has been increasingly neglected.56 Ernst Gombrich – yet another ingenious art historian – combined cultural iconology with psychology and cognitive research in order to be able to explain certain modes of understanding that could be derived

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not from the meaning inherently enclosed in the artworks, but rather from the way the audience used them.57 Originally, he was a pacesetter among the conventionalists, suggesting that no human seeing is natural and “innocent” since we are all socialized into conventions of perceiving and understanding. Toward the end of his career, he retreated in part and seemed to acknowledge differences in the degree of naturalness and conventionality in favor of visual expression over texts. He was severely attacked for this kind of “orthodoxy” by cultural radicals – Tom Mitchell being one of them. All these doubts and struggles among art historians can be related to two radical theoretical standpoints that emerged after World War II. The first is Wittgenstein’s theory of the language games, by which he suggested that language is inherently ambiguous (just like the notorious Duck– Rabbit image that he also included in his Philosophical Investigations) and thus no final meaning and understanding of any linguistic utterance can be established. The other influential attack on traditional thinking was formulated by Jean-François Lyotard in his La Condition postmoderne:  rapport sur le savoir (1979), in which he reckoned with “grand narratives” and metanarratives, which result only in reductionism and follow teleological thinking. He associated these with modernism and structuralism, while he boldly claimed:  “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives”.58 He referred also to Wittgenstein’s “language games”, which make it impossible to avoid a plurality of arguments and interpretations. After a while, all the greatest structuralists became conventionalists or pragmatists. The famous designer of the linguistic model of communication, Roman Jakobson, also had initial hopes that he would be able to precisely define “what is poetry”. But his structuralist analysis led him only to the “poetical function”, and by the 1930s he was ready to admit that no scientific method could answer his original question, because it depends on the interpretive practice of the audience.59 Lévi-Strauss experienced the same problem while studying myths and the pensée sauvage.60 His identification of strata and structures among the tribal people was ingenious, but his system was problematized by the appearance of interpretive anthropology which replaced the outsider scholar’s attitude with a much more ambiguous insider/outsider dynamic. It would appear that poststructuralism was the first theoretical movement to give up the long-pursued illusion of essentialism and reconstructionism by replacing them with a pragmatic turn. This meant recognizing that all cultural phenomena are context-dependent and that they function according to the conventions of user communities. The movement also acknowledged the relationship between cultural representations and the ideologies behind them, and recognized that those representations take part in the construction of human subjects by activating ideologies.

Poststructuralist Iconology 77 These developments caused upheaval in the humanities, which overshadowed the fact that the predecessors of the poststructuralist theoreticians had already taken important steps toward these radical turns. When I contextualize Mitchell’s work historiographically, I intend to do justice to his masters, too. If one accepts my thesis, according to which the twentieth-century history of theory can be seen as a long process of retreat and surrender, we have to look at its consequences as regards the relationship between words and images. A general tendency was to marginalize first the author, then the work itself, privileging the user, reader or audience – or to use Stanley Fish’s term, “the interpretive community”. Recently, postsemiotics has even undermined the validity of the question of who reads or perceives, because the interpreting subject has also become indistinct. Parallel to this dilemma, it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between the media of cultural representations, as Nelson Goodman wittily demonstrated: the same pattern can be text or image, depending on the user’s interpretive strategies. Mitchell comes to similar conclusions in Picture Theory. So, is this theoretical uncertainty a real loss? My answer is no. Theories – burdened by the need to create normative systems – did their best to define and separate the verbal and the visual from each other. As Mitchell has so clearly demonstrated, these demarcations usually served ideological purposes whose politics was to set the different media against one other. Thanks to poststructuralist iconology, and mainly to Mitchell’s work, we must now acknowledge that visual and verbal representations are inseparable in theory as well as in practice. Thus, we see the ut pictura poesis principle being proved by the tools of modern scholarship.

Notes 1 From now on I  shall use “artworks” and “cultural representations” interchangeably, although I define the latter as a broader category that includes all artworks as well as many other kinds of representation. On the other hand, the majority of my claims about artworks are also valid for all human cultural representations. See Gy.E. Szőnyi, “The Mediality of Culture: Theories of Cultural Representations”, IKON (Journal of Iconographic Studies, Rijeka), thematic issue: Iconology at the Crossroads, Vol. 7 (2014): 73–84. 2 This groundbreaking work was conceived as a guide to the representation of abstract notions. The first two editions were followed by seven more Italian editions up to the late eighteenth century. There were also eight non-Italian translations during this period:  French in 1644, Dutch in 1644, Dutch in 1699, German in 1704, English in 1709, German in 1760, French in 1766 and English in 1779. Although the English editions were rather late, there is a known seventeenth-century English translation which remained in manuscript (London, British Library, MS Additional 23195). See a partial transcription: Cesare Ripa, Introduction to the Iconologia or Hieroglyphical figures of Cesare Ripa, Knight of Perugia. Available at www.levity.com/alchemy/iconol_i. html, accessed October 24, 2014.

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3 Jan Białostocki, “Iconography,” in Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New  York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973–1974), Vol. 2: 524–541, quotation from p. 530. 4 Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (1912), in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, ed. and intr. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 563–592, quotation from p. 585. 5 See Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology:  An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art” (1939), in Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) (London: Penguin, 1993), 51–82. 6 Ernst Gombrich, “‘Icones Symbolicae’: Philosophies of Symbolism and Their Bearing on Art” (1948), in Ernest Gombrich (ed.), Symbolic Images: Studies on Renaissance Iconology, 1948–1972 (London:  Phaidon, 1978), 123–199. On the significance of Gombrich’s typology, see Gy.E. Szőnyi, “The Powerful Image:  Towards a Typology of Occult Symbolism”, in Gy.E. Szőnyi (ed.), Iconography East & West (Symbola et Emblemata 7)  (Leiden:  Brill, 1996), 250–263; and Gy.E. Szőnyi, “Semiotics and Hermeneutics of Iconographical Systems”, in Jeff Bernard, Gloria Withalm and Karl Müller (ed.), Bildsprache, Visualisierung, Diagrammatik (Akten zweier internationaler Symposien 1), Semiotische Berichte 19.1–4 (1995 [1996]), 283–313. 7 In this context, “iconoclasm” does not mean the destruction of images, rather the rejection of the “iconicist” understanding of images – that is, the denial that seeing is something “natural” and “transparent” rather than based on social-cultural conventions. 8 Mitchell was a pioneer in radically reconfiguring the idea of iconology, but his radicalization went hand in hand with a larger revisionist movement in art history. Just a few years later, Donald Preziosi (in Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1989)) developed a critique of traditional iconology and declared Panofsky obsolete. I by no means agree fully with this kind of radicalism, but I see this “pragmatic turn” as being of the utmost importance. In my own writing (see the text cited above in endnote 1 and my Hungarian monograph: György E. Szőnyi, Pictura & Scriptura: Twentieth-century Theories of Tradition-based Cultural Representations (Szeged: JATEPress, 2004)). I have made efforts to show that previous movements had paved the way for the new iconology and pragmatic approaches. 9 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1968), 10–11; quoted by W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1986), 56. 10 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 216. Also quoted by Mitchell, Iconology, 57. Looking back at this debate, my opinion is that in his Kant and the Platypus:  Essays on Language and Cognition (1997; London:  Secker and Warburg, 1999) Eco successfully disproved the extreme conventionalist stand and offered a healthy and rational compromise by introducing the concept of alpha (primarily visual) and beta (primarily textual) modalities (see the last chapter of his book and my Pictura & Scriptura, 236–243). 11 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”, in Image–Music–Text, tr. Stephen Heeth (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 43. 12 Ernst Gombrich, “Image and Code:  Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation”, in Wendy Steiner (ed.), Image and Code (Ann Arbor, MI:  University of Michigan Press, 1981), 11–42. The citation is from p. 11.

Poststructuralist Iconology 79 13 Mitchell, Iconology, 63. 14 Semioticians naturally registered the uncomfortable features of Goodman’s theory. See Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 423. 15 Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects (New York: Bobbs-Merill, 1972), 31–32; also quoted in Mitchell, Iconology, 64. 16 This is  why Gombrich called  Goodman an “extreme  conventionalist” (Gombrich, “Image and Code”, 14), which Mitchell approvingly quotes (Mitchell, Iconology, 65). 17 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 159. 18 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978), 66–67: “In crucial cases, the real question is not ‘What objects are (permanently) works of art’, but ‘When is an object a work of art?’ – or more briefly, ‘When is art?’ ” 19 Mitchell, Iconology, 69. 20 See Umberto Eco,  “Intentio Lectoris”, in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 44–64. 21 In Hungarian scholarship György Lukács and Tibor Klaniczay (the latter being the chief representative of Renaissance and Baroque studies in the 1970s and 1980s) memorably debated for decades the dangers of ideological evaluations of period styles. See Szőnyi, Pictura & Scriptura, note 343. 22 Mónika Medvegy, a Hungarian scholar, employs a term from psychology to describe this ambiguous attitude: double bind. “The attitude of literature towards pictures is at the same time attraction and repulsion; although it desires the beautiful world of pictures, at the same time it is suspicious of them” (my translation). See Mónika Medvegy, “Egy festmény narrativálásának módjai és poetológiai dimenziói. E. T. A. Hoffmann: ‘Doge és dogaressa’ ”, in Attila Kiss and Gy.E. Szőnyi, Szó és kép. A művészi kifejezés szemiotikája és ikonográfiája (Ikonológia és műértelmezés 9, 22) (Szeged: JATEPress, 2003), 287. 23 Mitchell, Iconology, 42–46. 24 Ibid., 43. 25 His chapter on the purism of abstract expressionism deals with one of these exceptions. 26 It is noteworthy that only three years after Picture Theory, Umberto Eco, in his Kant and the Platypus, adopted a similar methodology. As he admitted, in his earlier career he had desperately tried to create a large and coherent theory but later realized that somewhat arbitrary, though organically connected, reflections carry greater credibility. 27 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 5. 28 Ibid., 16. 29 Ibid., 17–18 30 Ibid., 24. 31 The relevance of research on ekphrasis around the time of Picture Theory is marked by the following contemporary publications:  Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words:  The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1993); Valerie Robillard and Els Jongenel (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998); Peter Wagner (ed.), Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996); see also two thematic issues of Word & Image, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1986):  “Poems on Pictures”; and Vol. 15, No. 1 (1999): “Ekphrasis”. 32 Goodman, Languages of Art, 231; quoted in Mitchell, Picture Theory, 152.

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33 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 83–100. See p. 89, n. 9, for the definition of image/ text. 34 Ibid., 153. 35 Ibid., 155. 36 Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981), cited in Mitchell, Picture Theory, 157ff. 37 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 181. 38 Ibid., 95. 39 Ibid., 89. 40 Ibid., 162. 41 Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem  Zeitalter  der Kunst (Munich: C.H. Beck,801990). English edition: Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe einer Bildwissenschaft (Munich:  Fink, 2001). There is no English translation of the latter, but a summary of the book was published as “Image – Medium – Body”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31 (2005): 302–319. 42 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 1. 43 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 15. 44 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 2. 45 Ibid., 7. 46 Ibid., 15. 47 Ann Eljenholm Nichols, “Books-for-laymen: The Demise of a Commonplace”, Church History, Vol. 56, No. 4 (1987): 457–473. Quotation from p. 457. 48 Ennead, V.8 [5]. Quoted and commented on by Gombrich, Icones symbolicae, 158. It is surprising that Plotinus, in spite of his very influential theory of the image, is mentioned only once in Belting’s monograph. 49 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 16. 50 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–184. Available at https://web.stanford.edu/class/ history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html, accessed April 16, 2016. 51 See Hegel’s Introduction to ‘Aesthetics’: Being the Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820s, trans. T.M. Knox, with an interpretative essay by Charles Karelis (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1979); and William Maker (ed.), Hegel and Aesthetics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). 52 Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn:  Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 53 A powerful analogy here was Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar. 54 See Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, ed. Ulrich Raulff (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1988); Aby Warburg, “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America”, trans. Michael P. Steinberg, in Donald Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 177–207. 55 See endnote 5, above. 56 The first major attack on the legacy of Panofsky was launched by Donald Preziosi in his Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 57 See endnote 6, above. 58 Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne:  rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979). English translation published as The Postmodern Condition,

Poststructuralist Iconology 81 trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1992), 11. 59 Roman Jakobson, “Qu’est-ce que la poésie?”, Questions de Poétique (1934). English edition: “What is Poetry?” in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings III: Grammar of Poetry and Poetry of Grammar (The Hague: Mouton, 1981). 60 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris:  Libraire Plon, 1962); English edition: The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld, 1966).

4

Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology Dinosaurs, Clones and the Golden Calf in Mitchell’s Image Theory Krešimir Purgar

To say that the pictorial turn, proclaimed by Mitchell in 1994, is actually more about animals than it is about humans would certainly be an exaggeration. However, the role that three types of animal ௅ dinosaur, calf and sheep ௅ have played in Mitchell’s understanding and explanation of the development of modern visual culture may prove to be extremely revealing and shed new light on how humans have made sense of images throughout history. Even so, one important clarification has to be made at the outset: the species that Mitchell continually refers to are presented and discussed theoretically in his books primarily as incarnations in images of cultural symptoms that go beyond their purely symbolic or iconic meaning.1 I will start by considering them more like figures of the current state of images and of our relation to them, not as theoretical terms perse. Only as their meaning gradually unfolds will it be possible to discern in them some of the (in)disciplinary logic that broadly characterizes Mitchell’s image theory. I will accordingly conclude that Mitchell is less concerned with theory that preconceptualizes its objects of inquiry and more with the knowledge that deliberately escapes being shaped into a theory in a strict sense. Using different disciplines in order to arrive at different kinds of insight, the American scholar both de-ideologizes older humanistic epistemologies and, simultaneously, creates a foundation for the general study of visual culture that is now largely known as visual studies. When Mitchell speaks of dinosaurs, he is neither a paleontologist nor an art historian; when he speaks of the Golden Calf from the Old Testament, he is neither a historian nor a theologian; when he speaks of Dolly the Sheep, he is neither a zoologist nor a biochemist. Instead, his hybrid point of view is, first and foremost, that of an iconologist who reads images and puts them in the context of their uses as images, in combination with the sensitivity of a cultural historian who never really becomes infatuated by ideological values such as beauty or connoisseurship. It is not that Mitchell does not account for ideological considerations ௅ on the contrary, he does so throughout his oeuvre ௅ but the way he explains how ideology creates the meaning of pictures should be understood more

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as a critique of every sort of disciplinary knowledge, rather than as an instruction for the use of any particular image.2 He explains that the role an iconologist performs with respect to images is comparable to what a natural historian does with respect to species and specimen: While we [iconologists] can recognize beautiful, interesting, or novel specimens [of images], our main job is not to engage in value judgments but to try to explain why things are the way they are, why species appear in the world, what they do and mean, how they change over time.3 This interest in visual phenomena as symptoms of the broader historical fabric of visual culture has led Mitchell to a specific deductive method in which analysis of a particular artifact will never exhaust the meaning of it unless an artifact is compared to other image-symptoms in different areas of culture, science and politics. The way in which Mitchell discerns the general meanings of images is paradigmatic not just for his position as a critical iconologist who establishes meaningful connections between seemingly disparate visual phenomena, but for the very visual theory he has worked on over the years. I  refer here to concepts such as “metapicture”, “imagetext” or “biopicture”, all of which serve in his visual theory as descriptions of both how the image is structured and what it means iconologically ௅ of both form and content.4 His idea is to create a theory of images in which images would somehow explain themselves by themselves and would be neither in desperate need of disciplines of critical theory nor haunted by more visually sensitive ones, like semiotics or art history. Critical iconology in Mitchell’s terms would then consist of what we may call cultural symptomatology: elements of culture that are condensed into groups of images that speak for themselves as much as they speak for the rest of the world they are immersed in. Dinosaurs, calves and sheep are among such symptoms inasmuch as they uncover our fascination with images, as well as our fear of them: picturing terror while picturing theory.

The Dinosaur as a Symbolic Animal of the Pictorial Turn Let us begin with the metapicture of a dinosaur:  an extinct animal, a reptile of rather intimidating proportions, which dominated the earth for more than one hundred million years and was wiped off the surface of the planet sixty-five million years ago. In connection with this still enigmatic species, Mitchell remarks that no one has ever seen a dinosaur, and yet everyone knows what they look like.5 Even though there is a unanimous belief that these creatures actually existed, the image of the dinosaur in our cultural imaginary has not been passed down to our generation by our ancestors, as is the case with most other images that relate to life or to

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things that existed before our era. The paradoxical function of the image is twofold in the case of dinosaurs: on the one hand, we make sense of them on the basis of our imagination, imagery and pictures created by other people, while on the other hand these pictures are mostly artistic approximations based on a relatively small amount of paleontological evidence. The dinosaur is therefore a “constructed image” and the product of the “creative imagination”.6 In The Last Dinosaur Book, Mitchell is concerned with the dialectical image of the dinosaur as a product of both nature and culture, where culture, dealing in this particular case with an apparently extinct species, takes clear precedence over nature. It is not possible ever to “see nature” in a kind of uncontaminated, primordial state, as it is always bound with the inescapable surplus meaning of language and representation.7 Mitchell makes his case even more clearly in stating that the reason why he got involved with dinosaurs lies precisely in what we cannot or will not normally see in them – that is, not just in the things themselves, but in their relation to images. He is interested in the seemingly paradoxical popularity of things we know so little about but are so eager to paint and draw, to photograph and collect. Two inextricably connected worlds suddenly appear: (1) the world of living things, of which dinosaurs are a particular group or class that happens to be extinct; and (2) the world of images, in which dinosaur images also appear as a particular group or class that is not only not extinct, but proliferating at a remarkable rate.8 Mitchell asserts that our creation of the generalized image of a dinosaur largely corresponds to the way we create all images: as representations and visual conventions that may or may not have iconic or indexical similarities to their referents from the “real” world. In so doing he anchors the status of the image in the processes of creative imagination, in human agency and in artifactuality, rather than as a reaction to a physiological visual stimulation or a copy of reality. Drawing on Henry Focillon’s Life of Forms, Mitchell acknowledges Focillon’s idea that the progenitor of an image is always another image, and that all images are interlinked by the agency of form.9 The first dinosaur picture is an invention that came into being composed of many scientific discoveries, intuitions and representational practices, but the picture itself (let alone the first picture of a dinosaur) is an act of imagination, an artistic intervention, a generated material fact.10 To explain fully the metapicture of dinosaur in Mitchell’s image theory and to put it in the right perspective, it is important to point out that this concept has appeared chronologically right between two of his more widely known works: between Picture Theory from 1994, in which the advent of the pictorial turn was announced, and What Do Pictures

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Fig. 4.1. Dinosaurs fighting in prehistoric landscape, © Nico99, Shutterstock

Want? from 2005, in which he introduced the concept of images as desiring subjects. Interestingly enough, while in the dinosaur book there is no single reference to the earlier turn toward images, this is still a profoundly critical-iconological book based on the most important assumptions of the pictorial turn.11 Even if Mitchell does not mention it specifically, the “dinomania” that took hold in the second half of the twentieth century is for Mitchell an undeniable symptom of the pictorial turn inasmuch as popular culture gets inhabited more and more with images that people created exclusively for purposes of joy and secular (totemic) adoration, as we shall see below. Ten years later, in What Do Pictures Want? comes yet another crucial Mitchell thesis connected in many ways to insights by Hans Belting from his Anthropology of Images.12 Both authors theorize and explain images as living beings. In Belting’s account, images need the human body as a place for their own incarnation: only amalgamated with the human body as a medium can they express their full meaning. In a different but still comparable way, Mitchell attributes life to images: they have desires and wishes of their own; they want something from us, who behold them. But the question that needs to be answered now is what

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happened with images in the meantime, in the apparently serene years before the rapid proliferation of computer-generated visuals, before the terror of 9/11 and the hooded man from Abu Ghraib. Did these “interim” images become alive, too? And if they did, who made them alive and who is in control of their desires? In Mitchell’s visual theory, these were the “years of reptiles” when dinosaurs were symbols of a new culture of images in the age shortly before the pictorial turn and in the midst of the disinterested entertainment that shaped the visual and political culture of the 1980s and 1990s.13 With a little help from scientists and movie producers, he asserts, it was basically ordinary people who made all these dinosaur images come alive in the late twentieth century, and it was ordinary people who were still in control of their fate. But why did people do that in the first place? Why would they want to domesticate these presumably frightening creatures (creating an incredible number of pictures of them) when they had already been dead for millions of years? For Mitchell, the answer lies in the totemic character of dinosaur images. The dinosaur is more than just contemporary object of commercially induced desire; it is “the totem animal of modernity”.14 Being contemporary, it differs greatly from traditional totems while its paradoxical dialectics of obsolescence and modernity to a large extent explains why the power over images is soon to be lost: The traditional totem was generally a living, actually existing animal that had an immediate, familiar relation to its clan. The dinosaur is a rare, exotic, and extinct animal that has to be “brought back to life” in representations and then domesticated, made harmless and familiar. The traditional totem located power and agency in nature; totem animals and plants bring human beings to life and provide the natural basis for their social classifications. By contrast, the modern totem locates power in human beings: we classify the dinosaurs and identify with them; we bring the dangerous monsters back to life in order to subdue them.15 Here we come to what I would like to call the transitory concept of images presented in The Last Dinosaur Book:  the world that went crazy for dinosaurs from the 1960s onwards, this “greatest epidemic” of big lizard images in the public sphere and media, is an excellent practical example of the pictorial turn in everyday life. By resurrecting extinct animals and transforming them into ubiquitous public figures ௅ proliferating in movies and toy shops, on cereal packets, towels and slippers ௅ people have created huge numbers of images of dinosaurs only in order to retain for as long as possible their soon-to-be-lost control over all images. The totemic aspect of dinosaur images is transitory insofar as they represented the extremely ambivalent status of images during the 1980s and 1990s: on the one hand, the power of digital technologies to breathe

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life into dead bones and to create images so close to reality was strong enough to create a feeling of total immersion in the prehistory of the earth; on the other hand, the digital technology that made all this possible was not yet available to the masses. People in those days knew very well that somebody else would have to create for them those spectacular images of cinematic oblivion. Everyday life ran at a slower, analog pace with only sporadic experiences of digital speed and visual extravaganza. In a word, it was the perfect time for totems, objects of adoration neither completely private and intimate (like fetishes), nor absolutely public and divine (like idols).16 Dinomania is not just the popular-cultural metaphor of the pictorial turn but a last attempt to master the rapidly dissolving visual sphere. Similarly, modern totemism in the guise of dinomania is not just a late-capitalist version of the total commercialization of life but a powerful theoretical tool for contemporary cultural and visual studies. At one point, Mitchell makes reference to Clement Greenberg and his famous dismissal of popular culture, spectacle and mass consumption, which the American art historian made in the typically high-modernist vein of separation between high and low culture. Without the slightest hint of irony, Mitchell wrote that “one could hardly find a better exemplar of what Clement Greenberg called ‘kitsch’ than the dinosaur’s linking of commercial vulgarity with juvenile wonder and the imitation of past styles”.17 While it is perfectly clear that dinosaur images irrevocably contaminated the puristic vision of a utopian society with its belief in the power of high culture and enlightenment to change the world, dinomania was, according to Mitchell, a sign of one more important event:  a complete change in the way people make sense of images, which was to become painfully evident in the first years of the twenty-first century. Technoscientific discoveries that made possible the resurrection of extinct species, albeit only in Hollywood spectacles and amusement parks, has now become an insidious warning that there is nothing essential to culture, be it high or low; there is only a visual construction of the mediatized continuum of the present we still call reality – or what is left of it.

Dolly the Sheep: From Living Clone to Living Picture Fragments of reality are scattered all around the visual field in dots and pixels. With the advent of the booming digital revolution, all our images became alive, with one fatal side effect being that they got out of our control. With his 2005 book What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell entered his “animistic” phase of theorizing the agency of images in order to understand “motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity, and other symptoms that make pictures into vital signs” by which he meant not just signs for living things but signs as living things. He presumed that “if the question, what do pictures want? makes any sense at all, it must be because we assume that pictures are something like life-forms, driven by desire and

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appetites”.18 As a scholar who does not preconceptualize his theoretical objects, when speaking of the life of images Mitchell expresses reasonable doubt about the possibility that they might not have any power at all, and asks whether it makes more sense to raise the questions of “what is it they lack, what do they not posses, what cannot be attributed to them”.19 What is, then, the crucial process or activity inside or outside of images that breathes life into pictorial artifacts, turning them into scandalous carriers of newly acquired twofold meaning:  as uncanny doubles and objects of admiration? How did it happen that by the mid-1990s it was no longer the insidious velociraptor that aroused awe in us (no matter how authentic it looked on the big screen), rather a much smaller and apparently harmless mammal? In What Do Pictures Want?, and later on in Cloning Terror, Mitchell widens the concept of the pictorial turn to take into consideration the most recent techno- and bioscientific discoveries as well as the fears that they have provoked. What interests him is how it happened that ovis aries, a quadruped unlikely to do anybody any harm, became the epitome of all our fears and insecurities ௅ of other people, of life itself and of the foreseeable future? Who, then, should fear Dolly the Sheep, and why? A docile animal created iconological turmoil because, as Mitchell suggests, the quite unremarkable image of it became the epitome of our all-time unconscious fears: for many people it represented physically palpable evidence that the greatest taboo – violation of life’s creation – is

Fig. 4.2. A close-up of Dolly in her stuffed form. Photograph by Toni Barros (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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actually possible. Besides the fact that replicating things ௅ whole organisms or just partial tissues ௅ comes out of a natural human desire to make things better and always be evolving, the production of exact copies of ourselves fundamentally undermines the singularity of the subject.20 We need only think of the best-known examples of cloning in popular culture (from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to The Terminator and Transformers) to recognize how the replication of life – even in our imagination – fills us with fear. Even the mere idea of interfering with the creation of life induces dread, let  alone any practical manifestations of playing God.21 Genetic engineering and biotechnology have wholeheartedly provided us with the means to produce real clones, and we have thereby crossed the line that was separating images and imagination from fearful reality. This has led to a seemingly contradictory understanding of both clones and images: first, that copying living beings is basically the same insignificant operation as copying images; and, second, that bare images might be more frightening than what they represent. When it comes to the analysis of pictures, the concept and the actual practice of cloning (of which Dolly is the uncontestable metapicture) for Mitchell has an extremely high metaphorical charge. He is perfectly aware of the fact that the visual construction of culture probably depends more on visual tropes than on pictures, more on beliefs than on actuality, more on simulacrum than on physical reality. The problem with the clone is that it has ultimately proved to both stand for and act as a symptom of what it signifies.22 The insurmountable physical and metaphysical space dividing divine creation and human intervention is now lost, allowing new biotechnological practices to act as an eerie nexus between the conceivable and (once) inconceivable: The clone signifies the potential for the creation of new images in our time ௅ new images that fulfill the ancient dream of creating a “living image” – a replica or copy that is not merely a mechanical duplicate but an organic, biologically viable simulacrum of a living organism. The clone renders the disavowal of living images impossible by turning the concept of animated icon on its head. Now we see that it is not merely a case of some images that seem to come alive, but that living things themselves were always already images in one form or another.23 While it is probably only a perverse twist of fate, the fact nevertheless remains that Dolly the Sheep, even before she was born following one of the most successful genetic experiments to date, already had a potential successor: the Twin Towers in New York City. The two clonelike structures, planted in the heart of the planetary financial circulation system and razed to the ground soon after the Al-Qaeda attacks of 2001, were certainly iconic both before and after 9/11. In a matter of minutes, images of fire,

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smoke, dust and falling men conquered every screen in the world. But, for Mitchell it was their anthropomorphized symbolism that was under attack, as if they were living beings, together with their existence as living images of the Western domination that was the thorn in the eye of their destroyers.24 We can only speculate whether or not the Twin Towers would have been destroyed had only one of the twins been built (if they had not been twins in the first place), and whether images of burning architectural clones are now twice as scary thanks to our likely irrational fear of exact doubles. The metaphor of life in and as images of Dolly the Sheep and the Twin Towers helped Mitchell to understand exactly how the shift from reality to representation and back to reality took place. It helped him to formulate the dilemma of whether this mechanism of action/reaction was to be found in beholders as human beings incapable of rationally comprehending what he calls “the surplus value of images”, or images, with all the technology invested in their creation, really took on some substantially new form of animism. In order to provide viable clues to tackle this dilemma, he posed himself some additional questions that uncovered underlying ethical problems concerning image studies as a disciplinary endeavor:  what was, to put it simply, the purpose of new epistemologies of the image? Was it pure knowledge that would eventually lead to changes in people’s attitudes and behaviors, or are we required to take immediate action due to the sheer fact that images are alive and that we fear them as much as we love them? Basically, “should we discriminate between true and false, healthy and sick, pure and impure, good and evil images?”.25 The answer Mitchell provides unmistakably shows that critical iconology and cultural history have always been better equipped to grasp recurring patterns of human behavior than the exact sciences that scrutinized pure technological advancements isolated from the fabric of visual culture. The figure of the clone is not for Mitchell just a biotechnological fact, even if his concept of biopictures heavily depends on radical new technologies of producing images and experiencing them as living beings. The metapicture of Dolly the Sheep does not come exclusively from the domain of images, and therefore it is not primarily about pictures at all: it comes from the domain of technology to eventually become part of ideological and social formations. But only then, within the broader pictorial and media context, does the image of a sheep begin metaphorically to reflect its full semantic burden.26 We will halt at this point to explore how this process works, as it is fundamental to understanding how Mitchell generally does things with images. It is symptomatic that in the case of cloning, advances in science are in fact being used to initiate what seems to be a retrograde process in biology, whereby a relatively simpler version of an organism is created (as a whole or in part) from a more complex one. Technically,

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as The Oxford English Dictionary defines it, the term “clone” refers to “any group of cells or organisms produced asexually from a single sexually produced ancestor”.27 The result is an exact copy of an originally sexually produced specimen, not an improved cell or organism that has naturally evolved into something better. So, the reproduction of living beings, Mitchell suggests, follows exactly the same path as the reproduction of works of art, as explained by Walter Benjamin in his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the only difference being the mechanics of reproduction: the shift from photography, cinematography or print to the biological reproduction of life itself.28 There is extensive evidence coming from the art world of the postmodern age (and from postmodernist artistic styles) to show that the idea in the decades subsequent to Benjamin’s essay of the originality, autonomy and uniqueness of the work of art has been replaced with pastiche, quotations and intertextuality of all kinds. Pop art, appropriation art, trans-avant-garde and many examples of ironic reworkings of past styles all testify to the fact that the myth of originality has now taken a completely different form. While in the contemporary posthuman age the old modernist belief in the autonomy of the subject still prevails, it is now the human body that is being reshaped and reconceptualized in a variety of ways. The metapicture of Dolly the Sheep (“an image of image-making itself”) is thus not just a metaphor of reconceptualization but also an iconic example of yet another level of the pictorial turn whereby the meanings of terms such as representation and signification open the way for a constitution of a new sort of image altogether: If an image is an icon, a sign that refers by likeness or similitude, a clone is a “superimage” that is a perfect duplicate, not only of the surface appearance of what it copies, but its deeper essence, the very code that gives it its singular, specific identity.29 For Mitchell, to clone an image does not mean just to reproduce it, to make a more or less faithful physical double of it, as was the case with images in the era of mechanical reproduction. Instead, the cloning of images involves capturing the very essence of (“deep copying”) the process that makes genetically possible the creation of every single copy. The reproduction of human or animal genomes corresponds to a duplication of digital zeros and ones insofar as in both processes the copy perfectly corresponds to the original or, inversely, the original ceases to exist. In Cloning Terror, Mitchell makes reference to Jean Baudrillard and his admonition that social cloning ௅ the school system, standardized knowledge, mass media and the like ௅ in fact precedes the actual biological

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cloning.30 Seen from this perspective, ideological cloning was a prerequisite for the scientific legitimation of genetic intervention per se or, more directly, ideology and standardized knowledge production make “deep copying” possible. Following both Mitchell and Baudrillard’s concepts, simulacrum (a copy without the original) would then signify the pictorial version of cloning, and cloning would represent the “corporealization of the simulacrum”.31 In other words, the concept of simulacrum allows for the existence of things without ancestry, memory or history, while cloning enables endless material (digital) proliferation of simulacra. Now, if every single individual, in an effort to keep his or her individuality and subjectivity intact, nurtures an unconscious but perfectly natural fear of his or her exact double, how does this “clonophobia” relate to images, if it does? Mitchell answers this question by linking the fear of clones to the fear of images ௅ iconophobia.

The Golden Calf as a Metapicture of Image Theory In Mitchell’s theory, the meaning of iconophobia is somewhat paradoxically constituted or, rather, the paradox itself is generated by the recurring nature of the pictorial turn. If we think that it is really only our own era that has ever suffered from a heightened sensitivity to images – as a result of all the screens we are constantly watching, with surveillance cameras monitoring us from all directions, and an incessant flood of images wherever we turn ௅ then we probably have the wrong perception of what Mitchell originally meant. For him, the emphasis is always more on the turn than on the pictorial, and therefore this largely explains how it is possible that the pictorial turn can happen in locations and at times where pictorial depictions of any kind were extremely scarce. According to Mitchell, the first ever enactment of the turn toward images is described in the Old Testament in the Book of Exodus where the third (or, chronologically at least, the first) of Mitchell’s iconic creatures appears ௅ the Golden Calf: When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him”. Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me”. So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.32 As described in the narrative of the Old Testament, the decision Aaron made to fulfill the desire of his people and make them a new God that

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they could actually see is, strictly speaking, not an instance of image production: it is a story about idolatry and about the possible dangers of losing supreme power over people’s beliefs. This old story is actually an admonition warning that images and clones as visible things have the means to take power away from the invisible deity ௅ to become both visible and alive. So, the pictoriality of this ancient turn toward images is performed as possibility and discourse, not in the form of any particular image or group of images. In order to understand the pictorial turn as both a synchronic and diachronic notion, it does not matter, Mitchell asserts, whether images are actually present or to what extent; what matters is that moments of believing in images and their power “seem to be a perennial cultural phenomenon, one that could be found throughout history, from the taboo on image-making expressed in the second commandment, right down to the contemporary debate about cloning”.33 The taboo on image-making is expressed very vividly in Exodus in the episode in which Moses is warned by God that the Israelites have made themselves an idol to worship. Moses then descends from Mount Sinai, smashes the two tablets of his ten commandments and burns the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:19–20). David Freedberg describes the breaking of the tablets onto which the words of God had been inscribed as the breaking of “verbal icons of the divine word”. It is to be understood as the birth of a specific tension that will from that moment on exist between words and images.34 Iconoclasm cannot be represented in image other than as a violation of what it fundamentally forbids, and therefore iconoclasm cannot be represented at all except as a verbal icon or text that somehow transcends its form in writing. Freedberg makes reference to Nicolas Poussin’s painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf, produced around 1634, and explains the picture’s excessive narrativization in terms of its impossible task: to show what should not be seen. Of course, there is, as he puts it, “a deep irony in all this. We admire … a picture which has as its subject the epitome of the negative consequences of looking, admiring and adoring”.35 What is most important for the theorization of the pictorial turn is that with Poussin’s painting (and others on the same theme) an ancient image of an iconoclastic gesture has taken the form of a picture ௅ the actual painterly object ௅ as yet another form of the pictorial turn. One of the most intriguing aspects (or readings) of the story of the Golden Calf and of the pictorial turn altogether is that fear of images might at the same time be a perfectly clear sign of the importance of images; that is, iconoclastic and iconophobic gestures paradoxically reinforce the power of what they are profoundly against. In his “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, Mitchell uncovers several layers of meaning in this biblical story, put into perspective with its physical incarnation as presented in Poussin’s painting. The iconoclastic nature of this story is revealed in full only when it takes the shape of visual

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Fig. 4.3. Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf; oil on canvas, 1634

narration, that is, when the written text of the Old Testament takes the form of its forbidden pictorial incarnation. But the process goes in the reverse direction as well: only after the image has been created (Poussin’s Golden Calf, in this case) are we able to fully understand the power of the word from which everything started. So, the pictorial turn, in its basic and probably most fundamental form, invokes the turn from words to images, from literate to illiterate, from elite to popular, regardless of the time frame in which we observe the phenomenon.36 In addition to revealing its underlying political agenda, the biblical motif of Aaron’s sculpting of a false God at the request of his fellow Israelites also reveals that the power of images resides in their abstract nature. Images can exist even if nobody can see them; they can be fearsome even if no one can touch them; they can come into existence by the mere act of evocation. Drawing on Panofsky’s concept of “motif”, Mitchell contends that images as representational entities are like texts telling stories and naming things, allowing for both cognition of their visual aspects and recognition of what they speak about. He calls this the “paradoxical absent presence” of images,37 making us ultimately understand that iconoclasm is not about the fear of any type or group of pictures, as they are proscribed by the Law of the Word, but about the fear of the word turned into image. It is the fear of the immense power of images, of which the potency is paradoxically activated by word.

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To explain this more in detail, we would need to go deeper into the typology of images that Mitchell presented in his 1986 book Iconology, the first extensive theoretical treatment of images and their relation to literary texts. He makes a clear distinction between images based not on what they semiotically represent or the media form they might take but on instances in which they make themselves visible to an individual subject.38 Bearing his typology in mind, we might say that the biblical story of the Golden Calf could have existed only as a mental image ௅ one that is formed and exists in people’s minds ௅ because otherwise it would betray the very nature of iconoclasm, which is not to show that which should not appear, either in flesh and blood or in representation. Once it has appeared in optical or graphical form in paintings or drawings, the Golden Calf has become an idol once more, now as the idol of history, art and Western culture at large. But are we absolutely sure that its significance today as a picture is that different from what it might have represented as a trope in the times of the Old Testament? When we stand in front of Poussin’s painting in the National Gallery in London or wherever it happens to be showed, worshipping its beauty and adoring both what it is and what it symbolizes, do we not at the same time believe in its magical power as a physically pulsating object? If we fear anything in this image today, it is certainly not related to the story depicted in it or the words that it evokes, but it has everything to do with the picture itself as the real idol of our contemporary cultural universe. While for Mitchell the dinosaur is the totem animal of modernity, the Golden Calf is the idol of our secular cult of spectacle and consumption; while Dolly the Sheep was the metapicture of the fear of dissolving subjectivities, the Golden Calf is the metapicture of both our infatuation with images and our fear of their power. *** The final argument brings us to an attempt to answer the question of exactly what kind of iconology or image science there is in the guise of these three animals. As stated at the beginning, if they are not theoretical terms in the same sense that the pictorial turn, biopictures or metapictures are, then what kind of agency can we attribute to them in the construction of Mitchell’s image theory? Are they mere metaphors, figures of speech, or perhaps some kind of narrative prosthesis of language, whose function is to make abstract arguments more figurative? Or, are the dinosaurs, the sheep and the calf the very subjects of iconological analysis that are not meant to be or become anything other than topics and themes? The sense that I make of these animals and how they are made operational in several of Mitchell’s books is that they represent one possible way in which visual studies as a discipline can be translated into visual theory, which is composed of different sets of working methodologies.

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In other words, the three animals are neither just theoretical terms nor just subjects of analysis; or, more precisely, they are an example of how “living images” with their “loves” and “wishes” have succeeded (with the help of the living person) in creating for themselves a new kind of living theory. While every visual studies scholar knows that this discipline draws upon numerous concepts and tools coming from various knowledge systems, it is essentially the restructuring of a particular disciplinary knowledge that can be called a visual studies methodology. In Mitchell’s books, the three animals are explained as recurring patterns of life and, consequently, their evolution from simple nonhumans to theoretical objects was a result of their paradigmatic character across different eras of visual culture. Are the dinosaurs, the sheep and the calf used as theoretical notions that are in any way comparable to the semiotic structuring of knowledge? Or, to put it differently, are they not perhaps just a fashionable triadic tool designed to embrace all instances of contemporary image production? Are they to be used as signs, phenomenal experiences or, maybe, “just” symptoms? If we used them as signs in a semiotic sense, it would presume that everything that happens in the sphere of images is somehow related to the pictorial turn, to simulacrum or iconophobia. This would not make much sense because, as important as they are, there are problems in image theory that do not concern any of the concepts mentioned. On the other hand, treating the three as phenomenal experiences would make even less sense because there is no way in which we can connect a generalized image of a dinosaur as a symbolic animal, for instance, with the personal experience of that symbol internalized in every human being. But, if we understand them as symptoms of particular events that appear and reappear in history, then we have custom-made tools for any occasion to describe this particular recurring pattern. We can call this “cultural symptomatology” or “living theory” inasmuch as these symptoms create their own ad hoc theoretical tools using the very objects they deal with. The concept of living theory, then, may indicate a fundamental argument waiting to be made: that the object of study is never disciplinarily preconceptualized or epistemologically framed in any way other than that created by the object itself for itself. The following objection may be made to this argument: what if the triadic structure composed of living images, living beings and living theory is not so self-explanatory and logically constructed? In other words, has Mitchell used living beings to explain the concept of living images, or is it the other way round? Have living images ௅ being (metaphorically) already alive or made alive by the power of theoretical argumentation ௅ somehow imposed on us the way in which they actually wanted to be treated? I would like to propose an argument, certainly one that needs to be discussed in greater depth on another occasion, that Mitchell’s iconic

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creatures are his way of going beyond the disciplinary borders that exist between different approaches and interests pertaining to the arts, humanities, biology and natural history, in order for him to come to terms with specific agencies of images. The dinosaurs, the sheep and the calf are therefore theoretical tools for understanding our rapidly changing world and objects of this world that for various reasons (some of which have been discussed here) have become theoretically relevant. Whether this can be seen as a new path for conceiving of image theory beyond open concepts of visual studies and critical iconology will largely depend on how much we believe in either of them.

Notes 1 I am referring here to the understanding of images that we get to when making reference to Charles Sanders Peirce’s traditional semiotic theory, for instance. The problem with semiotics, which Mitchell is continually trying to overcome, is that it deals with signs as material facts or, in other words, with pictures as material entities, leaving the whole realm of “verbal” and “mental” images outside of its frame of reference. For Mitchell the problem grows in scale, as we shall see below, as he posits one of the incarnations of the pictorial turn precisely in the realm of mental images ௅ in the process by which words evoke images that exist only in the mind. See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, in D. Birnbaum and I. Graw (eds.), Under Pressure (New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 16–19. 2 Mitchell’s reticence toward ideological uses of disciplinary knowledge is easily grasped in two brief sentences that he wrote, referencing Paul Fayereband’s Against Method: “humanistic knowledge … [is] best fostered by speculative experimentation and rigorous questioning of received ideas and procedures. … I want to prolong the indisciplinary moment of visual studies as long as possible” (in James Elkins, Gustav Frank and Sunil Mangani (eds.), Farewell to Visual Studies (University Park, PA:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), chapter 4. 3 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 85. 4 This principle of twofoldness where the meaning of a theoretical term is derived from what it refers to and from what it is meant to explain is encountered in Mitchell’s famous yet perplexing discussion on the name that the new discipline of visual studies should take. While he was rightfully claiming that visual culture was the object of study and visual studies was the discipline or field, he nevertheless allowed the possibility that the field and the things covered by the field could bear the same name ௅ visual culture. In this case, the “context would clarify the meaning” (W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing:  A  Critique of Visual Culture”, in  Michael Ann Holly and Keith  Moxey (eds.), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2002), 232. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 48. 6 Ibid., 50–51. 7 Ibid., 58. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 54.

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10 As Mitchell reports, the first “resurrection” of a dinosaur in the age of men took place in 1854 as the fruit of a collaboration between the paleontologist Richard Owen and the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. They created a sculptural model of an Iguanodon, bringing the extinct back to life in the form of a visual reproduction ௅ a living image (Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, 95–97). 11 In addition to the various explanations of the meaning of the pictorial turn that Mitchell has provided us with over the years – from its first theorization in Picture Theory (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1994) to the condensed and very comprehensive explanation in his “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”  – there is one key insight that connects them all. It is the understanding that our sense of the world is made through visual representations, as both “mental” and “verbal” images (metaphors and ekphrastic utterances) on the one hand as well as through physical, representational, “proper” images on the other. In other words, it is our discernment of “images” in apparently nonvisual media, like literature, that replaces the earlier poststructuralist insistence on “texts” in eminently visual media, like abstract painting. 12 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images:  Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014 [2001]). 13 The Age of Reptiles happens to be the name of one of the largest authentic fresco wall paintings in the world. It was painted during World War II by Rudolph Zallinger for the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, CT. The impressive fresco is a painstakingly realistic, thirty-four-meter long depiction of the era of the dinosaurs, conceived as a continuous landscape panorama spanning 170  million years of geological time. The dinosaurs’ second “resurrection” was to come more than three decades later: they were to return in the digital blockbuster movie Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg, and finally entered the popular culture mainstream of the postmodern era. 14 Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, 77. 15 Ibid., 79. 16 Ibid., 78. In Mitchell’s image theory the notions of fetish, totem and idol have a very prominent role. He does not refer to them as objects with stable, essential characteristics, let  alone precise meanings. He thinks we should understand them more like “object relations” which we use to describe our relations to different things in different circumstances. An image may for a particular person have a very private, “fetishistic” character, related to that individual’s personal history (a single visit to the museum, for instance). On other occasions, the same image may represent overwhelming concepts of culture: “Thus, when the calf is seen as a miraculous image of God, it is an idol; when it is seen as a self-consciously produced image of the tribe or nation … it is a totem; when its materiality is stressed, and it is seen as a molten conglomerate of private “part-objects”, the earrings and gold jewelry that the Israelites brought out of Egypt, it becomes a collective fetish” (Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 188–189). The same constantly shifting meaning also applies to images whose power, or lack thereof, can be described as relational, always in need of a specific context to be fully understood. 17 Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, 62. 18 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 6. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Ibid., 25.

Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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Ibid., 16. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 32. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror:  The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 25–29. Ibid., 27. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 318. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 29. Ibid., 31. See also: Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 25. Ibid. Exodus 32:1–4, Holy Bible, New International Version. Available at www. biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2032&version=NIV, accessed October 2, 2014. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 69. David Friedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 397. Ibid., 384. Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, 17. Ibid., 19. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 9–11. According to the division he made, graphic and optical pictures are the images that art history and semiotics are mostly preoccupied with. They are the images that we see printed on paper, painted on canvas or transmitted on screens. On the other end of the spectrum there are physically “invisible” ௅ mental ௅ images that exist only in our minds, like dreams, memories and ideas; and verbal images, like metaphors and ekphrastic utterances. Between visible and invisible images there are perceptual images ௅ “phantasmatic sensual data” ௅ occupying a border region between physical and physiological perception (see Mitchell, Iconology, 9–14).

5

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell Andrew McNamara

Your intellectual background is associated more with literary theory or cultural theory rather than art history or the visual arts. What has led to your interest in the visual? W.J.T. MITCHELL: Actually, I’ve been interested in the visual arts since the beginning of my scholarly career. My dissertation (Blake’s Composite Art, 1968) was on the illuminated books of William Blake, and dealt with relationships between poetry and painting, the printed word and the imprinted or engraved image. I  wrote the thesis for a literature degree, but I was supervised and examined by art historians like John White (at Johns Hopkins) as well as “hybrid” word/image scholars like Ronald Paulson. I’ve always located my work in this interstitial space between the arts and media. But it’s true that, to art historians, I’m often associated with literary and cultural theory, while my literary colleagues sometimes accuse me of deserting literature for the visual arts. Part of my pleasure in this double identity is no doubt a perverse delight in going against the grain; part of it may be “hardwired”: I am ambidextrous, and thus tend to have a lot of right/left brain “crosstalk” or interference. I respond to verbal metaphors and descriptions with vivid visual and tactile images, and enjoy the magical process of verbalizing about pictures and works of art, especially the ones that seem most reluctant to “say” anything very explicit. I suspect also that my early boyhood experiences with Catholic illuminated missals, especially one that had a tiny ivory relief sculpture of the Virgin Mary encased inside the front cover, permanently imprinted me with a sense that texts and images are indissolubly connected, yet radically different. AM: Your position may be characterized as seeking to trouble all accounts which try to draw neat conceptual demarcations around labels such as the linguistic or the visual. Is this a fair description? TM: Yes, I’m definitely out to make trouble for people who like things to be simple. This is partly a matter of taste; I prefer complex things. It’s also a matter of faith. I believe things really are complex. The “linguistic” and the “visual” can’t be neatly distinguished because their relation is not one of binary opposition, negation, logical antinomy, ANDREW MCNAMARA:

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 101 or even dialectic in the usual sense. Word and image are more like ships passing in the night, two storm-tossed barks on the sea of the unconscious signaling to each other. But I  don’t just want to be a troublemaker. My hope was that Iconology and Picture Theory might disrupt some of our habitual ways of thinking about the relation of words and images so that we could see them in new ways, or recover some old ways that have been prematurely consigned to the dustbin of history. If you believe that the “essential tension” between the seeable and sayable has been dissolved by postmodern theory or semiotics or information science or discourse analysis, then you will neither be troubled nor illuminated by these books. If, on the other hand, you think that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, observation, visual pleasure) is as deep a problem as reading, and not reducible to a form of reading, then you may find these books helpful. AM: Could you explain how you distinguish the terms “image” and “picture”? What is the reason for drawing such a distinction? TM: The distinction is not a rigorous or systematic one, but a pragmatic one drawn from usage. Sometimes there is simply no distinction, or nothing at stake in making one. At other times, distinctions may be useful, and I  propose three in Picture Theory:  1)  the difference between a constructed, concrete object or ensemble (frame, support, materials, pigments, facture) and the virtual, phenomenal appearance that it provides for a beholder (thus, one could say, “bring that picture over here”, but it would sound odd to say this of an image); 2) the difference between a deliberate act of representation (“to picture or depict”) and a less voluntary, perhaps even passive or automatic act (“to image or imagine”). This is why my title, Picture Theory, would not work very well as “image theory”. The force of the imperative, “to picture”, would be lost; 3) the difference between a specific kind of visual representation (the “pictorial” image, as opposed to the sculptural, for instance) and the whole realm of iconicity, likeness, and resemblance that is designated by “image”. My sense is that this distinction is very hard to translate from English to French or German – image vs. tableau and Bild vs. Vorstellung do not seem to work exactly the same way. AM: Are these terms exclusively visual? TM: Neither term is exclusively visual. For that matter, words like “see” and “paint” are not exclusively visual either, but may be transposed into verbal contexts with more or less violence. The question is, what sort of violence, to what purpose. My sense is that “picture” is relatively more closely tied to the visual than “image” (which can refer to nonvisual likeness or similitude in any medium or sensory channel) and thus “picture” produces a stronger effect when it is yoked with a word like “theory” that has connotations of abstraction,

102 Andrew McNamara with W.J.T. Mitchell nonconcreteness, discursivity, and invisibility. To picture theory is to exert a certain violence on it, to overcome its resistance to visual images and metaphors, to give a body to that which seems incorporeal. My discussion of Wittgenstein’s ambivalence about images and pictures (from his early “picture theory” to his late iconoclasm) is meant to illustrate this sort of violence or paragone between word and image. What does it mean to say “a picture held us captive and we could not get outside it”? (Philosophical Investigations, 115). AM: Could you explain what is at stake in drawing this distinction between “image” and “picture”? TM: What’s at stake in the distinction is the ambi-valence, the incurable splitting of visual experience, especially when focused on objects or pictures of objects, or pictures of nothing, “pure” abstractions. This is the doubleness that constitutes the ability to see a picture, or perhaps to see tout court. The shuttle between “seeing” and “seeing as”, to take Wittgenstein’s terms, or the equivocation between the picture as window and the picture as colored, painted, marked surface. This is why multistable images like the Duck-Rabbit are so fundamental and universal a feature of visual culture, why any picture can become a meta-picture. AM: What is the basis of your assertion that the problem of the twentyfirst century is the problem of the image? What is the problem? Does the image present an ethical concern, a political difficulty or an epistemological dilemma? TM: Like most statements of this kind, this is meant as a provocation to see what sort of thinking it might produce. I was echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s claim that the problem of the twentieth century was the issue of race. Of course it is idle to believe that any one issue is “the” problem of a century, but it may be productive to treat the claim as a thought experiment. As it happens the problem of race actually has a lot to do with the question of image – that is, with stereotyping, with visual imprinting, with the semiotics of color and physiognomy, with a whole cluster of assumptions about the visibility of race, and its transmission by genetic “iconisms” – visible or invisible templates that allow the reproduction of “identities”. Rereading Du Bois, I was struck by how many terms in his analysis, from the “veil” that separates the races, to the “color line”, to the “Invisible Empire” that masks itself in white sheets (the Ku Klux Klan) made it clear that racism (like sexism and prejudice against “others” more generally) is deeply linked with questions of imagery and visual representation. We have to ask ourselves what the relation is between visuality and the construction of social otherness: would a blind society be capable of racism? I was also thinking, of course, of the widespread assumption that visual media have assumed an unprecedented dominance in the

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 103 modern world, that television, movies, advertising, and political propaganda exert enormous power over politics and the consciousness of great masses of people. This view is a commonplace, not only in the work of advanced theorists (the late Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle comes to mind), but also in popular “wisdom” (e.g. Andre Agassi’s camera commercial telling us that “image is everything”). My remark, then, was meant to mimic and focus critical scrutiny on this widely accepted cliché. Is it in fact the case that images, and especially visual images, are now “everything”? (I might just note that now a soft-drink commercial has been released telling us “image is nothing, thirst is everything”). If by images we mean visual images and media, the answer seems to me far from straightforward. On the one hand, it’s true that modern manipulators of visual media reach far more people with their images than anything dreamed of by the ancient idol makers. On the other hand, the skepticism and cynicism about images has never been so great, and many of the real forces that impinge on daily life (the global circulation of information and commodities among multinational corporations) are radically invisible, and deliberately, necessarily so. The much-heralded expansion of visual experiences offered by new technologies like “Virtual Reality” and cyberspace (the Internet) seem to me more like a contraction of vision. VR is a visually impoverished medium that reduces visual experiences to the dimensions of a video game, and “surfing the net” is a radically nonvisual and disembodied experience. The current “scandals” about netsurfers who distribute pornography and “portray” themselves with fraudulent sexual, racial, or generational identities need to be understood concretely. They are taking place in the solitude of study carrels and computer workstations mainly through verbal communication, with vision and touch left to the imagination. That last word, however, brings us back to the problem of the image – the mental images provoked by a set of verbal signs. So perhaps the problem of the twenty-first century is that of the image, after all. My hope is that we can take this proposition, which currently operates as a kind of sound-byte in much media criticism and theory, and actually ask what it means. My claim that there is a “pictorial turn” in contemporary cultural theory is an attempt to focus on this possibility. By “pictorial turn” I  definitely don’t mean simply to recite the commonplace about the “new dominance of the visual”, but to remark on the way that images and visuality have emerged as a specific point of irritation in contemporary theory, an unsolved problem or anomaly. This problem is just as formidable as the one that faced theorists who first set out to devise a science or philosophy of language, setting the stage for the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century thought. AM: You stated in Iconology that you began writing the book with the

104 Andrew McNamara with W.J.T. Mitchell idea of forging “a valid theory of images” but found that it turned into a study of the fear of images – a struggle “between iconoclasm and idolatry”. Now in your most recent publication, Picture Theory, you argue that a pictorial turn is occurring that will overtake the linguistic turn. I was wondering whether your initial hypothesis still held. Will our ability to cope with a visual turn be hampered by a continuing propensity to swing between iconoclasm and idolatry? TM: Yes, it will. The human capacity for over-estimation of images remains undiminished. The reverence for, or hatred of icons, of substitutes, fetishes, is certain to continue. One side of this is simply misplaced politics. There is a reality outside of images, even independent of them. We can’t know it, but we have to operate as if it was there or we’ll go mad. Well, now the world has gone mad with images, the frenzy of the visible. We suspect that there may be nothing else but images, a spectral succession of simulacra. Language, in the form of science, theory, ruthless critique, dialectics, antidialectics, rides to the rescue, only to get swept into the bottomless pit of signification. This is the postmodern, Baudrillardian story of the image. It’s the absorption of critique of the spectacle, as Debord predicted, into the spectacle. As for “our ability to cope” with the “visual turn”, it’s important to ask who it is that is supposed to do the coping, and why. Baudrillard copes by writing in a radically iconoclastic style, what we might call (echoing Fred Jameson) “the hysterical sublime”, a style filled with nihilistic and apocalyptic premonitions and outrageous one-liners (“the Gulf War did not take place”). Ordinary people cope, I think, with complex strategies of irony, ambivalence, and disavowal. They (we, that is, you and I) live in a world that we know is filled with idols and fetishes, and we “sort of” take them seriously. Did the ancient Israelites really believe the Golden Calf was their god? We’ll never know, but it seems safest to assume that opinions were mixed, and that some of them (Aaron, for instance) saw the Calf as a practical necessity to preserve national unity in a fragile social entity. Unfortunately, many of our smartest critics (inspired perhaps by Moses, or Adorno) seem to think that modern forms of idolatry (i.e., mystification by images and ideologies) have to be met with a ruthless iconoclastic critique that gives no quarter to the idolaters. Moses has them massacred, and then forces the survivors to melt down the Calf and drink the molten gold. This seems to me a bad prescription for “coping” with a turn toward idolatry. It is a scenario that is repeated endlessly when critics and cultural theorists set themselves up as an intellectual elite that “knows better” than the mass public how it is being manipulated by images and visual media. It meets idolatry with iconoclasm, an encounter that prevents acknowledgment or negotiation; it isolates critical intellectuals as a priestly caste that has received the invisible truth in a writing that the masses do not understand.

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 105 Can you indicate how you approach these issues differently? My sense is that the great challenge to studies of images and visual media is to find a third way between iconoclasm and idolatry. Some clues are to be found in anthropology and psychoanalysis, the former because it attempts to treat idolatry and fetishism as alternative cultural practices, and doesn’t begin with assumption that they are perversions; the latter, because it takes a nonmoralistic, therapeutic stance toward the perversion or (in Lacanian psychoanalysis) treats it as a basic feature of normal psychology. I  think we should also be looking at other kinds of objects, alternatives to the “idol” and the “fetish” with their connotations of violence, voyeurism, and sadomasochistic sexuality. I’m particularly fascinated with the concept of the totem, which seems to me quite distinct from both the idol (the object of mass worship) and the fetish (the object of private perversion). Totems are more equivocal in their status; they aren’t gods, typically, but ancestor figures. Their sacredness often seems transitory and temporary, confined to a ritual moment (usually a meal) followed by a return to profane or ordinary status. They are more like what D. W. Winnicott called “transitional objects” – objects of play such as toys, dolls, stuffed animals, and blankets – than fixed or obsessional fetishes. I’m currently working on a book about popular fascination with dinosaurs (the “Jurassic Park syndrome”) as a form of totemism. It might be helpful, then, to analyze contemporary images and visual media, in terms of totemism. Among other things, it would relax the moral vigilantism of the critique and actually allow us to learn from and about idolatry rather than engaging in denunciations. Perhaps the real lesson of the story of the Golden Calf is that this was an emergent totem cult mistaken for idolatry by a jealous god and his zealous prophet. AM: I’d like to pick up on this point about iconoclasm and cultural critique. I think it is possible to explain Adorno’s iconoclasm in terms of his ambition to maintain aesthetic judgment – that is, to discern between good and bad; to discriminate critically; to raise the question of value, especially a noninstrumental criterion of value – in the face of, what appeared to him, the contrary capitalist socio-cultural impulse both to install a “critical free zone” of empty and instant gratification, and to judge everything by its use value (practical vs. abstract, relevant vs. obscure, applicable vs. useless). Cultural studies sometimes invokes such distinctions in an attempt to evade a hierarchy between high and low art. It aims to understand what Adorno called “the culture industry” virtually from the position of its consumption. Now art historians  – as well as critics and anyone else who seriously engages with the arts – still grapple with the issue of aesthetic judgment: is it art? Why? Is it good art? For what reasons? Who decides? The reason you might appear an interloper in art history is that your work would seem to sit more comfortably within AM: TM:

106 Andrew McNamara with W.J.T. Mitchell the cultural studies model (which scrutinizes and seeks to understand broad cultural developments, artifacts and their conceptual processes). Aesthetic issues, on the other hand, do not seem to be pivotal to your work. Is that a fair assessment? TM: I’m sure you’re right that Adorno’s iconoclasm stems from his desire to maintain aesthetic judgment, to discriminate art from nonart, good from bad. One problem I have with the Adorno (and Horkheimer) of “The Culture Industry” is that they tend to confuse these two forms of discrimination: “works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish”; “the culture industry does not sublimate; it represses”; “a laughing audience is a parody of humanity”. One could go on to find examples of categorical moral/ aesthetic judgments derived simply from the distinction between art and the “culture industry”. Many of these judgments hit the mark, or elicit the pleasures of righteous indignation, but the pleasure quickly turns to ashes. The difference between good and bad is not the same as the difference between art and nonart. Most art (say about 98%) is bad, mediocre, or just average. A tiny portion is good, and we should rejoice in that and make considerable fuss over it. Some products of mass culture are good; most of it is bad. Sometimes a laughing audience is a vicious parody of humanity; other times it is the very face of the human. A lot depends on what they are laughing at – Chaplin or Mickey Rooney. These “judgments”, of course, are notoriously slippery. But at least they are based on a relevant domain of things to be compared and judged. Adorno’s automatism – “art yes, culture industry no” – is redeemed by his wit, range of reference, and passion, but it is a dead end for progressive thinking about visual art and media. I find Walter Benjamin’s openness to the critical and liberatory potential of mass culture much more congenial and, above all, more dialectical in its avoidance of moralistic judgments based in generic differences. You may be right that “aesthetic issues”, at least in the sense of thumbs-up/thumbs-down value judgments, are not the central focus of my work. I prefer focusing on moments of turbulence and controversy in the sphere of value, moments when the very grounds of judgment are in question. I  personally think Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is a wonderful film. At the same time, I think its political “message” (if it has one) is probably incoherent or retrograde. It was also a film that produced, in its moment, a remarkable public debate and helped to create a new audience for African-American filmmakers. Final judgments of goodness or badness seem to me relatively uninteresting in a case like this. The other artists I discuss in Picture Theory  – William Blake, Robert Morris, Velázquez, Walker Evans, James Agee, Toni Morrison, Magritte, Malevich, Jasper Johns, Maya Lin, Frederick Douglass, and Oliver Stone – are there because they

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 107 challenge standard canons of value, not because they are “good” or “bad”. Sometimes (Oliver Stone’s JFK comes to mind) they are both. As Norman Mailer put it, “JFK is one of the worst great movies ever made”. The other crucial thing to say about aesthetics is that it is, classically, a much bigger topic than the evaluation of works of art. It is, as the origin of the word indicates, the analysis or critique of the senses. This is the sort of aesthetics that Benjamin was concerned to revive, and it helps to explain his uneasiness with fixation on judgments of the “unique” and “valuable” work of artistic genius. Aesthetics is about the cultural construction of the sensorium, the divisions of labor among the senses, the history of vision, hearing, touch, the experience of beauty, ugliness, sublimity, shame, shock, wonder, the uncanny, etc. Works of art, visual media, audiovisual archives, inter- and multimedia, new technologies of the body and the senses are all part of this comprehensive sense of aesthetics. That doesn’t mean that “art” is swallowed up by mass media or the culture industry. In fact, the distinctiveness of artistic institutions – their objects, practitioners, sites of display, models of spectatorship – only emerge against the background provided by a more general aesthetics that can map the ever shifting boundaries between visual art and visual culture as a whole. Art is a permanent capacity of the human species. That is why it has a history in which it can seem to die, disappear, only to be rediscovered or reinvented under the most unpromising circumstances. AM: Would it then be more accurate to say that this struggle between iconoclasm and idolatry continues because we still flounder on the conceptual difficulties posed by the nature (resemblance)/convention distinction? TM: No, it has nothing to do with a failure to make conceptual distinctions. The power of images is preconceptual, fundamental to the formation of concepts in the first place (it might be useful here to recall what Kant said about the blindness of concepts without sensations). No act of clear-sighted critique, analysis, rigorous description and distinction making is going to overcome superstitions about images. This is simply one of their most fundamental differences from language, and of course they infiltrate language everywhere, percolating up through its rough basement in the form of metaphors, descriptions, and formal gestalts. The nature/convention distinction is durable, indispensable. No matter how many times “nature” is revealed to be actually a matter of convention, it remains always to be revealed, exposed, unveiled. “Nature” has been the repressed category in cultural studies long enough now to seem like the point of keenest interest when it resurfaces, as it does for instance in Donna Haraway’s work on primatology and cyborgs or Eve Sedgwick’s recent writing on shame and affect.

108 Andrew McNamara with W.J.T. Mitchell If anything, the struggle between iconoclasm and idolatry continues because we insist on treating conceptual distinctions as absolute, to be preserved at all costs, or as mere illusions to be overcome at all costs. This struggle feeds, for instance, on an absolute distinction between “us” (iconoclasts) and “them” (idolaters). Have you ever noticed that it is always someone else who is taken in by an image? The person who laments the dominance of the visual rarely does so by way of confessing complicity in idolatry or fetishism. The fetishist is always someone else who needs to have their perversion drummed out of their head, at which point the distinction will be overcome. If they are critical intellectuals, they will then be freed from superstition and “nature” into the clear-sighted constructivist-conventionalist consensus. AM: Further to this point, you assert that the response of art history to the linguistic turn has ended up with the “predictable alternatives” emphasizing textuality or that visual arts are sign systems to be read and read as conventions. I was wondering what your problem with this approach is considering that many of the art historians you mention favorably (Bryson, Krauss, Marin, Damisch) do emphasize such issues? TM: I think the linguistic turn was liberating, was illuminating, especially in these writers, and in very different ways. But it has now become routinized. The revelation that an image is readable as a text is no longer a revelation. To a student of Renaissance painting, imbued with what David Summers calls the “language of art”, as well as the ut pictura poesis tradition and the rhetoric of images, the “revelation” was simply a transcoding of traditional modes of interpretation into new languages, the lingo of linguistics and semiotics. New things have indeed been revealed by this transcoding. But some old and abiding things may have been forgotten in the process. I think of the relation between word and image, or what Foucault called the “sayable” and the “seeable”, as the fundamental dialectic of cognition and perception. To apprehend the “Real”, in Lacan’s terms, requires a negotiation of the “Imaginary” and the “Symbolic”: they are woven in a kind of braided chiasmus in the very process of perception. This means that, of course, we will “read” the visual, treat the image as a text. We have never had any choice but to do this in some way or other. But we also have no choice but to “see” the verbal, to treat the text as an image. Whenever we deal with representations, media, art forms, or percepts we are dealing with “mixed media”, or what I’ve called “imagetexts”. There’s no such thing as an unmixed medium (though this utopian concept continues to haunt artistic practice and theory). So my uneasiness with the linguistic turn in art history is directed at this illusory sense that semiotics and linguistics have now given

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 109 us the key to meaning, even a “science” of the visual image. (I don’t think any of the figures you mention have taken this view, though Norman Bryson comes close to it in his essay on “Semiotics and Art History”, co-authored with Mieke Bal, in Art Bulletin a few years ago). I  think visual artists, connoisseurs, and most art historians know intuitively, however, that an image cannot finally be “cashed in” for words – that’s what the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, really means. And if we are, indeed, undergoing a “pictorial turn”, it seemed to me that this might be a moment when those who pay a lot of attention to visual images might be in a position to say something worth listening to, and that it wouldn’t be just the “news” that textual procedures can get meaning out of images. That’s why I recommended attention to “metapictures”, images that try to show us what images, and indeed the whole visual process, look like. AM: Isn’t the concern of such art historians not simply “literature” but the literal (refer Ch. 7 of Picture Theory)? Does not the issue of the icon simply blur this perennial difficulty in that the visual image is often viewed in terms of resemblance and hence equated with the natural, not the textuality of a linguistic sign? Being natural, so the assumption goes, visual meaning is not “arbitrary”, but fixed and therefore has a more fixed system of meaning. What would your position be in regard to these conceptual difficulties that seem to plague art history? TM: It would take all day to clear up the confusions in a familiar set of associations such as the linkage of the image with resemblance, nature, the nonarbitrary, and therefore “fixed” meaning  – and the parallel column of linkages – between words, difference, convention, and the arbitrary (and therefore “unfixed”?) meaning. One problem is that every link in both chains is capable of being shattered, and is shattered in actual artistic practices and in the uses of images and words. Some words are images (bang!); all spoken words are acoustical images (that’s the condition of their iterability), and Saussure thought the signifier/signified relation in language could be illustrated as a word/image emblem (see his famous “tree” icon). Some images are words, or are meant to be immediately replaced by or “seen as” verbal signs (this is where writing comes from). The really fundamental problem, though, is the idea that distinctions like nature/convention, resemblance/difference, motivated/arbitrary can somehow be deployed to stabilize, regulate, or “get to the bottom of” the difference between images and words. My argument is that there is no getting to the bottom of this difference by resolving it with some conceptual distinction:  it is itself a “bottom”, fundamental and constitutive of thought and discourse. (This is also, I take it, Foucault’s point about the verbal/visual calligram in Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe). The best strategy, then, is to note the way these

110 Andrew McNamara with W.J.T. Mitchell distinctions drawn from semiotics, philosophy of language, etc. are being deployed in specific situations to make claims about particular images and texts, and to ask what values, interests, and desires are being mobilized under cover of the neutral, scientific terminology. If the whole point turns out to be some “demonstration” that images are more “fixed” in their meaning than words, then I think it’s time to tune out. AM: You suggest that some of our most muddled thinking arises when we make distinctions absolute – for example, when we decide finally that the visual arts can be categorized as either nature or convention (as you say, this is a durable distinction that carries a lot of cultural baggage). We also tend to be most deluded when we believe ourselves free of the problems which arise from such emphases. This is interesting because a lot of theoretical effort has gone into disposing of the nature side of the equation because it is viewed as leading to a narrow and restrictive definition of the visual arts. If we were to follow your advice and not dispose of the nature (resemblance) emphasis, could you explain what is gained by maintaining this emphasis? What would be the benefits of examining the visual arts through the lens of nature (resemblance)? TM: It isn’t just a question of making distinctions absolute, but of sliding from one distinction to another, and thinking that the second one provides the deep truth or bottom line. So someone asks what the difference between words and images is, and the reply is, it’s the difference between convention (the arbitrary sign) and nature (resemblance). Then someone else comes along and says no, these are false, binary oppositions, reified essences, and the fact is that there is no difference between words and images because all signs (including images) are arbitrary and conventional, and anyone who disagrees is a fascist who believes in nature and essences. I want to stop this “debate” before it gets started. It’s not going anywhere conceptually or politically. The first step is to slow down, and ask how we got from word vs. image to convention vs. nature. Did we think images were “natural” because the objects they represent are often easy to recognize? Is it because we can tell that Magritte’s pipe represents a pipe “just by looking at it”, whereas the words “this is not a pipe” require knowledge of a language? Could we substitute for the words “nature” and “convention” the “easy” and the “difficult” or the “automatic” versus the “learned”? Would we be comfortable taking this as the ultimate truth about the difference between words and images, or would we want to raise questions about cases that go against the grain – words like “Dada” that seem to come spontaneously out of baby’s mouths long before they have a language, or images (like Magritte’s pipe) that seem to resonate with

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 111 invisible connotations that go well beyond literal denotation of a smoking instrument? The nature/convention distinction has been one of the most durable ways of describing the difference between images and words. It goes back at least as far as Plato’s Cratylus and continues to play a role in contemporary debates. I  have two suggestions to make about the use of this distinction. The first is not to suppose that it explains everything, or that it provides the “deep truth” that underlies the difference between word and images. Nature/convention is only one of several distinctions or what I call “figures of difference” between words and images. Others include the metaphysical distinction between space and time (Lessing’s favorite), the sensory division between the eye and the ear, or grammatical distinctions like the analogical vs. the digital (Nelson Goodman). The fact that so many powerful and disparate forms of differentiation have been used to explain the relation of words and images, and the fact that none of them finally succeeds in stabilizing this relation, suggests to me that the word/image difference names something truly fundamental to culture, a basic and perhaps universal fissure in cognition, perception, and representation. That doesn’t mean, I must insist, that there is an “essential” difference between words and images, one that can be given by any reduction of the problem to a conceptual binary opposition. There are numerous distinctions that emerge whenever a culture sets out to reflect on differences in the kinds of symbols it uses. These distinctions come loaded with associated values and political conflicts, which is why debates about signs, symbols, and artistic media rarely remain neutral or dispassionate, but move toward polemic. The space between words and images is a kind of void into which (and from which) ideas, passions, narratives, representations emerge. It is the “third space”, the in-between where contingency rules. AM: So what is your strategy here? Do you wish to resolve the debate? TM: I don’t want to neutralize polemic. I just want the stakes to be as clear as possible. But to get back to the thrust of your initial question, and to my second suggestion about what to do with the nature/ convention distinction: what would be the benefits of looking at the visual arts through the lens of nature and resemblance? Wouldn’t this roll back, in some sense, the politics of the arbitrary sign, and along with it the whole radical critique of representation? Not at all. It would simply move this critique off its fixation on the linguistic turn and its associations with conventionalism, relativism, and nominalism. The theoretical victories won against all forms of “naive” (fill in the blank: transparency, mimesis, resemblance, copy, representation, realism, naturalism, positivism …) need not be repeated endlessly. How many times do we need to unveil the fact that something taken

112 Andrew McNamara with W.J.T. Mitchell to be “natural” is really only a convention? Isn’t it more interesting to take this for granted, and ask precisely what nature is being constructed by a convention? One of the things I admire about Rosalind Krauss’ The Optical Unconscious is the way its obsession with language and the arbitrary sign finds its way all the way down to a nature of drives and automatisms. Suppose nature “itself” also does things that are not “necessary” or “motivated”, but are pure sport, caprice, chance, contingency, and play, with no predetermined payoff in evolutionary competitiveness. Suppose nature herself is an artist who makes beautiful things (the wings of butterflies) for their own sake (this was the view Lacan absorbed from Roger Caillois’s wonderful little book, The Mask of Medusa). Or suppose nature, like the unconscious, were structured like a language, speaking to us in tongues that we have projected onto her? Perhaps we can stop treating nature as a scandal, and pay attention to what she is saying, and to the multiplicity of identities or “natures” we are capable of constructing. A new openness to nature in discussions of the visual arts, then, could have all sorts of implications. It would reopen the problems of realism and illusion, asking why it is that not just anything can serve the purposes of realism, why illusion isn’t “arbitrary” but seems to obey constraints that are independent of any choice or decision. It might help us to distinguish different levels of nature – “first” and “second” nature, for instance – the realms of biology, animal behavior, organismic drives and the sphere of deep custom, habit, ideology, and “anthropological universals”. On the specific problems of the visual arts, it would help to remind us that visual pleasure, affect, and desire are grounded in a scopic drive which, if Freud and Lacan are right, has as much to do with nature as the oral, anal, or genital zones. If language and speech, no matter how arbitrary or conventional its sign units, are fundamental constituents of human nature based in orality, vision and visual culture seem equally fundamental: perhaps the paragone of word and image should be recast as a contest between the mouth and the eye. Magritte’s pipe might be read as a collision between the scopic and the oral. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that visuality can be exhaustively explained on the model of language. Vision has its own nature, and lovers of the visual arts should be attentive to it on its own terms, and not be ashamed if they fail to transcode it into textual, discursive, or linguistic metalanguages. All the naive “superstitions” about visual representation (transparency, mimesis, resemblance, idolatry, fetishism, etc.) that have supposedly been surpassed by a sophisticated conventionalism can be reopened with a new clarity and critical attention if we can get beyond the negative reflex that has become attached to the category

Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image 113 of nature. This is already happening, as I’ve suggested, in the work of Donna Haraway and Eve Sedgwick, among others. AM: You argue against the proposition that there is a single over-arching theory that encompasses and resolves all the issues raised here and discussed in your books. How would you explain your kind of relativism? What stops an “astute relativism” from ultimately being just relativism? TM: Nothing. At the end of the day, I’m probably just a relativist like all my fellow citizens are, which means that I’m a relativist until the shoe pinches. Then I want to get to the bottom of things. “Relativist” strikes me as the least interesting and informative label I’ve ever allowed anyone to pin on me. I’m not sure a T-shirt with the words “Astute Relativist” would be any more comfortable. I actually think of my skepticism about over-arching theories not as a form of relativism, but as a kind of hard-headed faith in the progressive, historically evolving character of human understanding, coupled with considerable anxiety about the human capacity for forgetting and relapsing into ignorance. The insistence on theoretical totality and closure is, in my view, quite incompatible with an empirical or scientific attitude toward knowledge. All such totalities are quasi-religious systems (hence, a new round of idolatry vs. iconoclasm) or reactive forms of relativism and nihilism. I’m generally more comfortable with the relativists and nihilists – until the shoe pinches. AM: Finally, how would you describe the critical role of your “astute relativism”? Do you aim to intervene to transform a situation? To transform our perceptions and knowledge of an object? What role does your work play in a culture undergoing a pictorial turn? TM: My aim is to get at the wonder and strangeness of the world of words and images around us, to map that world as carefully as possible in the blind faith that it will be useful to do so. I want to intervene in academic, professional discussions of symbols and visual representations by testing the limits of disciplinary expertise, drawing us out of our depth, beyond our competence, into “indisciplinary” moments of experimentation, surprise, and cognitive failure. For the culture more broadly conceived, my hope is that we might find a way to write about the images and words that comprise our culture in ways that are critically acute and widely accessible. My fondest wish would be for an incredibly complex, subtle, and nuanced account of human symbolic behavior that would be universally understandable. On that score, I’ve obviously been a miserable failure. This interview was conducted in 1996 and published in Eyeline magazine, No. 30, Autumn–Winter 1996, 16–21.

Part II

(Post)Disciplinary Context

6

From Image/Text to Biopictures Key Concepts in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory Michele Cometa

The Origins of Visual Culture: Definition and Scope One of the most influential American journals, October, in 1996 submitted to an authoritative array of art historians and visual art scholars the famous “Visual Culture Questionnaire”.1 Though the answers showed some scepticism about the term “visual culture”,2 this issue can be considered the point of no return in the evolution of a field that has since had, especially in the United States, but also in Europe, considerable and well-established institutional effects,3 an increasingly transparent and self-conscious disciplinary statute as well as an appropriate number of canonical texts that define the “visual turn” in the humanities. Twenty years separate us from the questionnaire, and in that time many lucid introductory summaries have been published, a huge number of academic programs have been instituted, and there has even been extensive discussion of the situation and developments in the discipline in prominent journals such as the Journal of Visual Culture, Invisible Culture, Bildwelten des Wissens and Visual Studies. The choice of this label was neither simple nor painless if one considers that the objective success of this phrase – by this point accepted in German (visuelle Kultur), French (culture visuelle) and Italian (cultura visuale)  – had first to overcome the resistance of those disciplines that had traditionally dealt with the visual field, most notably art history.4 Then it promoted the cultural over the more anodyne, though certainly more defensible – both on an academic and a communicative level – visual dimension. To choose the term visual culture meant to choose one name for the discipline (or disciplines) and, at the same time, to choose the object of study of that discipline: visual culture, in fact, studies the “visual culture(s)” of a certain age, nation and culture. The success of this term has deep roots, especially in the recent history of cultural studies, and certainly corresponds to the need to conceive this approach within the most significant “cultural turns” in the humanities.5 Before exploring the meanings and the goals of this new discipline, we should highlight the great significance that W.J.T. Mitchell’s intellectual

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experience had – and is still having – in the foundation (and now in the development) of this field of study. One of the early works in this discipline, Visual Culture:  An Introduction by John A.  Walker and Sarah Chaplin, appeared in 1997 and showed the huge effort that visual culture had to make in order to free itself from the dangers of methodological heterogeneity and eclecticism. Walker and Chaplin’s introduction shows the difficulty of creating a space in a disciplinary context dominated by the strongholds of art history and the European Kunstwissenschaft, which they see as holding fast to the solidity of “science” and “history” as opposed to the “weak” methods of cultural studies. If today Mitchell can afford to use the English term “image science”6 in a fruitful dialogue with Gottfried Boehm, one of the most important scholars of German Kunstwissenschaft and Bildwissenschaft,7 it is thanks to a slow process of rapprochement (taking almost ten years) between American visual culture and German Bildwissenschaft that has helped to overcome strong prejudices on both sides. This reconciliation is also due to the fortunate choice of the term “visual culture”, which opens the discipline to a dialogue with the sciences of culture.8 Mitchell himself opts for “visual culture” to inaugurate his courses at the University of Chicago, for he was always interested in the construction of visuality in an anthropological and cultural sense.9 In 1997 things were different. Walker and Chaplin’s meritorious attempt – in fact only a few other volumes anticipated it, and they are by now well historicized by Margaret Dikovitskaya  – puts forward two definitions: the first centered on the objects of the discipline, and the second on the intellectual traditions that merge in the visual culture project. In the first case, what the authors rightly call “the quantity problem” is a matter of identifying the objects of visual culture studies. The cascading list proposed by the authors under the heading of “The Field of Visual Culture” is worth quoting in full, not only because of its paradoxical nature, but because it immediately gives the measure of the enormous theoretical expectations which, incidentally, do not find any fulfillment in their book: Fine arts:  painting, sculpture, print-making, drawing, mixed-media forms, installations, photo-text, avant-garde films and video, happenings and performance art, architecture. Crafts/design: urban design, retail design, corporate design, logos and symbols, industrial design, engineering design, illustration, graphics, product design, automobile design, design of weapons of war, transportation and space vehicle design, typography, wood carving and furniture design, jewellery, metalwork, shoes, ceramics, set design, computer-aided design, subcultures, costume and fashion, hair styling, body adornment, tattoos, landscape and garden design. Performing arts and the arts of spectacle:  theatre, acting, gesture and body language, playing musical

From Image/Text to Biopictures 119 instruments, dance/ballet, beauty pageants, striptease, fashion shows, the circus, carnivals and festivals, street marches and parades, public ceremonies such as coronations, funfairs, theme parks, Disneyworlds, arcades, video games, sound and light shows, fireworks, illuminations and neon signs, pop and rock concerts, panoramas, waxworks, planetariums, mass rallies, sporting events. Mass and electronic media:  photography, cinema/films, animation, television and video, cable and satellite, advertising and propaganda, postcards and reproductions, illustrated books, magazines, cartoons, comics and newspapers, multimedia, Compact-Disc Interactive, Internet, telematics, virtual reality, computer imagery.10 As cloying as this list may be, it shows that among the different families of visual objects listed, there are some that constituted the specific object of cultural studies as intended since the Birmingham School, and certainly many of the media that have established the very notion of modernity, whether from a sociological and mass-mediological point of view or from a more traditional philosophical, literary or artistic one. The situation is made even more paradoxical when, in a later article, John Walker resumed the list, enriching it with more specific concepts, not only in terms of the media of visual production or the fields of knowledge but the specific objects of study: Photographs, advertisements, animation, computer graphics, Disneyland, crafts, eco-design, fashions, graffiti, garden design, theme parks, rock/pop performances, sub-cultural styles, tattoos, films, television and virtual reality  – to which I  would add sex and sexuality, Las Vegas, Hollywood and Bollywood, depictions of death and violence, international airports, corporate headquarters, shopping malls, contemporary fine art such as video and installation, transgenic art, Balinese tourist art, Bakelite, Barbie, Burning Man, contemporary curiosity cabinets, snow globes, the history of buoys, Pez, Sen-Sens, microscopic sculpture, utensils made for babies, macramé, marbled endpapers, reproduction, Victorian half-hoop rings at Claire’s Accessories, AstroTurf, ivory mah jongg sets, underwater Monopoly, found footage from 1950s health and safety films, email greeting cards, tamagochi, restaurant decorations, Cat Clocks, fluorescent paint, eastern European Christmas decorations, plaster casts of gargoyles, Ghanaian coffins in the shape of chickens and outboard motors, Santeria statuettes, pink flamingos and other lawn ornaments, miniature golf, commercial Aboriginal painting, cargo cults, nineteenth century posters and fliers, book illustrations, children’s books, passports and bureaucratic forms, tickets, maps, subway and bus charts, cigarette packages, tourist-attraction ashtrays, and many topics in photography including family photo walls, fin-de-siècle gay

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Once again, these objects became the basic repertoire for visual culture exercises. Of course, many of these topics were typical for cultural studies and they would have horrified art historians and even film or media historians, but still the problem was posed:  is a cultural study of these visual objects possible? Is it possible if one takes into account the different cultural contexts in which they appear? Art historians after Aby Warburg would have been interested in such a wide cultural (kulturwissenschaftliche) perspective that the inventor of the Bilderatlas would certainly not have considered heretical. However, the time and especially the American localization of these approaches meant that the path from cultural history to visual history remained unpassable. Other efforts should have been made to enable this meeting of disciplines. When Walker and Chaplin address the problem of visual culture studies from the point of view of the disciplines involved, the catalog of topics becomes embarrassing and, even though they are culturally localizable, these topics are in fact unreliable from a methodological and institutional point of view. Walker and Chaplin attempted to merge at least thirty-four disciplines within visual culture studies, from aesthetics to an unidentified “structuralism”, through cultural studies, phenomenology, philosophy, feminism and queer theory.12 Again, this effort towards synthesis must be considered a symptom of the discomfort in 1990s American culture, which, after the so-called canon wars, was able to accommodate within the paradigm of literary studies some concepts originating from cultural studies but which denounced strong resistance to methodological and institutional innovation in the field of the “visual”. In 2002, in the proceedings of the prestigious Clark Conference of the previous year, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, two of the most innovative American art historians and among the strongest proponents of a dialogue between traditional disciplines and cultural studies, declared that the three areas of art history, aesthetics and visual studies were able to complement each other but also to contradict each other, showing the weaknesses of a one-dimensional approach. Still at stake was the relationship between “three” disciplines – a triad that with some irony the curators trace back to the triadic passions of Western thought, in their case Peirce as “the greatest Trinitarian”13 – considered irreconcilable. Mitchell’s statements on their profound historicity played no role for Holly and Moxey:  aesthetics as a discipline of the seventeenth century, art history of the nineteenth century and visual studies of the twentieth century. Mitchell’s deep historicism (and antiessentialism)14 is in fact rejected in the name of a contextual dialogue between

From Image/Text to Biopictures 121 approaches and methodologies that are considered as essentially different and irreducible. However, it is worth noting that in this context visual studies is stigmatized for its claim to “study all forms of visual production, without any reference to a selection or judgment criterion” and it is suspected of being “potentially unproductive”.15 This prejudice is certainly reinforced by reading Walker and Chaplin’s endless lists, but also when considering the heterogeneity of many collections of essays inspired by the visual culture approach. And yet, is that exactly how things stand? Have the last twenty years revealed no alternatives to this metastatic enumeration of “objects” and “methodologies”? In fact, the definitions mentioned so far  – to which many others found scattered across a variety of visual culture handbooks could be added – do not take into account the alternative already offered by Mitchell in 1994 in one of the works that is now considered to be a classic of the discipline and that makes the author one of the fathers of contemporary visual studies. The work in question is Picture Theory, whose subtitle underscores that the book comprises Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. The volume contains Mitchell’s famous essay on the “pictorial turn”, in which there is a clearer and more theoretically plausible definition of visual culture: Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naïve mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. Most important, it is the realization that while the problem of pictorial representation has always been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with unprecedented force, on every level of culture, from the most refined philosophical speculations to the most vulgar productions of the mass media.16 I shall return later to the question  – crucial for Mitchell and for all English-speaking visual culture scholars  – of the distinction between “image” and “picture”, which underlines the mediality of our visual experiences. At stake is Mitchell’s interest in the image as a real cultural product that has a life, a medial consistency and a circulation. On each of these aspects Mitchell has offered extremely innovative readings, showing that “life”, “circulation” and “consistency” are not mere metaphors.

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However, it is important to highlight two other capital issues that make Mitchell the natural interlocutor of European research on images. First is the specific attention to the “linguistic turn” that has marked all contemporary research, which Mitchell opposes (and supplements) with his “pictorial turn”. Second, there emerges the specific origin of Mitchell’s approach, which is mostly literary and philosophical and strongly rooted in Rorty’s “linguistic turn”, enriched with Wittgenstein’s and Goodman’s philosophy of language.17 Thanks to the encouragement given by Hans Belting during a meeting at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Mitchell made clear to his German peer Gottfried Boehm18 and to his readers the deep roots of his approach to the question of images (pictures and images): the awareness of the irreducible coexistence and convergence of visual and verbal in both communicative systems. This is clearly exposed as early as his first book, Iconology, in 1986,19 which was linked to the pre- and postsemiotic debate on the difference between the sister arts, namely a post-Lessing theme, and eventually in the subtitle of his following work in 1994, Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. The view expressed in the above-mentioned definition, however, sets the stage for overcoming this opposition/similarity because, after reaffirming the centrality of textual practices in the interpretation of culture and of visual phenomena, Mitchell insists on the study of a visual literacy that in fact “cannot be explained on the model of textuality”.20 It is precisely the awareness of the irreducibility of the two media  – whilst ensuring that cultural artifacts are still “mixed media” – that allows an effective overcoming of the textolatry induced by the so-called linguistic turn, which risks misunderstanding cultural products in modernity in deciding to dissolve all cultural practices within purely textual phenomena. Mitchell is also well aware that even though the question of the “visual” seems to invade every discourse of modernity, it is not alien to other and older cultural contexts. His literary education and his extensive historical knowledge enable him, in each of the volumes of what he calls his “trilogy”,21 to range from the “textual paintings” of his beloved William Blake22 to CNN, from Romanticism to Coca-Cola advertising, from landscape aesthetics to dinosaurs as a twentieth-century imaginary icon.23 However, the issues at stake in Mitchell’s theory do not represent a dispersive culturalist approach, since the questions he poses are quite similar and parallel to those posed by European Bildwissenschaft, as it has developed in German-speaking countries and eventually, but certainly not subordinately, in France, Italy and Spain.24 The irreducibility of visual to verbal for Mitchell implies the search for a grammar of images (though perhaps he would contest that metaphor!), or, better, a pragmatics of images that differs radically from that of verbal language. It is no wonder, therefore, that his theses had particular resonance for another scholar

From Image/Text to Biopictures 123 interested in the study of the Logik der Bilder, a logic based on a deictic, that is, on the “power of showing” (die Macht des Zeigen) as a specific property of images. I am referring to Gottfried Boehm,25 the father of the iconic turn (Ikonische Wendung) who, starting from philosophical hermeneutics, seeks the nontextual specificity of images as Mitchell does. I  believe, however, that in Mitchell’s case the term “grammar” is not entirely inappropriate, because for him – and this perhaps marks his deepest difference from Gottfried Boehm – it is not so much a question of the essence of images, of their ontological consistency, but rather of their way of working within communicative processes of social significance. Indeed, we must not forget that this specific grammar of images becomes spurious, is contaminated by the verbal dimension, to the point that Mitchell has become a master not only of the communicative and social dynamics of the image but also of the deconstruction of the visual metaphors that govern oral communication. The case of the relationship between cloning and reproduction  – which Mitchell, opening unusual horizons, calls biopictures – is one of these. Reading even just the titles of the books in his trilogy makes us aware that Mitchell has followed a path that, however complex and irregular, has its own internal logic, almost a life of its own:  from the study of image tout-court and its presence in the discourse of science, aesthetics and philosophy, to the “material” picture, up to the question that includes them both but overturns the perspective: what do pictures really want? It is a matter of building a cultural history of images, highlighting the “social field of the visual”,26 and at the same time considering images as the subjects of social interaction, not reducible “to language, to ‘sign’ or to discourse”.27

The Question of Turns: Texts and Images Contemporary visual culture owes the expression “pictorial turn” to Mitchell. He has made clear its significance in comparison with Gottfried Boehm, the inspirer of the “iconic turn”. Again, Mitchell has been able to balance the theoretical nuances of his expression with the heuristic meaning it has in the broader context of a history of contemporary culture. The pictorial turn is primarily for Mitchell that change of perspective, within the disciplines interested in vision and visuality, that has enabled us to reconsider the textolatry of contemporary hermeneutics and semiotics which originates in the “linguistic turn” of twentieth-century cultural studies. As evidenced by his critical experience, this does not mean to oppose a visual paradigm with a verbal one, but just to investigate the deep consubstantiality of their semiotics. The title of his first work, Iconology, must be interpreted literally as an icono-logy, a parallel reading of image and logos, an interpretation of their coexistence (and conflict) in the human experience. This allowed Mitchell to completely

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revolutionize the debate on image and text by offering a reinterpretation of the original theoretical topos in which it was incarnated over the last three centuries: from the issue of ekphrasis – in the groundbreaking essay “Ekphrasis and the Other”28 – up to the fundamental notion of image/ text that opens the way for the statement that all media are mixed-media. It is worth recalling the main points of Mitchell’s argument on image/ text, since from here descend the revolutionary interpretations of ekphrasis and Blake’s iconotexts (and more). Mitchell addresses the issue in Picture Theory – in the first (more theoretical) part of the book – whereby he reckons once again with his past as a scholar of comparative literature, and, consequently, with the easy interdisciplinary enthusiasms that underlie contemporary visual culture. The chapter is, significantly, titled “Beyond Comparison:  Picture, Text and Method”,29 and it goes to the heart of the foundational issues of the new discipline. The title is defiantly clean of the enthusiasm of comparativism (even literary), which is based on the following three assumptions:  (1)  that beyond text and picture there may be a “unifying, homogeneous concept of sign”;30 (2) that text and image cannot be regarded as irreducible “otherness” (a word which for Mitchell has many social and gender implications); (3) that text and image are part of the same “story” that does not allow, at any time, “alternative histories, counter-memories or practices of resistance”.31 These arguments originate in the previous chapter, which is devoted to “metapictures”, images ranging from Las Meninas to Ceci n’est pas une pipe, and to “dialectical images”, such as Wittgenstein’s Duck–Rabbit. They all show that a reflection of picture on itself is possible, regardless of language. Images, therefore, systematically put a strain on our securities, on the more or less fraternal relationships between the verbal and the visual (the sister arts!). This brings even the hopes of comparativism into crisis. Starting from Blake’s experience, Mitchell questions the image/ texts of literary history, and he reaches – on a seemingly minor note in the essay – the following clarification: I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate “image/text” as a problematic gap, clevage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text”, with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and the verbal.32 The consequences that Mitchell derives from this interpretation of “literary” products, which live, for various reasons, within the relationship between verbal and visual, are very clear: One can and must, however, avoid the trap of comparison. The most important lesson one learns from composite works like Blake’s (or from mixed vernacular arts like comic strips, illustrated newspapers,

From Image/Text to Biopictures 125 and illuminated manuscripts) is that comparison itself is not a necessary procedure in the study of image-text relations. The necessary subject matter is, rather, the whole ensemble of relations between media, and relations can be many other things besides similarity, resemblance, and analogy. Difference is just as important as similarity, antagonism as crucial as collaboration, dissonance and division of labor as interesting as harmony and blending of function. Even the concept of “relations” between media must be kept open to question: is radical incommensurability (cp. Foucault on Magritte’s pipe) a relation or a nonrelation? Is a radical synthesis or identity of word and image (the utopian calligram) a relation or a nonrelation? The key thing, in my view, is not to foreclose the inquiry into the image/text problem with presuppositions that it is one kind of thing, appearing in a certain fixed repertoire of situations, and admitting of uniform descriptions or interpretive protocols.33 These arguments lead Mitchell to always walk the road of very targeted and contextual interpretations (from classical ekphrasis to the daily newspapers), not staying within the security afforded by history, and by making a careful analysis of fossilized metaphors in the vocabulary of theory.34 But above all, they convince him that it is impossible, under any circumstances, to imagine a simple common territory between image and text, nor a specular opposition. The notion of image/text is always a disputed territory, the scene of a battle: The image/text problem is not just something constructed “between” the arts, the media, or the different forms of representation, but the unavoidable issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are “composite” arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive connections, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.35 However, the pictorial turn, as it emerges in these theoretical interpretations, would have remained little more than a hermeneutic fashion, fated to disappear under the system of “turns”, if Mitchell’s analysis had not been immersed in the specific questions that images pose to contemporaneity.

Visual Literacy: Beyond an Ontology of Images The pictorial turn in this context is no longer merely a scientific phenomenon, a new perspective on old issues, but an inescapable fact of contemporary life that requires the conscious development of a new visual literacy.36 Today we are witnessing a pictorial turn not only in human sciences, but in the general awareness that we have about images in the societies in

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which we live. Our pictorial turn is just one of the countless pictorial turns throughout history, a time of cultural and social densification that establishes a new relationship between man and image. This relationship, according to Mitchell, is deeply influenced (and converted) by new image technologies. At stake is not, therefore, an idealistic philosophy of images, perhaps culminating in an ontology, but an interpretation of the social relations between (the production of) images, new technologies and the deep anthropological changes they involve. Clearly, we are not dealing with a mere mediology, supported and requested by new visual technologies. Conversely, Mitchell is well aware of the “deep time” of media,37 of their “survival”, and of the inexistence of turns claimed only in public opinion, but not at all verifiable from the point of view of technology.38 For Mitchell, it is a matter of questioning the effect that images have on the anthropological constitution of Homo sapiens, an effect that is very ancient.39 For example, it is what he appropriately calls the “iconic panic” of modernity or the fetishistic obsession that pictures again seem to trigger today, as if we lived in a primitive and not a postmodern society.40 This means that images today produce more and more glaring social reactions, often by reactivating old fears or even ancient ecstasies, and this is what enables us to speak of a “new” pictorial turn. Moreover, Mitchell is in tune with other great figures of contemporary visual culture that have tried to focus on the notion of “scopic regime” – I am referring especially to Martin Jay41 – as a complex interplay between images, vision technologies42 and gazes.43 It is clear at this point that Mitchell’s hermeneutic strategy does not only move on the abstract level of image theory, and that he deals with crucial issues of contemporary visuality since the turning point of 9/11: from here come such precious essays as those on the pictures of Abu Ghraib, on the Twin Towers, on the relationship between violence, fetishism and image, in constant dialogue with authors such as Susan Sontag, Edward Said and the American progressive intelligentsia. One of Mitchell’s greatest features is his extraordinary ability to focus on “low-culture” images – something that differentiates him from many foreign colleagues (but also from some American scholars) – dramatically reducing them to Western imagination archetypes. This is the case with the Abu Ghraib Hooded Man, in which Mitchell recognizes the Ecce Homo of Christian tradition,44 and with the subtle genealogies through which he identifies the first pictorial turn of human history in the very archetypal scene of the biblical Golden Calf. This constant tension between “popular culture” – the subject of cultural studies – and the “high culture” of art history, distances him from some of the simplifications of contemporary visual culture. But above all it puts him in dialogue with German Bildwissenschaft and European visual studies. At issue are not only the definitions of an “image science”, which holds together art images, nonart images45 and images of science, but the formulation of a

From Image/Text to Biopictures 127 more general “anthropology of the image”, a Bild-Anthropologie in the sense proposed by Hans Belting,46 which forces us to reconsider some of the fundamental issues that in recent years have driven visual research and now reach a theoretical synthesis of greater stringency. Here I take only a brief look at the major paths within Mitchell’s work, which are of course widely shared by other scholars: •

•

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The issue of the relationship between mental image and material picture needs to be rethought within a philosophy (and psychology) well aware of the new discoveries of philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. The construction of an iconology of the gaze47 should take into account not only the reciprocity of intradiegetic and extradiegetic gazes, but the deictic ability of images,48 their capacity to “act”,49 to produce reactions or – as Mitchell has explained – to want something or someone.50 In What Do Pictures Want?, recalling a still from a David Cronenberg movie, Mitchell writes:  “Pictures want to be kissed. And of course we want to kiss them back”.51 An anthropological history of optical devices and media technologies – from the Renaissance perspective window to Windows52 – causes, on the one hand, the visual “petrified metaphors” of Western thought that shape scopic regimes and collective imagination to emerge; and, on the other hand, produces a renewed media science,53 emancipated from a teleological view of history and able to consider – as Warburg’s Bildwissenschaft or Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte did54 – survivals, metamorphoses and asynchronies throughout media history.55 As Aby Warburg stated, the image, as well as the concept, consists of Zeitschichten, of temporal overlapping flaps which bring together facts otherwise very far away from one another. An illustration of this concept can be found in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s beautiful fable dedicated to the “puff pastry of time”,56 a clever meditation on “anachronism” defined not as an error but as a fundamental condition of human existence and historicity.57 To explain this, Enzensberger uses the example of a square-shaped dough for sweets which is repeatedly cut and stacked up to “build” a cake. Similarly – but Enzensberger uses mathematical models that we cannot take into account here – historical time builds its own “irritant topology” by connecting sections of the puff which not only change the single time position with respect to the substrate, but which end up constantly and imperceptibly changing the past itself.58 It would not be difficult to find similar interpretations in authors such as Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges. But beyond models and metaphors it is easy to see that media history is full of revivals that – perhaps through “degradations” (in Aby Warburg’s sense) – continuously expose us to an overlapping, rather than to a sequence, of scopic regimes. The most

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Michele Cometa striking case in visual culture studies is given by the “classical” scopic regime of perspective: have we ever left behind the logic of Alberti’s window if in the era of Bill Gates the most powerful metaphor of the display is still the “window”? Finally, media history and aesthetics must be reviewed not only in terms of temporality but also in terms of technology. Consistent with his antiessentialist approach, Mitchell considers media not as mere material instruments, but as “material practices that involve technologies, skills, traditions and habits”.59 Media are not just devices, but relational networks: “not just the canvas and the paint, in other words, but the stretcher and the studio, the gallery, the musuem, the collector, and the dealer-critic-system”.60 Summarizing positions covering more than a decade, Mitchell arrives at an extraordinarily stringent definition: “By ‘medium’ I mean the whole set of material practices that brings an image together with an object to produce a picture”.61

Prolegomena to an Image Science: Living Pictures The Italian word immagine and the German word Bild produce hermeneutical effects that are unattainable for Mitchell simply because these words combine the opposing meanings of image and picture.62 Mitchell would resist any attempt to find common ground between the two because, besides his obvious respect for the natural languages, his hermeneutics seeks to make these linguistic contradictions react critically in an attempt to stress that aspect of an image that is not communicable through language – its picture-quality. This is an area in which Boehm and Belting constantly challenge him. In the preceding paragraphs I  have reflected on some of the classical issues in Mitchell’s theory, referring to some of the essays collected in his trilogy: on the pictorial turn, the fundamental concepts of visual culture, the surplus value of images and pictures, and the “desires” they express. However, it is helpful to refer to three other militant texts that offer a glimpse of the intellectual activities also involved in a productive comparison with Mitchell’s readers inside and outside the academy. I am referring first, of course, to the text devoted to the “showing seeing” technique63 that is the basis for an original “look” at the deep mechanisms of Western visuality – a kind of phenomenological rethinking of visual culture. Second is Mitchell’s intense manifesto on “mixed media”,64 which is one of the fundamental achievements of his research. And the final study to be discussed is Mitchell’s essay on the unspeakable and unimaginable in images in the “age of terror”.65 This was the first in a long series of militant writings, and is an important evidence of Mitchell’s cultural and political engagement, but also opens up extraordinary prospects for “image science”. The essay is clearly an immediate and politically

From Image/Text to Biopictures 129 oriented response to the propagandistic use of the tragedy of 9/11, but it is not only this. In it, Mitchell opens new perspectives for contemporary visual culture, not because it adds his authoritative voice to that of Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others,66 or  – probably without any direct relationship – to that of Georges Didi-Huberman in Images in Spite of All: Four Photograph from Auschwitz,67 the most important book on the meaning of images in our century of terror. As Didi-Huberman uses the precarious photographs of concentration camps to build a nonessentialist theory of images and their media, so Mitchell, starting from the mutual terrorism of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush, gives us an unforgettable lesson about Western iconophobia.68 A “popular” case becomes an opportunity for a truly immemorial deepening of the images/ pictures in a transcultural context. The issue of iconophobia always finds new energy during the pictorial turns of history. Hans Belting has recently spoken on the same subject in an authoritative study on the Eastern and Western gaze: Florence and Bagdad:  Renaissance Art and Arab Science.69 The text is seemingly far from contemporary politics, but it needs to be read against the background of a little book70 in which the German art historian tackles the issue of the war of images (Bilderstreit) between East and West, not hiding the political implications of Western and Eastern iconophobia. The central question of iconoclasm and of iconophobia did not escape another great innovator of image theory – David Freedberg in his Power of Images.71 Returning to Mitchell, we face, rather than a historical-political interpretation, a real philosophy of image. We find ourselves apparently in a classical context, already evident in embryo in Iconology and Picture Theory: a reflection on the limits (or perhaps I should say about the liminality) of the unspeakable and unimaginable, a formulation that mimics – from afar – those typical of the European discourse on the speakable and the unspeakable. It is only mimicry, of course, since Mitchell insists on the absolute reciprocity of the two terms, and most of his essays discuss the connection of the classical ekphrasis72 with the Barthian “obvious and obtuse”, their theological implications (God as unspeakable and not representable) and their paradoxes.73 In the final pages, however, the text undergoes a dizzying dive into the issue of terrorism (against the US and by the US) – an apparent immersion in everyday life. Mitchell’s thesis is simple and not particularly original:  terrorism is eminently a war of images; it destroys simulacra, as with the Twin Towers, rather than human beings. The deaths of human beings represent only collateral damage. In fact, terrorism does not seek to occupy a space but to deterritorialize the war, making it a ghost – the more elusive and virtual it becomes, the more ferocious it is. The military response to terrorism is thus revealed to be totally inadequate because it resoundingly misses the true bone of contention:  images. This is an important and

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courageous stand from the political point of view, and a shared analysis among visual culture experts. The relationship between terrorism and image goes far beyond that of iconophobia turning into iconoclasm, or that of the military use of visual strategies (if Al-Qaeda strikes images, the US, since the first Gulf War, have turned war into lighting technologies). Today this relationship is mediated by a third entity – the clone – which shows us that we are in the middle of a new pictorial turn. The clone is, according to Mitchell, a “figure for the unspeakable and unimaginable” of our time.74 It is simply the reverse image of the terrorist (whose speech is totally pervaded by the lexicon of cloning: from sleeper cells to contamination). Both terrorists and clones are figures of the excess that awakens our iconic panic: an excess of clones reproducing without rules (or ethics), mechanically, multiplying their living image to infinity; and an excess of terror that instead endlessly destroys simulacra and living images (and the terrorist himself), and meanwhile produces images of destruction (how many thousands of pictures of the Twin Towers exist?). On the other side of the fence, allegedly antiterrorist forces circulate thousands of photos on the Internet of Abu Ghraib or of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. In both cases, and from both sides, they leverage the atavistic fears of Western iconophobia. What I want to emphasize here is the enormous meaning that the figure of the clone (which Mitchell appropriately calls a “biopicture”) takes in image science: The possibility of human reproductive cloning is now on the technical horizon, and this possibility has re-awakened many of the traditional taboos on image-making in its most potent and disturbing form, the creation of artificial life. The idea of duplicating life-forms, and of creating living organisms “in our own image” has literalized a possibility that was foreshadowed in myth and legend, from the science fiction cyborg, to the robot, to the Frankenstein narrative, to the Golem, to the Biblical creation story itself, in which Adam is formed “in the image and likeness of God” from red clay, and receives the breath of life.75 Needless to say, Mitchell is able once again to explain a phenomenon apparently linked to the doxa which originates from deep anxieties  – from human “phobias”, in Warburg’s words. These fears can only be understood through the power that images exert on us, and for Mitchell – who certainly does not have nihilistic inclinations  – are only partially compensated by the desires that images and pictures stimulate. In one of Mitchell’s most radical essays  – “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction”, an art-historical exemplification of cloning – we find perhaps the most important evidence that Mitchell relies on contemporary visual culture.76 Attention to biocybernetics, a

From Image/Text to Biopictures 131 term which according to Mitchell brings together all our dystopias of societal control and all our anxieties on the unpredictability of the responses of living beings, is not borne of a futuristic fascination. On the contrary, it comes to resume the deep roots of what – at least from Freud onwards – is known as the “Uncanny” (das Unheimliche). Because in the end the answer to the question “What do pictures want?” is rather simple and sinks into the mists of time: images want to be loved, and they want to be “real”.77 To exemplify this theme, which reaches from Pygmalion78 through the Golem right up to the second and third generation of The Terminator, Mitchell quotes the touching and uncanny story of David, the “mecha” of Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), who, like Pinocchio, just wants to be a “true” child and to be loved by its/his mother. Once again, there is an unyielding struggle, a battlefield between bios and cyber that enables Mitchell to summarize his main thesis and at the same time gives us a clue to much of contemporary art: It might be useful here to pause for a brief theoretical interlude, to put this whole matter in a larger theoretical and historical framework, the standpoint of semiotics and iconology (the study of signs and images). In this larger perspective, the relation of the bios and the cyber is a rewriting of the traditional dialectics between nature and culture, human beings and their tools, artifacts, machines, and media  – in short, the whole “manmade world”, as we used to put it. It is also a reenactment of the ancient struggle between the image and the word, the idol and the law. The cyber steersman is the digital code, the alphanumeric system of calculation and iterability that makes language and mathematics the controlling instruments of human rationality, from cunning calculation to wise estimation. As literary theorist Northrop Frye once noted, the real gift to humans on Mt. Sinai was not the moral law (which was already known in oral tradition) but the semiotic law, which replaced pictographic writing systems with a phonetic alphabet, analog writing with digital. The Cyber is the judge and differentiator, the one who rules by writing the code. Bios, on the other hand, tends toward the analogical register, or the “message without a code”, as Roland Barthes put it in speaking of photography. It is the domain of perception, sensation, fantasy, memory, similitude, pictures – in short, what Jacques Lacan calls the Imaginary.79 It is therefore “the specter of the ‘living machine’ ”80 that renders restless the dreams of postmodernity. The return of the Uncanny is the triumph of images that want to be kissed, loved and desired, as in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories81 or in Expressionist cinema. The images clone themselves and are cloned, and behave like human clones: this is what triggers our phobias.

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It is the idea that images can be animated, that they can become like us, claiming our desire and mimicking our vitality. If the anthropological implications of the problem of biocybernetic beings awakens old fears, even more important are in fact the implications in terms of a philosophy of reproduction, of copy, of cloning. Mitchell’s essay looks like a counscious rewriting of a Walter Benjamin essay, except that now the copy, the clone, is no more “technical” in the sense of “mechanical”, but is precisely “biocybernetic”. This implies an epochal turn in the philosophy of reproduction/copying/cloning that will engage contemporary visual culture for years. These biocybernetic copies are in fact better than the original, or at least indistinguishable from it; the relationship between artist and the work of art is far more complex, and the temporality of the copy is not understandable by means of our philosophy of time. A genetic clone is in fact purified and refined in various ways in the laboratory, and is, at least in principle, immune to all known diseases. Its aura is certainly more powerful than the original. Mitchell ironically remind us of the phosphorescent rabbit of Eduardo Kac which literally shines with its new aura. This is not to mention the “restyling” of the human form offered by surgical technology.82 The relationship between the artist and the biocybernetic body (or his/her own body, as in the case of Stelarc) is incomparably more invasive than in mechanical reproduction, thanks to the fact that it can be “operated” and “visualized” kilometers away. Finally, there is the question of time: the clone simply has no age or has every age. Either way, this upsets all our time parameters, actualizes the past and anticipates the future in a bustle that solves each historicist attempt and undermines what remains of our philosophies of history. It might be argued that Mitchell’s most important book is The Last Dinosaur Book,83 in which many of the arguments set out above are foreshadowed. Far beyond the “archeology of the present”84 of the late twentieth century, Mitchell wants to propose a sort of “paleontology of the present”,85 a discipline that would begin by acknowledging that contemporaneity is perhaps even more mysterious to us than the recent or distant past, and that would proceed by insisting on the connectedness of all forms of life – a project that might put cybernetics to work for human values.86 Perhaps visual culture is precisely this. On the one hand, it is a means of learning how to read, thanks to the immemoriality of the image/picture, the contemporaneity of the noncontemporary; on the other, it is a way to critically distance both the “utopian fantasies of biocybernetics” and the “dystopian reality of biopolitics”;87 and the belief that after all, this “moment of accelerated stasis in history” in which we live is giving us time to reflect on the human – an opportunity that we cannot miss.

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Notes 1 S. Alpers, E. Apter, C. Amstrong, S. Buck-Morss, T. Conley, J. Crary, Th. Crow, T. Gunning, M. A. Holly, M. Jay, Th. Dacosta Kaufmann, S. Kolbowski, S. Lavin, S. Melville, H. Molesworth, K. Moxey, D. N. Rodowick, G. Waite, Ch. Wood, “Visual Culture Questionnaire”, October, Vol. 77 (1996): 25–70. 2 The term “visual culture” first appeared in Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing:  Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 3 James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003), 7–14. 4 See D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History:  Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT and London:  Yale University Press, 1989); Mieke Bal, “Semiotics and Art History”, Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2 (1991): 174–208; Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29 (2003):  418–428; Deborah Cherry, “Art History and Visual Culture”, Art History, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2004): 479–493; Ernst van Alphen, “‘What History, Whose History, History to What Purpose?’: Notions of History in Art History and Visual Culture Studies”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2005): 191–202. 5 See Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns:  Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Berlin: Rohwolt, 2006). 6 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press,  2015). 7 For example, see influential publications by Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Bildwissenschaft:  Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Cologne:  Herbert von Halen Verlag, 2004); Klaus Sachs-Hombach (ed.), Bildwissenschaft:  Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 2004); Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2003): 418–428. 8 For a critic see Marquard Smith, “Visual Studies, or the Ossification of Thought”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4 (2005): 237–256. 9 Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture:  The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 57 and 243. 10 John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 33; see also Elkins, Visual Studies, 36. 11 John Walker, “Visual Culture and Visual Culture Studies”, The Art Book, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1998), 14–16. 12 Walker and Chaplin, Visual Culture, 3. 13 Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), ix. 14 Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2003): 5–32. 15 Holly and Moxey, Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, xvii. 16 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. 17 Ibid. 18 See Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen:  Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007). 19 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 20 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 16.

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21 Mitchell, Iconology; Mitchell, Picture Theory; and W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2005). 22 See: W.J.T. Mitchell, Blakes’ Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 23 See:  W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book:  The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 24 Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regard (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1999); Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000); Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’imagination (Paris: PUF, 1991 (1993)); Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, La vie des images (Strasbourg:  Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1995); Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Imaginaires du politique (Paris: Ellipses, 2001); Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, La vie des images (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2002); Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Philosophie des images (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 1997); Roberta Coglitore (ed.), Cultura visuale:  Paradigmi a confronto (Palermo:  duepunti, 2008); M. Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale (Milan: Cortina, 2012); M. Cometa, Archeologie del dispositivo:  Regimi scopici nella letteratura (Pellegrini:  Cosenza, 2015); Andrea Pinotti and Andrea Somaini, Cultura visuale: Immagini sguardi media dispositivi (Turin: Einaudi, 2016); José Luis Brea (ed.), Estudios Visuales: La epistemología de la visualidad en la era de la globalización (Madrid: Akal, 2005). 25 G. Boehm, Was ist ein Bild (Munich: Fink, 1994); G. Boehm, “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder”, in Ch. Maar, H. Burda (eds.), Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder (Cologne: DuMont, 2004), 28–43; G. Boehm, “Iconic Turn:  Ein Brief”, and W.J.T. Mitchell, “Pictorial Turn: Eine Antwort”, in H. Belting (ed.), Bilderfragen: Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch (Munich: Fink, 2007), 27–46. 26 W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures “Really” Want?”, October, Vol. 77 (1996): 71–82. 27 Ibid., 82. 28 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 151–182. 29 Mitchell, “What Do Pictures “Really” Want?”. 30 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 87. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 89. 33 Ibid. 34 Mitchell, Iconology, 151; following Sarah Kofman, Camera obscura de l’ideologie (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1973). 35 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 94. 36 James Elkins, Visual Literacy (New York and London: Routledge, 2007); J. Trumbo, “Visual Literacy and Science Communication”, Science Communication, Vol. 20 (1999): 409–425; Elkins, Visual Studies, 125 ff. 37 S. Zielinski, Archäologie der Medien: Zur Tiefenzeit des technischen Hörens und Sehens (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002); Cometa, Archeologie del dispositivo; Michele Cometa, Valeria Cammarata and Roberta Coglitore, Archaeologies of Visual Culture:  Gazes, Optical Devices and Images from 17th to 20th Century Literature (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). 38 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Realismo e immagine digitale”, in R. Coglitore (ed.), Cultura visuale: Paradigmi a confronto (Palermo: duepunti, 2008), 81–99. 39 Michele Cometa, “The Challenge of Cave Art:  On the Future of Visual Culture”, in Žarko Paić and Krešimir Purgar (eds.), Theorizing Images (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 35–58.

From Image/Text to Biopictures 135 40 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 188–199. 41 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Los Angeles, CA:  University of California Press, 1993); Martin Jay, “That Visual Turn:  The Advent of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2002): 87–92; see also R. Debray, “The Three Ages of Looking”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21 (1995):  529–555; A. Gauthier, Du visible au visuel:  Anthropologie du regard (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 1996); K.E. Schøllhammer, “Regimes representativos da modernidade”, Alceu, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2001), 28–41; G.J. Stack and R.W. Plant, “The Phenomenon of ‘The Look’”, Philosophy and Phenomelogical Research, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1982), 359–373; Cometa, Archeologie del dispositivo. 42 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London:  The MIT Press, 1990); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA and London:  The MIT Press, 1999); Cometa, Cammarata and Coglitore, Archaeologies of Visual Culture. 43 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of Gaze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990); M. De Certeau and P. Porter, “The Gaze Nicholas of Cusa”, Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1987):  2–38; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 44 Mitchell, “Pictorial Turn:  Eine Antwort”; Michele Cometa, “Prefazione”, in A.L. Carbone (ed.), Iconografia e storia dei concetti (Palermo: duepunti, 2008), 5–10. 45 James Elkins, “Art History and Images that Are Not Art”; Art Bulletin, Vol. 77, No. 4 (1995):  553–571; James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Roberta Coglitore, Pietre figurate: Forme del fantastico e mondo minerale (Pisa: ETS, 2004). 46 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 47 Hans Belting, “Zur Ikonologie des Blicks”, in Ch. Wulf and J. Zirfas (eds.), Ikonologie des Performativen (Munich: Fink, 2005), 50–58; and Hans Belting, “Per una iconologia dello sguardo”, in Roberta Coglitore (ed.), Cultura visuale:  Paradigmi a confronto (Palermo:  duepunti, 2008), 5–27. 48 Gottfried Boehm, “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens. Deiktische Wurzeln des Bildes”, in Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen:  Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), 19–33. 49 H. Bredekamp, “Bildakte als Zeugnis und Urteil”, in M. Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2004), vol. I, 29–66; H. Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010). 50 Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture, 238 ff. 51 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xvi. 52 C.W. Ceram, Eine Archäelogie des Kinos (London:  Thames and Hudson, 1965); B. M. Stafford and F. Terpak (eds.), Devices of Wonder:  From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, CA:  Getty Research Institute, 2001); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping:  Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkley, CA: University of California Press,1993); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA and London:  The MIT Press, 2006); G. Wajcman, Fenetrê:  Chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier, 2004); Valeria Cammarata (ed.), La finestra del testo: Letteratura e dispositivi della visione tra Settecento e Novecento (Roma: Meltemi, 2008), 9–76.

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53 Jochen Hörisch, Eine Geschichte der Medien: Von der Oblate zum Internet (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004). 54 Michele Cometa, “Iconocrash:  Sul disastro delle immagini”, in Roberta Coglitore (ed.), Cultura visuale:  Paradigmi a confronto (Palermo:  duepunti, 2008), 43–63. 55 Zielinski, Archäologie der Medien; U. Hick, Geschichte der optischen Medien (Munich: Fink, 1999); F. Kittler, Optische Medien: Berliner Vorlesungen 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 2002); Cometa, Archeologie del dispositivo; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 212. 56 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Von Blätterteig der Zeit: Eine Meditation über den Anachronismus”; in Zickzack (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 9–30. 57 See the different position regarding “anachronism” and “anachronic” works of art in Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990); G. Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps (Paris:  Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000); and A. Nagel and Ch. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2010). 58 Enzensberger, “Von Blätterteig der Zeit”, 19. 59 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 198. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 P. Spinicci, Simile alle ombre e al sogno: La filosofia dell’immagine  (Turin:  Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). 63 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 336–356. 64 W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2005), 257–266. 65 W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror”, ELH, Vol. 72 (2005), 291–308; W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 66 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004). 67 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All:  Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 68 Alain Besançon, Image interdite: une histoire intellectuelle de l’iconoclasme (Paris:  Éditions Fayard, 1994); David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen: Schwartz, 1985). 69 Hans Belting, Florence and Bagdad:  Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 70 U. Baatz, H. Belting, I. Charim, N. Kermani and A. Saleh, Bilderstreit 2006: Pressefreiheit? Blasphemie? Globale Politik? (Vienna: Picus, 2007). 71 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 72 Michele Cometa, Mistici senza Dio: Teoria letteraria ed esperienza religiosa nel Novecento (Palermo: Edizioni di Passaggio, 2012). 73 Ibid. 74 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 67. 75 Mitchell, Image Science, 35. 76 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 309–335. 77 Ibid., 309. 78 Victor I. Stoichita, The Pigmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 79 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 315. 80 Ibid., 316.

From Image/Text to Biopictures 137 81 Michele Cometa, Descrizione e desiderio: I quadri viventi di E.T.A. Hoffmann (Roma: Meltemi, 2005). 82 Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2006). 83 W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998). 84 K. Ebeling and S. Altekamp (eds.), Die Aktualität des Archäologischen in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004); Cometa, Archeologie del dispositivo. 85 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 324; see also Cometa, “The Challenge of Cave Art”. 86 Ibid., 334. 87 Ibid., 335.

7

The Birth of the Discipline W.J.T. Mitchell and the Chicago School of Visual Studies Ian Verstegen

We do not necessarily talk about a “Chicago school” of visual studies, but I  believe that doing so helps us situate and better understand the contribution of W.J.T. Mitchell to studies of visual culture. What if we think of Mitchell as engaged in a sympathetic undertaking along with Joel Snyder and, at a slightly later date, James Elkins? I write relying heavily on the evidence of the texts and with no special biographical insight into art history and visual studies in the 1980s and 1990s at the University of Chicago or in Chicago in general. While I may overlook certain things, perhaps my distance will allow me to overcome other intentional fallacies that might be contradicted by texts themselves. Although no formal Chicago school existed for visual studies, a more informal arrangement existed for a time in the so-called Laocoön group, and then the Chicago School of Media Theory (CSMT), which was centered on Mitchell’s seminar on media theory and included, among others, Snyder, Elkins and Hans Belting (then teaching in Chicago), not to mention the dynamics of the Critical Inquiry editorial board.1 As Mitchell himself recounts, the Laocoön group met from about 1977 to 1985 and consisted of Chicago faculty:  “[medievalist] Michael Camille … medievalist Linda Seidel, Byzantinist Rob Nelson, photographer-philosopher Joel Snyder, and modern historians Becky Chandler, Martha Ward, and Margaret Olin … along with literary scholars Elizabeth Helsinger and myself”.2 Lessing became a pretext for rethinking fundamental truisms in aesthetic thought, and the group became the imaginative vehicle for challenging it. If the Laocoön group was a media theory in gestation, it became full blown in 2003 in the CSMT, which organized symposia and had as its backbone Mitchell’s course in media theory. Even if it is impossible to find commonalities between such a diverse group of people, Mitchell was especially close to Snyder, and this relationship alone can yield important insights. Mitchell dedicated Iconology to Snyder and wrote in its preface that he, “was present, in body or spirit, at the birth of just about every good idea in this book”.3 This gives us license to broaden our scope to contextualize what scholars of a like mind in the same place were trying to accomplish in the state

The Birth of the Discipline 139 of literary and art historical studies. This chapter reconstructs the collective endeavor of W.J.T. Mitchell and his colleagues as a response to literary and image discourse in academia in the 1970s and 1980s. First discussing postmodern nominalism and the rejection of narratives, the chapter reviews discussions of media such as photography, leading to Mitchell’s formulation of the idea that there are no visual media. Passing to the idea of what images want, the chapter arrives at Mitchell’s fully formed, dyadic variety of visual studies, giving equal weight to viewer and object. The chapter ends with a critical discussion of this approach from a present-day perspective.

Visual Studies as a De-discipline of Disavowal Many of the contributions to this volume suggest notions of Mitchell’s mature system, in its various parts and emphases. For the purposes of this chapter, I need to provide a working understanding of the basics of his idea of visual studies in order to excavate its origins. Here I am helped by the series of countertheses that Mitchell has provided in his “Showing Seeing”.4 I characterize his idea of visual studies as a metadiscipline, or even a de-discipline, achieved through a series of disavowals (which to some may be surprising). Indeed, Mitchell continuously bucks the trend of a received view of visual studies. There are five ideas that he counters: •

•

•

•

•

That visual culture erodes high and low distinctions. While the dominant trend of visual studies has contributed to this leveling, Mitchell calls it a fallacy, because ignoring what he calls a “vernacular” (or intuitive) idea of high and low leads to a policing of their difference, and a reinstatement of their difference in the form of an inversion. The visual turn as anything other than a trope. The contemporary situation cannot be nominated as the sole recipient of a visual turn, because that would suggest that its dynamic cannot be observed in other arenas. He says the visual turn notes a “commonplace” today rather than a fact. As a trope, it has returned as it has in the past. The visual as hegemonic. If vision is hegemonic, once again we stop investigating its relation to other senses. Vision is ubiquitous and aids in the “visual construction of the social” rather than just the “social construction of the visual”. Visual media as a class of things. “Visual studies” itself cannot be supported if this seeks to segregate a group of objects for study. Doing so prejudices us from paying attention to “what is in front of us”. Vision as political tyranny. Finally, one cannot regard contemporary visuality as (solely) an instrument of domination. This is reductive. The politicization of visuality, while legitimate, runs the opposite risk of vilifying its object.

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Mitchell will have nothing to do with those simplifications of the insights of visual studies that become a kind of vulgar caricature of its deepest insights. The embedding of phallocentrism as the default model of Western spectatorship is just such a trope. One metanarrative has been substituted for another. For this reason, Mitchell arrived at a methodology of perfect disavowal, of a completely nonalienated object of study. The visual phenomenon would never be flattened out, underestimated; it would be listened to. As a consequence, Mitchell’s very idea of what constitutes an image is radically open and descriptive. Mitchell’s pioneering 1984 article “What Is an Image?” reviewed in a quite neutral way all of the potential kinds of images of interest. Mitchell stated openly that he will not be advancing “the theoretical understanding of the image”, and he put a number of different kinds of “images” into discussion – graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal – in an openly Wittgensteinian language game.5 Not privileging any traditional sense of image, he noted that “Real, proper images have more in common with their bastard children than they might like to admit”.6 Thus, all historical usages of image are prima facie reasons to take them seriously, for in this way there is no bias. Interestingly, I find that this inclusiveness lives on in Elkins’ work, which remains open to any number of senses of image. For example, in the introduction to his recent edited volume, What Is an Image?, Elkins reviews relatively outlandish senses of an image, and works quite hard not to privilege one over another. He writes that he will begin informally because “it would be difficult to do this more seriously,” and lists “in absolutely no order”: images as very thin skins of things; images as reminders of love; images as kisses; images as models, images as the touch of flowers; images as sign systems; images as defective sign systems; images as genus, composed of individual species …7 Elkins differs from his teacher to the degree that he adds individuals and institutions to his ironic distance from visual studies. The plurality of senses of image in Mitchell turns into the plurality of uses and needs put upon images by groups. Elkins wisely states in the same text that, “the words image, picture, and Bild in art history, theory, and criticism, and in visual studies, may work by not being analyzed, and so the work done in this book might be counterproductive or misguided”. In general, however, this approach seems to reflect a similar methodology of disavowal, a deconstruction of what an image is or can claim to be, and shows one deep affinity in Elkins’ writing with Mitchell. Politically speaking, we might say – and this is a point to which I will return – the Chicago model is based on a politics of inclusion and pluralism, a commitment to nonalienation. Its open-mindedness is founded on a tacit assumption consistent with postmodern commitments that determination is violence. Therefore, to define a person, or citizen, is as undesirable as determining whether a picture has more claim to be an image than an apparition.

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Toward a Postmodern Nominalism Mitchell absorbed most successfully the main tenants of French thought, in addition to nominalist, “pragmatist” trends of American philosophy, and provided a compelling theory. Both in retrospect and in context, Mitchell’s position becomes one of the most, if not the most, important consolidations of poststructuralism in art theory. Before arriving at his personal synthesis, it is useful to pay special attention to Mitchell’s discussion of Marx, which above all situates his project as participating in the surpassing of master narratives in the human sciences. Because this primary motivation is so important for the whole project of nonalienation that he developed, it is worth revisiting it in some depth. It is in the last chapter of Iconology that Mitchell  – after developing an argument about the nature of images – concludes with the problem of ideology. It is not surprising that Mitchell points out shortcomings in the way that Marxism has handled art. But Mitchell’s critique is harsh and – a point to which I will return – is an accusation that critique has nowhere to stand to judge the difference between ideology and real social processes. Ultimately, the Marxist paradigm cannot “interrogate its own premises”.8 Citing Jean Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, he later joins the now anticipated critique of the high priest of Paris structural Marxism, Louis Althusser, for violating his own premises, claiming his own privilege for critique. These criticisms were common at the time: questioning Marx and other figures for their univocal development of systems that were exclusionary.9 What Mitchell added to this was a “semiotic” method of indifference toward the creations of medium. For arriving at this point of view, we must turn to Nelson Goodman. Goodman was an American nominalist philosopher, famous for his Languages of Art, an analytic, apolitical tract whose constructivist audacity had attracted theoretical art writers.10 In his mainstream philosophical work, Goodman had proposed the new riddle of induction, and was an enemy of logical confirmation. Technically, he proposed a form of pure descriptivism, a plurality of worlds.11 In aesthetics, Goodman wiped away all presumptions about symbol systems and looked at them with a fresh, reductive eye, searching for surprising affinities. The result was the famous differentiation of symbol systems based on their level of continuity and disjointedness. The former analog media assign values to each and every point of its appearance, whereas a disjointed, notational medium  – like the alphabet  – assigns these values discretely. In addition, the traditional fine arts are also syntactically and semantically dense, where morphological changes result in changes to form and reference. This is a toolkit for emerging claims regarding anything. As Mitchell wrote:

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Ian Verstegen Nelson Goodman’s nominalism (or conventionalism, or relativism, or “irrealism”) provides, in my opinion, just the sort of Occam’s razor we need for cutting through the jungle of signs so that we may see just what sort of flora we are dealing with.12

If Goodman articulated a philosophical position, Mitchell et al. were seeking an approach to culture that was adequate to “theory”. In this sense, Goodman was shortsighted in ascribing the effects of “habituation” to a sense of realism in pictures. This challenge to Goodman was first voiced by Joel Snyder in “Picturing Vision”, where he left the door open for some rapprochement with nature.13 Noting that some habits are easier to pick up or break than others, the same ought to be true for vision. Later Mitchell represented this view when he sought to balance vision “as a cultural activity” with vision in “its non-cultural dimensions”. In one example, Lacan’s gaze, normally tied to the most stringent constructivism, is linked instead to an “evidently hard-wired disposition to recognize the eyes of another organism”, for a balanced theory would privilege neither extreme – pure enculturation or pure nativism.14 As we have seen, this emerging position completed Goodman’s sketch of a total discipline of disavowal, neither essentialist nor antiessentialist, neither nativist nor constructivist.

Media Hybridity or the Radical Media Critique Mitchell is known for the argument that “there are no visual media”.15 Indeed, for Mitchell there are no media at all, just mixtures of technical features in permanent mixture. Because for him all media are mixed, and none exist in practice alone, it is fallacious to affirm that any of them are “visual” (or “textual”, etc.). The result of this is that one forestalls any assumption about any medium whatsoever. Each must be approached on its own terms lest truisms or submerged ideas be repeated. This radical media critique began with the consideration of various isolated media (text/image, photography, literature) or representational modalities (linear perspective) as Mitchell and other scholars sought to question the inherited wisdom about the supposedly inherent features of such tools left by formalist and structuralist criticism.16 These observations on photography and artificial perspective are enough to see that media and representational techniques are not sufficient to stake out distinct, categorical media or modes of mediality. The upshot supports the nominal conclusion that pure media do not exist and any medial instance is actually a case of blending or hybridity. Mitchell extends this to the very idea of a sense modality. The impetus for reflection on medium was of course Mitchell’s early work on William Blake,17 a poet and artist whose unique works existed in a penumbral space of discursivity and imagery; Mitchell used

The Birth of the Discipline 143 his “composite” art as a model of an exception to the purist notion of medium. True to Mitchell’s later position, to police Blake with medial categories not only presumes the reproduction of nature but also forestalls any creative outcome of his novel procedures. Of course, reflecting on Blake and eighteenth-century aesthetics was the birth of the Laocoön group at the University of Chicago. Lessing became a pretext for rethinking fundamental truisms in aesthetic thought, and the group became the imaginative vehicle for challenging it. It is interesting to consider these discourses against Mitchell’s own early work on word–image relations.18 Mitchell had taken it from Goodman that “The boundary line between texts and images, pictures and paragraphs, is drawn by a history of practical differences in the use of different sorts of symbolic marks, not by a metaphysical divide”.19 In practical application, as in his study of spatial form in literature, he could argue that, “spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature” and “instead of viewing space and time as antithetical modalities, we ought to treat their relationship as one of complex interaction, interdependence and interpenetration”.20 In this way, Mitchell passed from a case study to an aesthetic maxim. From here, of course, in his important discussion of Lessing’s Laocoön Mitchell was allowed to look at the politics that follow from assigning various values to the spatial and linguistic forms, in particular qualities of masculinity and reason to literature, and femininity and silence to painting.21 Whereas one might see this as a first move to bring images and imagery back into study, Mitchell was actually anticipating the outcome of such a move, the new hegemony of the visual. Instead, he preemptively forestalled the essentialization of either picture or text and chose an involution of both, “spatial form” in literature (perhaps in search of its more common antonym, “syntactic structure” in pictures?). Such efforts would culminate in Mitchell’s conflated “imagetext”.22 The extensive work of Joel Snyder critiquing photographic naturalism both anticipates and confirms many of the media-skeptical claims developed by Mitchell.23 If one characterizes Snyder’s approach in broad outlines, it is one that challenges any ontological notion of photography by focusing on the epistemological gradations that it provides the viewer. That is, a categorical distinction for photography is dismissed because of the muddiness of the epistemology of the photograph, which decides the ontological question negatively. For example, Snyder argued that both photos and hand-drawn maps give us information about a locale, and that therefore it cannot be the sole province of photography to portray objective information. Another argument was that a photograph cannot present what a viewer would see because many photographs are unrecognizable from human experience, stop-action shots in sports photography for instance. This critique was important in deflating the scientistic pretensions of photography, raised to such a high level by defenders, such

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as André Bazin and Rudolf Arnheim, of what came to be called “causal” theories of photography.24 Another privileged mode of visual representation, linear perspective, came in for criticism as well. Linear perspective, and pictorial resemblance in general, was in Snyder’s words already given an “analytic demolition” by Nelson Goodman.25 Indeed, it was Snyder again, in “Picturing Vision”, who put a “Chicago” stamp on future investigation of the topic. Against perspective as representing objective geometry, Snyder analyzed Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura to show that he conceives of the geometry underlying perspective as inherently pictorial. Part of the naturalness of perspective, then, is simply that the world is already regarded as a picture, and it is therefore no surprise that the artificial construction and its putative model match. The idea is that, just as with the photograph, there is no inherent relationship between the perspective construction and the world; it is not “ ‘the way the world is’, ‘the way the world looks’, nor even ‘the way we use our vision’ ”. In consonance with Goodman’s descriptivism, whereby he said that one could not compare a description against the world, Snyder argues that we cannot compare a picture against the world. Therefore, in this view, the very notion of “realistic depiction” is incoherent. Although casual differentiations may be made among pictures as to which is more realistic, when we try to examine the issue more closely we find it impossible to find any common criteria to decide the issue. This is so, Snyder argues, because perspective is based on a tacit idea that the idea of naturalness is posited in the first place. Then, there can be a consonance between “visual objects” and represented objects, with images being “the completed perceptual judgments about the objects of sense”.26 Alberti’s articulated theory of perspective itself defines what can count as a visual experience; in retrospect, a geometry deemed natural is underwritten by a theory of perspective.27 Although he does not treat extensively of linear perspective, Mitchell cites this argument amidst a larger discussion of Goodman, Gombrich and others in Iconology. Artificial perspective “denies its own artificiality”, and similarly masks the “acculturated imagination” with which we view a world subjected to geometric rigor. Against Gombrich, Mitchell holds that a picture cannot resemble the world because “there is no neutral, univocal, ‘visible world’ there to match things against, no unmediated ‘facts’ about what or how we see”.28 In James Elkins’ dissertation of 1989, such a viewpoint is elaborated. According to Elkins, the book that grew from it, The Poetics of Perspective, was already sketched in 1982: “something with not much resemblance to this book was once projected as a book to be written with Joel Snyder”.29 Elkins’ work became the postmodern deconstruction of perspective built upon Snyder’s pioneering critique. Elkins stressed the multiplicity of perspective discourses, their incompatibility, their anachronic distance from modern geometry. Perspective existed in the early modern period as a

The Birth of the Discipline 145 rhetorical ornament, hence its “poetics”. Perspective elements adorned a picture, but there was no single perspective that could help adjudicate different geometrical claims. Some endorsement of Elkins’ views by Snyder is found in the latter’s review of the English edition of Erwin Panofsky’s Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’.30 Echoing Goodman, Elkins’ (and Snyder’s) viewpoint is compatible with that expressed by Mitchell about artificial perspective a few years earlier for a “hard, rigorous, relativism that regards knowledge as a social product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including different languages, ideologies, and modes of representations”.

Antifoundationalism, or What Do Images Want? The ultimate form of disavowal for visual studies is suspending judgment about images, observing an ethnographic attitude about what an image is or can do. There, it makes sense to ask Mitchell’s famous question: What do pictures want? It is not difficult to see how Mitchell’s idea of “vision as a psycho-social process” emerges from his early work on idolatry and iconoclasm.31 That work was part of a postmodern questioning of the Marxist narrative of unmasking fetishism and idolatry. Mitchell’s aim was to stress the dialectical nature of iconoclasm and idolatry, which converged with Bruno Latour’s iconoclash symposium, to which he contributed.32 The stress on the dialectic shows how inappropriate is the wide misunderstanding of Mitchell as affirming the life of images. He merely gives images their say in a two-way street. Therefore, because of Mitchell’s antifoundationalism, he could never be guilty of an uncritical turn toward visuality, “presence” or transparency. Indeed, a careful reader notes that power is on the side of semiotics, not desire, which is instead betrayed by need. “Quasi agents and mock-persons” are precisely not (symmetrical) agents but marked by their lack, their reduced status. Thus, registering the desire of pictures does not mean an overhaul or abandonment of former procedures. Mitchell would agree that his discussion of an Uncle Sam poster is highly semiotic, which explains why he “circled back to the procedures of semiotics, hermeneutics, and rhetoric”.33 These themes are all present in Iconology where, in a manner allied to the discussion of medial distinctions, those distinctions of naturalness and convention mark out a familiar metaterrain. In his incisive critique of Gombrich, Mitchell shows how his elder colleague held a stake in the naturalness of the image, which was tied to biological needs to assure its privileged status. Identifying the West with nature had deep normative consequences, when the Western image was held to be less subject to convention. It is here that the duality of idolatry and iconoclasm is first spelled out, because if the image as the “natural sign” is the “fetish or idol of Western culture”, it must “certify its own efficacy by contrasting

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itself with the false idols of other tribes – the totems, fetishes, and ritual objects of pagan, primitive cultures, the ‘stylized’ or ‘conventional’ modes of non-western art”.34 What is of most importance to Mitchell here is not just the critique of Gombrich but the metalogic of the economy of images, wherein idols certify their legitimacy (and idolatry is legitimated as iconophilia) against improper uses of similar logics, denounced as idolatry and given over to iconoclasm. The concluding chapter of Iconology reiterates this critique of the rhetoric of iconoclasm. Contrary to the master narrative of Marxism, with its unmasking of fetishism, Mitchell implicates the act of iconoclasm as just as problematic as idolatry itself. Because the accusation of idolatry brings with it a judgment of both folly and vice, it is inherently intolerant. Better to regard them as different sides of the same coin, one the obverse of the other. For Mitchell, the whole logic was wrong, and Gombrich’s error was believing that he could escape it. In Gombrich’s case, Mitchell further discovered a “predatory character” to the biological orientation of stimulus substitution, which concealed gendered elements of a naturalized sexuality (as the most powerful form of reaction to images). Once again, presumed natural ideas about image and image practices turn quickly to norms. Once enshrined, the naturalization of what begin as conventions turns into a logic of contrast, between legitimate and illegitimate practices. If we suspect what an image, a medium, or even what a work of art can be, our only recourse is to hold the viewer and object in oscillating suspension. It is only in this sense that the image is like a person, as a place held for nonpresumed qualities. The image is given the respect of a person even if not one.

A Concluding Assessment: Are All Images Created Equal? Without suggesting any teleology, I  hope to have shown how certain common themes in academic thought, specifically around the University of Chicago, evolved into Mitchell’s robust platform for visual studies. In conclusion, I  want to offer a more critical review, to finalize such ideas. For while they are quite coherent, their historical recounting brings to the fore historical contingencies, and I  believe some of their presuppositions can increasingly be brought to challenge. Although Mitchell was increasingly aiming to stress the de-disciplinarity of visual studies, its focus was strongly relativist, especially at the outset, and it can be argued that this has never left the project. Relativism was healthy against a tacit objectivism still lingering in the 1980s when Iconology was published. But as Martin Jay pointed out, the emphasis was strongly on the constructivist side of things.35 As I will argue, the clearing of a middle ground between objectivism and a hedged bet of thoroughgoing openness

The Birth of the Discipline 147 led to a retreat to a default relativism (put another way, nominalism has inevitably relativist consequences). In Iconology, Mitchell passed from a critique of Karl Popper to an endorsement of Paul Feyerabend.36 In contrast to Gombrich, Mitchell opted instead for Goodman’s descriptivism and plurality of worlds. One either holds the reasonable “relativist” commitments or one is an “essentialist”. As has become clearer in recent years, thinkers like Feyerabend and Goodman (and Quine, and Kuhn) fatefully kept in play many premises of the earlier dominant positivism.37 Its emphasis on verification caused postpositivists to take seriously the deflationary consequences of the impossibility of confirming laws, which subtly displaced the aim of uncovering deep mechanisms. Most important, however, is the identification of law with conjunction. A law is true if its predictions hold; B must be a consequence of A, else the law is meaningless. The nature of some working of the world is exchanged for actualized successions recordable for observation. The consequence of a latent positivism for visual studies is that a theory can be true only if consequences follow directly from its predictions.38 For example, Mitchell has an idea that a medium’s ontology must be transparent to qualify itself as a medium, and media must imprint their products with their essentialness to nominate medial difference in the first place. Going back to Snyder’s work in photography, we can see that for him a photograph would have always to deliver a consistently different product for it to be uniquely “photographic”. The same is true for his analysis of linear perspective. If we cannot derive a notion of realistic depiction that immediately moves beyond Wittgensteinian family resemblance, we have no hope of one. Elkins’ evolved conclusion about linear perspective is similar in that one either has to accept the rationality of Renaissance geometry or the pluralistic approach. This way of looking at things heightens the drama of the single encounter of the photograph or image, and questions the evidentiary value of the single medial instantiation (perspective image, photograph). The systems devised by Kuhn and Quine were not adequate to explain the successes of science, and their successors’ claims for “realism with a human face” (Putnam) fell flat against the contradictions of their theoretical commitments on paper. The most interesting successor to positivism, realism, posited the reality of the objects of natural science but accepted the fallibilism of our access to them.39 Constant conjunctions expressed in laws were exchanged for dispositions that may or may not reach our experience, or even be actualized. From a realist point of view, the demand for transparency that states that a sense modality or medium must imprint its working on every instantiation of it overlooks the difference between saying that works are in practice mixed and saying that each modality has tendencies that exclude the other. To refuse to see the

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difference is to commit the epistemic fallacy, where what we know of something is assumed to be what it is. In the case of photography, for example, with a positivist outlook we are not allowed to consider the overall causal connection between the photographed object and viewer via the photograph. The framework precludes any relationship other than single encounters between viewers and photographs, not systems of interaction.40 Seen in a causal way, however, one could posit a tendency working in such products, a resistance or friction enacted by the sense or modality.41 Similarly, Snyder underestimates Gombrich’s theory of making and matching, which was specifically developed to produce limits on comparison that could be meaningful, at least for one class of transcriptive works of art. It goes some way toward enlightening the context in which comparison is sensible but without requiring a totalizing “model” like Albertian theory. As for the life of image, one can see how in Mitchell’s writing images exist in an uneasy state between animacy and passivity. We are led to ask what they want and at the same time read off of them relations of power. Both in the end become a kind of forestalling, completely in keeping with Mitchell’s commitments. But if the goal is to find out what images really want, then a more direct route is necessary, one that seeks to multiply all those gradations of being and quasi-being in order to specify exactly what an image is and how it acts – what its “agency” is.42 Such ideas also play into how Mitchell addressed the status of visual studies as a “dangerous supplement”. This is the fear that visual studies can change the very nature of how we do business in the academy and the nature of the objects that we study. Mitchell poses the possibility that art history and aesthetics can “carry the weight”, and put this way there can be little hope but for conflict because aesthetics, while theoretical, is not generally historical. But what seems more interesting to me is visual studies as a meeting point, a place that helps negotiate how the different disciplines fit together (somewhat like Kunstwissenschaft stood to Kunstgeschichte in the classic phase of German art history).43 It would be highly concerned, then, not with its own disciplinarity, but with the transformation of knowledge from one discipline into another so that exchange could be undertaken. Mitchell would probably agree that to re-evaulate any of these points would require a reassessment of the very basis of his project in resisting metanarratives and above all of Marx. Have things changed in regard to such master tropes of social normativity? I believe they have. Thinkers like Feyerabend allowed us to accept the impugnment of science as a check on notions of progress and exceptionalism. With the burgeoning success of the natural sciences, however, to continue to hold the relativist position becomes merely evasive. Similarly, with Marxism, the adoption of a nonpositivist approach means that Marxian structural assumptions

The Birth of the Discipline 149 and normative proscriptions can track reality approximately, without being a totalizing system. If for Mitchell all images are created equal, and all image traditions demand equal respect, I would press the issue with whether all politics are created equal. In this case, liberal democracy and its capitalist framework can provide a limiting horizon beyond which it is impossible to think alternative politics. If true politics is impossible in a state of nonalienation, the creation of the political through antagonism means that sometimes it is necessary to name an enemy.44 The corollary for visual studies is that, as with politics, not all images are created equal. I think that what motivates Mitchell in his open inventory of images is precisely the idea that keeping all notions of the image on the table can keep us from allowing any one notion, especially the modern sense of the image as commonplace commodity, from dominating. However, I believe the reverse to be the case. The liberal inclusion of senses of image is precisely the inclusion of voices in communicative capitalism and is more apparent than real. In other words, the pluralist sense of image promoted by Mitchell is the limiting horizon. The antagonistic element of visual studies is the partisan viewpoint on what an image really is or can and should be. Where does this leave Mitchell’s legacy? By clarifying its emergence from poststructuralist concerns and its status as perhaps the preeminent postmodern approach to art history, we are able to use it as an example of a theory that is presuppositionless. If we choose, methodologically, to pursue new normative ideals, Mitchellian visual studies is our yardstick of potential harms. Any of the adjustments to theorizing perspective or photography I have parenthetically proposed are theoretical replacements, but made in a spirit of accepting the grounds of debate proposed by Mitchell.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, in Oliver Grau (ed.), Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 405, describes the CSMT as “a student research collective organized at the University of Chicago in the winter of 2003”. At the time of writing (August 2015), the site is still up: http://csmt. uchicago.edu/home.htm. 2 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 3 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ix–x. 4 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing:  A  Critique of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1 (2002): 175; W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7. For interdisciplinarity, see the essay by Jens Schröter in this volume (Chapter 8).

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5 Mitchell, Iconology, 8. 6 Ibid., 14. Later, he opposes scientism that defers to a “social system committed to the authority of science”, to an anarchic approach of Feyerabend. 7 James Elkins, “Introduction”, in James Elkins and Maja Naef (eds.), What is an Image? (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011). 8 Mitchell, Iconology, 206. 9 Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism:  Althusser and his Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984). In an incisive critique, Geoff Boucher show how much “post-Marxism” remains in a state of unacknowledged “negative dependency” on structural Marxism; The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek (Melbourne: re. press, 2008), 7. 10 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). For a contemporary use of Goodman, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History”, Art Bulletin, Vol. 73 (1991): 174–208. 11 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis,  IN: Bobbs-Merrill,  1978). 12 Mitchell, Iconology, 63. 13 See Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6 (1980): 499–526. 14 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 175. 15 Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”. 16 For a contemporary example of media skepticism, see Noël Carroll, “The Specificity of Media in the Arts”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 19 (1985): 5–20. 17 W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art:  A  Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 18 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory”, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1980). 19 Mitchell, Iconology, 69. 20 Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature”, 273. 21 W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoon”, Representations, Vol. 6 (1984): 98–115; Mitchell, Iconology, ch. 4. 22 These are the forerunners of the pair found in Picture Theory, “textual pictures” and “pictorial texts”. 23 Joel Snyder and Neil W. Allen, “Photography, Vision, and Representation”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2 (Autumn 1975), 143–169; c.f. Joel Snyder, “Photography and Ontology”, in Joseph Margolis (ed.), The Worlds of Art and the World (Amsterdam, 1984), 21–34. For more on photography, see Chapter  11 by Thomas Stubblefield in this volume. 24 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16; Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography”, New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:  University of California Press, 1986). Snyder spent a great deal of time critiquing Arnheim’s contribution. A powerful critique of Snyder’s approach was given in Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures:  On the Nature of Photographic Realism”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11 (1984): 246–277. 25 See Snyder, “Picturing Vision”. 26 Ibid., 516. 27 Some support for Snyder’s position relative to Alberti comes from Thomas Puttfarken, who stressed the nonprojective nature of the elaboration of De

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43 44

Pictura; The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 74. Mitchell, Iconology, 38. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), xv. Joel Snyder, review of Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Verso, 1991); in Art Bulletin, Vol. 77 (1995): 337–340. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 176. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Cloning Terror”, Iconoclash symposium, Karlsruhe, 2002. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 46. Mitchell, Iconology, 90. Martin Jay, “Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1 (2002): 267–278. Mitchell cites Paul Feyerabend, Against Method:  Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975). Christopher Norris, Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism (London: Routledge, 2004), 165. I want to be clear in mentioning the “p” word. People in the humanities level the accusation of positivism against progressive accounts of knowledge, surely not a feature of Mitchell’s system. The other component of positivism, its antimetaphysical bent and focus solely on the empirical, is indeed a strong feature of most visual studies. I am pointing to the further feature of reality equaling the demonstration of a law. The watershed book was Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds: Leeds Books Ltd, 1975). Carlo Maria Fossaluzza and Ian Verstegen, “An Ontological Turn in the Philosophy of Photography”, Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics, Vol. 6 (2014): 1–13. Ian Verstegen, “Dispositional Realism and the Specificity of Digital Media”, Leonardo, Vol. 47 (2014): 167–171. Ian Verstegen,“New Materialism and Visual Studies: A Critical Realist Critique”, in Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen (eds.), The Art of the Real:  Visual Studies and the New Materialism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 172–188. In addition to these disciplines, I would want to add the philosophy of mind, social science and history, as well as the empirical disciplines of anthropology and sociology. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).

8

What Discipline? On Mitchell’s “Interdisciplinarity” and German Medienwissenschaft Jens Schröter

If I  were a representative of cinema and media studies, for instance, I would ask why the discipline that addresses the major new art forms of the 20th century is so often marginalized in favor of fields that date to the 18th and 19th centuries.1

Although W.J.T. Mitchell is mostly known for his groundbreaking work in the fields of the theory, history and aesthetics of images, he also contributed to other fields of study, especially the theory of disciplinarity. He developed his ideas, not surprisingly, in discussing the field of “visual culture”, or to put it more precisely in his own words, “visual studies [as the] study of visual culture”.2 This happened especially in one small but very concise essay: “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”.3 This essay will be the focus of my discussion, but I will not discuss the problem of visual studies or visual culture here. There are lots of articles and books on that topic, and I can add nothing to this highly sophisticated debate.4 My approach is different: I think the importance of Mitchell’s musings on interdisciplinarity is strengthened if one can show that they are not restricted to visual culture (or visual studies). His differentiation of three different types of interdisciplinarity and his notion of “indiscipline” are especially interesting and will be the first point for discussion. In the second section of this chapter, this discussion will be related to the field of media studies, which is mentioned (in passing) by Mitchell, as another example of a potential “indiscipline”. Since my background is in media studies in Germany, I will use the German situation to discuss Mitchell’s notions. In the third section I will draw some conclusions.

Mitchell’s Concept of the “Indiscipline” When Mitchell wrote “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture” for Vol. 77, No. 4 of Art Bulletin in 1995, the topic of “visual culture” or “visual studies” was highly debated. The famous “Visual Culture Questionnaire” was to appear only one year later in renowned art journal October, and famous theorists such as Rosalind Krauss and others wrote scathing critiques5 of the new … well, what exactly? A “field”, a “formation”, a

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“discipline” – or an “interdiscipline”, first defined by Mitchell as “a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines”?6 The precise character of this “site” remains to be seen, and I will discuss some of the principal issues below. In any case, Mitchell proceeds with a short historical reconstruction of the emergence of the notion of “interdisciplinarity” and sums up: “Interdisciplinarity, in short, is a way of seeming to be just a little bit adventurous and even transgressive, but not too much”.7 As this quote already suggests, Mitchell is not uncritical where interdisciplinarity is concerned. On the contrary, understood as the intermingling of several disciplines, interdisciplinarity produces “stress”8 for the researcher because of the several connecting fields of knowledge, in which one finds oneself “certifiably incompetent”.9 This seems to contradict the first definition of “a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines”, but there is a crucial but subtle difference. If interdisciplinarity were understood as the combination of given disciplines to produce new knowledge (as might be suggested by Mitchell’s use of the term “convergence”), this would indeed be too great a burden for researchers, because such an operation would presuppose that all researchers knew all fields completely (as regards the specific problem under discussion), but this is unrealistic. However, if interdisciplinarity is understood more in the sense that the various disciplines come into contact, driven by a specific problem, are shaken up and – in a positive sense – destabilized (at least partially, or at some of their “borders”, or regarding a certain issue), then a new space emerges, a new “site” in which all the different disciplines can contribute, but without presupposing their whole entrenched disciplinary apparatus. To put it in another way: interdisciplinarity only makes sense when disciplines are not combined in toto (whatever that would mean) and come to overlap in their totality, but when they are driven to form new areas – and then these new areas intermingle.10 This is why Chandler spoke of “shadow discipline”11 in relation to the phenomena here: they are like shadows thrown by the disciplines proper, and it is these shadows that interact rather than the disciplines “themselves”. It seems to me that this is what Mitchell had in mind when he wrote: My real interest, in other words, has not been in interdisciplinarity so much as in forms of “indiscipline”, of turbulence or incoherence at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines. If a discipline is a way of insuring the continuity of a set of collective practices (technical, social, professional, etc.), “indiscipline” is a moment of breakage or rupture, when the continuity is broken and the practice comes into question. To be sure, this moment of rupture can itself become routinized, as the rapid transformation of deconstruction from an “event” into a “method of interpretation” demonstrates. When the tigers break into the temple and profane the altar too regularly, their appearance rapidly becomes part of the sacred ritual. Nevertheless,

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And therefore it is not surprising that he differentiates three forms of interdisciplinarity: In these terms, I  would distinguish three kinds of interdisciplinarity: (1) “top-down”: a comparative, structural formation that aims to know the overarching system or conceptual totality within which all disciplines are related; (2) “bottom-up”: a compulsive and compulsory interdisciplinarity that is dictated by a specific problem or event; (3) “inside-out”: the indisciplined or anarchist moment I have alluded to above.13 In my view, the second and the third forms are two aspects of the same process:  driven by a “specific problem or event”, disciplines come into contact and then each form on their terrain a “shadow”, a new and unstable (and in that sense “anarchist”) field whose openness is the condition for the interaction with other shadows in other disciplines. The shadows or indisciplines can cluster and condense into a new disciplinary field. The problem of “media” initiated such a process (in Germany, at least), disrupting and transforming classical philologies, communication studies, art history, sociology and philosophy. I will come back to that in more detail shortly. The first type of interdisciplinarity corresponds to my formulation of a phantasmatic interdisciplinarity which would be a combination of the developed disciplines in their totality (which implies that these disciplines are homogeneous and monolithic structures, which is far from the truth): “The top-down model dreams of a Kantian architectonic of learning, a pyramidal, corporate organization of knowledge production that can regulate flows of information from one part of the structure to another.”14 I  think that Mitchell’s use here of the notion of a “dream” (which is similar to what I mean by “phantasmatic”) is very apt because this first type of interdisciplinarity is more a kind of utopia or a regulative ideal than a real option. And to complicate the picture even further, I would argue that this first type is always and unavoidably a part of the second or third type. When turbulence occurs at the borders – triggered by a new problem or event  – an “indiscipline” or “shadow discipline” is always formed. This takes some time, and then the “dream” of a systematization or ordering emerges, often connected to the processes of materializing “a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines” into very concrete sites such as websites, publications, institutes,

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departments, study programs and the like. In my reading of Mitchell, the three types of interdisciplinarity are not three clear-cut options existing side by side, but three aspects or phases of the performative process of the destabilization and restabilization of disciplinary regimes. To test my reading of Mitchell’s approach, I will discuss in detail the case of German “media studies” (Medienkulturwissenschaft) as it has emerged in recent decades. It bears similarities to visual culture, since its central term, “media”, “names a problematic rather than a well-defined theoretical object”.15 Mitchell himself addresses the problematic of “studies in film and mass media”,16 and the field’s problematic tendencies “to circle its professional wagons prematurely around a ‘proper’ object of study”.17 It may seem somewhat unusual to approach this whole discussion of Mitchell’s theory of interdisciplinarity by discussing not visual culture but the field of media studies in Germany, but – as I said – the point is that Mitchell’s conceptualization of interdisciplinarity is not restricted to visual culture but can be generalized to other fields. This very fact demonstrates its relevance.

Media Studies in Germany On the History of Medienwissenschaft and Its Self-description From the start, the field of media studies has been subjected to debate about whether it is or should be considered a separate discipline, or whether it is an interdisciplinary and therefore heterogeneous “site of convergence and conversation” for a wide variety of objects, theories and methods. Of course, it is not possible to provide a comprehensive history of German media studies here (not to mention international differentiations in the field). To some extent, this has been done elsewhere.18 These reconstructions, however, show  – first – that media studies have differentiated points of origin. These include, on the one hand, the philological disciplines (i.e., literary criticism) that gave rise to many of the aesthetic, historical and hermeneutic lines of inquiry that are important today. On the other hand, they include journalism and communication studies, which contributed methods based on the social sciences. Particularly in Germany, however, journalism and/or communication studies is still a separate subject, from which kulturwissenschaftliche Medienwissenschaft seeks to set itself apart. Second, as emphasized in particular by Claus Pias,19 media studies can be concentrated into a single problematic or event (as Mitchell would put it), that of the medial conditions of knowledge  – a question relevant to, and already (partially) addressed by, various disciplines. This, however, raises the question as to why there is and should continue to be a separate, institutionalized discipline of media studies. Perhaps the discipline has developed in order to constitute a site of

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convergence and conversation, one in which “scholars from a wide range of disciplines … can talk to one another”20 and respond to Pias' basic question of the media. However, the individual disciplines could in future take back this “indiscipline” (which is what media studies was in the beginning, at least),21 and continue media-related debates on their own terrain. (Indeed, rumors of media studies’ disappearance seem to constantly accompany this area of study – media studies departments were already being shut down in Germany back in the 1980s.) Speaking of the future, the 1988 volume Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft (Prospects for a Future Media Studies)22 – a founding document of the discipline, as underscored by Joachim Paech23 – offered a seminal and detailed discussion of the role of media studies and its potential. The chapters in the volume proclaim it as an “emerging discipline”. The many questions raised by these contradictions merit a more detailed exploration. The foreword to Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft emphasizes the fact that the development process for the discipline had, up to 1988, “not yet led to any widely accepted epistemology of media studies”.24 So the lack of disciplinary unity was identified very early on. The words “not yet”, however, betray the dream that a unified epistemology may still be achieved. There is a certain tension between this and the following remark in the same text: “In any case there is no denying that we are in the midst of a process of diversification”.25 On the one hand, then, there is hope of a “consolidated discipline with an established canon of objects and methods”,26 one which might arise from a “debate within media studies aimed at self-understanding [Selbstverständigung]”.27 On the other hand, the foreword also describes a diversification of the field, or  – and this is not the same thing  – it refers to media studies as an “eclectic collective term for … [scholarly] work related in various ways to media”.28 By 1988, the rapid development of the media and the constant succession of new questions already seemed to be preventing media studies from stabilizing into a single coherent field.29 The text draws the following conclusion: Even if some people see it as desirable, for epistemic reasons, to be able to define the boundaries of the discipline … in clearer terms and with a firmer material basis, we believe that the “open borders” of media studies, the status quo, offer a great opportunity: the opportunity to actually be a place of interdisciplinarity.30 Hope remains, they continue, that such “interdisciplinary connections can be preserved and expanded”.31 The “excited cycles of self-invention” subsequently observed in media studies32 can therefore be seen as the nexus of three processes. First, there is the epistemic (theoretical, methodological) and institutional

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development of media studies as an independent subject – and the question of the feasibility or even desirability of this, because it seems as if the institutional stabilization of an “indiscipline” reduces its disturbing and refreshing character. Second, there is the internal diversification of media studies, and the question of whether this diversification will at some point dissolve media studies into new subdisciplines. Third, there is the changing relationship between media studies and its neighboring disciplines. Is media studies a “site of interdisciplinarity”? If so, how does this fit with its tendency toward increasing disciplinary autonomy? Is it not the case that other disciplines are developing their own branches of media research? (This idea, succinctly expressed by Pias,33 had appeared as early as 1988.) If so, especially if it is rife with internal differentiation, what is the point of media studies? In another essay from Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft, Hans-Dieter Kübler stresses that “media studies, which is gradually becoming more clearly defined and consolidated”,34 should aim for Verständigung (agreement or understanding) about its objects, theories and models. He emphasizes that the “most important and urgent task” is Selbstverständigung (self-understanding) about its “methodology and methods”.35 He continues by warning that: Such theoretical and methodological clarifications are likely to be more necessary in the future; they would be especially vital if media studies wanted to establish and assert itself as an independent, clearly defined and respected discipline in the densely populated arena of academia  – though opinions may certainly diverge about this, i.e. about the point, the necessity, and the benefit of such assertion. In its current research and teaching practices, media studies tends to operate, as far as one can discern, as a non-specific, eclectic collective term for all those media-related efforts that cannot be or refuse to be allocated or subordinated to the established academic disciplines, in particular literary studies on the one hand and journalism on the other. The choice of methods applied is correspondingly aleatory; there is no tradition or canon, either with regard to specific objects or within subdisciplines, however these might be demarcated. And this is not just a good thing; it is also necessary.36 The end of this extract (like the foreword quoted above) suggests that the interdisciplinary openness and sometimes “eclectic” heterogeneity of media studies is by no means just an Entstehungsherd, or site of emergence,37 that needs to be overcome, or a final stage in which the discipline is unraveling, but could be the entirely rational norm for the indiscipline of media studies.38 For it may be an “unjustified assumption that paradigmatic integration is a sign of maturity and is desirable for every discipline”.39 Perhaps the (transdisciplinary) question of the media

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could only emerge from an interdisciplinary “shadow discipline”, as Chandler once described media studies.40 One might also wonder how a unification of the discipline is actually supposed to succeed without “attempts at outmaneuvering and outvoting” by its members.41 Who would or should attempt such a unification? One candidate is the Wissenschaftsrat, the German Council of Science and Humanities. Founded in 1957, it is the most important advisory body to the German federal and state governments concerning the development of academic science and research. And in fact this council did present, in 2007, the controversial and much-discussed paper Empfehlungen zur Weiterentwicklung der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaften (Recommendations for the Further Development of Communication and Media Studies). The paper, intended mainly as an impetus for debate, nonetheless conceded:  “The fact that the edges remain blurred [in the debate about communication and media studies] does not have to be a shortcoming; on the contrary, it matches the dynamic process of change within the field.”42 Knut Hickethier’s chapter in Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft, with the programmatic title “Das “Medium”, die “Medien” und die Medienwissenschaft” (The “Medium”, the “Media”, and Media Studies), also deals with the tension between disciplinary stabilization, intradisciplinary internal differentiation, and interdisciplinary openness or interaction: The diversity of the particular, mostly individual beginnings of media studies motivates … the consolidation of a subject which is not yet sure of its objects and methods. Nonetheless, something that would call itself or at least consider itself to be media studies has been evolving for nearly twenty years[!].43 Particularly important is Hickethier’s remark44 that any attempt to deduce the systematic coherence of media studies from predefined relations between media45 – in a way that Mitchell describes as the phantasmatic top-down interdisciplinarity – is condemned to failure, both epistemically and institutionally.46 The reason for this is the highly dynamic character of the object in question. Because the field of the media is constantly shifting and changing, any attempts to contain the academic discipline tend to obstruct research:  “The formation of a system with distinct, non-intersecting subsystems, a system that creates a widely acceptable structure for the academic discipline and simultaneously gives stimuli for research, does not seem … possible”.47 Hickethier then goes on to hypothesize:  “The growing breadth of the subject will lead to the development of autonomous subdisciplines within media studies”.48 In the end, however, he also stresses: “Besides an increasingly autonomous discipline of media studies, there will nonetheless continue to be, as a matter of necessity, media research in other

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disciplines as well”.49 On the one hand, media research in the neighboring disciplines can function as a point of intersection with media studies, but on the other it can also threaten to make media studies superfluous. Hickethier therefore proposes a solution that mediates between autonomy and interdisciplinary connection:  “Research on the media must always be up to date with the latest scholarly methods and findings. Moves toward autonomy and integration into existing academic disciplines are therefore necessary”.50 Medienwissenschaft: Internal Structure, Institutionality and Mediality The increasing autonomy of subdisciplines seems to have become a reality, though this has come about in different ways for different subdisciplines of media studies. While older disciplines such as film studies retain their relative autonomy within media studies (despite ongoing debate about whether film studies is actually a separate discipline outside of media studies), new fields are also emerging. For example, a considerable amount of research focused on sound (often in dialogue with musicology) has been designated as “sound studies”. These two examples are not chosen at random; they are based on the working groups that have formed within the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM, Society for Media Studies), the umbrella organization for kulturwissenschaftliche Medienwissenschaft.51 In early 2016 there were twenty of these working groups, with names such as “Film Studies” or “Auditory Culture and Sound Studies”. The GfM website states: The GfM’s working groups are the actual center of the society: This is where the subject areas that make up the society are defined, this is where debates about content take place – e.g. in the panels set up by the working groups during the annual conferences – this is also where essential processes of differentiation from other professional societies are undertaken.52 On the one hand, these groups make it possible to discern the much-discussed (and sometimes undesired) internal differentiation of media studies; on the other hand, they also serve to mark the boundaries between media studies and neighboring disciplines dealing with similar problems. The main way to access a discipline is via its institutional framework, and such a framework is available in the form of the GfM’s website and its publicly available documentation, particularly that focused on its Selbstverständigung. The medial form of a website is a very literal “site of convergence and conversation”. For example, the listing it provides of its twenty working groups suggests both the internal differentiation of

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the field and its mechanisms of external demarcation. At the same time, this listing (see below for more on lists) shows a certain heterogeneity. Thus, working groups that refer to a technical medium (e.g., “film studies” and “photography research”, and here there is already an interesting distinction between the designation of “studies” on the one hand and “research” on the other) are listed alongside those that reference economic aspects (“media industries”), cultural aspects (“popular culture and media”, “gender/queer studies and media studies”), or disciplinary aspects (“media philosophy”). This should not be seen as a deficiency, but it makes clear that the development of an academic discipline – and media studies is, after all, no longer such a young discipline – takes place through bifurcations and multifarious advances. The tabular presentation of GfM’s Kernbereiche der Medienwissenschaft (Core Areas of Media Studies) strategy paper,53 which outlines the fields that comprise media studies, brings together a heterogeneous variety of concepts. Making this observation is by no means the same as “celebrating the heterogeneity of research”, as Geert Lovink54 comments in a text criticizing “media studies”.55 Instead, it is simply a reflection of empirically observable output. The role of institutions such as the GfM and its working groups, or its media presentation and infrastructures, draws attention to what might be called the material culture of discipline formation and stabilization. Thus Hickethier’s demand  – that “media studies has to develop a stronger voice in relation to organizational politics”56 – is by no means external or secondary to the discipline. In this sense the GfM has been highly successful in that it has been able to admit so many members in recent years, and that these numbers clearly exceed the membership of the professional organization for communication studies, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik und Kommunikation. This is hardly a sign of the imminent disappearance of media studies, as it is sometimes prognosed.57 Another example of the institutionality of the discipline is provided by the institutes (or departments, “teams”, and in the case of Weimar, faculty) of media studies at German-speaking universities. Particular aspects of the diversification and also stabilization of the discipline are reflected in the designations that different institutes of media studies give to their professorships. It can also be observed, however, that shrinking budgets, coupled with a simultaneously increasing breadth of subject matter (as Hickethier puts it; see above), mean that the professorships announced have increasingly general job descriptions (advertisements for new professorships in media studies often state that “The person appointed shall represent the subject in all its breadth in research and teaching”), simply because there are often insufficient funds available for internal differentiation within institutions. Another important way in which a discipline exists institutionally, of course, is in terms of its programs of study. Not surprisingly, there is a section corresponding to this on the GfM’s website. There again, the tension

Table 8.1 Core areas of media studies Media theories and their methods

Society

Media archaeology and technogenesis

Actor Network Theory Deconstruction Discourse analysis Gender theories Communication theory Constructivism Critical theory Media economy Media psychology Media politics Media law Semiotics Systems theory Network theory Media archaeology and technogenesis Universals of media Technology

Culture

Cultural studies Media anthropology Media philosophy Psychoanalytic cultural theory Theories of individual media General media theories

Theories and methods of media history

Theories and methods of media aesthetics

History of media systems and the public sphere

Aesthetic forms and social structures:

Functional and structural history of media Institutional history of media History of media "programming" History of media of storage, transmission and broadcasting, as well as separate media technologies: print, photography, film, radio, television, computer, Internet; history of information technology Histories of the form and content of individual media:

Pop culture, mass culture, etc. Visual communication Theory of form and genre, esp. for film and radio

Aesthetics of production and reception (conditions of perception) Formal aesthetics of media technologies, research into intermediality and interactivity

Media-arts, media philologies, aesthetics of individual media forms: photography, print, images, sound, film, text, film, television, visual culture, radio, computer, aesthetically based Internet; history theories of general of transmedial and/or intermedial and individual genres, forms and media; game studies, visual discourses communication, intermedial forms

Source: adapted from Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM), www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de

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between disciplinary unity and internal differentiation is being negotiated. On the one hand, a general “profile” is given of what a study program in media studies should be; on the other hand, it is made clear that the various programs of study at different universities have different emphases. A “database of media studies programs” gives a detailed overview over the numerous programs on offer in Germany today. In its 2007 document on the future of media studies in Germany, the Wissenschaftsrat58 recommended that there should be no bachelor programs, only master programs, in kulturwissenschaftliche Medienwissenschaft. The central argument was that at bachelor’s level a “basic” education in a traditional discipline (literary studies or art history, for example) should be offered. Only with these traditional objects and methods firmly in place can the obviously more abstruse questions of media and mediality be addressed. This suggestion, in itself another interesting example of how the “indiscipline” of media studies might relate to more traditional disciplines, both conceptually and practically, was harshly criticized by nearly all representatives of German media studies. It was not put into practice, and currently there are various bachelor programs in media studies in Germany. It is important to mention specifically the relation between these programs of study and “practice”. This is another aspect of the self-definition of a discipline, but of course it is also an example of external pressures exerted by politics on universities.59 Particularly after the Bologna Process (harmonizing the architecture of the European Higher Education system largely through reforms implemented the first decade of the twenty-first century) there was increasing pressure for universities to develop programs of study that directly qualified students for jobs. For media studies, this meant preparing students for jobs in media industries, and not first and foremost for university positions in research and teaching. The priority thus shifted from efforts to reproduce the discipline of media studies to getting students qualified for employment in media and related industries. The task of the self-reproduction of the discipline of course remained, but it stayed in the background, and was gradually transferred to externally funded research in the form of research centers and graduate schools, as described below. Students themselves, who were applying in ever greater numbers for media studies programs, demanded to be taught practical skills and thus placed new expectations on departments of media studies. People who were able to teach these curricula had to be hired, potentially reducing the money available for research. Additional costs arose for technological equipment, for example cameras and film studios. Still, isolation from “practice” is often bemoaned by students who mistake media studies programs for those of film schools and art academies. Here, another fundamental problem for the self-definition of the discipline of media studies becomes visible – but now in relation to practical teaching rather than the traditional humanities. How much “practice” can be admitted without disrupting the disciplinary identity of

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kulturwissenschaftliche Medienwissenschaft, whose discursive norms are ultimately derived from the humanities? Finally, large externally funded research facilities, such as the collaborative research centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche) and research training groups (Graduiertenkollegs) of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), are important for the development of a discipline. They highlight particular questions and concepts, foster interdisciplinary meetings, and recruit young researchers. Last but not least, their publishing output, which is at times astounding in its sheer quantity, but often also in its quality, plays a large part in determining what might be called the “medial performance” of the discipline. By “medial performance” I  understand the discipline in terms of an ongoing series of media products:  articles, books, presentations, websites, etc. It is therefore no coincidence that the success of media studies since the mid-1990s has been accompanied by various research centers (“Screen Media” and “Media Upheavals” in Siegen; “Media and Cultural Communication” in Cologne; and very recently “Media of Cooperation” in Siegen), graduate schools (“Intermediality” and “Locating Media” in Siegen; “Automatisms” in Paderborn; “Media Historiographies” in Weimar) and other types of research centers (“Media Cultures of Computer Simulation” in Lüneburg; the “International Research Center for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy” in Weimar). Dynamism (Dynamik) is one of the most frequently used words on the GfM website; there is talk of the “dynamism and polymorphism of present-day media studies”, and of the “dynamic development of the discipline”. We read: At the same time, both the media themselves and media studies have developed extremely dynamically within the last two decades. Even just a few short keywords related to the genesis of the discipline of media studies can show this dynamism.60 And yet it seems that the dynamic relationship between disciplinary stabilization, interdisciplinary internal differentiation, and interdisciplinary openness or interaction (possibly resulting in transdisciplinary lines of inquiry) is by no means specific to media studies. While the extensive debate on the theory of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity cannot be elaborated here, reference may be made to a noteworthy essay by Robert Post,61 which not only gives a helpful overview of the topic, but also emphasizes two points that are particularly relevant here. First, the debate about media studies outlined above expresses a very obvious desire for disciplinary homogeneity, for a preformed template (Zuschnitt),62 for a “widely accepted epistemology”,63 for an “integral media studies”,64 for a “media studies as a separate discipline with clearcut content, methods and tasks”,65 and for an “integrative form”.66 There

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are also calls for “media studies … as a unified discipline”,67 for the “centering of a terminology that comprehensibly describes its field in the circle of academic disciplines”,68 and for a “unified epistemology”.69 In a different context, Post70 emphasizes that this desire is characteristic of all disciplines, and that it can be understood in terms of a regulative idea (even if there may be disciplines in which uniformity seems easier to achieve than in others).71 This desired disciplinary unity is an ideal to aspire to – a spur that motivates debates on Selbstverständigung – but it remains ultimately unattainable. This is precisely what Mitchell called the “Kantian dream”, but as an integral part of the process of the formation of an “indiscipline” and its following institutionalization. In reality, the situation is different: And yet, of course, most of us realize that the “notion of disciplinary unity is triply false:  minimizing or denying differences that exist across the plurality of specialties grouped loosely under a single disciplinary label, undervaluing connections across specialties of separate disciplines, and discounting the frequency and impact of cross-disciplinary influences”.72 It remains to be seen whether or not the attempt to resolve the tension between disciplinary “centering”73 and intradisciplinary/interdisciplinary divisions through the concept of the regulative idea will be successful. In any case, this tension does not seem to affect only media studies. It is constitutive of the disciplinarity of disciplines in general.74 Second, Post underlines the production of disciplines that has been hinted at above, both in a (broader) institutional sense – “Questions of disciplinarity are … frequently entangled with questions of departmental politics” – and in a (narrower) medial sense – “Disciplinary publications are important gatekeepers of disciplinary norms”.75 Though this cannot be discussed in detail here, the above reference to the GfM website shows the preeminent role of such media and their organizational and institutional integration for the performance of a discipline. This is crucial, particularly from the point of view of media studies, and particularly if “the only battle cry that can be agreed on is The Medium is the Message”.76 The obvious centrality of media for media studies leads inevitably to the question of the mediality of media studies itself. Or as Pias notes, in general terms, that “any thinking about media is itself part of a contingent media history”.77 This brings with it a range of implications: even the emergence of media studies can be described as an effect of media development. Media development is the “problematic” and “event”, in Mitchell’s sense, that triggers the whole process. First and foremost, the academic disciplines must at some point react to media discourses, which have become increasingly difficult to ignore, and to the public problematization of the media. The advent of the mass

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press led to the emergence, around 1916, of newspaper studies (as an offshoot of economics). The first wave of media studies – referred to by that name – was linked with the increasingly important role of film and especially television since the 1960s.78 The second major development that pushed media studies into the foreground was almost certainly the spread of the computer and digital media from the early 1990s. Thus the different “generational advances”79 of media studies correspond to major changes in the media. Media studies also uses technical media to constitute its objects. For example, Paech’s historical presentation repeatedly underlines the role played by the video recorder80 as a condition for the existence of theater studies and film and television studies – an idea that goes back at least to Schanze.81 Finally, media studies needs particular media in order to exist as an (inter)discipline. Journals such as the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal for Media Studies) are in themselves media performances (and serial performances) of media studies. Seen in this light, the oftenproblematized internal differentiations of media studies appear to be an effect of its previous institutional stabilization. This stabilization led to the creation of new jobs, new dissertations, conferences and a large volume of publications, incorporating monographs, new journals and edited volumes. The resulting expansion and diversification of knowledge in turn destabilizes the unity of the discipline (until, perhaps, new processes of institutionalization take effect, and so on): “Unidisciplinary competence is a myth, because the degree of specialization and the volume of information that fall within the boundaries of a named academic discipline are larger than any individual can master.”82 This “problem” is exacerbated rather than diminished by the further accumulation of information by means of an endless succession of new media performances (based on technologies with ever greater capacity for storage and distribution), for example in digital humanities or e-humanities. Thus the crisis of media studies asserted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung83 and others is actually a “crisis of success”.84 But in many ways, the “success” is actually of media technology in general, a development that fundamentally affects all disciplines. *** It is clear from these reconstructions of some of the processes and debates around media studies in Germany that Mitchell’s three types of interdisciplinarity, when they are understood not as separate types but as moments and phases of a process of discipline formation and de-formation, are very helpful. The discussion in this chapter shows that Mitchell’s model is not restricted to visual culture or visual studies, but can be applied to other fields that have a similar structure. It can shed light on the question of how – driven by a “problematic” (the “media”

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and their evolution)  – traditional disciplines are destabilized and form new “shadow” fields of indiscipline that then interact to form a new “interdiscipline” or “hybrid discipline”. Then, after some time, and under certain circumstances, “dreams” of institutional consolidation emerge. This may include the “Kantian dream” of a unified epistemological structure, which is on the one hand a “regulative idea” triggering Selbstverständigung in a given “indiscipline”, but can on the other hand lead to a formal normalization and even petrification of the new field. In the future, this may in turn be destabilized anew by a fresh “problematic”. It may even be that Mitchell’s description fits all disciplines, because the described process could be seen as the general form of the formation of disciplines. Finally, it should be noted that the discussion in the present chapter could and should be related to other discussions of the theory of science, especially to Kuhn’s concept of the “paradigm shift” and the reestablishment of “normal science”, which seem to be quite similar to Mitchell’s theory.85 Perhaps the ideas outlined in this chapter are located more on a meso- and even micro-level, since we are not talking about paradigm shifts that occur as total rupture of a given “science”, but about more localized, confused and messy processes at the level of single disciplines. But this is a topic for further research.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2002): 165–181, 166. 2 Ibid. 3 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, Art Bulletin, Vol. 77, No. 4 (1995): 540–544. 4 Except, perhaps, my work on three-dimensional images, but that is another topic. See Jens Schröter, 3D: History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Transplane Image (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 5 See Svetlana Alpers et  al., “Visual Culture Questionnaire”, October, Vol. 77 (1996): 25–70. There are several very pointed critiques of visual culture; especially scathing is Rosalind Krauss, “Der Tod der Fachkenntnisse und Kunstfertigkeiten”, Texte zur Kunst, Vol. 20 (1995): 61–67. 6 Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, 540. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 541, n. 6. 9 Ibid., 541. 10 See also W.J.T. Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?”, in Irving Lavin (ed.), Meaning in the Visual Arts:  Views from the Outside:  A  Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) (Princeton, NJ:  Institute for Advanced Study, 1995), 207–217, here 207, where he uses the notion of “hybrid discipline”. 11 James Chandler, “Introduction:  Doctrines, disciplines, discourses, departments”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2009): 729–746, here 737. 12 Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, 541. 13 Ibid.

What Discipline? 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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Ibid. Ibid., 542. Ibid., 543. Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?”, 210. Cf. Rainer Leschke, “Von der Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft als regelmäßiger Übung”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, Vol. 132 (2003): 67–89; Tarmo Malmberg, “Nationalism and Internationalism in Media Studies  – Europe and America since 1945”, paper presented at the First European Communication Research Conference, Amsterdam, November 25–26, 2005. Available at www.uta.fi/cmt/yhteystiedot/henkilokunta/tarmomalmberg/index/05-11-28_Amsterdam.doc, accessed August 11, 2016; Joachim Paech, “Die Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft. Ein Erfahrungsbericht aus den 1970er Jahren”, in Claus Pias (ed.), Was waren Medien? (Zurich:  Diaphanes, 2011), 31–55; Claus Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften? Stichworte zu einer Standortbestimmung”, in Claus Pias (ed.), Was waren Medien? (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011), 7–30. Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”, 16–18. Ibid., 19. One hint of its “indisciplined” character was the scandal around Friedrich Kittler’s habilitation, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, in the early 1980s; on this see the special section (including all controversial reviews) on Kittler’s habilitation: Ute Holl and Claus Pias (eds.), “Insert. Aufschreibesysteme 1980/2010. In memoriam Friedrich Kittler”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Vol. 6 (2012): 114–192. Rainer Bohn, Eggo Müller and Rainer Ruppert (eds.), Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft (Berlin: Sigma, 1988). Paech, “Die Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft”, 52. Bohn, Müller and Ruppert, Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft, 7. Rainer Bohn, Eggo Müller and Rainer Ruppert, “Die Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Fingierbarkeit”, in Rainer Bohn, Eggo Müller and Rainer Ruppert (eds.), Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft (Berlin: Sigma, 1988), 7–28. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8. Hans-Dieter Kübler, “Auf dem Weg zur wissenschaftlichen Identität und methodologischen Kompetenz. Herausforderungen und Desiderate der Medienwissenschaft”, in Rainer Bohn, Eggo Müller and Rainer Ruppert (eds.), Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft (Berlin: Sigma, 1988), 29–50, quoted in Bohn, Müller and Ruppert, Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft, 9. Cf. Bohn, Müller and Ruppert, “Die Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Fingierbarkeit”, 19. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Leschke, “Von der Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft als regelmäßiger Übung”, 67. Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”. Kübler, “Auf dem Weg zur wissenschaftlichen Identität und methodologischen Kompetenz”, 31. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 32; emphasis added. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Donald F. Bourchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164, here 150.

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38 For general remarks on interdisciplinarity, see also Michèle Lamont,   How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement  (Cambri dge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 202–238. 39 Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 1992), 453. 40 Chandler, “Introduction”, 737. 41 Leschke,“Von der Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft als regelmäßiger Übung”, 84; cf. Julie Thompson Klein, “Blurring, Cracking and Crossing: Permeation and the Fracturing of Discipline”, in Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David Sylvan (ed.), Knowledges:  Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville, VA:  University of Virginia Press, 1993), 185–211, here 206. 42 Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen zur Weiterentwicklung der Kommunikationsund Medienwissenschaften in Deutschland (2007), 7. Available at www. wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/7901–07.pdf, accessed February 3, 2014. 43 Knut Hickethier, “Das ‘Medium’, die ‘Medien’ und die Medienwissenschaft”, in Rainer Bohn, Eggo Müller and Rainer Ruppert (eds.), Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft (Berlin: Sigma, 1988), 51–74, here 51, 52. 44 Ibid., 55. 45 Cf. Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?”, 210: “An organization of the curriculum around traditional artistic genres or media-types runs the risk of simply replicating existing disciplinary divisions”. 46 Here Hickethier is criticizing Werner Faulstich’s approach; cf. as a later example Werner Faulstich, Grundwissen Medien (Munich: Fink, 2004). 47 Hickethier, “Das ‘Medium,’ die ‘Medien’ und die Medienwissenschaft”, 56. 48 Ibid., 57. 49 Ibid., 65. 50 Ibid., 66. 51 Robert Post, “Debating Disciplinarity”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2009): 749–770, here 753, underlines the important role that “disciplinary organizations” play. 52 Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM), Arbeitsgruppen. Available at www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de/gfm/arbeitsgruppen/index.html, accessed January 8, 2014. 53 Gesellschaft für  Medienwissenschaft (GfM), Kernbereiche der Medienwissenschaft. Beschluss der Mitgliederversammlung der GfM  (Bochum, October 4, 2008). Available at www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de/gfm/webcontent/files/ GfM_MedWissKernbereiche2.pdf, accessed January 11, 2014. 54 Geert Lovink, “Media Studies: Diagnosis of a Failed Merger”, Limina, No. 2 (2012): 72–91, here 82. 55 David E. Wellbery, “The General Enters the Library: A Note on Disciplines and Complexity”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2009):  982–994. See in particular p. 986 on discourses that romanticize the transgression of disciplinary boundaries. 56 Knut Hickethier,“Film und Fernsehen als Gegenstände der Medienwissenschaft”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, Vol. 132 (2003): 133–135, here 134. 57 Cf. Oliver Jungen, “Irgendwas mit Medien”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1, N5, January 2, 2013. 58 Wissenschaftsrat, Empfehlungen zur Weiterentwicklung der Kommunikationsund Medienwissenschaften in Deutschland, 8; see also 89–90.

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59 The question of if and how universities should be related to the needs of a “practice” (and how this “practice” is defined) is a matter of controversy. See Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils”, Diacritics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1983):  2–20, here 17–20. See also Marshall Sahlins, “The Conflicts of the Faculty”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2009):  997–1017, especially on early debates on that topic. 60 Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM), Kernbereiche der  Medienwissenschaft.Ein Strategiepapier der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft. Available at www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de/gfm/gfm/kernbereiche_der_medienwissenschaft.html, accessed January 8, 2014; and Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM), Fachgeschichte:  Entwicklung der Medienwissenschaft. Available at www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de/gfm/gfm/fachgeschichte_entwicklung_der_ medienwissenschaft.html, accessed January 8, 2014. 61 Post, “Debating Disciplinarity”. 62 Jungen, “Irgendwas mit Medien”. 63 Bohn, Müller and Ruppert, “Die Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Fingierbarkeit”, 7. 64 Georg Christoph Tholen, “Medienwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft. Zur Genese und Geltung eines transdisziplinären Paradigmas”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, Vol. 132 (2003): 35–48, here 38–39. 65 Gebhard Rusch, “Vorwort”, in Gebhard Rusch (ed.), Einführung in die Medienwissenschaft (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 7–9, here 7. 66 Gebhard  Rusch, “Medienwissenschaft als transdisziplinäres Forschungs-, Lehr-   und Lernprogramm”, in Gebhard Rusch (ed.),  Einführung in die Medienwissenschaft (Wiesbaden:  Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 69–82, here 71. 67 Reinhold Viehoff, “Von der Literaturwissenschaft zur Medienwissenschaft. Oder: vom Text- über das Literatursystem zum Mediensystem”, in Gebhard Rusch (ed.), Einführung in die Medienwissenschaft (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 10–35, here 13. 68 Helmut Schanze, “Vorwort”, in Helmut Schanze (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Medientheorie/Medienwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), v–viii, here v. 69 Helmut Schanze, “Medienwissenschaften”, in Helmut Schanze (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Medientheorie/Medienwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 260. 70 Post, “Debating Disciplinarity”, 751. 71 Cf. Leschke, “Von der Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft als regelmäßiger Übung”, 75. 72 Post, “Debating Disciplinarity”, 751, quoting Klein, “Blurring, Cracking and Crossing”, 190. 73 Schanze, “Vorwort”, v. 74 For the concept of “disciplinarity”, cf. Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David Sylvan, “Introduction: Disciplinary Ways of Knowing”, in Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David Sylvan (eds.), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 1–12. 75 Post, “Debating Disciplinarity”, 753. 76 Sven Grampp, “Hundert Jahre McLuhan”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2011): 183–187, here 184; emphasis in original. 77 Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”, 23. 78 E.g., Hickethier,“Das ‘Medium,’ die ‘Medien’ und die Medienwissenschaft”, 59. 79 Cf. Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”, 7–11.

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80 Paech, “Die Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft”; but also the photocopier, cf. ibid., 38–39, and Joseph Mort, The Anatomy of Xerography:  Its Invention and Evolution (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1989). 81 Helmut Schanze, “Fernsehserien. Ein literaturwissenschaftlicher  Gegenstand?”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, Vol. 2, No. 6  (1972): 79–94. 82 Klein, “Blurring, Cracking and Crossing”, 188. 83 Cf. Jungen, “Irgendwas mit Medien”. 84 Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”, 15; for disciplinary crises cf. also Klein, “Blurring, Cracking and Crossing”, 198–199. 85 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1962).

9

Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue1 Image Science in the European Context Luca Vargiu

One of the points on which Gottfried Boehm and Tom Mitchell agreed in their 2009 correspondence does not appear to have lost its significance. In this exchange, they concur that the elaboration of a complete history of the Bildwissenschaft is still premature. Nevertheless, both scholars still wanted to outline a “history in medias res”, or at least to “record [their] respective itineraries through this labyrinth”, as Mitchell stated.2 A few years prior, in Italy, in a somewhat similar situation, the art historian Maria Andaloro stated that, while it was not her intention to draw historical conclusions, she too did not want to “give up on recounting how the general course of this reflection came about”.3 She was discussing the shifts that began in the 1980s in the historical research on icons; however, we may still consider it a valid analogy because we also find an iconic turn in late Antiquity and medieval research, in approximately in the same period. If it is the case that the relationships between the debate on images which evolved within medieval studies and studies carried out in other fields – starting with the closest one, art historiography – have not been sufficiently examined, then it would not be rash to consider this debate to be a sort of litmus test which revealed the premature character of a history of Bildwissenschaft. And yet, names like Hans Belting and Michael Camille should be enough to suggest theories and reconstructive hypotheses which rightly take into account studies on medieval images. Belting’s background was in medieval history, and he authored a fundamental contribution to these discussions – Likeness and Presence. Camille wrote The Gothic Idol, and was known to Mitchell as a member of the “Laocoön group” of which he himself was a member.4 Moreover, it is significant that what was possibly the first reference in Italy to the expression “iconic turn”, owed to Gerhard Wolf, stems from the same context in which Andaloro had made the above-cited statement: the 2001 Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo.5 Naturally, it should be noted from the start that the debate that originated within medieval studies has its strongest and most meaningful

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motivations within this discipline, beyond the parallelisms, the similarities and any exchanges with other fields of knowledge. In synthesis, these motivations stem from the need to escape the anachronism of trying to apply a modern conception of art to the Middle Ages. Or rather, they reflect the need to avoid applying the concept of art in its modern sense to the Middle Ages, thereby favoring research that separates historical analysis from aesthetic judgment.6 These considerations aside, within the framework of a general interest in images and the collection of material for a history of the Bildwissenschaft which has yet to be written, we can maintain that the Middle Ages are an “ideal workshop”, as Wolf himself claimed in a manner that already seems retrospective: Starting from early Christians’ refusal of images, to their acceptance, the beginnings of an image cult, the placement of images as city palladia, through the iconoclastic crisis and the following triumph of images, to their leading role in miracles, traditions, and paraliturgical rites in Byzantium, Rome, and in the whole Christian world, all the way to the Reform crisis, the Middle Ages seemed to reveal themselves as an era of Image before the era of Art.7 Here, it is worth noting that the reference to “an era of Image before the era of Art” comes from Belting’s views as expressed in Likeness and Presence and crystallized in the book’s subtitle, A History of the Image before the Era of Art. These views concern the separation of an era of Art, which begins with the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, and an era of Image, which precedes it and spans the whole of the Middle Ages. This separation has almost become some sort of slogan, in both medieval and early modern studies, but also in aesthetics,8 and it now represents one of the formulations with which Belting is most often associated and identified. Furthermore, the premature character of a history of the Bildwissenschaft makes itself evident in matters beyond the inclusion or exclusion of some debates, lectures and approaches. Such considerations begin with the difficulties which lie within the associated terminology and eventually end up involving its very statute. We can hence understand the doubts Mitchell expressed in his correspondence concerning the manner in which we interpret an expression such as “image science” in a language like English where, generally, the word “science” is reserved for “ ‘exact’ or ‘hard’ or ‘experimental’ ” disciplines.9 Without question, this also helps us explain the choice made by various scholars to use other expressions, such as “image studies”. However, we must first understand whether the two expressions coincide and are interchangeable. Further, we need to examine whether they coincide with other terms, such as “visual studies”, and, lastly, explore their relationship with German Bildwissenschaft.

Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue 173 In a flier circulated to advertise an event in which Belting was involved, which was scheduled at Milan State University in February 2006 but was later canceled, it would seem that any interchangeability had been excluded. The flier vividly presented the scholar as the “ ‘German’ answer to the visual culture” of Anglo-Saxon origin, almost implying a difference in research approach between the two regions. While this may simply have been a representational formula, there are other findings that carry more weight, including those made by the Polish scholar Mariusz Bryl when he attempted to reconstruct the evolution of historic-artistic disciplines in German and Anglo-American settings between 1970 and 1990. On the matter, Bryl found a large enough discrepancy in methods and theories between the two regions that he considered it a fundamental element in any study of the theoretical aspects of contemporary art historiography. On the basis of his findings, and the parallel landscape in the historical-literary field described by Robert C. Holub in his Crossing Borders, Bryl highlighted the lack of a true dialogue between German and American art historians, in spite of the affinities existing on both sides. Such affinities would appear to have given life to a “synchronicity of alternatives” rather than to a reciprocal exchange, with exceptions made for the few attempts to “cross the borders” – to put it in Holub’s words.10 In its broad strokes, this is a very convincing reconstruction. Some of its elements are also convincing in hinting at a richer picture, contributing to the impression of a more complex framework. This is evident, among other instances, in the debate on the “end of art” and the “end of art history”, and in the discussion that stemmed from it, from the late 1980s, between Arthur C.  Danto and Belting himself. While on the one hand this discussion produced a two-way border-crossing phenomenon, on the other it is also a testament to the different approaches to the problem in the two regions, and hence to the “synchronicity of alternatives”.11 In harmony with this interpretation, we could pair Danto’s image, which compares his discussion with Belting to two “paired dolphins, frolicking in the same conceptual waters for over a decade”,12 with Boehm’s image, which represents himself and Mitchell as “two wanderers … who had traversed the same, scarcely-known continent of pictorial phenomena and visuality”,13 and lastly with Mitchell’s own image, which pictures, perhaps somewhat reminiscent of Heidegger’s Holzwege, the relationship between the iconic turn and the pictorial turn: “not one of priority, but of a parallel wandering in the forest”.14 Similarities can be found in all these images:  synchronies, pairings, common crossings and parallelisms. Nevertheless, the exchanges concerning the relationship between the iconic turn and the pictorial turn are perhaps more numerous, frequent and longer-lasting than those relating to the artistic and historical context studied by Bryl; this is not to mention the fact that they are much stronger

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than how they have been portrayed in the discussion between Danto and Belting. In fact, interest in images, as it has evolved over the past few decades, has seemingly broadened in scope compared to the iconic and pictorial turn denominations. Furthermore, it is true that in Germany the iconic turn label ended up encompassing the whole of the debate on images. Hence, such a label has been intended in a much broader way than Boehm did in the essay in which he introduced the term as well as in his correspondence, given that he meant it, in extreme synthesis, as some sort of complementary countermelody to the linguistic turn, aimed at analyzing “how … images create meaning” and identifying their proper, specific logos.15 As Boehm himself observes, there are numerous examples of this broader definition – which developed into a veritable cultural trend16 – such as various publications, conventions, seminars, forums and websites explicitly dedicated to this theme, beginning with Hubert Burda Stiftung’s.17 The Italian and French scenarios, however, show a different outcome from Germany and relative independence from Boehm’s and Mitchell’s formulas. In Italy, the first use of the expression “iconic turn” appears to have been by Wolf in 2001, as mentioned above. The first occurrence of this expression in Italian, translated literally as “svolta iconica”, dates back to 2003, to Victor Stoichita’s introduction to the reprint edition of Cesare Brandi’s Duccio.18 It is significant that both instances involved non-Italian scholars, however close their ties to Italy. Wolf is to this day the director of the Florence Kunsthistorisches Institut, while Stoichita studied in Rome under Brandi himself. This is significant because, although we had to wait for the 2000s and for two foreign scholars to record the appearance of the name, the thing had already surfaced years prior and there had even been an attempt to track its coordinates. I am referring, first of all, to the year 1987 and the twelfth centennial of the Second Council of Nicaea, from which stemmed a renewed interest in the topics of images, iconoclasm and iconophilism at an international level and according to a broad cultural perspective.19 Ten years later in 1997, which saw the publication of the Italian translation of the Council acts, significantly titled Vedere l’invisibile (Seeing the Invisible), the volume’s curator, Luigi Russo, pointed out the rediscovery in this first retrospective analysis and highlighted the centrality of Nicaea on the contemporary cultural horizon. He described a revolution connected to the subject of images, “a true scientific revolution”, which “on the wake of Freedberg’s fundamental work The Power of Images” traversed the final years of the millennium.20 With this dual reference to Nicaea and David Freedberg, these observations demonstrate how even the world of Italian culture was precocious in acknowledging the interest in images from multiple parties. It also attested to Italy’s ability to interpret it independently: not in terms of a turn, but as a revolution. It is worth noting that Russo’s volume has been recognized as kick-starting the debate on images in Italy.21

Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue 175 In France, the subject’s reception takes the same direction, at least in broad strokes. In the same year that Vedere l’invisibile was published, Jean-Jacques Wunenburger concluded his Philosophie des images saying that “the matter of image seems on its way to become once again a live philosophical topic”, and in the 2000s a section in the Larousse philosophical dictionary broadens the scope of the discussion to the point of asking whether “a new Copernican revolution” was at hand.22 So, while denominations based on the concept of turn prevailed in Germany and the United States, Italy and France preferred to refer to a revolution, or a Copernican revolution. It is in this manner that we reach, or go back to, what Boehm in his correspondence calls, with an obvious reference to Kant, the “turn of all turns”: the Copernican revolution.23 In doing so, in his consideration of the meaning that should be attributed to turn – paradigm, according to Kuhn’s teachings, or a “rhetorical twist that recalls last fall’s fashions”24 – Boehm appears to equate that expression to revolution. It is true that in Boehm the reference to the Copernican revolution appears in relation to the issue of the foundation of both linguistic and iconic turns and not regarding their denomination and reception. This consideration aside, the possibility of placing the two expressions – turn and revolution – on the same level allows us to extend Boehm and Mitchell’s considerations of the former to the latter. Mitchell adds to turn or trend one additional interpretation of the contemporary interest in images. He highlights an interpretation from his previous works which defined it as a “trope” or “figure of speech”.25 According to Mitchell, there are no substantial differences between the paradigm shift and the trope shift given that, as he states in his correspondence when referring to Foucault, the paradigm itself is nothing but a trope, that is, a “ ‘figure of knowledge’ within a discipline”.26 From these considerations it appears that the pictorial turn can be intended either as a paradigm shift or as a movement underlying the rhetoric of turn, without finding significant differences between the two. It is that very same rhetoric that, starting with Rorty’s linguistic turn and increasing in pace as we get closer to the present day, has produced a series of turning points which is impressive in its number alone.27 Perhaps we could try to propose a detailed study of the multiplication of turns in the framework of a history of ideas or concepts, or even of metaphorology à la Hans Blumenberg. Boehm himself pushes in this direction when he refers to the Copernican revolution as the “turn of all turns”. In doing so, he recognizes his debt to Blumenberg and, in particular, toward his study on the “Copernican world formula”.28 But beyond this digression, which could be a compelling suggestion for future analysis, it is interesting to note how these considerations had Mitchell question the contents and the value which should be attributed to this turn, trope, paradigm, trend or style – call it what you will.

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To better frame Mitchell’s observations and their context, we should begin to ask ourselves whether the number of turns that we have witnessed in recent years is enough to raise suspicion that we have been abusing the word. This suspicion should be counterposed to those who, like the theater theorist Christopher Balme, claim that in today’s scientific culture the propagation of turns should be accepted as a necessity,29 an attitude that is halfway between fatalism and legitimizing the existent order of things. If, from such general matters, we focus our attention on the iconic turn or the pictorial turn, we come across multiple opinions, according to which the turn is either only hoped for, or, more optimistically, has already happened or is about to take place. When Boehm coined the expression in 1994, the iconic turn appeared to him to be something to introduce, postulate and defend. It is significant that there was a need to sketch out its broad strokes and outline its prehistory.30 In more recent contributions, for example Horst Bredekamp’s, the iconic turn is instead seen as an acquisition that has already happened in art history, despite the multiple oppositions that continue to exist on the matter and which we can trace in other participants of the debate. We could mention, among others, Andreas Köstler, who states his skepticism regarding this turn’s completion, precisely in opposition to Bredekamp.31 From an analogous point of view, Mitchell warns about what he dubbed as a “fallacy of a pictorial turn”, which is potentially shared by both its backers and its detractors.32 It consists of holding the belief that the broad interest in images and visuals is peculiar to our times. If, in his correspondence, Mitchell lingers on the aspects of “iconic panic”, on “hand-wringing and iconoclastic gestures”,33 in other works he broadens his range of action and also takes into account demonstrations of enthusiasm. In any case, he insists on warning us that with the expression “pictorial turn” he never intended to indicate a turn which is particular only to the contemporary Western world, but rather to prepare “a diagnostic tool to analyze specific moments when a new medium, a technical invention, or a cultural practice erupts in symptoms of panic or euphoria (usually both) about ‘the visual’ ”.34 In his correspondence, Mitchell is more explicit than elsewhere in reaffirming that the pictorial turn involves both the academic disciplines  – human sciences, but not exclusively – and what he refers to as the “public sphere”. He is equally explicit in connecting this dual reference to the belief that iconic turns have taken place in the past. These turns, which were common – as Mitchell specifies – to “the worlds of learning and the public sphere”,35 occurred as a consequence of the birth of a new technique for the production or reproduction of images, or stemmed from the establishment of a particular attitude toward images themselves.36 Hence, his intent to use the pictorial turn critically and historically, as other scholars have, is made clearer. Moreover, such usage constitutes one of the fundamental aspects of the contemporary pictorial turn, or,

Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue 177 better, in Mitchell’s own words, of the “very specific form” this turn has undertaken in our times.37 We know, in fact, that within the iconic turn assumptions that are theoretical and, broadly speaking, political in nature coexist, and are intertwined. Two extracts from the 2005 volume Iconic Turn, the first by Bredekamp and the second by Willibald Sauerländer, help us define the terms of the discussion. Bredekamp states: Every image coming from mass-media, from natural sciences, and from figurative art, is subject to an iconic gravitation [ikonische Gravitation], which provides the keys to avoid being submitted to the overflowing “flux” of images, which is continuously warded off, to their overwhelming “speed”, and to their elusive “power”. The iconic turn was proclaimed with the need not only to complement the current visual fields, but also to analyze them in the way of a “logic of images” which is to be patiently developed.38 Sauerländer states: We need a critical iconoclasm … of visual perception funded not only on art history and aesthetics, but more so on the public and civic sphere. … A discussion on new media can’t be limited to the analysis, however brilliant, of procedures and innovations because the circulation of large quantities of images in our media society has become a matter that interests the public sphere. … We can’t, hence, talk of the pictorial turn or iconic turn in a merely descriptive manner, but we need to address it from an ethics and civil point of view. The French scholars speak of an “écologie des images”, an ecology of images.39 When it comes to “political” assumptions, we must question the role that images, of all types and origin, play in the contemporary world in order to account for the risks, real or presumed, that this role entails. From this stems the need for an ethical and civil debate, for an “ecology of images”, and for a “critical iconoclasm”. As far as general theoretical assumptions are concerned, a generalized understanding of images implies a claim for the autonomy of the field of images and visibility. From this autonomy stems, among other things, its difference, if not its irreducibility, from the linguistic-verbal field. This is why Bredekamp speaks of “iconic gravitation” and the “logic of images”. The weave of “political” and theoretical assumptions perhaps makes the gap found between Boehm and Mitchell in their correspondence a little less wide, if it does not close it completely. The former summarizes this discrepancy by defining his “own” turn as a “criticism of the image”, while the latter criticizes this ideology altogether.40 If one of Mitchell’s aims lies in “bringing together … iconology and ideology”,41 Boehm’s

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stipulations develop in a different manner. He was inclined to consider the critique of ideology as mostly focused outwards, on the context, and in any case on other-directed factors, and he meant to render this context apparent through the logical analysis of images, and thus from an “immanent order” of the image itself42  – comparable to Bredekamp’s “iconic gravitation”. In Mitchell’s view, or elaborating on his ideas, it is apparent that Boehm’s plane of analysis, which is of immanence and where the “complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality” is given – to use Mitchell’s own words as quoted by Boehm43 – is never neutral but is instead always characterized ideologically. For both, we can then state that the critique of images is in itself a critique of ideology, insofar as the critique of ideology is constitutive to and immanent in the logic of images, and it does not delineate itself as an external, subsequent element. Whether the iconic turn manifests itself as a paradigm shift, a figure of speech or a trend, and whether the critique which it brought forth is outlined as a critique of images or ideology, or, in fact, as both, the matter of the outcomes of this turn in the affected disciplines is left somewhat to the side in the aforementioned correspondence. Beyond the difficulties tied to the use of an expression such as “image science”, and whether or not image science, image studies, visual studies and Bildwissenschaft coincide, it is a matter of figuring out whether the broader discourse, of which the iconic or pictorial turn is or would be a figure of speech, creates new sciences that consolidate themselves according to their own statute, or if it is transversal and multidisciplinary but does not necessarily create new disciplines, or if it takes a different route altogether. It is true that visual studies expressly established itself as an “interdisciplinary area of research”,44 which is its narrowest definition. However, we need to keep questioning the difficulties and doubts observed by Mitchell in the early 2000s in regard to its definition, its statute, its field and objects of study, its academic institutionalization, and its complementary or supplementary role with respect to the disciplines which traditionally study visuals, such as art history and aesthetics.45 In this sense, then, ten years after Boehm and Mitchell’s exchange, it seems appropriate to explore the meaning of Boehm’s doubts as he expressed them at the beginning of his letter. According to Boehm, if it is still premature to write a history of the Bildwissenschaft, this is because the discipline still does not know “what it is, or what it can be”.46 Today, we do not necessarily have to share these doubts in toto – after all, we did not have to do so ten years ago, either. Nevertheless, they still possess some significance as a warning and a methodical validity for an investigation into a matter that in some ways risks being tied to a trend or – as the appearance of the expression “after the iconic turn” seems to suggest – going out of fashion.47

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Notes 1 Translated from Italian by Giuliano Cataford. 2 W.J.T. Mitchell in Gottfried Boehm and W.J.T. Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn:  Two Letters”, Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 50, No. 2–3 (2009): 112. 3 Maria Andaloro, “Le icone a Roma in età preiconoclasta”, in Evelyne Patlagean et al., Roma fra Oriente e Occidente. XLIX Settimana di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, vol. II (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2002), 732. 4 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 116. In reference to Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and to Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and ImageMaking in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 5 Gerhard Wolf, “Alexifarmaka. Aspetti del culto e della teoria delle immagini a Roma tra Bisanzio e Terra Santa nell’alto medioevo”, in Patlagean et al., Roma fra Oriente e Occidente, Vol. II, 755. 6 For a first overview, refer to my “La ‘svolta iconica’ della medievistica”, Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Cagliari, Vol. 24 (2006): 423–440. 7 Wolf, “Alexifarmaka”, 755–756. 8 See, for example, the brief reference in Paolo D’Angelo, Estetica  (Rome:  Laterza, 2011), 90. 9 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 112. 10 See Mariusz Bryl, “Między wspólnotą inspiracji a odrębnością tradycji. Niemiecko- i anglojęzyczna historia sztuki u progu trzech ostatnich dekad”, Rocznik Historii Sztuki, Vol. 24 (1999):  especially 217–220 and 258–260; and Robert C. Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), viii– ix and passim. 11 On the topic, refer to my “ ‘Like paired dolphins’. Sincronia di alternative tra Danto e Belting”, Rivista di Estetica, Vol. 35 (2007): 335–355. 12 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art:  Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xix. 13 Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 104. 14 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 112. 15 Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 105–106. As is common knowledge, the linguistic turn refers to Richard Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn:  Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967, 2nd ed. 1992). It is worth noting that in the introduction Rorty already had a critical position toward the linguistic turn. See Rorty, “Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy”, in Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn, 1–39; on this matter, see also Diego Marconi and Gianni Vattimo, “Nota introduttiva”, in Richard Rorty, La filosofia e lo specchio della natura (Milan:  Bompiani, 1992), xxxi, n.  2. According to Vattimo and Marconi, Rorty maintains the thesis of a “failure of the ‘linguistic turn’ ”. 16 See Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 103–104. 17 The Hubert Burda Stiftung website at www.iconicturn.de has not been updated since 2012. 18 See Victor I. Stoichita, “ ‘Astanza’ di Duccio, presenza di Brandi”, introduction to Cesare Brandi, Duccio (Siena: Protagon, 2003), 9.

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19 See François Bœspflug and Nicolas Lossky (eds.), Nicée II 787–1987. Douze siècles d’images religieuses (Paris:  Cerf, 1987). To this work we owe the renewed interest in the Second Council of Nicaea, starting with the belief that “the reception of the Nicaea II decree needs to be reviewed” (“Preface”, ibid., 12). 20 Luigi Russo, “Presentazione”, in Luigi Russo (ed.), Vedere l’invisibile. Nicea e lo statuto dell’Immagine (Palermo: Aesthetica, 1997), 9–10. 21 See Elio Franzini, “Introduzione all’edizione italiana”, in Régis Debray, Vita e morte dell’immagine (Milan: Il Castoro, 1998), 12, n. 2. See also Franzini’s review of Vedere l’invisibile, in Domus, No. 803 (1998): 120. 22 See, in order, Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Philosophie des Images (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 294; and François Soulages and Jacques Morizot, “L’image est-elle l’enjeu d’une nouvelle révolution copernicienne?”, in Michel Blay (ed.), Grand dictionnaire de la Philosophie (Paris: Larousse, 2003), 523–525. 23 Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 105. 24 Ibid., 104. 25 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture”, in Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2002), 237 and 240. 26 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 114. 27 Later, all of the following – and this is by no means a complete list – were discussed:  a hermeneutic turn, a pragmatic turn or pragmatische Wende, a textual turn, an aesthetic turn, a kulturalistische Wende and a cultural turn, an ontological turn, a cognitive turn, a spatial turn, a semiotic turn, a narrativist turn, a pragmatic turn, a performative turn, a material turn. The case of the visual turn is slightly different. Its father should be Martin Jay, and Mitchell uses it as a synonym for pictorial turn. See Martin Jay, “That Visual Turn: The Advent of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1 (2002): 87–92. 28 See Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 105, n. 2, in reference to Hans Blumenberg, Die kopernikanische Wende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965). 29 See Christopher Balme, “Stages of Vision:  Bild, Körper und Medium im Theater”, in Hans Belting, Dietmar Kamper and Martin Schulz (eds.), Quel Corps? Eine Frage der Repräsentation (Munich: Fink, 2002), 349. 30 See Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder”, in Gottfried Boehm (ed.), Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: Fink, 1984), especially 13–17; and the different attitude, ten years later, in Gottfried Boehm, “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder”, in Christa Maar and Hubert Burda (eds.), Iconic Turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder (Cologne: DuMont, 2005), 28–43: 28–30; and in the interview “Das Bild in der Kunstwissenschaft”, in Klaus Sachs-Hombach (ed.), Wege zur Bildwissenschaft. Interviews (Cologne: Halem, 2004), 20. 31 See and compare Horst Bredekamp, “Drehmomente  – Merkmale und Ansprüche des iconic turn”, in Maar and Burda (eds.), Iconic Turn, 15–26; and “Metaphern des Endes im Zeitalter des Bildes”, in Heinrich Klotz (ed.), Kunst der Gegenwart. Museum für neue Kunst (Karlsruhe: ZKM; Munich: Prestel, 1997), 35–36; and Andreas Köstler’s statements in “Kunstgeschichte im neuen Jahrtausend. Ein Gespräch mit Christian Freigang (Göttingen), Klaus Herding (Frankfurt/M.), Andreas Köstler (Bochum), Birgit Richard (Frankfurt/M.), Viktoria Schmidt-Linsehoff (Trier), Kerstin Thomas (Frankfurt/M.), Willi Winkler (Hamburg)”, ed. Christoph Danelzik-Brüggemann and Gottfried Kerscher, Kritische Berichte, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2000): 13. 32 See Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 240–241.

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 115. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 241. Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 115. Much in the same way, even though stemming from different theoretical premises, we should consider the identification of an iconic turn in ancient Egypt by Jan Assmann or the interpretation of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy in terms of a pictorial turn proposed by Emmanuel Alloa. See Jan Assmann, “Die Frühzeit des Bildes – Der altägyptische iconic turn”, in Maar and Burda (eds.), Iconic Turn, 304–322; and Emmanuel Alloa, “Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2013): 3–29. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 241. Bredekamp, “Drehmomente”, 23. Willibald Sauerländer, “Iconic turn? Eine Bitte um Ikonoclasmus”, in Maar and Burda (eds.), Iconic Turn, 422 and 425. Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 107. Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 120. Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 106. W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn”, in Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16; quoted by Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 109. Cristina Demaria, “Cultura visuale”, in Michele Cometa (ed.), Dizionario degli Studi Culturali, 2000. Available at www.studiculturali.it/dizionario/ lemmi/cultura_visuale.html, accessed August 11, 2016. See Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”. Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 103. See, among others, Christa Maar, “Iconic Worlds  – Bilderwelten nach dem iconic turn, Vorwort”, in Christa Maar and Hubert Burda (eds.), Iconic worlds. Neue Bilderwelten und Wissensräume (Cologne:  DuMont, 2006), 11–14; Rem Koolhaas, “Nach dem iconic turn – Strategien zur Vermeidung architektonischer Ikonen”, in Maar and Burda (eds.), Iconic worlds, 107–129; and Andrea Pinotti, “Estetica, visual culture studies, Bildwissenschaft”, Studi di estetica, Vol. 42, No. 1–2 (2014): 273. Available at http://mimesisedizioni. it/journals/index.php/studi-di-estetica/article/view/143/196, accessed August 11, 2016.

10 Images and their Incarnations An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell Asbjørn Grønstad, Øyvind Vågnes

It would be very interesting to hear your thoughts about the iconoclasm of a number of the grand narratives of cultural theory in recent years, not least against the background of your idea of “living images” in What Do Pictures Want?. But let us begin with “the object”, and return to the more sweeping claims of theory later. In What Do Pictures Want? you describe critical practice as a way of responding to a “resonant” object, and this made us think about Mieke Bal’s description of the object that “talks back” in her Travelling Concepts of the Humanities (8–10). Bal calls for a “qualified return to ‘close reading’ that has gone out of style” (10); in What Do Pictures Want?, you suggest that answers to the central questions of visuality “must be sought in the specific, concrete images that most conspicuously embody the anxiety over image-making and image-smashing in our time”. We’d like you to comment on this, but perhaps you first could talk a little bit about what you in Picture Theory call the “metapicture”, since that conceptualization made us think about Bal’s notion of a “thinking” object in the first place? W.J.T. MITCHELL: In Picture Theory I tried to distinguish three different kinds of metapictures: first, the picture that explicitly reflects on, or “doubles” itself, as in so many drawings by Saul Steinberg, in which the production of the picture we are seeing reappears inside the picture. This is most routinely and literally seen in the effect of the “mise en abime”, the Quaker Oats box that contains a picture of the Quaker Oats box, that contains yet another picture of a Quaker Oats box, and so on, to infinity. (Technically, I gather, the term first appeared in reference to heraldry, where the division of a coat of arms into increasingly diminutive sectors containing other coats of arms traces the evolution of a genealogy). Second, the picture that contains another picture of a different kind, and thus reframes or recontextualizes the inner picture as “nested” inside of a larger, outer picture. Third, the picture that is framed, not inside another picture, but within a discourse that reflects on it as an exemplar of “picturality” as such. This third meaning implies, of course, that any picture whatsoever (a simple line-drawing of a face, a multistable image like ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD AND ØYVIND VÅGNES:

Images and their Incarnations 183 the Duck-Rabbit, Velázquez’s Las Meninas) can become a metapicture, a picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures. The ever-present potentiality of the metapicture has several implications for the rest of your question. First, it suggests that any picture is at least potentially a kind of vortex or “black hole” that can “suck in” the consciousness of a beholder, and at the same time (and for the same reason) “spew out” an infinite series of reflections. This is not just a matter of the infinite or indefinite spatial depth that is suggested the moment a surface is marked and thus opened as a space for perception and reflective thought. It is also right there on the surface, in the infinity of aspects that a line or color or blurred erasure can provoke. As William Blake puts it, infinity is located in the “Definite & Determinate Identity” of the “bounding line”, and not just the endless, empty space of perspective or the void of the unmarked space, the blankness or chaos of potential out of which images emerge. (Think here of Leonardo’s advice to painters to look at the random splashes of mud left on plaster walls by passing carts, and to meditate on the forms of figures and landscapes that seem to emerge from them; or Nelson Goodman’s notion of the “density” and “repleteness” of analog symbol systems.) Of course this infinity of potential aspects in a picture is rarely experienced. Most images pass by and through us so quickly that we scarcely notice them. They are fast food for the eyes, and mostly junk food. But some of them demand more attention, and even the trivial or overlooked ones have this potential waiting to be tapped. The approach I am proposing with the metapicture is thus quite compatible with Mieke Bal’s appeal for a return to the “close reading” of images (though I’m sure she would want to interrogate the model of reading itself and raise the question of what we mean by reading, and whether the image is perhaps always opening up a threshold of the unreadable and even the indecipherable). My general pedagogical aim is to slow down the reception of the image, to encourage prolonged contemplation, second and third looks, reversals of perceptual fields such as figure/ground and surface/depth, and the Foucauldian strategy of suspending the rule of the “proper name” and nominative discourse over the image, as in his treatment of Las Meninas. I  urge this practice, not (as is sometimes feared) because I have a magical or mystical view of images, but because I am seeking a clear-sighted analysis of the nature of pictures, one that is willing to explore its object with rigorous phenomenological or psychoanalytic or semiotic or socio-historical modes of interpretation. But I do not see any of these modes of analysis as a uniquely privileged metalanguage for the understanding of pictures. And the aim of the metapicture is to create a critical space in which images could function, not simply as illustrations or “examples” of the power of this or that

184 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes with W.J.T. Mitchell method, but as “cases” that to some extent (generally unknown in advance) might transform or deconstruct the method that is brought to them. The widest implication of the metapicture is that pictures might themselves be sites of theoretical discourse, not merely passive objects awaiting explanation by some nonpictorial (or iconoclastic) master-discourse. In relation to the domesticating tendencies of semiotics, for instance, with its taxonomies of signs and sign-functions, I like to think of the image as the “wild sign”, the signifying entity that has the potential to explode signification, to open up the realm of nonsense, madness, randomness, anarchy, and even “nature” itself in the midst of the cultural labyrinth of second nature that human beings create around themselves. In What Do Pictures Want? I put this in terms of the following analogy (roughly paraphrased): “when it comes to images, then, we are in something like the position of savages who do not know where babies come from. We literally do not know where images come from, or where they go when (or even if) they die”. The metapicture, then, is also a figure that helps to explain the often-observed uncanniness of images, their ghostliness or spectrality, their tendency to look back at the beholder, or seemingly to respond to the presence of the beholder, to “want something” from the beholder. I don’t think we can properly understand images without some reckoning with vitalism and animism. And I  do not mean by this some kind of regressive return to primitive thought, but (as Lévi-Strauss so often insisted) a taking account of the persistence of the “savage mind” at the dialectical heart of whatever we mean by the modern. I would also want to urge that we not see this exclusively in anthropomorphic terms, as if the vitalistic or animated character of the signs and symbols we create around us could be exhaustively described in terms of personification or prosopopoeia. Certainly, the conceit of the “desiring picture” or the “animated icon” may involve an analogy with human attributes, but the features of vitality, animation, and desire (at minimum, appetite) also permeate downward, into the animal and vegetable kingdoms. This is why, in What Do Pictures Want?, I want to stress the non- or inhuman desires of images, and explore the neglected concept of totemism (with its emphasis on natural iconographies  – plants, animals, and even minerals, including fossils, of course), in addition to the more familiar and anthropocentric concepts of fetishism and idolatry. My aim in What Do Pictures Want? is thus not to project personhood onto pictures, but to engage with what I call “the lives and loves” of images. So, while I like very much Mieke Bal’s concept of “art that thinks”, I  don’t want to begin with the assumption that it always thinks like us. The principles of vitalism and animism require that we also take account of what are sometimes called “lower” forms of consciousness – mere sentience, for instance, or sensuous awareness,

Images and their Incarnations 185 responsiveness, as well as forms of memory and desire. What we call thinking (in images or in living things) goes deeper than philosophical reflection or self-consciousness. Animals remember. And most of human consciousness is pre- or unconscious. The nervous system is not the only system in our bodies that can learn. There is also the immune system, which learns to recognize and deal with a staggeringly large number of alien organisms in the life of any individual, and which works through a mechanism of copying, mimesis, and reproduction of antibodies that are symmetrical “twins” of the antigens they combat. AG/ØV: Do you think of yours and Bal’s alternative as symptomatic in any way for how things are turning around, with the increase of interdisciplinary work being done in the humanities? TM: I hope they are more than symptomatic. My aim is to be diagnostic and (even more challenging) to create prognoses or interventionist strategies both in pedagogy and research. From the standpoint of disciplinarity, this means something more than the familiar invocation of “interdisciplinarity”, which in my view is a bit too safe and predictable (I’ve argued this elsewhere in an essay entitled “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”). I prefer a notion of image science and visual culture as sites of what I want to call “indisciplinarity”, moments of breakage, failure, or deconstruction of existing disciplinary structures accompanied by the emergence of new formations (to some extent this is probably a reflection of my long-standing attraction to anarchist theories of knowledge, the sort pioneered by Paul Feyerabend). It is clear, to begin with, that images do not belong exclusively to any single discipline  – not semiotics, or art history, or media studies, or even cultural studies (if it is a discipline). Their study compels us to be interdisciplinary at a bare minimum, just as paleontology requires that its researchers be geologists, biologists, anatomists, and artists. AG/ØV: Perhaps we could return, then, along the lines of these thoughts, to how a critical engagement with the object has to address what we initially referred to as the iconoclasm of some of the “grand narratives” of cultural theory in recent years? TM: I think that many of the modernist master-narratives (say of Marxism, psychoanalysis, or of modern art and philosophy) were iconoclastic in very fundamental ways. They tended to treat images as the object of destructive critique, of critical operations that would dispel their power, eliminate them from consciousness, and smash them once and for all. Ideology critique, for instance, was consistently portrayed as a practice of emancipation from a false consciousness depicted as a repertoire of seductive and false images. Ditto for psychoanalysis and its relation to imagination and fantasy. The history of philosophy, from Plato’s banishment of the artist to Richard Rorty’s “linguistic

186 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes with W.J.T. Mitchell turn”, resolutely set its face against the image. As Wittgenstein put it, “a picture held us captive, and we could not get outside of it”. Heidegger thought that modernity had trapped humanity in an “age of the world picture”, and that philosophy (or poetry) might find a way out of it. What has happened in our time, I think, is that this pervasive iconophobia and iconoclasm has become itself the object of a second-order set of metapictures. Martin Jay’s book, Downcast Eyes, was a fundamental breakthrough in putting the antiocularcentric philosophical tradition under a magnifying glass. And if I  started listing the number of books on iconoclasm in the last thirty years, from David Freedberg, say, to Marie-José Mondzain and Dario Gamboni, we could fill up many pages of this interview. These attempts to “depict iconoclasm” (if I may put it that way) are symptomatic of what I’ve called “the pictorial turn”, the treatment of the attack on images, not as an automatically reliable strategy, but as itself a cultural phenomenon that needs critical reflection and theorizing. AG/ØV: In What Do Pictures Want? you describe a critical practice in which one strikes images “with just enough force to make them resonate, but not as much as to smash them”. TM: As you know, I  derive this strategy from Nietzsche’s preface to Twilight of the Idols, where the greatest philosophical iconoclast of them all proposes a method of dealing with idols that sounds at first like traditional image destruction. Nietzsche tells us that he will “philosophize with a hammer”, striking not at temporary idols, but at the “eternal idols” that have mystified the entire philosophical tradition. What is sometimes forgotten is that he goes on to elaborate the metaphor of the hammer, depicting it not as an instrument for destruction, but for “sounding the idols”. In case we miss the point, he even goes on to elaborate it further by trading in the figure of the hammer for that of the “tuning fork” as the instrument for striking the idols. This dazzling metaphor (which is in fact a philosophical image, a theoretical picture) has at least two implications: the first is that Nietzsche does not aim to destroy the eternal idols (how could he, since they are eternal?) but only to “sound” them – that is, to make them speak, to divulge their secrets. He aims, in other words, to break only the silence that is so characteristic of idols. The other implication is that the sounding is dialogic or dialectical:  by exchanging the hammer for a tuning fork, Nietzsche suggests that it is not only the idols that are sounded, but the critical discourse that is brought to them.1 I see this implication as deeply connected to the notion (argued at some length in What Do Pictures Want?) that images cannot be destroyed. (Pictures, by contrast, material objects that are the bearers of images, can of course be destroyed; but the image survives that destruction, and often becomes even more powerful in its tendency to return in

Images and their Incarnations 187 other media, including memory, narrative, and fantasy). The act of destroying or disfiguring an image, as Michael Taussig argues in Defacement, has the paradoxical effect of enhancing the life of that image. An image is never quite so lively as in the moment when someone tries to kill it. AG/ØV: Of course, your analogy between images and living organisms in What Do Pictures Want? should both provoke and inspire readers. “It certainly keeps me awake at night”, you write (89). What is the response you’ve had so far? And perhaps you could say a little bit more about iconoclasm from the perspective of “living images”. TM: Skepticism, and critical resistance, but also a considerable amount of curiosity and a fair amount of supportive testimony. The best question that has been raised is: what are the limits of this analogy? Where does it run out of steam? And I have to confess that I don’t know the answer to this question, partly because the theory of analogy (as my colleague Barbara Stafford has shown) is so deeply woven into the problem of images and pictures as such. One interesting limit is reached, I think, in the question of where images come from, and where they go. Should we postulate, for instance, that images (in contrast to pictures, the specific, concrete, material supports or embodiments of images) can “neither be created nor destroyed” as the physicists used to say of matter and energy? At this point we are engaged in speculative suppositions, which I  think of as probes to test the limits of an analogy. Art historians, of course, are quick to point out (and I am quick to acknowledge) that the analogy between images and living organisms is not really a new idea. In fact, I explicitly state in What Do Pictures Want? that I  am not presenting this as a novel idea, but as one that has an ancient pedigree, and resurfaces in varying ways in every culture and historical period that I know about. If there is novelty in what I am proposing, it is in the universality of the claim, especially my argument that the idea of the image as life-form cannot be sequestered in the savage mind, or in the minds of children, neurotics, etc. The whole effort to deny the vitalist/animist metapicture in favor of modern rationalism, materialism, or secular, critical realism, I want to suggest, is precisely a form of disavowal that inevitably generates the “double consciousness” I have been outlining here. And it’s not that I believe we could somehow overcome this double consciousness with some sort of therapeutic critical method, and settle for one side of it. My argument is that the so-called primitive or savage or superstitious view of images as life-forms was also accompanied by a fair amount of skepticism and critical realism. The best test-case for this is the attitude of children toward images, especially the host of “transitional objects” (Winnicott) such as dolls and stuffed animals. Parents know very well that children know that

188 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes with W.J.T. Mitchell their dolls are not really alive, that they are “only pretending” and playing – however vividly – with the conceit of talking horses and dolls that wet (this is why my own kids never seemed very impressed with dolls that “really” wet their pants). But we forget this lesson when we engage in what I call “secondary beliefs”, or “beliefs about the beliefs of other people”, in which we attribute to them a literal belief in what we, with our superior modern, enlightened consciousness, know to be “merely” figurative beliefs. The classic instance of this is the attribution of promiscuity and cannibalism to idolaters. Promiscuity and cannibalism may be out there, but I don’t think we can posit a necessary relation between them and idolatry, which is just the over-estimation of the importance of an image, as seen from the point of view of a devout iconoclast, who projects a fantasy of what an idolater “must believe”.Of course there are cases in which an idolatry/iconoclasm complex arises that is absolutely pathological and toxic in character, especially when peoples go to war over an image or a metaphor. Nothing I’m saying would deny the possibility of a psychotic (as opposed to the normal neurotic) relation to images. My point is that the (futile) effort to destroy the offending image is invariably counterproductive; it is a battle with a phantom or spectre that only makes the offending image stronger. I’m thinking here, of course, of the current “war on terror” which is really a war of and on a body of images, one which (as always) finds a way to mutilate and destroy actual, living human bodies, while the images themselves just grow stronger. AG/ØV: Could we ask you how you came to think in terms of a “double consciousness”, which is a concept you borrow from W.  E. B. Du Bois? TM: I think it came to me out of the conjunction of critical race theory and the role of images in the practice of racial stereotyping. Double consciousness, for Du Bois, arises out of a consciousness of being perceived as an image, through a screen or “veil” of racist misrecognition, and the “second sight” that the subject of the racist gaze receives as a result. Homi Bhabha’s classic essay on “The Other Question”, which generalizes the peculiar duplicity and dialectics of the stereotype, was another key moment. But I  don’t think the whole thing came into focus until I  saw Spike Lee’s marvelous and disturbing film Bamboozled, with its relentless exploration of the reappropriation (and thus reanimation) of blackface minstrelsy across the full range of modern media, from the original minstrel show, through vaudeville, cinema, radio, television, and the internet. Spike Lee’s film struck me as not only the most profound cinematic reflection on racial stereotyping that we have, but also as a precise anatomy of the way “double consciousness” is constituted, not just by racial difference, but by images as such – the uncanny doubleness we have

Images and their Incarnations 189 been discussing (presence/absence, depiction/metadepiction, “wanting” as desiring/lacking, the stereotype as alive or dead, sterile or all too fertile). AG/ØV: It’s a good example of how the idea of “living images” enables one to think critically about images in a fresh way. Perhaps we could continue this reflection around iconoclasm and the image with reference to a specific example? One of us (Øyvind Vågnes) is currently finishing a dissertation on the Zapruder film. It consists of a series of chapters that look at various reappropriations of the film, or to stay with your terminology in What Do Pictures Want?, at some of the “habitats” where images “reside”. Reading your book has inspired the idea that such a footage strip could be considered a kind of “fabula” that we need to look at carefully in order to find out how it “desires” something new for each narrative. The concept of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, seems to open up a host of critical perspectives about the tensions that arise in the narrativization of a historical event that seems to be so strongly connected to a specific image. Do you have a response to this that you would like to share with the readers of Image and Narrative? TM: I think the Zapruder film is a perfect case of an image – or rather a whole image-sequence – “wanting” a narrative and discursive frame, in the multiple senses of wanting – i.e., needing, demanding, and lacking. The film is, from the very beginning, already a reappropriation, a doubled image in the sense that the Presidential motorcade was itself a deliberately staged “photo op”, meant to put on stage the openness and youthfulness of the Kennedy presidency, by driving through the hostile streets of Dallas without a protective bubble, his beautiful young wife by his side. The scene was, in that sense, meant to be shot – though of course not in this way. It shows the riskiness in the notion of the photo op as such, the staged production of an image which can be reappropriated and take on a significance quite antithetical to the producers’ intentions. (For a comic parallel, we might look at the “Mission Accomplished” photo op staged by the Bush administration to declare victory in Iraq, which became the subject of numerous parodies, and had to be resolutely disavowed by the White House.) The Zapruder film, once it enters mass circulation, spreading throughout the habitat of national and international imaginaries, clearly wants something, especially in the sense that it lacks and needs something, namely, an explanatory frame, a context. It becomes the central exhibit in every conspiracy theory, every judicial and journalistic investigation into the Kennedy assassination. And it reaches its apotheosis, in my view, when it is woven into the mise en scene of Oliver Stone’s JFK. There, it is as if this kernel “fabula”, as you describe it, becomes the primal scene of what Stone called a “myth”, literally (as Northrop Frye would insist) a “song about a god”. It’s as

190 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes with W.J.T. Mitchell if not just the event represented in the Zapruder film, but its grainy, out of focus, jumpy, and fragmentary character becomes the fundamental tonal structure of Oliver Stone’s cinematography in this film. As you know, I’ve written (in “From CNN to JFK” in Picture Theory), about Stone’s reappropriation of Zapruder to create a countermyth to the Warren Commission Report. And I’m delighted that you are going to give this iconic fabula or narreme a comprehensive treatment. What I  would like to learn from you in this research is what – if any – master-narrative will emerge from your survey of the entire range of habitats that this image has entered? And what does this image want from you, as a cultural historian and iconologist? You ask about ekphrasis in the expanded field. I think the effort to translate any visual experience into words, whether it involves art works or images or not, is involved in the problematic of ekphrasis. So a novelistic description of a scene or an ordinary object in everyday life is also a kind of ekphrasis. AG/ØV: Perhaps it is fitting to end this interview with looking both back and ahead. First, looking back to the historical moment that you, in Picture Theory, called “the end of postmodernism” and “the pictorial turn”, to what extent would you say that the humanities in the States and in Europe in the decade since have adequately begun to absorb both the conceptual and the institutional implications of your argument? TM: This is really an impossible question for me to answer. No one, of course, ever feels that they are adequately understood or appreciated. But I do feel that my books are read fairly widely, and often by a nonspecialist audience, one that includes artists as well as scholars. That is extremely gratifying. The one thing I find missing, I suppose, is a brilliant, well-reasoned negative critique, one that would try to dismantle the entire structure of the arguments I have been making over the last twenty years. What Do Pictures Want? may, in some semi-conscious way, be an attempt to provoke just such a critique by deliberately going “too far” with a vitalist/animist theoretical model for images. As my mentor William Blake put it: “you will not know what is enough until you know what is too much”. My linking of the pictorial turn to the end of postmodernism was probably an overhasty truncation of two different ways of framing historical periodization. The “end” of postmodernism was not simply a “beginning” for the pictorial turn, first, because postmodernism only “ended” as a name for the present moment. The pictorial turn was, in my view, already well under way, and perhaps was one part of the postmodern, especially in Debord and Baudrillard’s critique of spectacle and simulation. AG/ØV: This is a blatantly speculative question, of course, but who better to ask? Our final question is: what comes after the turn to visuality?

Images and their Incarnations 191 TM:

I’d like to amend the question to include “picturality”, and the “pictorial turn” (or “iconic turn” as Gottfried Boehm defines it) as well as the “visual turn”, because I see them as closely related, distinct, and often confused with one another. But let’s pretend for the moment that this “turn”, whatever it is, has in fact taken place in a number of different disciplines and cultural locations – in art history, media studies, cultural studies, philosophy, etc., on the one hand, and in mass or popular culture on the other. Certainly there is plenty of testimony that something of this sort has taken place. The notion that we live in a culture dominated by images, by spectacle, surveillance, and visual display, is so utterly commonplace that I am sometimes astonished at the way people announce it as if they had just discovered it. My aim has been to subject this commonplace to critical and historical analysis, to question whether and where and to what extent it is true, and what it means. And the first distinction I would want to make is between the pictorial turn as a matter of mass perception, collective anxiety about images and visual media, on the one hand, and a turn to images and visual culture within the realm of the intellectual disciplines, especially the human sciences, but also to a remarkable extent, within the natural sciences (medicine, biology, physics, neuroscience, natural history). To some extent I think of the “mass” version of the pictorial turn as a perennial and recurrent phenomenon, the turn as a cultural “trope” that recurs whenever a new image technology, a new medium, or new apparatus of spectacularization or surveillance comes along. Thus, the invention of artificial perspective, or alphabetic writing, or moveable type, or photography are accompanied by a sense that a “pictorial turn” is occurring, one which is often seen as threatening traditional modes of knowledge and behavior – or (more characteristically within modernism) threatening an atavistic return to tribalism, irrationality, superstition, illiteracy – the entire repertoire of stereotypes associated with idolatry and (let’s not leave out) ideological mystification. I would distinguish, then, this popular version of the pictorial turn from the emergence of something we might call “image science” as a site of interdisciplinary turbulence. Strange conversations are going on these days between physics and aesthetics, scientists of the eye, the brain, and that extended nervous system known as “the media”; between biologists and iconologists. Archives of scientific images accumulate, and a new, image-and media-conscious account of the history of science emerges. An inquiry into a host of related topics is inaugurated: visual culture, media studies, studies of word and image, audio-visuality and performance; visualverbal cognition; visual anthropology; visual and material culture. This form of image-science is a globally distributed phenomenon

192 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes with W.J.T. Mitchell mainly within the academy, but to a large extent beyond it as well in the realm of public and popular writing, where the commonplace notion of a pictorial turn rules. Yet all this is grounded, I think, in a utopian impulse that yearns for a critical relation to images, a way of demystifying, opposing, and critiquing their power with a counterdiscourse, a way of critically separating them into the usual binary categories:  false and true; evil and good; inauthentic and authentic; worthless and valuable; nonart and art. Image science is, in this sense, already around as a modernist science, and indeed I  have been learning this year from art historians Horst Bredekamp and Karl Clausberg at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin just how deep the roots of image science are in 19th-century Germany. Science converges on the image from more than one direction, then:  on the one side from the history of technology; from questions of representation in logic, mathematics, notational theory, writing, information and semiotics; from the realm of the perceptual, cognitive, psychological sciences. On the other side, a group of ethical, political, sociocultural, and historical disciplines converge. The critique of the image becomes a moral and political task. And iconoclasm, the destruction of idols or “images of the other”, becomes the default discourse. My suggestion is that these two sides of image science – let’s call them the “critical” and the “hypothetical” (in the sense of an empirical hypothesis) can find a common ground in the concept of the indestructibility of images as elements of consciousness and the construction of a symbolic world, a human world. Again, I do not mean that pictures cannot be destroyed, or that images of specific things cannot disappear or be forgotten. My claim is rather that images are the thing that allows matter to have memory, as Bergson might have put it, and that the intentional effort to destroy an image always guarantees its survival in some other medium. What comes after the “pictorial turn”? In view of what I’ve just been saying, my prediction is a “return to the picture” in the light of a newly formulated concept, or metapicture of the image as such. The concept of a pictorial turn opens up a new dimension of the history of culture, just as the concept of the unconscious makes us read art and literature a new way. Not just a history of images as human productions (the traditional task of iconology and art history), but a new, critical history of images that emphasizes their role as “living” historical agents at turning points in human affairs and human understanding. Horst Bredekamp calls this the Bildakt or “picture act” that is the best name we have for the necessary framework or “appropriate situation” that gives a speech act its efficacy. Art history itself was the product of an earlier pictorial turn based in photography and mechanical reproduction of images.

Images and their Incarnations 193 Our current pictorial turn is different from that:  photography itself is becoming a different medium, and (even more important) a whole new realm of image production has emerged in the life sciences, epitomized by the highly controversial and publicized process of cloning. The clone – especially the human clone – signifies the updating of the pictorial turn in our time, the literal realization of the ancient dream of creating a living image. We might call this the “biopictorial turn”, a technical advance which depends on the convergence of digital technologies with the biology. So the pictorial turn, even at the level of research in the learned disciplines, is also a cyclical and recurrent trope, even though I would not want to confuse it with the pictorial turn as matter of popular anxiety. A  pictorial turn (a turning aside to graven images and idolatry) was a constitutive moment in the development of Jewish theology, and at the same time it is narrated in the Bible as a historical moment of mass hysteria and mass murder (thousands of Israelites are massacred by their own leader for violating a commandment against idolatry that has not yet been delivered to them). Plato was responding to a pictorial turn in his arguments against the arts and the invention of writing (“writing, Phaedrus, is unfortunately like painting”). As Deleuze puts it, “Philosophy always pursues the same task, Iconology”.2 But it does not always do so under the same conditions. Iconology is now different because the technoscientific and cultural conditions of the image have changed. So when I am asked to name the cultural-historical period that we are entering or have entered, I follow Walter Benjamin word for word and call this the age of biocybernetic reproduction, in order to specify the convergence of digital technology and the life sciences that make the image what it is today. I  think this is a more adequate description of our time than “postmodernism”, which always struck me as a temporary place-holder, one that served important polemical and critical purposes in the 1970s and 80s, but has now itself been consigned to a relatively brief historical moment. As you might guess, this also means that I have some problems with that other, massively influential and ambiguous historical placeholder known as the “modern”. I lean toward Bruno Latour’s view that “we have never been modern”, and that postmodernism was an interlude whose main purpose was to help us see that. But we will never, so far as I can tell, get beyond the pictorial turn, and with it a system of “world pictures” that will lie in our language and hold us captive. First appeared in the online magazine Image and Narrative, November  2006.

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Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1888]), 32. 2 “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy”, appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 260.

Part III

Interpretive Readings

11 What Do Photographs Want? Mitchell’s Theory of Photography from the Camera Obscura to the Networked Lens Thomas Stubblefield The medium of photography assumes a number of different roles in W.J.T. Mitchell’s body of work. It is called upon to illustrate the relationship of text and images in Picture Theory, the interpenetration of representation and ideology in Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology and the shift from mechanical to biocybernetic modes of reproduction in Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Given Mitchell’s continual criticism of the universalizing tendencies of media theory, his dismissal of technocentric modes of analysis and predilection for staging arguments across rather than within specific media, attempting to extract something like a theory of photography from these diverse instances, introduces a numbers of obvious pitfalls. Recognizing these dangers, the following analysis will circumvent linear progressivist narratives and their tidy relations of causality by charting the echoes that reverberate between two seemingly disparate moments within the medium’s history. The first of these centers on Mitchell’s reading of Marx’s metaphor of the camera obscura in German Ideology and the origin of photography as a medium, while the second considers his view of the ontology of digital photographs and their relation to realism. Forming bookends to a fluid set of relations rather than a static history or photographic essence, these instances will not only circumscribe a series of questions concerning the medium of photography in Mitchell’s work, but also attempt to heed his “deliberately perverse advice” for theorists to “always anachronize”.1 In relation to the photographic theory of the last several decades, Mitchell’s work on the still image is striking for its recurring privileging of practice over the technical agency of the apparatus. Unlike, for example, Vilém Flusser who regards the camera as containing preconstituted cognitive categories that the user or “functionary” materializes via the production of images, the apparatus never precedes the social for Mitchell.2 In the context of the aforementioned historical vignettes, this methodology serves to open up the medium beyond reigning interpretations. In reference to the camera obscura, it presents the apparatus as an intermedial experience which absorbed and redistributed elements of the

198 Thomas Stubblefield magic lantern and photography at the time of Marx’s writing. Positing the operation of the camera obscura as the intertwining of empirical certainty with the fetish logic of magic, Mitchell is able to successfully align the peculiar inversions of Marx’s metaphor with the inner workings of ideology where other commentators have failed. Bringing this methodology to bear on the digital camera, Mitchell similarly presents the electronic image as not only eschewing an “in itself”, but in fact recirculating analog modes of exhibition and archival methods via specific modes of practice. This serves to undermine both the optical basis of photographic realism and persistent declarations of a “digital turn”. As this brief introduction suggests, while photography engages with a specific set of questions in Mitchell’s work, a number of key points regarding the theorist’s relation to media in general also emerge from this discussion. These include the historical heterogeneity of media forms, the status of critique as a system or science and the privileging of fetishism in understanding the viewer’s relation to images. In order to draw out these issues, this essay will read as much with as against Mitchell, contextualizing arguments and bringing together passages on photography in order to build a more coherent picture of the medium as it functions within his work. After assembling this methodological foundation, the conclusion will attempt to apply these ideas in relation to two contemporary photographic works, Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid (1990) and Penelope Umbrico’s Suns (From Sunset) (2006–ongoing).

The Camera Obscura as Metaphor and Medium In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Mitchell engages with a notoriously contradictory metaphor in which Marx describes the distortions of ideology in terms of the inner workings of the camera obscura (“in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura”). The problem that underlies this rather counterintuitive figure of speech concerns the enduring historical association of the apparatus with material certainty rather than misrepresentation, a dynamic that was if anything bolstered by the transformations the camera obscura was undergoing at the time of Marx’s writing. Rather than attempting to reconcile these tensions as many commentators before him have sought to do, Mitchell presents the contradiction as exemplary of the dialectical relations which undergird both the image’s fetish logic and the inner workings of ideology. In pursuing this reading, many of the methodological concerns that would come to inform later works such as What Do Pictures Want? and Cloning Terror are made apparent. From the pursuit of naturalism in the visual arts to the quest for scientific truths in fields such as astronomy and optics, the camera obscura has been associated with objectivity and empirical observation for most of its history.3 This correlation is reiterated in philosophical discourse where

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the apparatus is repeatedly conjured as the embodiment of rational processes and concrete materiality. While Rousseau and Descartes are critical players in this narrative, Mitchell cites John Locke’s deployment of the camera obscura as perhaps the most confounding interlocutor with Marx’s metaphor. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes: … external and internal sensation are the only passages that I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left to let in external visible resemblances or ideas of things without would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.4 As Mitchell points out, not only is Locke’s model of human understanding quite similar to Marx’s notion of the concrete concept, but so might his notion of “internal and external sensation” be considered as roughly equivalent to the latter’s “perception and imagination”. Yet despite the shared parameters that enframe the metaphor, its status is curiously reversed by Marx. While Locke uses the camera obscura to dramatize the centrality of sensory knowledge in the experience of concrete reality, Marx employs the apparatus to embody the distortions that ideology enacts with regard to these same processes (“this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”).5 This is no doubt part of Marx’s larger intent to utilize the camera obscura to enact a second order inversion in which the idealism of the Young Hegelians is “turned on its head”. He explains: “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven”.6 However, as Sarah Kofman points out, the extension of the metaphor from the apparatus to the eye introduces yet another complication through which the metaphor would seem to effectively neutralize itself. If the eye duplicates the action of the camera obscura, would this inversion of an inversion not correct the apparatus’ distortions and thereby nullifies its intervention?7 Marx’s metaphor grows even more problematic when read in conjunction with the transformations the apparatus was undergoing at the time in which his German Ideology was published. In the mid 1840s, faith in the transparency of this device was if anything bolstered by the arrival of photography. In freezing previously fleeting impressions into still images, the photographic camera allowed for an extended scrutiny that indirectly reaffirmed the empirical associations of its predecessor. Roland Barthes

200 Thomas Stubblefield even describes the operation of this new apparatus in terms of a performance which renders its interrelation with the camera obscura palpable for the photographer. He states: Technically, Photography is at the intersection of two quite distinct procedures; one of a chemical order:  the action of light on certain substances; the other of a physical order: the formation of the image through an optical device. It seemed to me that the Spectator’s Photograph descended essentially, so to speak, from the chemical revelation of the object (from which I  receive, by deferred action, the rays), and that the Operator’s Photograph, on the contrary, was linked to the vision framed by the keyhole of the camera obscura.8 The operational image of the medium preserves this prehistory of the camera obscura not simply by its presentation of animated life through the viewfinder, but through its interjection of “physical order” which the chemical order is able to re-present in symbolic form. Considering the history of the camera obscura, its afterlife in successive technologies and the symbolic associations that contribute to its cultural function and meaning, the question arises: why does Marx use an apparatus that is so heavily associated with empirical certainty to describe the distortions of ideology and false consciousness? Like Terry Eagleton, who considers the passage to be an attempt to drive home the “empirically imperceptible” nature of the real under capitalism, Mitchell is fairly dismissive of the notion that the camera obscura represents a failed metaphor.9 In attempting to recast its contradictions as dialectical relations, he instead presents the empirical reality of the camera obscura as entangled with fetishism. He does this by pushing the discussion away from the technical operation of the camera obscura and toward the domain of practice. From this perspective, the stringent notions of medium specificity and technodeterminism which undergird previous interpretations give way to a variegated mode of history in which the neutrality of apparatus is necessarily entangled with belief. Central to this reappraisal is Mitchell’s observation that, at the level of practice, the camera obscura maintained a “double reputation as both scientific instrument and ‘magic lantern’ for the production of optical illusions”.10 On the surface, this claim may appear contradictory since, as Sir David Brewster describes, the camera obscura was explicitly posited as a tool to dispel the mysticism and irrationality of its counterpart of the magic lantern. For this reason, while the magic lantern may have migrated from the realm of science to popular entertainment in the nineteenth century, the camera obscura largely retained its status as an instrument.11 However, Mitchell’s scare quotes suggest a more nuanced relationship which attempts to break down the medium specificity that undergirds such divisions. He cites Svetlana Alpers’ claim that the apparatus was not

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only used for faithfully rendering reality, but could also be transformed into “a magic lantern show” in which, for example, a king would be transformed into a beggar and back again.12 By undercutting the technical essentialism of the camera obscura, Mitchell opens up the device beyond a number of binaries, allowing it to take on contradictory roles which intertwine both technical and cultural forces as well as rational and irrational processes. The discourse surrounding the camera obscura metaphor illustrates the multiple problems Mitchell sees with the kind of medium specificity espoused by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Inscribing media within a singularity tends to foreground their technical aspect and exclude the social realm of practice. Succumbing to “the old Derridean mantra … that there is nothing outside of the media[/text]”, such a position too easily yields to what Mitchell calls “the deepest temptations of the concept of media”, that is, technodeterminism and totalization.13 Additionally, as Modernist modes of medium specificity often grant a determinative agency to media which produces subjects in a linear fashion, it is wrapped up with Mitchell’s skepticism regarding “hegemonic readings” of media history.14 This trajectory is evident in his critique of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer and its understanding of the camera obscura. In that work, Crary writes: The veracity of the camera [obscura] was haunted by its proximity to techniques of conjuration and illusion. The magic lantern that developed alongside the camera obscura had the capacity to appropriate the setup of the latter and subvert its operation by infusing its interior with reflected and projected images using artificial light. However, this counter-deployment of the camera obscura never occupied an effective discursive or social position from which to challenge the dominant model.15 Mitchell’s rather scathing critique of Crary’s work in an essay entitled “The Pictorial Turn” offers an inadvertent rejoinder to the above passage: Crary falls prey to some of the worst occupational hazards of iconology, failing to heed many of his own warnings about overgeneralization and categorical truth claims. His modest and interesting account of optical devices and physiological experiments rapidly gets inflated into “a sweeping transformation in the way in which an observer was figured”, a “hegemonic set of discourses and practices in which vision took shape”, a “dominant model of what an observer was in the nineteenth century”. Dominant for whom?16 Mitchell’s insistence upon variegated, nonessentializing media histories is part of an understanding of the apparatus as only partially containing

202 Thomas Stubblefield the sensorium, agency and/or consciousness of its users. Rejecting both the Kittlerian position that “media determine our situation” and the Derridean understanding of media as a closed system, Mitchell insists “there is always something outside the medium”.17 Approaching the camera obscura from this position allows him to reframe the contradictions of Marx’s metaphor as nonoppositional terms so that the status of objectivity that the fluctuations of light obtain within this apparatus appear as a product of the set of beliefs and practices that users bring to the instrument rather than the reverse. Mitchell’s position is bolstered by the conditions surrounding the origin of the photographic camera. As many photo historians have pointed out, the birth of photography makes for particularly messy historiography. What is puzzling about this history is not so much that its evolution is spread across a series of developments within an expanded history, although that is certainly the case, but that the medium of photography seemed to take much longer than necessary to actually come into being. After all, the camera obscura had been around for at least two millennia by the time photography arrived. Light-sensitive material such as bitumen of Judea and silver nitrate had also been in use for centuries. Bringing these two components together would, at least in hindsight, seem obvious, and yet it did not happen in a concerted way for centuries. Geoffrey Batchen and others have attributed the delay to the fact that to become commercially viable the medium needed a middle class (the early history of photography was after all driven by entrepreneurs), and it was only in the nineteenth century that such a consumer base would be delivered.18 From this perspective, the industrial revolution did not necessarily deliver the technology that made the camera possible, although it certainly allowed its manufacture and processing to proceed on a larger scale. Rather, the camera was a product of the social and cultural transformations that came about in conjunction with these changes. Given the indebtedness of the camera obscura’s successor to the capitalist mode of production, it is not unreasonable to conclude, as Mitchell does, that “the idea that such toys could provide a serious model of human understanding must have struck [Marx] as ludicrous”.19 As Mitchell puts it, the illusions of the camera obscura were the privilege of the leisured gentleman and for this reason surely constituted another “false bourgeois revolution” in the eyes of Marx. Photography’s more complicated class allegiances would have only amplified these relations of the camera obscura. Marx’s intentional inversion of the position of the apparatus was thus part of demythologizing the relations in which it was immersed. As such, the metaphor’s contradictions serve to expose ideology as what Mitchell calls a “coherent, logical, rule-governed system of errors”, a system whose tensions remain obscured by the universalizing tendencies of those readings that posit media as simple instruments of hegemonic modes of power or passive reflections of the world.20

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Mitchell’s engagement with the camera obscura metaphor illustrates not only his rejection of medium specificity, totalization and technodeterminism, but also his embrace of what he describes as “medium theory” over “media theory”. The latter approaches media “from the outside”, designating its operation as secondary to some larger symbolic system of reference, usually language, while the former operates as an “immanent metalanguage, … [often working through] metapictures that show us what images are”.21 In assigning a kind of “firstness” to images, Mitchell stages his methodology in opposition to the semiotics-based art history represented by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson in which the image’s production of meaning is understood in terms of a system or science of signs. In Mitchell’s analysis of Marx’s metaphor, images overtake the textual system of reference, reversing the directionality of the metaphor so as to free the contradictions that surround this figure. Textual references serve as interlocutors that relate dialectically rather than deterministically to the images and media conjured within the text. In turn, the apparatus is not so much a passive medium used to illustrate the ascendancy of material conditions over an absent metaphysical sphere, but rather an active agent whose production of images prompts the text to disclose these relations. In moving from the fleeting impressions of the camera obscura to the electronic images of the digital camera, I hope to not only illustrate how Mitchell’s early positions come to fruition in later work, but also dramatize an important point of his historiography – its anachronistic structure. In order to get at these circular histories that the practice of digital media produces, an investigation of Mitchell’s assessment of both the ontology of digital photography relative to its analog predecessor and its relationship to photographic codes of realism is in order.

Digital Photography, Realism and Anachronism In the 1990s, the arrival of digital photography was portrayed as compromising the medium’s historical claim to the real. These arguments posited analog photographs as “natural signs … [which] like the fossil trace, the shadow, or the mirror reflection in a still lake … carry a certificate of realism … as part of [their] fundamental ontology”.22 At the root of this unique status is the dual presence of indexical and iconic aspects of the image, which together form a symbiotic bond that the digital’s infinite malleability and overall dematerialization would appear to sever. In “Realism and the Digital Image”, Mitchell takes issue with these claims, offering a rebuttal built upon three primary gestures:  the recognition of the shifting standards by which realism as a category is defined, the rejection of the Manichean binary between digital and analog media and the foregrounding of practice over technical essentialism. On these grounds, Mitchell refutes both the claim that digital photography

204 Thomas Stubblefield maintains an ontology that is “quite different” from its analog counterpart and the correlative assertion that the medium’s relation to the referent is subject to radical revision as a result of this new ontology.23 The iconic photograph of Abraham Lincoln in his study is a composite image that appropriates the physique of John C. Calhoun for the president’s body. The empty landscape that originally framed Ulysses S. Grant in a well-known Civil War photograph was replaced in the darkroom with a smoldering battlefield for dramatic effect. As these and many other examples suggest, photography was from the beginning understood as medium whose image was subject to significant revision.24 However, the important point about this extended history of manipulation is not that it corrupts an otherwise pure transcription of reality, but rather that the medium’s claim to realism is itself embroiled in an uneasy relationship with these alterations. Consider Robert Hirsch’s description of Civil War photography: Civil War photographers expanded the definition of photographic documentation. Technical limitations and thick battlefield smoke enforced a standard of accuracy different from today’s. Photographic truthfulness was not only a question of picturing what chance placed before the camera, but of depicting the experience of war. Creating a field of representation, rather than accepting only what could be recorded as it happened in front of the camera, was an inventive act. If a studio photographer’s duty was to arrange the sitter for a specific effect, and if the resulting image was considered reality, then where were the boundaries of truthfulness when a photographer went outside of the studio?25 Hirsch’s question opens onto the many layers of contradiction that underlie the history of photographic realism, a narrative that repeatedly refutes the notion that there is an inverse relation between “doctoring” images and their attainment of realism. At the root of this paradox is the idea that an image’s status as “realistic” or “authentic” is dependent upon its ability to satisfy a shifting set of codes, and yet in doing so the representation appears to operate in the absence of codes. This sense of transparency is achieved through a variable relation, or what John Tagg calls a “constant cross-echo”, whereby images draw upon a “reservoir of similar texts” in order to formulate a reality that has no referent in the strictest sense.26 As the repetition of convention and reference sustain belief in transparency, images are granted the power to produce norms and to some degree reality itself. The productive nature of this self-sustaining relationship is critical to understanding its variability. For example, while Matthew Brady’s exquisitely arranged corpses may not have diminished the veracity of his images for nineteenth-century audiences, such overt intervention into

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the profilmic event would most likely encounter resistance in the contemporary context. Consider, for example, the widespread condemnation of a 2008 photograph of Iran’s missile test in which several additional missiles were added to the frame after the fact, or the fallout from Kate Winslet’s February 2003 “airbrushed” GQ cover. These conflicting contexts illustrate two interrelated components of Mitchell’s theory: the historical specificity of realism and the tendency of digital practice to elevate protocols of realism to an even higher standard relative to their analog predecessors. According to Mitchell, as the digital platform makes photo manipulation more readily available and easier to perform, it not only fails to undermine the medium’s claim to authenticity, but in fact has the opposite effect. Explaining this dynamic in terms of his own relation to images, he states: “I manipulate almost all the digital images that come into my computer, not in order to fake or fabricate anything, but to enhance their functionality”.27 While Mitchell’s distaste for analysis of the technical aspects of media dissuades him from explicitly saying so, there is the suggestion of a circular relationship here, another system of “cross-echo”, wherein a “backdoor” enforcement of these codes of realism occurs via the specific design and parameters of the tools by which users manipulate the image. This is precisely the interpretation of D.N. Rodowick, who regards these processes of “optimization” as operations of normalization, which promote compliance to the codes of realism. He explains: “Mitchell notes the cultural function of digital capture today is optimizing rather than challenging or subverting the norms of depictive credibility.”28 This understanding of optimization is part of Mitchell’s larger attempt to align photography with “philosophical realism”, which centers on the notion that “abstract, ideational entities are ‘real entities’ in the real world – more real, in fact, than our confused repertoire of sense impressions and opinions”.29 This position moves the discussion away from the double bind of icon and index, de-emphasizing the material component and to some degree the analogical function of photographs. In the process, it shifts the stakes of photo alteration away from the discourse of faithful transcription of reality toward the larger discursive sphere of practice. From this perspective, the interventions of digital photography tend to disappear. For this reason, it is not surprising that Mitchell maintains a deep skepticism regarding the “digital turn” and its teleological narrative of incremental development. Cataloguing the numerous ways in which digital practices reaffirm the criteria and methods of their predecessor, he concludes that experience of digital media is built upon a “highly labile and flexible” dialectical relation between digital and analog. While focusing on the tendency to output digital images in physical form, Mitchell might have also cited the continuation of materiality within the digital practice of photography  – the constant touching of

206 Thomas Stubblefield the screen that the format mandates (pressing, swiping, scrolling, dragging, pinching and spreading), the intimacy of the mobile device to the body and even the physical sensations that keyboard and mouse produce in our negotiation of digital images. If dematerialization is the underlying logic of the digital signal, then the practice of digital media can be seen as enacting various modes of rematerialization. This seems to be the central thrust of an interactive exhibit created by the designer Gabriele Meldaikyte, titled “Multi-touch Gestures”, which asks visitors to reproduce the five central gestures of touchscreen via several handmade, analog machines. In divorcing these gestures from the screen, these quirky wooden and acrylic devices excavate the often hidden physical dimension of digital devices. Returned to the physical world of gears, buttons and pulleys, the bodily movements these devices elicit present the physical language of the multitouch screen as an atavistic performance of labor, which enfolds the digital into industrialized modes of physicality associated with early-twentieth-century modes of corporeality. In revealing anachronisms within “new” media, these machines echo Mitchell’s articulation of nonlinear media histories and the correlative rejection of progressivist narratives of innovation. However, the question that inevitably follows from these interventions concerns how one is to differentiate digital and analog media if their operation is so heavily intertwined. A  common response to this question would claim that digital media is a modular and discrete system of content delivery which contrasts with the analog presentation of information as a continuum of less immediately quantifiable data. Summarizing this distinction, William Mitchell states: The basic technical distinction between analog (continuous) and digital (discrete) representations is crucial here. Rolling down ramp is a continuous motion, but walking down stairs is a sequence of discrete steps – so you can count the number of steps, but not the number of levels on a ramp.30 For W.J.T. Mitchell, however, the practice of digital media absorbs this distinction. Whether it is the pixels of a screen that bleed into one another upon illumination or the binary code of an MP3 file which manifests as the pulsations of a speaker, the discrete elements of the digital (the stairs) always manifest as an analog continuum (the ramp) at the level of experience. Corey J.  Maley’s distinction between representational format and representational medium helps to clarify Mitchell’s point. Maley defines the former as the physical or technical basis from which representation is formed, and the latter as the system or structure of representation. Working from this division, Maley concludes:  “the representational format may be discrete or continuous, although the

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representational medium … is discrete”.31 The ramifications of this relationship for digital photography are made apparent in the following passage by Lev Manovich: If we limit ourselves by focusing solely, as [William] Mitchell does, on the abstract principles of digital imaging, then the difference between a digital and a photographic image appears enormous. But if we consider concrete digital technologies and their uses [as W.J.T. Mitchell does], the difference disappears. Digital photography simply does not exist.32 Admittedly, Manovich’s remarks are meant as a provocation which seeks to undermine the hyperbolic narratives that surrounded digital media at the time. As such, the binary they present should be understood as strategic rather than literal. Nonetheless, this structure serves as a productive interlocutor for Mitchell’s theory of digital photography. Mitchell’s refusal of ontology is positioned in opposition to the “kind of vulgar technical determinism that thinks the ontology of a medium is adequately given by an account of its materiality and its technical semiotic character”.33 For Mitchell, granting a distinct technical identity to the medium is tantamount to “[isolating] the ‘being’ of photography from the social world in which it operates, and reifies a single aspect of its technical processes”.34 This fear of technodeterminism, however, appears to yield a position that is equally extreme: The notion that the digital character of an image has a necessary relation to the meaning of that image, its effects on our senses, its impact on the body or the mind of the spectator, is one of the greatest myths of our time.35 Admittedly, the privileging of practice as a category can easily bleed into a model of “empowered subjects” whose navigation of the apparatus is entirely open and free, a formula that is the very essence of neoliberal capitalism. This model of subjectivity is, however, precluded from Mitchell’s theory by the recurring appearance of the fetish logic or, more specifically, “the idol/fetish/totem triad”. Practice is embroiled with systems of beliefs, often the “bad objects of colonialism” and other means of ideology, that are embedded in actions, ideas and norms and yet do not penetrate into the apparatus. The fetish grants agency to images at the symbolic level, while preserving the pervasive bracketing of the technological that runs throughout Mitchell’s work on media. In this way, Mitchell’s work complicates the binary of Manovich’s claim as digital photography does exist, but only in the context of a specific belief system rather than a given set of technological parameters.

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Conclusion: Circulation, Rematerialization and the Networked Lens In the conclusion to this chapter, I want to briefly touch upon two works of art in order to both render some of the preceding discussion of digital images palpable and introduce a tension between Mitchell’s theories and the networked nature of contemporary photography. The first is Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid (1990), which consists of a grid of ten 8" × 10" photographs, each of which depicts a close-up of the weathered surface of a penny. While engaging with economic anxieties following the stock market crash of 1989 and the shifting role of physical money after the abandonment of the gold standard and the ascendancy of speculation, the work is also very much about photography. As each worn surface presents a material record of absent events, the pennies mirror the indexical processes of analog photography in which they are captured. With both media appearing to be under siege by the intrusion of the digital at the end of the twentieth century, the metacommentary that emerges from this entanglement of the receptive surface of the coin with that of the film camera is one of nostalgia and loss. George Baker explains: Although almost worthless, the pennies that Davey depicts are “like” photographs in many different ways:  they are objects of circulation and of use kept close to the body, in wallets and pockets; they are tokens stamped with their date. They are miniatures, enlarged by the photograph’s innate habit of holding on tight to its objectworld, progeny of the close-up and the zoom. They are obsolete, throwaway vestiges, but also keepsakes, collectors’ items, the useless avatars of blind luck or cunning thrift simultaneously. Indeed, each “Copperhead” seems a memorial to photography’s eradication, or – what amounts to the same thing – its ceaseless dedication to that which is on the verge of disappearance.36 Despites these melancholic undertones, Baker insists the ultimate aim of the artist’s intervention is to open up photography to new possibilities. As a prognostication on the future identity of the medium, Copperhead Grid is notable for shifting the conversation away from the recurring cries of dematerialization and infinite manipulation. Instead, this correlation with currency emphasizes the impending circulation of the still image and the histories that it will accumulate through this movement. The persistence of the material base of the medium, visualized in Davey’s work by both the content of the images and the physical nature of the prints themselves, attests to the enfolding of analog and digital modes that will animate this circulation. Writing on the images of Abu Ghraib twenty years later, Mitchell describes what might be considered the fully realized mode of these processes of circulation. The transformative power of these images of torture

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Fig. 11.1. Moyra Davey, Copperhead Grid, 1990; a grid of ten 8" × 10" photographs, courtesy of the artist

and humiliation confirms for Mitchell that “the main relevance of digitization is not ‘adherence to the referent’ (which is almost always, in any case, established by documentation and testimonial credentials outside the image itself) but circulation and dissemination”.37 Mitchell even suggests that the rampant immobilization and containment of human bodies in the contemporary sphere is countered by the “the rapid, virulent circulation of digitized images [which] gives them a kind of uncontrollable vitality, an ability to migrate across borders, to escape containment and quarantine, to ‘break out’ of whatever boundaries have been established for their control”.38 Clearly, the sharing of images was not born with the digital format. From cartes de visite to postcards to school photos, photography maintains an extensive history of such practices. However, the acceleration of these processes that occurs at the hand of the digital networks seems to suggest a qualitative shift in the function and role of the medium. In this relationship, the technological is not simply an extension of the prehistory of practice, but an active agent in shaping these codes. This idea is reinforced by Penelope Umbrico’s Suns (From Sunset) (2006–ongoing). The work is composed of a collection of digital images produced by a simple keyword search for “sunset” on the Flickr website. Displaying these collections of images in large formations that emphasize their repetition, sameness and anonymity, the series visualizes not only the

210 Thomas Stubblefield glut of images that comprises the digital every day, but also the synchronicity that the instantaneity and connectivity of digital networks produce. As individual suns bleed into a singular collective celestial body, an eternal sun is insinuated which dramatizes the eradication of time that takes place at the hands of the shared present of digital networks. Echoing the positions of Davey and Mitchell, Suns (From Sunset) discloses the digital iteration of photography as rooted in circulation, but does so without positing these processes as external to the medium. It is not simply that users produce and reproduce virtually the same image, a condition that could easily apply to the analog experience as well, but that these images are aggregated by metadata via the search engine and made accessible via the random access database, dynamics which maintain a formative role in constituting the discourse of photography as a medium and a practice. As such, the exceptional sameness of these images presents the practice of photography as partially predetermined by a technical infrastructure which does not merely collate images but intervenes into foundational questions regarding what constitutes a photograph and what is in fact photographable. In this way, Umbrico’s work suggests that the movement of digital images is not always transformative or uncontained, but can very well congeal into patterns of synchronization which undercut the powers of immanence that Mitchell observes in reference to the photos of Abu Ghraib. It also discloses the way in which the technical, when defined in terms of a larger network of inorganic agencies, complicates the dualism of practice and technical essence. It does this by chronicling the way in which the “liveness” of the digital image renders it always already social, engaged in a constant feedback loop with cultural codes that circumscribe photography. It is difficult to imagine, as Mitchell’s theory asks us to, how realism and questions of ontology might maintain their position “outside the image itself” within such an environment. And yet, perhaps it is precisely this door that he leaves open in his recognition of circulation as the distinguishing characteristic of digital photography.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Foreword”, in Liv Hausken (ed.),  Thinking  Media Studies:  Media Studies, Film Studies, and the Arts (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 26. 2 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1983). 3 As Sarah Kofman points out, the camera obscura was a critical component of dispelling the Euclidean notion of extrinsic vision in which the eye emits particles that bounce off of objects. Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 3. 4 Quoted in W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago,  IL: U niversity of Chicago Press, 1987), 168.

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5 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845). Available at www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm, accessed August 12, 2016. 6 Ibid. 7 Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, 2. 8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang), 10. 9 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (New York: Verso, 1978), 69 10 Mitchell, Iconology, 171. 11 Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations:  Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 47. 12 Mitchell, Iconology, 171. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Mitchell, “Foreword”, in Liv Hausken (ed.), Thinking Media Studies, 20. 15 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1992), 33. 16 W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn”, ArtForum (March 1992), 92. 17 Mitchell, “Foreword”, in Liv Hausken (ed.), Thinking Media Studies, 19. 18 Geoffrey Batchen, “Conception”, in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 22–53. 19 Mitchell, Iconology, 172. 20 Ibid. 21 Mitchell, “Foreword”, in Liv Hausken (ed.), Thinking Media Studies, 22. 22 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image”, in Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2015), 49–64, 49. 23 Ibid., 51. 24 A 2013 show at the Met Museum, titled “Photoshop”, succinctly drives home this point. The exhibition consisted of two rooms. The first was an example of nineteenth-century images that had been manipulated via darkroom techniques, and the second held contemporary prints that had been digitally edited. In addition to the historical symmetry established by the show, its Adobe sponsorship seems to drive home the point in a powerful way, as if the company’s popular Photoshop program was the product of this archeological history. 25 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social History of  Photography  (New    York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 83. 26 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation:  Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnessotta Press, 1993), 99. 27 Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image”, 50. 28 D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 103; my emphasis. The language Mitchell uses to describe this process, “optimizing”, carries a certain connotation of technophilia and efficiency; a charitable reading may suggest that this references the self-reinforcing nature of realism under the digital. 29 Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image”, 64. 30 William Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye (Cambridge, MA: 1994), 4. 31 Corey J. Maley, “Analog and Digital, Continuous and Discrete”, Philosophical Studies, Vol. 155, No. 1 (2011): 117–131. 32 Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography” (1994). Available at http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/paradoxes-of-digital-photography, accessed August 12, 2016. 33 Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image”, 51.

212 Thomas Stubblefield 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 George Baker, “Some Things Moyra Taught Me”, Frieze, Issue 130 (April 2010). Available at https://frieze.com/article/some-things-moyra-taught-me, accessed August 12, 2016. 37 Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image”, 55; original emphasis. 38 Ibid.

12 The Eyes Have Ears Sound in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Pictures from Paragone to Occupy Wall Street Hannah B Higgins

If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: If Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.

William Blake, Jerusalem, 1821 In his 1986 book, Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology, W.J.T. Mitchell describes the relationship between words and images as “a dialectical struggle in which the opposed terms take on different ideological roles and relationships at different moments in history”.1 In 1994, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Mitchell deployed this dialectics of words and images to survey the exploding range of media forming what he coined the pictorial turn of the present, a time when “it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the era of video and cybernetic technology, the age of electronic reproduction, has developed new forms of visual stimulation and illusionism with unprecedented powers”.2 Since that time, visual culture studies has become an academic discipline that examines words and images housed in different media:  painting, film, video, drawing, print, map, print layout, sign, graffiti, poster, landscape, cave, T-shirt, billboard, hologram, the small screens of personal electronics, surveillance systems and more.3 Mitchell’s most recent book, Image Science, critiques and expands this legacy, even as he laments a certain tendency to use the pictorial turn “as merely a label for the rise of so-called visual media. Such as television, video and cinema”.4 Even prior to the arrival of the “pictorial turn” as a term, mid-century Modernist criticism (especially in the visual arts) treated the image surface as paradigmatic of “the visual/aural structure of symbols as a natural division”.5 Art critic Clement Greenberg’s 1940 essay “Towards a Newer Laocoön”, for example, made precisely this claim, reaching back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 masterpiece, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.6 Both texts essentially establish the proper domains of literature and visual art in the structures of apprehension (the ear, the eye), with literature expressing the passage of time, or events, and paintings expressing the visualization of space (in Greenberg’s

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terms, the support). In this tradition, “Poetry is an art of time, motion and action; painting is an art of space, stasis and arrested action”.7 Poetry is heard or read. Painting is seen. Chapter 10 of Image Science – “There Are No Visual Media” – addresses the limitations of this overdetermined sensory bracketing of the arts, and specifically the visual arts. Mitchell explains: First, the very notion of purely visual media is radically incoherent, and the first lesson in any critical account of visual culture should be to dispel it. Media are always mixes of sensory and semiotic elements, and all the so-called “visual media” are mixed or hybrid formations combining sound and sight, text and image.8 As he describes the problem, images create visual experiences but can be evoked using all manner of sensory scaffolding. In addition to the “so-called visual media” of television, video film, paint, print, etc., less clearly pictorial media likewise produce images; script, speech, music, dance, mathematic equation, song, linguistic sign, and touch are also practicable pictorial tools since they evoke images. In sum, every medium is also an intermedium since the senses do not operate in isolation from one other.9 This chapter examines the role of the “mixed or hybrid formations combining sound and sight” in Mitchell’s picture theory and in his most vivid images. Another way to say this would be to argue that sound plays an important role in Mitchell’s theory of images. The trajectory of his books, from Iconology to Picture Theory and Image Science, offers a particularly useful sequence – a history – of the role of sound in certain highly affective pictures from the eighteenth century to the present.

Eye and Ear: Intensifying the Effect of an Image Iconology formed the groundwork for Mitchell’s exploration of how the dueling authority of images and texts in early modern Europe established the terms for the present. For example, Chapter  5, “Eye and Ear:  Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility”, begins by theorizing “Mute Poesy and Blind Painting”, which challenges the “reductions of the arts to the senses proper to their apprehension”10 by recounting instances that put particular stress on the association of poetry with speech and painting with vision.11 Beginning with Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone (Comparison, in English), the chapter describes the moment when Europeans came to see themselves as connected to an objective and reasoned world by the eye (as receiving likenesses that are handed down to the other senses for judgment). For Leonardo, the increasingly primary status of vision placed the visual art of painting at the top of the hierarchy of the arts – its (painting’s) objectifying power

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approximating the objectivity of science, versus the abstraction necessary for the apprehension of poetry or music.12 In disentangling Leonardo’s bias toward the visual, Mitchell’s chapter depicts how power is naturalized through, and even concealed by, the association between vision and cold, hard facts or, at the very least, their appearance. Through the process of illusion-making, of course, painting became at once the best truth-teller and the most duplicitous servant of lies because of the inherent illusionism of linear perspective. Insofar as it takes acts of judgment to determine which is which (whether truth or illusion), this emerging emphasis on the visual generated a newly modern, visual “image-based theory of the mind”.13 Knowing became seeing, seeing became believing, and so forth. The modern world would leave behind a world spoken into existence by divine utterance in order to be reconstituted on a plain of objective facts and the rule of reason. Or so Leonardo seemed to think. As argued by Mitchell, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke’s debate on the French Revolution provides a knotty example of the evolving dialectic of word and image two centuries later.14 Burke’s 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, argued that the sublime is best suited to expression in words and the beautiful to expression in images. The chapter compares Burke’s passionate defense of the sublime power of poetry to express the summit of human emotions (as against the insipid, decadent, beautiful effects of Rococo painting), to his subsequent, intensely negative reaction to the French Revolution thirty years later.15 Mitchell finds expression of this surprising inconsistency in the presence of two sublimes in Burke’s early Philosophical Enquiry: In modern rhetorical terms, we might say that the first theory [of the sublime] is based on metaphor and similitude, the notions of likeness and resemblance; the second is metonymic, grounded in arbitrary, customary linkages. The second sublime is the moderate one because its basis in acculturated, conventional feeling imposes a boundary on the passions, while the visual, speculative and imaginative sublime has no boundaries, and is the sort of passion that leads to revolution … Burke’s preference for the moderate verbal sublime is consistently exemplified by an analysis of language as primarily an oral, not a written medium.16 Basing his sublime on “acculturated, customary linkages” establishes the logic whereby, at the very moment when the French Revolution is summarily brushing aside the system of monarchy using the “rule of law” of written constitutions, Burke defends the archaic, orally generated legal system of Saxon kings. This oral tradition would be (by definition) based on custom, on the rules set by monarchy and habit, or kingship and

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kinship. Even when such systems are written down, as in the British legal tradition, the function of writing as a transcription of an existing oral system means that legal conventions inscribed in writing necessarily serve the “habit and manners” of defenders of the status quo. Within Burke’s system, in other words, the proper function of writing, even perhaps outside the confines of legal texts, is structurally closed to the unbounded “speculative and imaginative sublime” of revolution. Burke’s emphasizing the spoken origin of written law in this account goes a long way toward explaining his animosity toward Thomas Paine’s passionate defense of the constitution of revolutionary France. Paine describes that “A constitution is a thing antecedent to government, and a government is only a creature of a constitution”.17 Describing an event, the Revolution, in terms of events and people structured according to a system of emerging universal rights, Paine’s view of the revolution became “a Puritan allegory in the emblematic tradition of the dissenters”.18 The resulting two articulations for constitutions (Paine’s visible/ speculative/textual and Burke’s customary/oral), closely resemble the two sublimes of Burke’s text. Burke scorned the French revolution as launched by “swinish multitudes” who invaded the apartments of the poor and naked Queen and violated “the most splendid palace in the world … swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses”.19 Paine retorted that Burke’s “horrible pictures”, for these descriptions were pictures of a verbal kind, were merely vivid, a sensationalized version of actual events intended to scare the public. Sound enters the picture in the form of unstructured utterances (the opposite of the oral basis for written law) which plays a crucial role in conveying Burke’s disgust to the visual imagination. Burke again: the disrobed, royal couple is torn from the palace “amidst the shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies” of hurled, verbal insults.20 Sound (it would seem) is essential to the effectiveness of the negative spectacle of revolution. Indeed, as argued by Mitchell and others, this highly theatrical depiction had historic effect, encouraging a rejection of the Revolution by most of the British public and generating international support for the counterrevolution of Napoleon.21 Clearly, sound functions in Burke’s “horrid pictures” as an excess of communication. A  “shrilling” scream is physically penetrating, jarring, alarming, the addition of “ing” underscoring that the scream does something besides merely being shrill. The scream becomes active, surpassing the capacity of words to communicate the feeling of the moment as whoops, howls and spontaneous cryings-out all penetrate and reshape the world of the revolutionary and the reader. Similarly, the “frantic dance” portrays a body colonized by an unraveling rhythm, the embodied fury of the revolutionary besting the stable pulse of music, whether waltz or folk dance. “Infamous contumelies” invoke images of foaming-at-the-mouth

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curses, disgraceful name-calling and humiliating gestures, depicting the contempt of a feral public that has lost its taste for polite and properly socialized speech. In all three cases (shrilling scream, frantic dance and infamous contumelies) the image of revolutionary fervor is presented to the reader through the capacity of sound to alter both the actual bodies and the environment of the fervent public. Mitchell contrasts this audiovisual spectacle to the deliberate, pictorial symbolism of Paine’s version of events, a version characterized by the “emblematic tradition of dissenters”, where visual symbols (emblems) engender imaginative play and critical reflection. Paine, for example, ties a sequence of iconic images to John Bunyan’s 1678 Pilgrim’s Progress: The Bastille was to be either the prize or the prison of the assailants. The downfall of it included the idea of the downfall of despotism, and this compounded image was become as figuratively united as Bunyan’s Doubting Castle and Giant Despair.22 In Bunyan’s book, the lead character, Christian, holds (and has always held) the key that opens all the doors out of the allegorical prison of doubt, emblematized as a castle whose analog here is the real Bastille. The storming of the notorious French prison is compared to the pivotal moment in the allegory when salvation (in the French case, enlightenment) becomes a matter of pursuing a path to its logical destination. Not surprisingly, many editions of Bunyan’s books contained a map  – all the better to interact with an objectively imagined field of emblems laid out objectively. Merged with the actual events of the Revolution, this figurative pair renders Paris as a field of emblems brought to life by real dissenters. Paine repeatedly stressed the visual as against the oral tradition in determining the just basis for governance: “A constitution is not a thing in name only, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in visual form, there is none”.23 Mitchell rightly concludes, “Burke’s constitution was thus both political and aesthetic”, and enormously persuasive by virtue of its rhetorical excess. Sound, it would seem, is fundamental to the production of the excessive image. With his visual symbol system firmly at the helm, Paine’s aesthetic formulation of the constitution was comparatively open to the speculative, imaginarily open-ended (in the sense of unknown) revolutionary process. By contrast, Burke’s reliance on sound in his sublime depiction of the Revolution demonstrates a sense of the capacity of sound to structure and alter the real.24 Both versions, Mitchell notes, were pictorial, and each took aim at the other using the logic of iconoclasm. The most vivid descriptions in Mitchell’s subsequent picture theory often occur when sound animates or overwhelms the visual, intensifying its capacity to communicate time, motion, action and feeling. Put

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differently, the auditory appears within the visual spectacle repeatedly in Mitchell’s theory as a marker of rhetorical excess, as a means of expanding the objectifying role of the visual in depicting (as crisp, as stable, as obvious) the relationships between things, and between things (including people) and space. Part of the mechanism that produces this excess no doubt lies in the biobehavioral function of sound. A noise makes a head turn to see what is coming. Seeking the source, the coordinated sensorium of the thinking person guides the eyes in the world of the as-yet-unseen. It follows that sound is a bellwether (no pun intended) of both danger and joy: the shrill cry of man or beast, things that go bump in the night, a loved one’s voice after an absence, the familiar sounds of domesticity, the cry of a newborn. The Western philosophical tradition is rich with exactly this association between sound and direct or lived experience. Martin Heidegger’s description of sound is typical: “What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling”.25 In other words, sound is direct, and not (as language presumably is by contrast) a matter of translation or interpretation. We first hear the thing, in other words, not the word that describes the thing. Another example of this principle of directness, this time from French philosophy and defining instead the idea of music’s distance from language, would be Roland Barthes’s depiction of music as specifically antilinguistic in Image–Music–Text. Barthes asks the reader to “displace the fringe of contact between music and language”, and replace this intermedial region with the granularity, the grain, of the individual voice or experience of the direct encounter between the performer’s body and the instrument.26 Whether on the side of sounds in the world, or music in the music hall, in other words, both modern authors (standing in for vast and complex traditions in Germany and France that are not my main concern) attribute a radical directness to things heard. This ideal of the directness of sound and music can be imported to pictures, and often is. Of course, as with the multisensory character of vision and visual art, sound is not only heard. It is also felt in the vibrations on the surface of the skin of sound’s beholders, and this, too, may be depicted in images. The frantic dance suggests as much. Given this deep history, perhaps it comes as no surprise that the appearance of sound seems to intensify the effect of an image, localizing it in the world of physical experience in the here and now. Burke’s effectiveness at evoking horror counters the idea that visual art and literature do not change, cannot change or should not even try to change the world. Another way to put this would be to say his “horrible pictures” did the trick. Mitchell explains: Burke produced a poetry that made things happen, both in life and art. His very success may help us to see why there could be a certain

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attractiveness in a notion of art that would make nothing happen, one that would turn Burke’s poetry away from real politics into a politics of sensibility, a revolution in feeling, consciousness, and “all the mighty world/Of eye and ear”.27 It stands to reason that the disengagement of art from the social in the form of “art for art’s sake” would be, by equal terms, a means of dividing the arts from each other (modernist media purification), separating them by sensation (the eye from the ear) as well as striking from the evaluation of art all manner of social function, a politics of sensibility. Mitchell concludes “[T]he senses, the aesthetic modes, and the act of representation itself continue to fall back into the history from which we would like to redeem them”; this falling back situates the eye and ear as separate sensory systems locked in historical, if productive, antagonism.

The Listening Eye: A Dialectical Evolution In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell considers Robert Frank’s giving up photography after The Americans. What might his depiction in photographs of sound and music, and specifically American music (the pop, jazz and rock and roll of jukeboxes), tell us about his rejection of the art form? These are not merely images of musical subject matter; rather, Mitchell describes how music affects the form and personhood of Frank’s subjects in ways designed to move the viewer to identify with them. “But The Americans is also an acknowledgment of a distinctly American sublimity,” he writes: [T]he baroque radiance of the jukeboxes … weaves a music into these photographs that may have been mere noise to the refined European ear of Theodor Adorno, but is the focus of ecstasy and absorption to Frank’s listening eye. I see him in the face of the young woman grooving on the sounds coming from the jukebox in “Candy Store – New York City”, and in the hands of the young man mimicking a clarinetist in the foreground.28 In art historical circles, the language of absorption is widely associated with the art historian Michael Fried. Fried’s masterful Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot identifies the depiction of the subject’s rapt attention in a task (utter absorption) as a benchmark of early modern art.29 Fried describes the turn toward the modern as an engagement with the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist, that he was not really there, standing before the canvas; and that the dramatic representation of action and passion, and the causal and instantaneous

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In this account, absorption stands in opposition to theatricality, the getting suckered in by mere action, ornament, the merely dramatic, the distracting, the fake and the ecstatic. It stands to reason, especially given the theatrical tastes in the Rococo era of Diderot that drives Fried’s argument, that absorption requires a certain quiet habit, the ability to focus, to turn away from the frippery and amusement of court culture. Absorption belongs to the quiet occupations of reading, letter writing, scientific and scholarly inquiry, and (if we expand the term to the era of Modern art) the contemplation of the flat surfaces and mute forms of abstract art. Significantly for my purposes, Fried argues explicitly that absorption is communicated visually, writing that its cognitive benefits would “above all … reach the beholder’s soul by way of his eyes”.31 The act of concentrating on the image, like the subject in the image itself, evokes precisely the visually determined “image-based theory of the mind” and human subject described already in Mitchell’s Iconology. By ignoring the spectator, the girl (who grooves) and the man (who mimics) precisely enact absorption as understood by contemporary art historians since Fried. As in Burke’s “horrid pictures”, the vividness of the image is produced by the invocation of sound and music. In this case, however, the musical form contains the subject, meaning these young listeners do not exceed its rhythms (they are not frantic) or melodies (they do not scream). Rather, Frank’s dancing and playing figures combine “ecstasy and absorption”, sound liberating and transforming the body dancing to a jukebox tune and mimicking a saxophone while also affirming its sociality. “Candy Store  – New  York City” thereby departs explicitly from the normative account of absorption. If ignoring the audience (which Frank’s picture does) resonates perfectly with the historic emergence of absorption, this image adds an auditory component to it. Frank’s image therefore departs, through sound, from the high art orthodoxy of its art world, for that is what the principle of absorption in and as art had become for modern artists by the time this picture was taken in 1959. The jukebox, by this account, is no mere automat used to deliver mechanically recorded music at the slip of a coin. Rather, the chamber’s light is resplendent, the celestial fires of stained glass and candlelight liberated into the secular domain where the integrated spectacle of sound and vision form a woven picture, in the sense of sound threading through and shaping the image for the viewer. In opposition to the proscriptive musical modernism of the philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno, Frank’s audience is treated to the immersive “ecstasy and absorption”, of a good groove. The people closest to the jukebox listen with closed eyes, their bodies slightly blurred, and they physically yield, moving to the music.

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“Frank’s listening eye”, in other words, expresses the sonorous, immersive sublime of jukeboxes and the street in the modern American city, providing a pictorial space for the beholder to imaginarily connect to a young woman who grooves and a young man who mimics a clarinetist. Even as they ignore us, the viewers, the dancer and clarinetist inhabit a world (at that moment) constituted by sound. Given their closed eyelids, surely it is no accident that the background of the photograph shows a partial sign, presumably for a manufacturer of window blinds, that says, simply, “Made Blinds”, as if the sound emanating from the jukebox had closed the eyes of the young audience, transforming them (amusingly) into a generation of isolated, monadic “made blind” people even as their “made blindness” is what they have in common. The power of sound in Frank’s images is much like Burke’s, depicting shared experiences between the people as well as a level of rhetorical excess, albeit clearly with the opposite social intention. We are to be horrified by Burke’s verbal pictures of the revolution, but engaged – in shared alienation – with Frank’s. Mitchell again: Frank’s great gift was his ability to convey alienation (that all-purpose cliché) from up close and within, a position of sympathy, intimacy, and participation. America may be a segregated society … but it is also a place where racial mixing is as natural as mother’s milk … or the sounds coming from the jukebox.32 Music, like the depiction of sounds more generally, generates a sense of shared physical space, a space of “sympathy, intimacy, and participation” that, while fleeting (“America may be a segregated society”), links us one to another. Frank’s photographs conveying “alienation … from up close and within, a position of sympathy, intimacy, and participation” speak very specifically to the intermedial nature of these photographs as conveying a sense of separateness (alienation) and togetherness at the level of the sensory apparatus. The eyes are closed by choice for the closest listener, indicating the capacity of the human being to carefully gauge and adjust the sense ratio for him- or herself. Other figures in the photograph watch the two and each other, effectively modeling the real social experience of the emerging world of the mass mediated sensorium. Sociologists describe the relationship to the emerging technologies of recorded and televised media in the 1950s as generating newly one-directional communications personalities in a new “parasocial” realm, where potentially intimate-seeming relationships with a media persona create the kind of real sociality depicted in Frank’s photograph. “Sympathy, intimacy and participation” here signify a range (from observing and sympathizing to doing and participating) of options for engagement in the social world of the image as well as our viewing of it:

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Hannah B Higgins To say that he is familiar and intimate is to use pale and feeble language for the pervasiveness and closeness with which multitudes feel his [the star’s] presence. The spectacular fact about such personae is that they can claim and achieve an intimacy with what are literally crowds of strangers, and this intimacy, even if it is an imitation and a shadow of what is ordinarily meant by that word, is extremely influential with, and satisfying for, the great numbers who willingly receive it and share in it.33

But this is no mere fantasy: The relationship of the devotee to the persona is, we suggest, experienced as of the same order as, and related to, the network of actual social relations. This, we believe, is even more the case when the persona becomes a common object to the members of the primary groups in which the spectator carries on his everyday life. As a matter of fact, it seems profitable to consider the interaction with the persona as a phase of the role-enactments of the spectator’s daily life.34 To choose the reality of the “Made Blinds”, in other words, indicates the depicted subjects’ choice of an absorptive (and therefore alienated from the immediate) world that opens up to (a range of) sympathetic, intimate and participatory involvement in another. In this image, at least, the mechanism for this exchange is sound. The same might be said of Mitchell’s choice of Frank’s Political Rally – Chicago (Man with Sousaphone) (1959) later in the same chapter. The image depicts the figure’s head and torso completely covered by the open face (the bell) of the enormous, brass sousaphone, the instrument that forms the beefy bassline of American marching bands closely associated with the composer John Phillip Sousa.35 The performer’s right hand stretches wide to press the keys: “OOMPAH!” He stands in front of a blank wall, lacking all interaction with his fellow musicians whose arms frame the picture. “OOMPAH!” Imagine the vividly intense experience of sound entering the body if such an instrument – “OOMPAH!” – were to blow, full volume, from so close – “OOMPAH!” – at hand. The experience is absolute, rendered uniquely totalizing by the presence of sound. Conversely, the player cannot see where he is going. All directionality for this marcher would be dictated by the marching feet to his front and sides. As if to underscore the mindless patriotism of the time, stars-andstripes bunting emerges from the figure with a lean line of fabric hitching the crisp pennant graphic to the bell of the instrument. If this were a cartoon it would be a speech bubble:  “The flag!!! The flag!!! Rally round ye mindless public!!!” Perhaps this is what Mitchell means when he describes how the decapitated sousaphone player depicts a “kind of

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wound he [Frank] was sensing in the national character” as a consequence of the blind patriotism of Cold War propaganda.36 More immediate than the longer-term associations between sound, absorption and bodily submission that I  have described in Mitchell’s account thus far would have been the memory of the role of recorded and amplified sound in orchestrating the submissive public of Hitler’s Germany. True, the radio played a crucial role in the Allies’ victory as well as in the Resistance and in propagandizing behind German lines. But memories of the mass rallies of the Third Reich and the use of marching bands (daily through occupied Paris, for example) gave politically astute members of the American public pause during the Cold War. The McCarthy era revived the mass rally, an irony apparently lost on our headless sousaphone player and his general public. As described by Mitchell, “I mentioned earlier that Frank’s images of jukeboxes implied a ‘listening eye’, as if it were just as important for a photographer to use his ears as his eyes”.37 It is no wonder that Frank gave up taking pictures. It was not enough to be seen. He also wanted to be heard. In summary, What Do Pictures Want? can be described as offering a dialectical evolution in Mitchell’s deployment of the role of sound in images. The idea of directness that was critical in Mitchell’s description of the Burkean moment is no doubt still in play. However, in this later timeframe of 1959, and in the emerging media culture of America, the depicted capacity of sound to take over bodies does not render them feral and horrible – or rather, it does not necessarily do so. Instead, sensory ratios have become adjustable within a shifting media landscape. By virtue of the isolation of sound in recordings (be it in the format of record or radio) by the 1960s, sound was easily moved around to different physical and social spaces, and used to shape a wide variety of physical and social experiences. Even as it became separated in space and time from its source, however, its associations with direct experience remained intact, rendering an emergent audiovisual world of parasocial media.

Making the Invisible Visible Sound, as we shall see in Mitchell’s most recent accounts, has moved to the very center of the media spectacles of contemporary culture in ways that are both consistent with and distinct from the historical record. Cloning Terror puts the matter succinctly:  “As Marshall McLuhan predicted, the electronic age produces a diabolical reversal at the level of social interaction, fusing archaic and modern forms of human behavior, tribalism and alienation, visceral embodiment and digital virtuality”.38 In Cloning Terror the “twin inventions” of computer and genetic engineering animate pictures through the process of animal and digital cloning, a process in which images (like viruses) go viral, and hybrid lifeforms and images evolve as fast as they can be conceived. People become more

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separated and more connected, able to communicate and experience familial and tribal connections across vast distances while losing all sense of communality with someone a few feet away. The viral meme depicts a hooded torture victim made to stand on a box hooked up to live wires with his hands outspread in a perverse echo of the image of a suffering Christ, the iconic “man of sorrows” (see Fig. 12.1). He stands somewhere in the nameless warren of rooms of Abu Ghraib, the notorious American prison in Iraq where degrading torture was carried out by the hands of American soldiers. “Imagine”, writes Mitchell, “yourself balancing precariously atop a cardboard C ration box with electrified wires attached to your fingers and genitals, stifled and blinded by a hood”.39 Like Frank’s sousaphone man, the power of the image has in some part to do with the effect of the hood in isolating the figure from his context, in effect performing a kind of symbolic decapitation while also evoking an anonymity that makes this an image of Everyman. Unlike Franks’ image, which is all sound, the hood isolates sound from its source. Imagine a jeering voice or, conversely, a cry for help. Turn your head here? Nothing. There? Nothing. Nothing. The most horrible sounds are visually decoupled from their source. The effect compounds the terror, a device widely deployed in the arts in the black spaces of horror films, haunted houses, etc. Mitchell describes the man as “absorbed in pain and terror only he can feel, accompanied by the menacing anticipation of electrocution to come if he steps off his box”.40 The image depicts a person for whom visual contact with the torturer (and the viewer) has been denied. Sound would, of course, be multisourced. From outside the hood, the hooded man would hear the taunting utterances of the torturers, the ambient sounds of the prison (including the screams of other victims) and perhaps the 24/7 blare of heavy-metal music used to torture through sleep deprivation and sound overload elsewhere in the prison. From inside, the low thud of the torture victim’s pulse would be animated by the fuel of adrenalin, grounded by his breath, attuned to the whining scream of his own terribly taut nerves, his voice perhaps to connect with his tormenters on the other side of the encasing void. As described above, he has been “stifled and blinded”, denied the communicating power of speech, the hood performing its most immediate function as an instrument of visceral claustrophobia. The circumstance, as we have seen with the role of sound in Mitchell’s pictures generally, is one of utter absorption, as forced on the victim and imagined by the viewer of the image. Indeed, it could be argued (and has been) that the power of this iconic image of Abu Ghraib lies precisely in its erasure of the identity of the victim and (therefore) viewer alike, creating sensory identifications across the roles, a bland anthropomorphism generating a sense of stately and dignified frontality that artists the world over exploited, in silhouette form: “[T]he image rapidly mutated into a

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Fig.  12.1. “Hooded man from Abu Ghraib”. Image of a prisoner, Ali Jalal Qaissi, being tortured in Iraq in 2003

global icon … The man with the Hood appeared throughout the world, on television, over the Internet, in protest posters, and in murals, graffiti, and works of art from Baghdad to Berkeley”.41 Mitchell had already systematically eroded the idea of the purely visual emphasis in photography in his account of Frank. He continues here: But the most important error in Danto’s account is the generalizing claim that photography cannot show the invisible. If there is one thing that the Abu Ghraib photos can be said to have done, it is to make visible what would otherwise have remained invisible.42 His extraordinary account of the power of these images, and particularly the bagman, continues through an in-depth study of various Christological types (as supplicant, prayer, blessing, tortured, descending to hell). One particular example, chosen as Plate Four of the few color plates in Mitchell’s book, depicts Hildegard von Bingen’s Imago Mundi from a medieval codex (see Fig. 12.2). In the image, Adam is depicted as containing the world as he, the human figure, is encompassed by Christ: “As the clone of the father, Christ is the perfect divine, imago dei [image of god], while the imperfect Adam is the imago mundi [image of earth]”,43

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the nonphysical (or for our purposes digital) copy containing the visceral world. Significantly, Hildegard von Bingen was a composer, and the image depicts Adam subjected to fire, water and (most dominant in the image) the breath of animals situated at the cardinal, secondary and tertiary directions. “In the beginning was the word”, presumably spoken, and these figures are in some manner word made flesh. From deep in the medieval past, in other words, Mitchell found an image of the world constituted through song, a universe breathed into being, the language of the music of the spheres certainly a familiar concept for this composer, who depicts herself at the lower left of the image. That world constituted through the word and song is, following McLuhan, in some ways much like our own. We now imagine ourselves constituted by a Big Bang. Walking through New York’s SoHo in 2004, Mitchell found the image of the Man with the Hood stealthily integrated into the neon-colored grid of an iPod billboard, the silhouetted dancers with their cords linking ear and device mingling alongside silhouettes of the man with a hood produced by Forkscrew Graphics. He describes the image specifically in terms that expand on the sensorial range of images that depict utter absorption: “Perhaps the best way to understand the iPod/iRaq culture jamming is to analyze the relation between the self-pleasuring dancers, narcissistically absorbed in music only they can hear, and the self-torturing stasis of the hooded man”.44 The self-consciously free gestures of the dancers seem (by virtue of their proximity) to taunt the man forced to stand in a stress position, these icons of free movement depicting an increasingly wired human sensorium. These human shells, for that is what a silhouette is as an image exclusively of exteriority, reach back to the shrilling cries of revolution, with its frantic dance in Burke’s account of the French Revolution. However, in the handheld listening device, sound is personal, generating an absorption in … the self. Significantly, the absorptive mode in both has to do with sound and the impact of sound on vision. The bagman sees nothing by force; the iPod dancer has bracketed out the world by choice. Both are, to varying degrees, blind. He continues: The intervention of the Bagman icon into the iPod iconography is nothing more (or less) than a provocative thought on a host of issues – the relation of art and politics, of pleasure and pain, motion and stasis, wired bodies, technologies of the sensorium, torture and sexuality.45 Of course, by exchanging the sounds of the immediate world for musical soundtracks, podcasts and conversations, the new technologies of the sensorium also link individuals to broader, more distant publics. These distant publics are linked together in a net-system rooted in each through a plastic “bud” planted, seedlike, into the brain itself where it presumably blooms.

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Fig. 12.2. Hildegard von Bingen, Imago Mundi; Latin codex, eleventh–twelfth century. “Visions of saint Hildegard of Bingen, Book of the Works of God”. Depiction of Adam subject to universal forces (air, water and fire)

In accounts of contemporary warfare, as in video games about contemporary warfare, blasting rock music figures heavily in producing the absorptive experience of violent combat, driving the sublime experience of war further into the subject of the real or imagined soldier at the same time as the actual world (of distractions from the task at hand)

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beyond that soldier is driven away from his specular sublime. The artist Harun Farocki’s Serious Games I–IV (2009–2010), for example, deploys the video game technology used to train American soldiers and to treat them for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder using Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy, giving evidence for how self-guided robots and the screens of aerial weaponry blur the boundaries between real world, surveilled world and game.46 The setting for Part III Virtual Iraq, for example, is a virtualreality version of an actual fabricated town in California built for war exercises, complete with the smell of roasting lamb, audio of apparent calls to prayer, stereotypical (and disguised) Muslim men, the sounds of war, explosive devices and the desert landscape.47 The point is not that music constitutes the spectacle or does not, but that its shifting place in the sensorium results in, by equal turns, an intensification of the spectacle and/or a bracketing of the real as well as the opposite (a challenge to the specular and intensification of the real). As Mitchell notes in his most recent book, Image Science, each medium constructs an inside and outside to itself. The iPod and the bagman images demonstrate the principled fact that “Every turn toward new media is simultaneously a turn toward a new form of immediacy”.48

A City of Music: Toward Sonic Images The current, perceived state of apathy, particularly among youth, who historically (we imagine) might have struck out in support of political change across the globe, is reflected in the now-familiar scenes of groups of youth absorbed, instead, in their devices. They are as ubiquitous in American shopping malls as on hipster street corners and in refugee camps the world over. The collapse of the Arab Spring and the hideous civil war in Syria has not awakened any yearning for American intervention. On the contrary, Americans, and much of the first world, seemingly thoroughly weary of war, longing only to be left alone.49 Academia in general, not to mention adults across the political spectrum (but especially at the extremes), proliferate doomsday scenarios about the end of caring, the collapse of literacy, the neoliberal core of the problem (or the socialist origin of it). Guy Debord’s voracious Society of the Spectacle, in becoming surveillant, now gorges itself on the most intimate details of our lives using instruments we carry into our home (the internet of things), wear on our person (smartphones, smart clothing) and swallow into our bodies (medical monitoring devices and surgical instruments). As private lives become public entertainment, as governments and corporations seem to dig deeper and deeper into our private lives, a dispiriting passivity seems

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to speak of nothing more or less than a generation’s throwing in the towel. Big money seems more in control than ever, as the goliath of neoliberal economics is poised to eviscerate the middle class in the US and abroad. Paranoia, it seems, is paramount. At the same time, however, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the Tea Party and various forces for political change (across the spectrum) move at lightning speed across the internet – “our internet” as the demagogue Donald Trump recently described it.50 The internet, it should be remembered, is a landscape medium and is therefore a real and imagined place. “There is always something outside a medium” is, after all, one of Mitchell’s ten axioms.51 The closing chapter of Image Science, “The Spectacle Today: A Response to Retort”, demolishes the neatness of the apocalyptical cynicism that is overwhelmingly dominant in discourse from the polarizing wings of the political spectrum. As handled by Mitchell’s deft pen (if I may use a nearly obsolete metaphor), the contemporary scenario is much more complex as the public enters a timeframe when, thanks to the online journalism of folks like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, “surveillance has itself become a spectacle”.52 In the set-up for his closing argument, Mitchell warns that: Spectacle seeks to take power over subjects by distracting them with illusions; surveillance, by contrast, functions in the register of realism, taking power over subjects by treating them as objects subjected to a penetrating gaze that knows where they are and hears what they are saying.53 But the Orwellian two-way screens of 1984 are now handheld, carried around, and their images can be projected back into an increasingly complex world. The screens of 1984 were universal, one-directional and panoptic. Today’s are multidirectional. He adds that “We are stuck with the language of Modernity, Capital and Spectacle as the ‘idols of the mind’ we have inherited”, but thankfully he offers the reader an alternative that locates sound at the center of his image: I propose, then, that we treat these as “eternal” idols in the Nietzschean sense, as icons that can be sounded but not smashed with the hammer – or better, the tuning fork of critical reflection … In my view we must sound the images of the spectacle, not dream of smashing them.54 This image of Nietzsche’s tuning fork offers an alternative. Political campaigns of outsider candidates, in the US and elsewhere, link the two systems – the base levels of capital capable of being tuned, attuned, perhaps sometimes even turned against a hyperelastic, rapidly changing

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superstructure through the ever widening bell of information exchange, to borrow once again from the imagery of the sousaphone. Mitchell continues: “I cast my lot in with the devils of Milton who take the path of production, inventing new technologies, building a city with music, and endlessly debating the fundamental questions of philosophy.”55 This world, our contemporary one, was imagined as the result of a Big Bang, which, it turns out, is no mere metaphor. Inaudible as music in the physical sense, ours is a universe of light and dark matter, pockets of space where spacetime collapses, where time speeds up and slows down, where dimensions that far outpace our perceptive apparatus nevertheless hum with our own. To be sure, beating the drum of transformation takes work, and it would be foolish to diminish the risk or real resistance in a thunderous hallelujah of mere song and dance, which effect personal change (to be sure) but likely do not do much to move populations, or to feed or clothe them. However, we run the risk of no change at all when “Modernity, Capital and Spectacle” become the kinds of “idols of the mind” whose death we imagine we can effect by simply smashing them, or become (at the hands of too many of my scholar colleagues) the kind of flatfooted critique that ensures our irrelevance for most contemporary students and folks living in the world, or hoping to better their situation in it. In his critique of Retort Collective’s Afflicted Powers:  Capital and Spectacle in the New Age of War in the last chapter of Image Science,56 Mitchell offers the reader a suggestion that leads back to the very beginning of his career. “This is a good time”, he advises, “to be rereading Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell”.57 Having never read it in its entirety, I decided I would. In it, Blake attacks the architects of a Christian heaven (theologians), who build a world of false distinctions between sins (usually of the body, but including false piety) and who, like gods, made a pretence of guaranteed tickets-to-heaven that engender the blind rulefollowing smugness of the devout. In terms that challenge the streamlined moral orthodoxies of all kinds, Blake describes the many commandments Jesus broke to save his disciples, writing “No virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules”.58 Blake’s poem describes a journey taken by the poet with an angel to view his destiny. He is shown a giant void full of suffering animals and pestilence and, of course, hellfire. At the moment when the poet is liberated from the predictable imagery, when he realizes he has been drawn into a figment of the missionary-Angel’s imagination, the poet finds himself alone: I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river, by moonlight, hearing a harper, who sung to the harp; and his theme was:  “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind”.59

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Blake reappears in the brilliant coda to the book, which argues passionately for a “For a Sweet Science of Images” alongside Nietzsche’s tuning fork. “For Blake”, writes Mitchell, “sweet science is a form of Enlightenment that sets its face against the ‘dark religions’ that mobilize war and destruction”.60 He continues with an exquisite series of descriptions of how this sweet science offers tools to scholars that are more subtle than those we generally procure in the scripting of our scenarios. The last sentences of the coda weave together the most recent of his musicinfused images, this time in an admonition that we, writers on images, image makers and image placers, attune our task a little differently. We are given a pair of apparently mismatched iconic images (a mechanic’s wrench that turns, a boxing glove that strikes) and asked to deploy them both in a manner that resonates structurally and materially, as music does, with the world we encounter: Of course, in practice the two functions resolve into a single complex relation of subjects and objects, beholders, artists, pictures and worlds. Perhaps the two functions of striking and turning are precisely what gets combined in Nietzsche’s figure of the tuning fork, which strikes idols without destroying them, making both the instrument and the object resonate to the sweet music of image science.61 This sonic image comes as no surprise, for this world-shaping, responsive function of music has been there all along in Mitchell’s most vivid pictures, and his picture theory is as much description as directive.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 98. 2 W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn”, in Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1994), 15. The term first appears in print in “The Pictorial Turn,” ArtForum (March 1992); German translation as first chapter in Christian Kravagna (ed.), Privileg Blick: Kritik der visuellen Kulturen (Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv, 1997), 15–40; a retrospective on this article appears in ArtForum’s series surveying the first thirty years of its history (March 2002). 3 Ibid. 4 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2015), 14. 5 Mitchell, Iconology, 119. 6 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. Ellen Frothingham (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Lacoön”, Partisan Review, No. 7 (July–August 1940): 296–310. This relationship is discussed in detail in “Space and Time in G.E. Lessing”, in Iconology, 97. 7 Mitchell, Iconology, 48.

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8 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Concepts” in Image Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 14. 9 This term was borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge by my late father, Dick Higgins. See Dick Higgins, “Intermedia”, Something Else Newsletter, Vol. I, No. 1 (1966):  1; reprinted in Leonardo, Vol. 34, No. 1 (February 2001): 49–54. 10 Mitchell, Iconology, 116. 11 For the illusion of space in a linear perspective painting to work, for example, the viewer relies on a deeply acculturated, physically developed sense of navigating space and touching things with the body and/or the hand (proprioception). Similarly, poetry evokes all manner of images in the mind using the entire, embodied sensorium. 12 In the Middle Ages, by contrast, divine authority (absolute for our purposes) had been located in divinity of holy texts (the origin of the world in the word, the world as materialization of the word of God, the object of the ten commandments, the sacredness of old and new testament texts, etc.). These sacred texts were habitually read (as words), but not seen (since as images, they would be subject to the charge of idolatry or image worship). The obvious exceptions, stained glass and manuscript illuminations, were conceived primarily as aids to the illiterate, vehicles for meaning that would be explained by clergymen with knowledge of the written document. Da Vinci’s text (alongside other documents of humanist discourse) effectively reversed the terms, establishing the superiority of images as an address to the eye, a direct conduit for divine knowledge. 13 Mitchell, Iconology, 121. 14 The debate can be seen as an early expression of the debate between moderns and conservatives (or whatever the opposite of modern might be at a given time), between abstract and representational (narrative) art, between critical art and propaganda, between high art and low, and between an art of the intellect and emotion. 15 Burke was deeply critical of British policy toward the American colonies, so is often described as a supporter of the American Revolution, which would seem to deepen the contradiction in play here. However, while critical of his government, he was in fact ambivalent about the colonial American desire for a complete break, in part because he was certain the smaller country would collapse financially. As a result, he implored the British Parliament (in a series of speeches in the 1769–76) to change the onerous tax policies, include the colonies in the British Constitution, and to develop other, clearly conciliatory policies. In 1777 he wrote a letter to the British Colonists in America imploring them to maintain the union with Britain. 16 Mitchell, Iconology, 140. 17 Ibid., 141. 18 Ibid., 147. 19 Ibid., 142. 20 Ibid., 143. 21 Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression:  Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1975). Quoted and discussed at length in Mitchell, Iconology, 148. 22 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Watts and Company, 1906), 17. 23 Mitchell, Iconology, 141. 24 Unsurprisingly, painted and printed images of war routinely depict the earsplitting roar of cannon and gun fire as disordering the visible scene, making it impossible to locate oneself as viewer in a stable location. Art history is rich

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with examples from the time and from both sides of these conflicts, particularly as the rhetoric of revolution found painterly expression by supporters and detractors. From the pulverized spaces of those sympathetic to revolutionary fervor, such as Goya’s Third of May (1808) and especially Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (1868–69) to antirevolutionary or nationalist thinkers (on the model of Burke) in David’s famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) and Jean Louis Ernst Meissonier’s Siege of Paris (1870), the impact of explosive sound as destabilizing space, even shaping it, is central to the visual effect of the picture. Similar logic holds even for much of the best abstract painting. Most famously, in Wassily Kandinsky’s 1913 Improvisation #30, Cannons, cannon fire is depicted as a sonic cloud rupturing all semblance of matter and space in its wake. Cities and trees are curved, seeming to ride the physical wave of sound or be pushed aside by it. Similarly, albeit without the association with war, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and Henri Matisse’s Jazz images depict how sound orders the cityscape and human body, respectively. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962/2001), 207. Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 181. Mitchell, Iconology, 149. W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Ends of American Photography”, in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 278. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980). Ibid., 103. Ibid., 92. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 280. Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”, Particip@tions, Vol. 3, No. 1 (May 2006). Ibid. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 285. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 285. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror:  The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 99. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 106–107. Ibid., 106–107. Special thanks to my Research Assistant, Pinar Üner Yilmaz, for suggesting Farocki as an addition to this chapter and for helping me with the editing process. Sara Brady, “The Soldier Cycle:  Harun Farocki’s Images of War (at a Distance)”. Available at www.academia.edu/7468229/The_Soldier_Cycle_ Harun_Farockis_Images_of_War_at_a_Distance_, accessed February 5, 2016. See also Henry Bial and Sara Brady (eds.), The Performance Studies Reader, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016). Mitchell, Image Science, 114. Ibid., 207.

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50 The incident was widely reported. For details see Nicholas Thompson, “Please Don’t Shut Down the Internet, Donald Trump”, The New  Yorker, December 17, 2015. Available at www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/pleasedont-shut-down-the-internet-donald-trump, accessed February 2, 2016. 51 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 216. 52 Mitchell, Image Science, 207. 53 Ibid., 208. 54 Ibid., 213; original emphasis. 55 Ibid., 214–215. 56 Retort, Afflicted Powers:  Capital and Spectacle in the New Age of War (London:  Verso, 2005). Retort includes the authors Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. 57 Mitchell, Image Science, 217. 58 William Blake, The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. John Sampson (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1908). Available at www.bartleby.com/235, accessed February 2, 2016. 59 Ibid., 138. 60 Mitchell, Image Science, 220. 61 Ibid., 225.

13 Living Pictures of Democracy W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology as Political Philosophy Maxime Boidy

Among W.J.T. Mitchell’s countless investigations into the lives, loves, powers and desires of images for more than forty years, politics has always played a very important role. The chapter of his Iconology devoted to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his considerations on the artistic frontiers between poetry and painting, similar to nation-state borders, or the essay focused on Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theory as a framework to enable a rereading of Burke’s later critiques of the French Revolution, are the very first examples of a brand new research program for political iconology. According to Mitchell, politics is more than a struggle between men – and women – for power, leadership or equality. It is inscribed at the very core of the “Image X Text” battlefield.1 His intellectual work has coped with many different aspects of politics, from the Abu Ghraib archives of the “war on terror” to various spaces of representation and nonrepresentation. His considerations on landscape are deeply rooted in a critical tradition going back to the analysis of eighteenth-century painting by Raymond Williams and John Berger, who famously criticized the display of the English countryside with its owners but without the peasants who actually produced it.2 Therefore, to paraphrase another thinker of space, W.J.T. Mitchell is not a political philosopher, but there is a political philosophy in his iconology.3 I would like to explore here some specific implications of this statement. In my opinion, many different aspects of Mitchell’s work can be scrutinized through one single lens. I  have to confess that, while I  was musing on this chapter, I felt scared many times to use it, insofar as it is so loaded with blurred meanings and violent political debates. What a surprise for me, then, to find it at work in his latest book Image Science, in the chapter extending his dialogue with the French philosopher Jacques Rancière – no coincidence at all – in a description of the classical biblical episode of the Golden Calf constructed by the Israelites in the Sinai desert. This scene, “so often denounced as the prime example of idolatry”, but paradoxically depicted in numerous pictures such as Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf (Fig. 4.3),

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“might also be read as a good example of populist democracy in action, with ‘the people’ self-consciously commissioning a visible sign of their sacred unity as a nation”.4 The painting, often regarded elsewhere as an instance of the “image/picture” relationship or as a “metapicture” showing some of the very conditions of pictorial representation, finds here a new, quite disturbing interpretation.5 Populism is the keyword I  would like to deal with in the following pages. My aim is to show how it can connect W.J.T. Mitchell’s politics of vision to politics “as such”. In the first section of this chapter, I will indicate how classical accounts of populism are embedded to some extent in an iconology, very close to common descriptions of the episode of the Golden Calf. In other words, there is a strong relationship between populism and idolatry, understood as two plagues which should be denounced, even eradicated. The second section will be devoted to the similarities of Mitchell’s insights with the pathbreaking account on populism and democracy given by the Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau. Both thinkers have redefined idolatry or populism as a positive framework for politics and no longer as something to condemn. In the third section, I will explore how a reframed notion of populism can relate W.J.T. Mitchell’s politics of vision to his politics of knowledge, on the assumption that this redefinition may also be instructive in relation to this other aspect of his iconological theory. To clarify my views, this new step of my inquiry will start by pointing out an unintended connection between populism and idolatry at the origins of the intellectual and institutional birth of visual culture studies. Then, before concluding, I  will consider a visual and political practice slightly distant from Mitchell’s research topics and much closer to mine:  that is, the “black bloc” tactic – my personal Golden Calf. This visual construction of politics, born in extreme-left political circles of West Germany during the 1980s, has become part of a global imagery and has been a widely disseminated cultural icon in video clips and movies, especially in the United States during the “war on terror”. Little wonder that the black bloc aesthetics can illustrate and clarify Mitchell’s political iconology: all along his work has enabled me to grasp this aesthetics.

Populism Revisited: An Iconological Account Let me start with a basic rhetorical account on the word “populism” today. As one of the most loaded terms in contemporary politics and public debate, it connotes the corruption of a naive people driven into madness and false representations by a charismatic leader, either from the extreme left or the extreme right. Therefore it implies very often that the only democratic parties and programs are located near the “center” of the political chessboard, the conservatives and the social democrats in Western representative democracies. The alternatives are restricted

Living Pictures of Democracy 237 to two main options, like, in France, the (so-called) “socialists” and “republicans”, although these two choices may appear to be very close together as soon as one looks at their respective economical programs from a wider perspective. This is populism par excellence according to many (so-called) experts: the contention that “there’s hardly any choice”, or the calling into question of a certain kind of political legitimacy – with my soft uses of “so-called”, or by harsher means. Another aspect is worth consideration:  this rhetoric of populism is rooted in an iconology. In a short article originally published in 2011, ahead of the last French presidential election, Jacques Rancière argued that the term is not used today “to characterize any well-defined political force. It denotes neither an ideology nor even a coherent political style. It serves simply to draw the image of a certain people”.6 This image is perfectly drawn, indeed: the people represented in it are supposed to be as dangerous today as they were during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the ideological process described by Ernesto Laclau as a “denigration of the masses” began.7 Drawing on brand new fields of knowledge such as criminology and psychology, writers like Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon started to use metaphors in order to analogize the crowd to a bunch of hysterical women. To quote the title of a classic text on this topic, they used madness, gender and alcoholism as “distorting mirrors” to sketch what they feared to be a realistic image of the people.8 Along these lines, a second iconological and ideological connection is worth highlighting. The distorted image of the people produced at the end of the nineteenth century was also, to some extent, an image of an idolatrous people driven mad by a “pictorial turn” (to use W.J.T. Mitchell’s expression): a tendency to mistranslate discourses into images, an inability to get the right meaning behind the words of politics. In other words, it was not sufficient to draw a distorted picture of the people framed by and for those able to look at it – that is, Le Bon and his readers, who saw crowds becoming “like the sphinx of ancient fable”, and who were scared of “being devoured by them”. It was also important to frame a vision of crowds as multitudes producing images from language – “the power of words is bound up with the images they evoke, and is quite independent of their real significance”, according to Le Bon – but unable to look at these images without falling into the lures of idolatry. As Laclau summarizes it, for Le Bon, “this association of images is not an essential component of language as such, but a perversion of it: words have a true significance which is incompatible with the function of synthesizing a plurality of unconscious aspirations”.9 Therefore, populism as a sin is the perfect modern heir of classical idolatry for describing people going crazy through the veneration of a wrong image instead of the true (word of) God. We are already back in front of Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, which is another picture of idolatry, as W.J.T. Mitchell has

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routinely insisted. The fact that the picture is, to some extent, a visual rendering of “populist democracy” is established. We have now to discover how it can be a positive description of the democratic impulse.

The Empty Signifier and the Golden Calf: Two Metapictures The best way to continue is to compare Mitchell’s theses with the writings of Ernesto Laclau, the philosopher who, in parallel with Rancière, has given the most powerful insights into what populism can mean beyond the historical denigration I have described above. According to Laclau, populism is not a threat, but a basic mechanism of politics, which was portrayed as something dangerous at the very moment of the rise of the proletariat as a new political subject. Redefined by means of a close historical examination and philosophical reconceptualization which I  can only sum up here, it becomes “not a fixed constellation but a series of discursive resources which can be put to very different uses”. Heterogeneous “demands” by collective subjects are articulated together to produce “equivalential chains” as far as they share a common element in a given political situation, despite their heterogeneity. This articulation is materialized by what Laclau (following the structuralist tradition) calls an “empty signifier”, the common ground of the political alliance constructed. The chain draws a dividing line needed to frame the political antagonism.10 To use the example of the Occupy movement, the slogan “We are the 99%” was an empty signifier which built the antagonism with the remaining 1% by aggregating an equivalential chain of heterogeneous demands for social justice – healthcare, wealth redistribution, abolition of student fees, help for the homeless, environmental protection, and so on. According to Laclau’s theory, “the construction of a ‘people’ would be impossible without the operation of mechanisms of representation”. Therefore, similar to the classical concept of populism forged with an iconology, his own is grounded in a complex understanding of the representation process, which it is useful to read in detail: The empty signifier can operate as a point of identification only because it represents an equivalential chain. The double movement which we have detected in the process of representation is very much inscribed in the emergence of a “people”. On the one hand, the representation of the equivalential chain by the empty signifier is not a purely passive one. The empty signifier is something more than the image of a pre-given totality: it is what constitutes that totality, thus adding a qualitatively new dimension. This corresponds to the second movement in the process of representation: from representative to represented. On the other hand, if the empty signifier is going to operate as a point of identification for all the links in the chain, it must actually represent them; it cannot become entirely autonomous

Living Pictures of Democracy 239 from them. This corresponds to the first movement found in representation: from represented to representative.11 My aim here is not to discuss this erudite and meticulous explanation of politics, but to sketch the basic outlines of his common linguistic views with what W.J.T. Mitchell has summarized in a pictorial scene, in order to grasp what this encounter enables for visual theory. In Mitchell’s terms, the biblical episode is a “metapicture”, a picture of what pictures are, and of the idolatrous and iconoclastic reactions they can provoke. But his reading of the scene as “populist democracy”, actually frames for us two brand new metapictures that he had begun to forge previously in his analysis of the “surplus value of images” in What Do Pictures Want?, when he contended that the Israelites had constructed the calf as an “ancestor that has begotten them as a people”.12 Exactly which new metapictures do we have to think with? On the one hand, we have populism in its redefined form, so to speak:  a staging of a people begotten, constructed or (to use Laclau’s word) constituted. It is fundamental insofar as it is not only a reversal of a classical understanding of the phenomenon, but also a total reframing of the latent iconology that has structured it from the very beginning. More precisely, we have a metapicture of the process of redefinition, a former vision of populism becoming a new one, which is precisely the turn highlighted by W.J.T. Mitchell:  from populist idolatry to populist democracy – in Laclau’s view, how a denigration of the masses becomes a certain form of political reason. The analysis of Le Bon’s writings proposed in the pages of On Populist Reason exemplifies this point very precisely. According to the psychology of crowds, words have a denotative meaning that is corrupted by the images the multitude associates with them. For Laclau, on the contrary, this wordĺimage trap, this pictorial turn structuring the threat of populism as idolatry, is in fact a basic condition of all kinds of politics: “The unfixity of the relationship between words and images is the very precondition of any discursive operation which is politically meaningful.”13 The second metapicture is therefore pretty much evident: it is that of Laclau’s theory itself by means of the founding image of the Golden Calf as “empty signifier” and “point of identification”, insofar as it actually “represents an equivalential chain” to some extent. The Calf is more than a pregiven image of the Jewish people: it is an animal body comprised of all the jewelry brought from Egypt by the Israelites, an amount of gold “demands” which becomes an entity with a “qualitatively new dimension”. In the molten calf, the value of the gold aside, the previous specificities of the individual objects have disappeared so as to produce a common ground. I will end this intellectual comparison here, but it would be worth extending it further on a political scale. A  good point for further consideration would be the disagreement of both Ernesto Laclau and W.J.T.

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Mitchell with Slavoj Žižek about the centrality of the working class in contemporary movements, and the supposed renouncement of an authentic critique of capitalism in populist politics like the Rainbow Coalition in the US.14 But there are probably more important paths to explore in order to continue our inquiry into iconology as political philosophy, around the concepts of populism and idolatry. We have already assessed the basic outlines of rhetorical accusations of populism in journalism and politics so as to produce a certain image of the crowd by those who were, and who remain, afraid of its beastly reactions. But populism and its idolatrous undertones are also at work in the realm of (visual) knowledge.

A Matter of Knowledge: Deconstruction of a Founding Picture This issue is especially worthy of inquiry because it has been illustrated by the very birth of visual culture studies in the Anglo-American academy. Quotations excerpted from the famous “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October in 1996 are of particular interest in this respect. The art historian Thomas Crow notably suspected that the forerunners of visual studies were framing a research field destined to become closer to New Age literature than to any valid form of academic knowledge, as W.J.T. Mitchell still reminds us twenty years later in his Image Science.15 But Crow also accused visual culture of launching “a misguidedly populist impulse” against the discipline of art history.16 In addition, with Rosalind Krauss, he blamed visual culture scholars for not paying heed to an unavoidable “deskilling” of art history as a result of the “studies” destruction of established academic disciplines.17 Yet the concept of “deskilling” as it has been invested actually has a long intellectual history. It finds its origins in a text published in the early 1980s by the Australian artist Ian Burn on the classical art skills abandoned by conceptual art during the 1960s and 1970s. Burn himself discovered the concept in the writings of the Marxist sociologist Harry Braverman, who described deskilling as the capitalist destruction during the twentieth century of traditional forms of knowledge belonging to workers. Braverman forged it as a derivative and reactualization of Karl Marx’s classical notion of alienation. Therefore, this series of authors quoting authors ends accurately with the Frankfurt school psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who reminds us that “the whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry”, with precious commentaries on the intellectual connections between the two notions in Christian theology and European thinking.18 By recalling these arguments formulated against visual culture studies, and by highlighting the implicit and unnoticed accusation of idolatry that is associated with populism, I do not intend to reopen old wounds, but to make two points. First, we have here supplementary proof that populism is a matter of rhetoric, a term that can be used by journalists or politicians

Living Pictures of Democracy 241 but also by scholars who wish to fight with their colleagues within the academy. The argument is particularly controversial in context of the latter, one should note, since academic thinkers are implicitly supposed to be immune to the virus of populism – and likewise, visual culture scholars are supposed to be resistant to the plague of idolatry, and to any tendency “to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital”, to quote the third question in October’s “Visual Culture Questionnaire”. Second, the elitism/populism dichotomy is thus more than a battlefield of political visions debating the (un)necessity of leaders or “heads of state” to be the eyes, ears and mouths of the “body politics”. It is also a battlefield in knowledge (here, art history vs. visual culture studies), involving more or less the same issues. The French political scientist Laurent Jeanpierre has given an acute description of the various “populisms” in contemporary humanities and social sciences.19 In his view, the loaded term “populism” is interesting to consider insofar as it provides a framework common to both politics and knowledge, based on critiques of elitism, hierarchies and professionalization. This common ground helps to understand how it is essentially possible to speak of a “politics” of knowledge, about the way knowledge is produced, shared and owned. Various coexisting forms of “scientism”, defined as exclusive elitist beliefs in science, may help us to understand the correlative existence of different kinds of reversed “populist” epistemologies. In this sense, the cultural studies launched in the UK with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1962, or the subaltern studies summarized by the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” famously posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are “populisms” of knowledge because their very scholarly posture is not about who is speaking the truth, but who is speaking at all.20 The most interesting lessons are for those historians of ideas who want to study the various Marxist “theoretical schools” of the 1960s and 1970s (in England, India, France or elsewhere), and their internal relationships between knowledge and politics. The “power/knowledge” equation, commonly attached to Michel Foucault, was indeed a widely conspicuous issue for many politicized scholars at the time in France, in the Marxist circles outside the realm of the French Communist Party.21 This sheds new light on some intellectual backgrounds, such as the trajectory of Jacques Rancière’s thinking since the end of the 1960s, including his famous break with Louis Althusser and his philosophical connection between politics, aesthetics and pedagogy, or why a critique of the supposed knowledge exclusively owned by the Communist Party could not be made without a general critique of scientism – that is, the “truth” of the few as opposed to the “beliefs” of the many. This rapid overview of the notion of “populism” applied to knowledge brings me back to the politics of iconology according to W.J.T. Mitchell. Rancière’s intellectual career helps to make clear why he and Mitchell

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are allies. Yet first and foremost, it helps us to recognize that a “populist” coherence is also present in Mitchell’s theory of knowledge, even if it is differently articulated. If you spontaneously swapped in the word “pictures” instead of “who is” in the phrase I used above – “not about who is speaking the truth, but who is speaking at all” – you may have already got the message. Mitchell’s “populism”, a term redefined here to grasp the deepest meanings of a democracy of visual knowledge, combines a strong will to let pictures speak of their own desires – or of their own knowledges22 – with a deconstruction of the founding picture (the Golden Calf) showing why images should stay mute, and why the people should too. Against this background, it is therefore striking to discover, for the historian of ideas I also sometimes claim to be, so many things brought into relation:  (1)  how my understanding of intellectual populisms has been confronted with the choice of “Image Science” as the title of Mitchell’s latest book; (2)  how the first blatant formulation of a populist epistemology in the knowledge of pictures, that is, the first occurrence of the question “What do pictures want?”, was published in the same issue of October in which the supposed “populism” and “deskilling” of visual culture were harshly denounced;23 and last but not least, (3) how the very definition of the “pictorial turn” formulated in Picture Theory by W.J.T. Mitchell was already very close to the Rancierian background in the early 1990s through an analysis of Louis Althusser’s elitist theory of ideology, and, more generally, by means of a critique of “the temptation to science, understood as the panoptic surveillance and mastery of the object/‘other’ (individual or image)”.24

Populism and Totemism: New Visions Now is the opportune moment to make explicit what has only been suggested up until now: populism is not a necessary term for speaking about W.J.T. Mitchell’s theory of images in general, or about his political iconology in particular. I have used it in order to make things intelligible, to connect pictures, discourses, knowledges and intellectual backgrounds. Nevertheless, I have in a certain way made my point like a scientist drawing on his own vocabulary without paying heed to the way things are already formulated in the fieldwork. To avoid any kind of mastery of what I am talking about, let me say clearly that Mitchell’s “populism” actually bears the simple and beautiful name of totemism, an anthropological category on the subject of which he has written the most insightful pages of What Do Pictures Want?. As indicated by the title of one of the most important chapters of his book, “Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry”, totemism is deeply inscribed in a triadic relationship with idolatry and fetishism  – the episode of the adoration of the Golden Calf is, again, a striking illustration of their

Living Pictures of Democracy 243 respective instability, from both a religious or theoretical point of view.25 Indeed, if these three categories have been forged at different historical moments and in distinct geographic areas so as to describe concrete religious practices involving images and objects, they also play a major role as concepts and metaphors in Western thinking. As early as the seventeenth century, the English philosopher Francis Bacon used the idol to characterize the false representations which he considered should be eradicated by true scientific method; the metaphor was still vivid in Émile Durkheim’s sociological writings at the end of the nineteenth century, in outlining what a modern social science should get rid of. On the other hand, as W.J.T. Mitchell has shown in his Iconology, fetishism plays a major role in Marxist theory, describing how relationships between people have been replaced by relationships between commodities in the capitalist mode of production, and how modernity and rationalism have paradoxically nurtured magical ways to deal with and live with objects.26 Idolatry and fetishism refer to different pictorial attitudes, but both are negatively connoted. The reason why these two notions have been of so much interest to W.J.T. Mitchell and other major contemporary visual thinkers is surely that the best way to see what is at stake with pictures is to grasp why they inspire(d) so much fear and suspicion. Totemism, on the other hand, is a more neutral and positively perceived attitude: “While idolatry and fetishism were generally condemned as obscene, perverse, demonic belief systems to be stamped out, totemism usually has been characterized as a kind of childish naiveté, based on an innocent oneness with nature”.27 Accordingly, the concept is much more open to redefinition, especially in characterizing the connections between people and environment beyond the nature/culture divide. It is therefore no coincidence to find it at work in Mitchell’s Image Science, describing not the populist space instituted by the Golden Calf but more contemporary scenes, the “ ‘totemic’ foundational sites of communal gathering, of which Occupy is clearly an instance”.28 Totemism appears here as a synonym of populism attached to a specific location, the common ground of a people to come. But of course, it can also be connected with “portable” signs, such as Occupy’s slogan “We are the 99%”, or any shared visual sign or picture, as far as, at the very core of this belief, “the images of the totemic being are more sacred than the totemic being itself”.29 In order to take this investigation one step further, let me explore now a specific form of contemporary totemism/populism by means of a visual sign not unrelated to the Occupy movement: the dark uniform and masks of the black bloc tactic. For some time I chose the visual politics of the black bloc as a research program without any clear idea of these implications, but I  already knew that it had something to learn from W.J.T. Mitchell’s iconology. It is probably well known to my readers that the “temptation to science” discussed in the chapter of Picture Theory devoted to the pictorial turn is criticized through a confrontation of two

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epistemological scenes, the first taken from Erwin Panofsky’s iconological methodology, the other from Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. To get to the hidden meaning of each scene and the knowledge of their encounter, Mitchell proposed getting rid of their respective figures: Panofsky’s friend taking off his hat and Althusser’s passerby interpellated like a suspect by a policeman. He chose to look at the scenes as empty sites. On the contrary, I decided to invite a hooded black bloc activist to take possession of the space, to challenge both Panofsky’s gaze and Althusser’s interpellation, while questioning the very democratic character of this new “little theoretical theatre” (to quote Althusser).30 Many things result from such an experiment, from the doubtful gender identity of the figure to the politics of iconological description seen as a “cop’s practice” (a reversal of interpellation), to the discovery that the black bloc is actually an aesthetics in the deepest sense of the word, even reenacting, on the streets of Genoa during the riots of July 2001, the classical dichotomy between absorption and theatricality theorized by Denis Diderot, and historicized by Michael Fried in his writings on eighteenth-century French painting.31 And for those who are willing to ask W.J.T. Mitchell’s classic question, “What do pictures want?”, the answer is pretty clear: the black bloc is basically a collective political image that wants to be (in)visible, to be seen while staying anonymous. Yet some of the most salient features of the black bloc aesthetics probably lie less in the concrete political arena of antiauthoritarian anarchism than in the fact that this visual tactic has become a major “cultural icon” of disobedience and resistance on a global scale, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement.32 Two examples excerpted from popular visual culture are especially relevant, in line with W.J.T. Mitchell’s inquiry into the visual signs of the “war on terror”.33 The first one is a major blockbuster, the cinematographic adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta comics by film director James McTeigue in 2006, with screenwriting by Andy and Lana Wachowski, the directors of the Matrix trilogy. Through the movie, the black bloc has gained global visibility comparable to the fame of the enigmatic Guy Fawkes mask worn by the hero, V.34 Moreover, the tactic itself plays an active role in the visual construction of the movie, which is reinforced by the use of archive footage of the Genoa riots showing hooded demonstrators in two insurrectional sequences. The tactic combines a political construction of the visual with a visual (cinematographic) construction of the political. It is therefore an exemplary object of visual culture according to some classical definitions: the black clothes and Guy Fawkes mask later became the central features of the online symbols of the Egyptian black bloc during the 2011 revolution.35 More important, as far as we are concerned here, is the final scene of V for Vendetta, which shows the population of a dystopian London on the brink of insurgency against the ruling totalitarian regime. A compact

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Fig. 13.1. Guy Fawkes mask, from the film V for Vendetta; Musée des miniatures et décors de cinéma, Lyon, France (CC BY 2.0)

crowd wearing large black capes and Guy Fawkes masks is walking in the direction of Trafalgar Square, determined to confront the army occupying the space. Though the soldiers ultimately refuse to open fire, the hooded figure of justice nevertheless dies without having the opportunity to see the triumph of his revolution. Here we have another picture of Ernesto Laclau’s theory: the heterogeneous population of London aggregates around an empty signifier composed half of V as a leader made of flesh, half of the image of his attire. It is a positive picture of populism par excellence, legitimated by an hour and a half of terrible detail that renders the regime totally unacceptable for the beholder – a picture in which all the hooded faces can finally leave their masks as proof of having kept their identity all along, and of having gained a democratic public sphere in which to do it safely. If the mask and clothes compose an “empty signifier”, these artifacts also materialize a visual portable totem which has the effect of reconstructing a brand new English people. Here, the black bloc aesthetics has the same political meaning that the Golden Calf had for the Israelites. To quote once again W.J.T. Mitchell’s

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words about Poussin’s painting, the last sequence of V for Vendetta can “be read as a good example of populist democracy in action”, with a people emancipating and forging itself by wearing “a visible sign of their sacred unity”. A second example, from slightly earlier, and to some extent more interesting, is the music video accompanying the song Mosh, which was released by the rapper Eminem during the US presidential campaign of 2004. It is more thought-provoking because of the peculiar political message produced by its articulations of lyrics and cartoons. If the many different reasons why the Londoners are rising up at the end of V for Vendetta remain implicit and speculative, here the “chain of equivalence” is limpid. A  young black man arrested without reason and humiliated by white cops; a GI just back home and already reassigned to Iraq; a mother with children informed that she is going to be evicted from her apartment: all finally pull on a black hoodie and go out onto the streets as Eminem’s lyrics call on them to march after him – “Come along, follow me, as I lead through the darkness” – in a way strangely similar to the Jewish people making a calf intended to “go before” them, according to the Old Testament.36 The black hooded silhouettes finally come up against antiriot forces in front of an official building, an evocation of the famous front page of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, with the slight difference that the individuals composing the “body politics” are not admiring the head, but are ready to smash it. No revolution here, though: the building is just an office in which people register to vote.

Fig. 13.2.

Movie still from V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, 2005

Living Pictures of Democracy 247 Eminem’s political propaganda, using black bloc style to appeal to people to vote, obviously made some anarchist and leftist activists pretty angry at the time.37 Nevertheless, one must also remember that this “black hood” totem is not really a reappropriation of a well-defined symbolism, but a new step in a long series of reenactments with no clear origin. During the 1980s in Germany (the cradle of the tactic), the black bloc had to establish its meanings. As the political scientist George Katsiaficas reminds us, the symbolism was pretty much as totemistic at the time as it would be in Eminem’s anti-Bush video: The black leather jackets worn by many people at demonstrations and the black flags carried by others signaled less an ideological anarchism than a style of dress and behavior … Black became the color of the political void – of the withdrawal of allegiance to parties, governments, and nations.38 One can hardly imagine a better expression than this color of void and emptiness to grasp the totemic process which has sustained this signifier from the very beginning. *** Eminem’s video is a moving image which asks to be followed and deserves to be obeyed for at least three reasons. Clarifying these reasons is probably the best way to conclude this essay on W.J.T. Mitchell’s political iconology, which could have explored many other aspects instead of the living pictures of democracy we have looked at, with Mitchell.39 The first reason is the opening sentence of Eminem’s song, the words “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America”, which are recited by children in front of the singer’s face hidden behind a textbook, recalling the classroom scene in which George W. Bush was informed of the first attack on the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. The Star-Spangled Banner appears everywhere in the video, from words to pictures, and even on Eminem’s head, worn as a bandana before he pulls on his hoodie, making a clear connection between the two signifiers. In showing us the flag used literally as clothing, Mosh helps us to see that “metaphorically speaking, [the black bloc is itself] a huge black flag made up of living bodies, flying in the heart of a demonstration”40  – that both flags are definitely living pictures. Above all, it provides a reminder, following Mitchell’s early advice, that the totem/fetish/idol triad is a political postmodern framework. Second, there is the wall on which Eminem has hung pictures and newspaper cuttings to gather the pieces of the puzzle broken by 9/11. The overall situation of the “war on terror” as a threat for a wide range of American people is connected with aspects of the rapper’s personal life. A headline proclaiming “Congress OKs $87 Billion for Iraq” is near

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to another cutting explaining that Bush’s tax policy is helping the rich, that the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan are actually paid for by the 99%, who will make their voices heard and their bodies seen years later, on the totemic foundational sites of Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. The wall is therefore a good example of using a combination of texts and pictures in order to see through the madness of an age of terror, an era deconstructed by W.J.T. Mitchell long before he considered the very motif of the visible atlas as a way to understand the relationships between “method, madness and montage” in contemporary global visual culture.41 And finally, in keeping with Mitchell’s totemic practice of iconology, Mosh is a moving image picturing its own theory, be it of collective disobedience or populist democracy. Before it, we, the beholders, are free to draw our own relations without presuming whatsoever the absolute power of all images – remember that neither this video nor any other image could prevent George W.  Bush’s re-election. For future research, we have at our disposal ancient visions of people, pictures painted centuries before CNN, MTV and the rise of digital video. And we have W.J.T. Mitchell’s iconophilic gestures and totemic insights to make the right connections at the right moment.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1986), chapters 4 and 5. On the “Image X Text” relationship, see chapter 4 of his Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 2 See the introduction of W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Raymond Williams, The Country and The City (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1973), 120–126; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 106–109. 3 The original quotation (“Marx is not a sociologist, but there is a sociology in Marxism”) is excerpted from Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). 4 Mitchell, Image Science, 83 (my emphasis). 5 On these two concepts, see ibid., chapter 2 (“Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”). 6 Translated into English by David Fernbach. See Jacques Rancière, “The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass”. Available at www.versobooks.com/ blogs/1226-the-people-are-not-a-brutal-and-ignorant-mass-jacques-ranciereon-populism, accessed August 15, 2016. 7 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), part 1. 8 Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). A visual prehistory of this ideological operation can be found in English conservatism during the first half of the century and the rise of the working class. As Nicholas Mirzoeff has shown, Thomas Carlyle called for a “visuality” possessed by a very limited number of white male leaders, therefore legitimated to rule a multitude unable to govern itself by nature. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look:  A  Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011), 124–125.

Living Pictures of Democracy 249 9 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 21–22. The previous quotations (discussed and reproduced by Laclau) are from Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (New Brunswick and London: Transactions Publishers, 1995), 124. An iconophilic counterpart to this fear can be found in the French socialist philosopher Georges Sorel’s account on the general strike as a way to construct a visual myth that is impossible to frame through the medium of language. See Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 228–229. 10 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 176, passim. For a limpid instantiation of the equivalential chain, see ibid., 73–74. 11 Ibid., 161–162. 12 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 105. 13 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 24–25. 14 Ibid., 232–239; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 71. 15 Mitchell, Image Science, 134–135. 16 Thomas Crow’s answer to the “Visual Culture Questionnaire”, October, No. 77 (1996): 34. 17 Ibid., 36. See Krauss’s interview with Scott Rothkopf, “Krauss and the Art of Cultural Controversy”, The Harvard Crimson, May 16, 1997. Available at www.thecrimson.com/article/1997/5/16/krauss-and-the-art-of-cultural, accessed August 15, 2016. 18 Ian Burn, “The 1960s:  Crisis and Aftermath”, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.), Conceptual Art:  A  Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1999), 392–409; Harry Braverman, Labor and  Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, trans. Sam Berner (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961), chapter 5: “Alienation”. 19 Laurent Jeanpierre, “Les Populismes du Savoir”, Critique, No. 776–777 (2012): 150–164. I am indebted to him for conversations on this topic and many others. 20 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 21 As recalled for example by Alain Badiou. See Jeanpierre, “Les Populismes du Savoir”, 159. 22 Mitchell, Image Science, 68. 23 W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures (Really) Want?”, October, No. 77 (1996): 71–82. 24 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 30. 25 See Mitchell, “Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry”, in What Do Pictures Want?, 188–196. 26 Mitchell, Iconology, chapter 6. 27 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 162. 28 Mitchell, Image Science, 165. 29 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 133; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 101, 178. 30 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)”, in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. 31 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980). See

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my articles “Visibilities in Words, Visibilities on Bodies: Forgotten Teachings from the Genoa Summit of 2001”, FQS – Forum: Qualitative Sozialforschung (forthcoming); “Surveillances, Spectacles, Visibilités”. Available at www. 50jpg.ch/blog/article-categorie-essay, accessed August 15, 2016. Francis Dupuis-Déri, Who’s Afraid of the Black Blocs? Anarchy in Action around the World, trans. Lazer Lederhendler (Toronto:  Between the Lines, 2013), 12. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror:  The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2011). See especially chapter  3 (“Clonophobia”) on visual connections between cloning and the classical and contemporary depictions of the body politics. See Oliver Kohns, “Guy Fawkes in the 21st Century:  A  Contribution to the Political Iconography of Revolt”, Image & Narrative, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2013): 89–104. “Visual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision”. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 343. Ibid., 16, 105, 123. See Thomas Wheeler, “Eminem Joins the ABB Mosh Pit”, Dissident Voice, October 31, 2004. Available at www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Wheeler1031. htm, accessed August 15, 2016. George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland, CA:  AK Press, 2006), 90. For example the politics of life itself as far as pictures, according to Mitchell, are subjected to the need of care and the threat of precarity. See my essay “La précarité du visible”, in Dork Zabunyan (ed.), Les Carnets du Bal no3:  Les Images manquantes (Marseille:  Images en manœuvres, 2012), 42–59. Dupuis-Déri, Who’s Afraid of the Black Blocs?, 3. W.J.T.  Mitchell, “Method, Madness and Montage: On Global Image Overload”, International Conference “Quand les images viennent au monde”, Paris, Musée du Jeu de Paume, June 5, 2015. Cette recherche a bénéficié d’une aide de l’ANR au titre du programme Investissements d’avenir (ANR-10-LABX-80-01).

14 Showing Showing Reading Mitchell’s “Queer” Metapictures John Paul Ricco

The “metapicture” is one of the “four fundamental concepts” of “image science”, the latter phrase being not only the title of W.J.T. Mitchell’s latest book,1 but the most recent name that he has coined for the field of study that he inaugurated thirty years ago with the publication of Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology (1986). While I  do not believe the term appeared in that early text, since the publication of Picture Theory (1994) and continuing with What Do Pictures Want? (2004), and Cloning Terror (2011), the metapicture has been one of the hallmarks of Mitchell’s work and the many indelible contributions that he has made to visual studies, art history and media theory. Indeed, in comparison to the “pictorial turn”, the “image/picture distinction”, and perhaps even the“biopicture”, which together complete the set of four fundamental concepts, one might be tempted to argue that the metapicture holds a place of prominence and unrivaled importance, to the extent that its originality wholly resides in Mitchell’s conceptualization of it. If we were to insist on nominating a picture of Mitchell’s signature picture theory and image science, we might select the metapicture. We would not choose one of the particular examples of “metapictures” that populate his essay of that name2 and that have come to be so intimately associated with Mitchell – the Duck–Rabbit, Saul Steinberg’s The Spiral, René Magritte’s Le trahison des images, or even the meta-metapicture that is Velázquez’s Las Meninas – but the concept of the metapicture itself, for which there is no picture  – unless that picture is the image and the work of Tom Mitchell himself. In addition to being a picture of a picture, and a picture of the act of picturing (including “picturing vision” and “showing seeing”  – two of Mitchell’s other coinages), I am interested in the ways in which Mitchell’s very own examples, in operating as metapictures, go beyond self-analysis and self-reference, and demonstrate that an outside, defined in terms of that which is unseeable and/or unsayable, is presented and remains unseeable/unsayable by the metapicture in its very picturing and showing. Not, that is, in terms of the representation of that which is otherwise unseen, but the presentation of the unseeable within the seeable.

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We might think of this as a certain persistence of the unseeable/outside “within” the seeable. I derive this notion from Michel Foucault, the philosopher with whom, I would argue, Mitchell shares the greatest affinity and whose writing on the image/picture distinction, and more broadly on the relations between discourse and the visual, Mitchell has consistently and repeatedly returned to, in his ongoing pursuit of “a sweet science of images”.3 In the section titled “Reflection, Fiction”, in his remarkable text on Maurice Blanchot, The Thought from the Outside, Foucault writes that “fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible”.4 In painting, for instance, it is the large canvas with its back to us in Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas that shows “the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible” within the very spaces of representation and presentation. It is this exposure to the outside that is the trajectory and comportment toward which Mitchell’s metapictures direct us, including in the lessons that he conveys to us, in part through his returned insistence on certain lessons that he derives from his engagement with Foucault’s own picture theory. Mitchell uses the language of fact and fiction in his discussion of Steinberg’s self-reflective metapicture The Spiral, a cartoon that appeared in The New  Yorker magazine in 1964. In doing so, he lends credence to the idea that this Foucault-inspired outside is not an abstract philosophical fantasy or even a fiction in the conventional sense of the term, but is its own material fact, in this case, of the actual praxis of drawing. In the Steinberg drawing, we see the drawn figure of a man holding a single straight line in his hand (what we are to take to be an extremely schematic-looking drawing instrument), out of which extends a large spiral “whose outer ring has been elaborated as a rural landscape with trees, a wisp of cloud, and a cottage on a hill”.5 Quite rightly, according to Mitchell, to cast this figure as residing at the end  – and thus as the ultimate reference point – of the drawing is to render this scene a fiction, including the fiction of the individual subject as the source and center of its own self-drawn/self-referential place in the world. This fiction is of the self, as the inward-directed point of return, a “sky-god in a whirlwind above his creation” in which, “everything in his world, including himself, has been created by himself”.6 However, as Mitchell goes on to point out, if we see the drawing as the trace of a real event, an act of drawing by Saul Steinberg, we may read its narrative in the opposite direction, and the temporal line will run from inside to outside, from center to circumference … Read counterclockwise, the drawing shows another history, one that has moved from the figure to abstraction to landscape to the writing at the bottom – to a “New World” that lies beyond the circumference of the drawing.7

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It is this spacing beyond that the drawing opens up right along the outer edge and contour of its fiction where, Mitchell affirms, we can access another history to the extent that we see this spiraling exposure to the outside as the fact of drawing – and hence of the metapicture. In our reading of Mitchell and in our engagement with his theory and examples of metapictures, this spiraling outward, or what he refers to later in the essay as the “figure of the ‘whirlpool’ ” or the “Vortex effect”, must be retraced and thereby not lost sight of, since it is the trajectory toward the outside, there where any sense of identity or self-reference is no longer self-evident. For Mitchell, this is what generates the multistability effect of the metapicture, and it finds “its most explicit rendering in Steinberg’s ‘New World’, where the graphic abstraction of reverie finds its appropriate icon in the spiraling doodle”.8 Following Mitchell’s line of argumentation, it is because of this that, while “Steinberg’s drawing is a metapicture, a self-referential image” and is, “quite strictly and formally a drawing that is ‘about itself’ ”, it is nonetheless not prevent[ed] … from being about a great many other things and, even more fundamentally, from calling into question the basic issues of reference that determine what a picture is about and constitute the “selves” referred to in its structure of self-reference.9 So in addition to enabling us to think about the self-reflective operations of metapictures, Mitchell, in a rather disarming way, provokes us to think about metapictures as scenes of the withdrawal, retreat and abandonment of the self, self-reference and identity, and hence equally as scenes of exposure to new worlds that are not historically determined and circumscribed by the conventions and protocols of the seeable (representation) and the sayable (discourse). In other words, the “meta” of the metapicture is the extra-pictorial “outside” for which there is no picture, and it is this outside that is the ground, source and sense of the image. *** I want to focus my discussion of what I am calling “queer metapictures” on the last two images that Mitchell discusses in his essay “Metapictures”.10 I am referring to the illustrations that appeared on the front and back covers of the September 1985 issue of Mad magazine. On the front cover, we see the back of Alfred E. Neuman’s body as he stands on a wooden fence, wearing a trench coat that he has opened broadly in a gesture recognizable as that of a flasher. Indeed, the question of recognition is clearly at issue and at play here:11 first in our ability to identify the magazine’s iconic character based upon the big ears prominently jutting out from the sides of his big round head – his silhouette; and then, our

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recognition of his decidedly exhibitionist act, based upon his attire and gesture, along with the public setting in which it takes place. The fence upon which he is perched, pigeon-toed and wearing combat boots and black socks, is painted with the words “NUDE BEACH”, and on the other side of the fence a group of people has gathered, all exhibiting facial expressions of varying degrees of horror and disgust at what Alfred is revealing – something that they can see but we cannot. Before turning the magazine over, and thus without seeing the image on its back, the image on the front operates in its own right as something of a joke, given the seemingly incongruous response to the presumed nudity of the flasher by the presumed nudists at the beach. It is this incongruity and seemingly logical contradiction that at the same time clues us in that something else must be at stake here, other than public nudity. Flipping over the magazine in order to see the illustration on its back cover, we find that Alfred E. Neuman is in fact not exposing his naked body, but is wearing shorts and a T-shirt, the latter of which has printed on it the words “FLASHERS AGAINST NUDITY”. Maintaining the identity that he performs by his public gesture of self-exposure, Neuman performs what Mitchell describes as a “form of visual transgression … [that is] most threatening in a world defined by the free visual access to the naked body”, namely “the open, illuminated world of nudism”.12 It might seem strange and not terribly fortuitous to begin a discussion of queer metapictures with these images from Mad magazine. For as Mitchell himself has described it, the magazine is from the archive of “the popular culture of the adolescent white American male in the second half of the twentieth century”, and is part of “a whole realm of pubescent transgression that has marked the maturation of boys in this country since the 1950s”. To which we might further qualify that these boys would most likely be those class nerds whose horny adolescent perversions circulated around never being able to ask a girl to dance, and not those roused in their curiosity by other boys’ bodies in the gym locker room. But this is precisely where I  wish to begin, first of all because, as Mitchell notes, “this particular cover … brings the metapicture into the territory of sexuality, voyeurism, gender difference, pornography, and the pictured body”. This territory is certainly not exclusive to queer theory; however, these have been some of the principle themes by which, in doing (i.e., queering) theory, queer theory has also proven itself to be a way of picturing theory. But more specifically, I  am interested in how these pictures can be inflected in ways that are afforded by, but not entirely discursively inscribed by, these pictures, thereby intensifying their status as a metapicture. (Or is it “metapictures”, in the plural, that we are dealing with here?) As we can see, the situation here is already rather tricky when we consider that of Mitchell’s many other examples, the cover of Mad magazine

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is the only metapicture that comes in two parts, in the form of two separate yet connected images. Yet in the other examples (think, for instance, of the Duck–Rabbit), the metapicture’s duplicity – a duplicitousness that often takes the form of a doubling (e.g., two animals:  duck and rabbit) – functions within a single picture.13 In other words, what Mitchell refers to as the “multistability” of the picture and its disposition often lies in the singularity of its doubleness. Accordingly, it would seem that we should discourage ourselves from thinking that the Mad magazine cover satisfies this necessary duplicity, simply based upon the fact that it comes in the form of two images. Instead, by following Mitchell’s use of the impersonal singular pronoun “it”, it would seem that we are meant to regard the cover images as two sides  – front and back  – laminated together, inseparable in their function, and thus constituting one single metapicture. However, if there is anything that we have learned from Mitchell about the metapicture, it is that this lamination of images never completely adheres, such that the metapicture proves to be the image-source of a sense of multiplicity that is not contained by any system or order of representation. Meaning that the multiplicity that pertains to the metapicture is neither a matter of a mere proliferation of images, nor the result of some dialectical negation, but instead is that which exceeds the logics of plurality and contradiction and presents itself as what Michel Foucault referred to as compossible or “mutually possible”. Meaning:  shapes, forms and figures that constitute what Foucault more fully describes as a “concerted incertitude of morphology” that, coexisting in the same text or image, authorizes “incompatible but mutually possible systems of reading – a rigorous and uncontrollable polyvalence of forms”.14 So in response to Mitchell’s observation that the picture on the front cover of the magazine “leaves us asking what it is that could arouse such horror and astonishment”, I  would say that it is something decidedly queer. “Queer” not in terms of an identity category, but instead in the mode of a categorical confusion of identity, including that which results from the impossibility of being able to differentiate one set of things from another, precisely when incompatible things occupy the same picture. This means an exempting from any law or norm by which “sexuality, voyeurism, gender difference, pornography and the pictured body” might be thoroughly policed and disciplined. It is this exemption, released by Neuman’s showing gesture and stance, that “causes women to cover their mouths in horror and cover their children’s eyes”, that “leaves men gaping in amazement, even managing to distract a distant volleyball player who is transfixed in midair”.15 In continuing his description, Mitchell notes that whatever Neuman is exposing evokes a set of responses that cycles between repulsion and attraction, disgust and fascination. The

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And if we look again at the left-hand side of the picture, we see not one but two men gesturing. With their heads contiguously overlapping and facing, Janus-like, in opposite directions, one (described above) is looking out of the frame as he raises his hand up in the air and, with index finger extended, points in the direction of Neuman. The other man, blond with a darker mustache and equally aghast in his similarly wide-opened mouth, has raised one hand – fingers splayed – up to the center of his chest. From the position of a certain observer, this gesture is easily read as “clutching one’s pearls” – its own articulate sign and conventional gesture amongst gay men of a hyperbolically feigned shock and horror. Pair that with the hand gesture of the bearded volleyball player in the background, whose limp wrists extended high above the net can only partially disguise the team that he is actually playing on, and we suddenly realize that we are seeing a picture of something that we have always known: that the majority of men who populate any nude beach are gay.17 So there is the intended joke, the one that combines the shock and horror of nudists at a nude beach at the sight of a flasher (front cover), with the double absurdity of a flasher at a nude beach protesting against nudity (back cover). However, if we were to follow Mitchell’s reading of another one of his metapictures from the same essay, namely the Alain cartoon of the ancient Egyptian life-drawing art class, and specifically Mitchell’s correction of Gombrich’s reading of the same cartoon, we realize that there is another joke to be had on the Mad magazine covers. For as Mitchell points out, “the most conspicuous problem in Gombrich’s reading is his suggestion that the cartoon shows the Egyptians ‘perceived nature in a different way’ ”, whereas, as he goes on to argue, “in fact, the whole point of the cartoon is that the Egyptian art students are not shown as ‘different’ at all, but behave just as modern, Western art students do in a traditional life-class”.18 Translating Mitchell’s insights onto the scene at the nude beach, we might say that like the Alain cartoon – which, by the way, also involves sexuality, gender difference, the picturing of the body, voyeurism (albeit sanctioned), and, why not, perhaps even pornography  – what is funny about the Mad magazine cartoon is not that gay men (but also, separately, voyeurs, exhibitionists, pedophiles and pornographers) are shown to be exotic, alien, abnormal and different from “us”, but that they are shown to be just like “us”. In his more recent and unprecedented work on cloning in post-9/11 visual culture, Mitchell has further pursued this insight about an indistinguishable and hence terrifying sameness that drives iconophobia. As he

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explains in a chapter titled “Clonophobia”, “the true terror arises when the different arrives masquerading as the same, threatening all differentiation and identification. The logic of identity itself is put in question by the clone”.19 We might say that it is all the more threatening when that masquerade takes the seemingly unmasked form of nudism at a public nude beach.20 “Seemingly unmasked” because modes of normative recognition are predicated upon presuming that the “other” is unmarked by difference (by identity) unless proven otherwise. For instance, it is presumptive whiteness that has enabled nonwhite subjects to pass as white, and for nonheterosexual subjects to pass as straight. As the critical literature on the topic has demonstrated, the phenomenon of passing reveals as much  – if not more  – about the normative protocols of perception that certain observers abide by, as it does about the performative act of the one who passes. Passing shows the normative seeing of others, and so we can say that pictures and scenes of passing are metapictures. That is, passing-as-metapicture shows the presumptive and hence normalized alignment of picture and image (that lamination) in the realm of subjectivity and social identity. While often understood as a question and contest over the “truth” of identity, passing is more accurately understood to be what passes for the truth, in the overlapping spheres of discourse and vision. The famous painting by Magritte is its own scene of passing, in the sense that it stages a split between the seeable and the sayable, as though the legend “this is not a pipe” bears a secret knowledge that belies the perception of a picture that looks like the textbook image of a pipe.21 While within the context of this discussion we might define homophobia as, in part, that form of iconophobia that arises when it is difficult to distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals, clonophobia is that fear and anxiety that arises when, within the normative signs of masculine sameness, it is difficult to tell the difference between a straight guy and a gay one. This is the type of confusion caused by the gay male clone, that “camp appropriation of masculinity” and “queering of machismo” that was born in 1970s gay male culture. As Mitchell concludes: from the point of view of straight men … the clone was a figure of anxiety, a convergence of homophobia and clonophobia. The problem with the clone, then, is not only that it is a living image of a living thing, but that it is indistinguishable, anonymous.22 If the gay male clone is that image of masculinity that can pass as straight, then where does the “truth” of masculinity reside? With the gay clone, the male body is not simply a body that can be pictured (represented or presented, i.e., a “pictured-body”), but is a bodyas-picture. This is to say that, in its corporeality, it is the material support for the various images that are constructed by and projected from a body. The gay male clone wearing aviator sunglasses, tight-fitting jeans

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and T-shirt or perhaps some sort of leather gear, sporting a big mustache or trimmed beard, and with a stern expression on his face, is the picture of a male body that functions as a phantasmatic and replicated image of iconic masculinity. So while the artist Robert Morris does not identify as a gay man, in his well-known self-portrait pictured on the poster for the Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery exhibition in 1974, he is nonetheless the spitting image of an early-1970s West Village gay male leather-daddy-biker clone (the designations abound here).23 So we might repeat the question, now in “reverse”, and ask:  if the straight macho man can present an image of masculinity that looks to be gay, then where does the “truth” of masculinity reside? Returning to the Mad magazine cover, with these insights and questions now in hand, we might cast the gestures and looks of some of the men in this image as expressions of homosexual panic in reverse. “In reverse” since “homosexual panic” is the phrase used to describe and legally defend any act of violence against a gay man who purportedly “came on to” another man who, in turn, claimed to have “panicked” when confronted by the purported sexual advances, and who then responded violently to the purportedly unwanted solicitation. To complicate things further, it is a pubescent boy who causes not just the gay men but everyone at the beach to panic, and who, given his young age and exhibitionist gesture, not only brings the metapicture into the territory of sexuality, voyeurism, pornography and the pictured body, but remaps these categories by inevitably conjuring up images and scenes of childhood sexuality and pedophilia, voyeurism between children and adults, and child pornography. With his trench coat opened in a gesture of flashing, and in the presumed exposure of his naked pubescent body, Alfred E. Neuman is here the figure of pedophilia and of pedophilic desire. Ironically, it is this seeming “Medusa effect” – as Mitchell aptly describes it – of Neuman’s self-exposure that, in transfixing the nudists on the beach in states of paralyzed horror, also unfixes identity and the categorizations that it serves, specifically as it and they might be used as principles or logics by which to organize sexual and gender difference, the pictured body and the images that it can generate. But what about Neuman’s gesture of flashing and the words “FLASHERS AGAINST NUDITY” printed on his T-shirt? Is this simply meant to be ironic and, as such, the basis of its own metapictorial joke about the disjuncture between the seeable and the sayable, including between identity and act, being and doing? For indeed, how ironic is it that a flasher seen flashing is also at the same time, publicly protesting against nudism  – and, even further, needing to do so not by way of his naked body, but while wearing clothing, printed with readable language. But what if we were to preserve Neuman’s identity, the identity that he may be seen to be claiming by having his body inscribed with the word “flasher” and by executing the stereotypical act of opening up the trench coat he is

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wearing to reveal his body? Which is in turn to ask, if he is still a flasher and an exhibitionist, then what is it exactly that he is exhibiting or presenting, which is clearly neither “nudism” nor his naked body? My first answer is that in his gesture, stance and sartorial details  – that is, in his body-as-picture – he is, as a flasher, showing showing, and specifically that exhibitionist form of showing that is flashing. Yet at the same time, he is showing flashing as a transgressive act that does not necessarily require the unexpected public exposure of a naked body, quickly revealed and (often) just as quickly concealed.24 My second and more extended answer requires us to return to Mitchell’s essay and his own reading of these images. As Mitchell explains, “exhibitionism doesn’t simply violate the law against a certain kind of visual display; it relies on that law for its very [transgressive] effect”.25 In turn, “nudism is the deadly enemy of exhibitionism, for it offers the possibility of bodily display without sex, secrecy, or transgression”. Yet this must not be read as a statement regarding nudism as somehow unaffiliated with or undetermined by the law, in part because nudism is based upon the way in which it is (at least theoretically speaking) against any contamination of nudism by sex, secrecy or transgression. This is simply to say that what the law of nudism is against is nakedness, and thus while it “threatens the regime of concealment and surveillance, and overturns the alliance between voyeurism and exhibitionism”, nudism is also its own form of concealment of and surveillance against nakedness, and always stands the chance of being made the mantle for an undercover alliance of voyeurism and exhibitionism under the cover of sanctioned nudism.26 Like the handwriting in Magritte’s painting, it is as though the text that we read on Neuman’s T-shirt rewrites the writing on the wall, so that it may now also be read as “This is not a naked beach”. This might mean that in addition to being an “illustration of what Foucault calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’ concerning sexuality”, via an act of discourse that creates a rule of law and hence also desire based upon a sense of lack, Neuman might also be seen as a figure of what I will call the “excessive hypothesis” concerning bodily exposure and nakedness, which exceeds the position that nudism assumes when it comes to sex and visibility, including in terms of the masking of nakedness through the presumed transparency and luminescence of nudity. So while it makes perfect sense to see Neuman as a figure of the very repressive law against nudity that exhibitionism relies upon in order to be a transgressive act, and thus he can be seen here as flashing this law and the desire that it provokes in terms of lack, might it not also be possible to see him as neither transgressing nor reinscribing this law against nakedly bodily display, but exceeding its limits through an intensification of showing? In other words, he shows flashing to be that which exceeds nudity, in its intrusive and unwarranted nakedness, and hence as that which also reveals nudism’s proximity to things like voyeurism, exhibitionism, sexuality, gender

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difference and even pornography – all of those nakedly excessive things that nudism conceals and to which it seeks to deny any relation. Thus we can conclude that in showing the showing that is flashing as a naked exposure to that which exceeds nudity, the Mad magazine double-cover functions as a queer metapicture. Even further, if nudism is a showing of the unclothed body that conceals that same body’s nakedness, and exhibitionism (including flashing) is a showing of the unclothed body that exposes that same body’s nakedness, then we might say that the specific showing that is exhibitionism lies in showing the extent to which “showing” is always a matter of exposing. This would thus lead us to argue that the pictured-body of exhibitionism is a metapicture. As Mitchell says of Magritte’s drawing, so we can say the same of Richard Williams (the illustrator of Mad magazine cover images), that he shows everything that can be shown: printed and painted words, bodies, gazes and gestures. However, following Mitchell’s analysis of the Magritte, I too want to argue that the effect here (if not the aim) of Williams’ queer metapicture “is to show what cannot be pictured or made readable”.27 For in remaining clothed while showing flashing, Neuman is showing that there is an exposure that exceeds both nudity and nakedness – including the common frontier or fence that connects and divides them at once. As the exposure to the outside and nonknowledge, this is not only the dissolution of the link between the sayable/seeable and the “I think”, but also the suspension of the link between “I think” and “I know”. Just as much as any metapicture offers a means of knowing something about pictures and images, seeing and picturing – including picturing theory – it also offers us an opportunity to pretend not to know (as Foucault advises in his essay on Las Meninas). Reading Mitchell’s work in terms of nudity, flashing, showing, nakedness and its impossible excess is to consider the links between these things and the very question and process of knowledge, in particular at their juncture, which takes the form of the image. What do images want? Images want us to know that they are one of our principal means of access to the very possibility of knowledge, including as our exposure to nonknowledge (as that which is incapable of being captured by any discourse, representation or picture). Mitchell’s metapictures are essentially and effectively a concern with the nakedness of any image – that is, the ways in which an image can function as showing seeing and showing showing. Image science, then, is a science of exhibitionism. Not the medieval theological notion of “naked essence” (as in Eckhart), but image science as “naked science”.28 It is precisely this “wildness” and madness of images that Mitchell has called our attention to, again and again, over the past thirty years. Venturing down along the path that he has charted, we must not resist or refuse to confront that which remains unseeable and unsayable in the ground that

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opens up between the seeable and the sayable. This ground can never be a common ground or common space, at least in the sense of a single, unifying collective territory. Nor is it the space of radical and inextinguishable antagonism, but instead it is a spacing of shared separation. It is an edge and not an end, a threshold and not a fence. It is the sense of the common as the impossible picture of the common – no flag or banner, or if so one that is anonymous, colorless or at the most a neutral grey. As the exposure to nonknowledge, it is, following Foucault, too much even to claim that it is a blank or lacuna but “instead it is an absence of space, an effacement of the ‘common place’ ”. Foucault finds this “neutral strip” there between words and images, in the “few millimeters of white, the calm sand of the page” – the page that W.J.T. Mitchell, that great maker of castles on the edges or shores of the visual, has simply translated as “the beach”.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 2 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Metapictures”, in Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 35–82. 3 A study of Mitchell and Foucault would be extremely illuminating and is long overdue. My essay does not intend to fill that gap, although during the process of writing it became increasingly clear to me that such an analysis is necessary, given the extraordinary presence and in many respects the centrality of Foucault’s work in Mitchell’s own. “I think it is no exaggeration to say that the little essay on Magritte, and the hypericon of Ceci n’est pas une pipe provides a picture of Foucault’s way of writing and his whole theory of the stratification of knowledge and the relations of power in the dialectic of the visible and the sayable” (Mitchell, Picture Theory, 71). Rewriting this, I in turn think it is no exaggeration to say that his essay “Metapictures” (ibid., 35–82), and the aggregate of metapictures contained therein, provides a picture of Mitchell’s way of writing and his whole theory of the knowledge-as-image and the relations of power in the dialectic of the visible and sayable. 4 Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault, Blanchot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 24. This text, originally published in 1966 (La pensée du dehors) is from that period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Foucault was most deeply immersed in the study of literature, the question of writing and their relation to madness and death, and in the examination of painting. For instance, it was also in 1966 that his text “Las Meninas” appeared as the first chapter of his book Les Mots et Les Choses; in 1968 he was interviewed by Claude Bonnefoy, a conversation only recently published as Le beau danger, and translated into English as Speech Begins After Death; in 1971 while in Tunis he gave lectures on Manet and the Object of Painting; and in 1973 he published Ceci n’est pas une pipe, his little book on Magritte’s painting by that name – the homonymous titles thus themselves staging the very scene of the infinite rapport between (that) text and (that) painting. 5 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 40. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 75.

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9 Ibid., 41–42. 10 Ibid., 35–82. 11 As Mitchell has recently noted in a comment on Erwin Panofsky’s notion of the “motif”, the “image” (distinct from the picture) is that “element in a picture that elicits cognition and especially recognition, the awareness that ‘this is that’, the perception of the nameable, identifiable object that appears as a virtual presence, the paradoxical ‘absent presence’ that is fundamental to all representational entities”. As we will see, like any metapicture, images in a queer metapicture not only elicit a sense of recognition, they also provoke an equal degree of uncertainty of identification and the awareness that “this is that”. They often do so less in terms of a virtual presence that inheres in the absent presence of pictorial representations than by way of an intensification of appearance that exceeds the nameable in its anonymity on the register of presentation. Mitchell, Image Science, 17, emphasis in original. 12 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 80. 13 As Mitchell estimates, “The humble multistable image of the Duck-Rabbit is perhaps the most famous metapicture in modern philosophy, appearing in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as an exemplar of ‘seeing as’ and the doubleness of depiction as such” (Mitchell, Image Science, 19). 14 Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology – Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 2 (New York: New Press, 1998), 27. I take this to be at once a definition of the metapicture and a description of two “systems of reading” (Mitchell’s and my own) in which the morphological incertitude of the metapicture generates incompatible scenes of showing seeing that are mutually possible and thus not contradictory. 15 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 78. 16 Ibid. 17 Indeed, one might even be led to argue that “nude beach” is often a euphemism for “gay beach”, given the significant and unmistakable presence of gay men on its sands. However, through a shift in the economy of modesty and public display of bodies amongst gay men, who, while still frequenting nude beaches in large numbers, mostly do so these days without actually getting naked. Instead, an impressive catalogue of speedos, bathing suits and, yes, even knee-length surfer or board shorts is on display. This has the ironic effect of making gay men more recognizable, standing out as they do amidst the noticeably smaller number of diehard nudists, the majority of whom are recognizably straight (and usually of an older and more deeply tanned generation). 18 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 44. 19 W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror:  The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 34. 20 This in turn points to the way in which nudism is its own form of masking – a point that I return to below. 21 Magritte’s painting may be a pun on the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart’s theory of the image and its connection to nudity, in which, as Giorgio Agamben has explained, “ ‘the image (identified with ‘naked essence’) [is turned] into something like the pure and absolute medium of knowledge.” The possible pun lies in Eckhart’s description of the image and its implicit reliance on an unspoken analogy between the image’s nudity and an erect penis. Quoted by Agamben, Eckhart writes that, “The image is a simple and formal emanation that transfuses in its totality the naked essence … It is a life [vita quaedam] that can be conceived as something that begins to swell and tremble [intumescere et bullire] in itself and by itself, without however thinking at the same time about its expansion outwards [necdum cointellecta

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ebullitione]’ ”. In light of this, Magritte’s painting of a pipe might be thought to be stating that “this is not a pipe” because it is instead an image, which is to say, a penis. Yet at the same time, the painting is stating that this is not a pipe/image, at least to the extent that it is not swelling (not erect), but in the pipe’s curvaceous shape seems to be nothing more than a rather droopy and limp – and not tumescent at all – dick. Thus, in its own nakedness, the Magritte painting is not the pure and absolute medium of essential knowledge, and hence it is properly titled Le trahison des images (The Treachery of Images). Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 83. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 36–37. In his chapter on “Lessing’s Laocoön and the Politics of Genre”, Mitchell makes clear that the laws of genre also bear upon the politics and laws of gender – that is, those gender and sexual economies of power, knowledge, desire and meaning that are structured dichotomously into separate zones of masculine and feminine identity (W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 95–115. If, in our reading of Mitchell here, we were to argue that iconoclasm is homophobic, in the sense that it is “a rhetoric of exclusion and domination, a caricature of the other as one who is involved in irrational, obscene behavior” around images that are “typically phallic”, then the iconoclastic response to emasculate, feminize and cut off the tongues of the idols in order to render them mute, empty and illusory can be seen as performing a kind of gender reassignment surgery. This is a violent excision that ironically transforms the hypermasculine idol into an image of transfemininity, which then goes by the name of “aesthetic object”, and thus violates by blurring (and vice versa) the very laws of genre that it seeks to enforce. Conversely, to resist the violence precipitated by these laws of genre and gender demands exactly what Mitchell, at the very end of his chapter, suggests might be necessary: namely, “some other concept of the image to work with besides Lessing’s alternatives – the mute, castrated aesthetic object, or the phallic, loquacious idol”. We might call this new concept the “trans-image”, one that would include that mimetically replicated image that transits “within” the “single” genre/gender of masculine/masculinity that is the gay male clone. Following Agamben, we might say that flashing reveals (gives a quick peek of) clothing as that which shows naked corporeality to be clothing’s obscure presupposition. Even further, flashing shows that nakedness to have been thoroughly demoralized – instantly privative and thus perhaps only disrupted in an equally instantaneousness flash. Agamben, Nudities, 65. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 80. For instance, in the early-twentieth-century German naturist movement and its “free body culture” (Freikörperkultur), the nude bodies of its adherents were described as being clad in “clothes of light” (Lichtkleid). Mitchell echoes this in his own description (quoted above) of “the open, illuminated world of nudism”. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 69. Drawing on one of Mitchell’s favorite scenes, might we then say that image science, as “naked science”, is also a Nietzsche-inspired “gay science”? In it, one not only strikes the hollow idols with a tuning fork in order to make them sound, but also strokes the idols with, say, a dildo, in order to make them sweetly vibrate with pleasure.

15 After the Pictorial Turn An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell Krešimir Purgar

I would not like to be discouraging, but I think we should start with the most difficult questions, or perhaps a multitude of questions, regarding the nature of images  – what they are and how to understand them. In my opinion, it is both revelatory and confusing reading; for instance, a chapter from the volume What Is an Image?, one of the Stone Art Theory Seminars organized by James Elkins:  more precisely, the discussion on the ontology of image(s). Addressing this topic, several respectable scholars (including yourself) presented many possible answers to it. But several contributors to this book [W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures] remind us that the image/icon (and the pictorial turn for that matter) are, according to you, a discursive formation, therefore an entity and an event without ontological basis. Does the question “what is an image?” have any relevance today, except for broadly delimiting the area of our interest for images? W.J.T. MITCHELL: I think this question always has relevance, and always will, precisely because images are not static, fixed entities, but historical, discursive, and even evolutionary phenomena that change their nature in relation to new situations. Asking “what is an image?” is rather like asking the question “what is life?”. Neither question admits of a final, scientific definition (and by the way, who believes anymore that science provides anything like final answers? Science is always provisional and progressive, no matter how “settled” a particular paradigm may be). As you know, I  regard the question of the image as very closely related to the question of life, of the living thing. Classically, images are “imitations of life”. They can represent living things. Sometimes they even simulate them very precisely, as in automata, robots, and cyborgs. And they can depict entire life-worlds in the phenomenon of the world picture. But I  suspect that the philosophically hard-core question of the “ontology of images” is well above my pay grade. So my rejoinder would be to reverse the question and ask: what is our image of ontology? Is it true that “discursive entities” have “no ontological basis”? Or is ontology itself a discursive formation within philosophy that obsessively examines the question “what is …?” What pictures of being do we take for granted when we assert that something exists, KREŠIMIR PURGAR:

After the Pictorial Turn 265 or when we claim that a picture is a true or false representation of an existing thing, or a true representation of a nonexistent thing, e.g., a mythical being, a chimera? Is there any sense in saying that there can be an incorrect picture of a unicorn? I think there is a sense to such a statement, and it reveals an interesting point about the relation of images and ontology. Images are traditionally associated with mere appearance, with imaginary beings, shadows, phantoms, dreams, and illusions. They seem not to exist in quite the same way that objects and things exist. And yet they are not nothing. They are essential features of our being in the world. What would human beings be without images? Very poor, bare, forked animals, I’m afraid, like King Lear stripped naked in the storm. Plato may inaugurate ancient ontology by contrasting the cave filled with images to the reality of the Forms in the sunlit real of true being, but he has to admit that we cannot live out in the sun, but must reside in the cave of our bodies, senses, and appearances. Even more profoundly, he admits that his model of human existence in the allegory of the cave is nothing but a “strange image”. So images produce a kind of crisis in the very notion of ontology, a science of being, of what “really, truly, actually exists”. They present a phenomenon at the edge of being and nonbeing, at the border between reality and fantasy. In other words, they are located precisely where human beings find themselves, in the zone of determinate indeterminacy and fatal choices that we call life and history. Wittgenstein noted that “a picture held us captive” inside a certain metaphysics that dreamed of positive knowledge. But like Plato, he did not explain how we could escape that captivity. I suspect that our picture of ontology as a method of getting at true existence by way of philosophical reflection is precisely the prison that holds us captive. That is why I agree with Deleuze that philosophy is better off when it starts with iconology rather than with ontology. KP: How would you connect (or would you at all) your concept of the pictorial turn, together with the fortune it made during the last two decades, with the success of visual studies at large? Do you think the pictorial turn needed visual studies in the same way as, let’s say, avant-garde art or modernism needed art history to put them into perspective; is our disciplinary organization of knowledge always in need of some overarching idea or foundation that explains the nature of a whole epoch? TM: I am not sure that I grasp the premise of this question, but here is a stab at an answer. I suspect that the function of the pictorial turn was to give visual studies a sense of its own historicity among the disciplines, in much the same way that the linguistic turn provided a new paradigm for philosophy, but also for the history and archaeology of discourses pioneered by Foucault. In fact, it was Foucault’s archaeological model of the “sayable” and “seeable” as historical

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“strata” that made the relations of language and visuality intelligible to me. I am not sure whether the pictorial turn needed visual studies, or visual studies needed the pictorial turn to launch its sense of itself as a research program. In either case, both concepts worked to expand the field of art history, or more precisely, to return art history to its most ambitious origins in the work of encyclopedic scholars like Aby Warburg. As for art history’s relation to the avant garde, I think the latter did much more for the former. The avant garde in the arts was one of the principal vectors that drove all of the “turns”, pictorial, linguistic, or otherwise, that have characterized the modern evolution of culture. That, and the shock of new technologies and revolutionary political movements, made it clear that the human species had turned a corner – in fact several corners – and required a rethinking of both foundational concepts and over-arching ideas – a new architecture of the human condition. KP: In your “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science” of 2008, you mention key points essential for understanding the contemporary culture of images: image/picture dichotomy, the pictorial turn, metapictures and biopictures. You presented them in a very concise way for the purposes of a lecture format, but do you think it is possible to build out of them (and out of other important topics) sort of a theory of visual studies? Or, would you rather stick to “… visual studies [as] not merely an indiscipline or dangerous supplement to the traditional vision-oriented disciplines, but an interdiscipline that draws on their resources and those of other disciplines to construct a new and distinctive object of research”.1 Personally, you emphatically stick to that claim (“If anyone is hardcore visual studies, it’s me!”, you said in Farewell to Visual Studies2). But, generally speaking: is visual studies today, compared to its early days, more ready to become institutionalized, is it in a danger of losing its inter- or nondisciplinary status? And if it loses it, what would this mean? TM: Visual studies has already become institutionalized. It now has departmental or programmatic status at universities all over the world, and it is deeply woven into existing departments of art history, cinema and media studies, anthropology, and cultural studies. It is very hard to generalize about what all this means. I  am delighted, of course, that younger scholars continue to use it as an opening to all kinds of new research in fields as diverse as psychology, cognitive science, and political theory, as well as the history and philosophy of science. It is clearly not just a “cultural studies” subfield, and it its still evolving. I hope it is not yet declining into obsolescence, but I feel that it has perhaps moved beyond its adolescence. One of the most exciting developments from my point of view is the way it helped to spawn “countermovements” such as sound studies, which often began with a polemical complaint about the “privileging of vision”. As Hannah

After the Pictorial Turn 267 Higgins’ essay [Chapter 12] in this volume shows, the proper study of vision entails a renewed attention to acoustical worlds, and a new focus on tactility as well. Vision is not everything, and its historic status as the “sovereign” sense has provoked a healthy rebellion among the other members of what Hegel called the “theoretic senses”. Ears, eyes, and hands remain, for all their technical prostheses in digital media, touch screens, and virtual reality helmets, the sensuous foundations of human experience. Visual studies helped to open our eyes to this, and its work is not finished. As for my “four fundamental concepts”, I am sure that there are more to come. They provide one starting point that has borne fruit, but I do not think of them as the end point in any sense. KP: In one of your earlier interviews, you said that you’d appreciate a critique that would “dismantle the entire structure of the arguments” that you have been building, mentioning that arguments presented in What Do Pictures Want? regarding a vitalist/animist theoretical model for images actually “might have gone too far” [see the interview with Grønstad and Vågnes, Chapter 10, this volume]. As you are probably aware, Janet Wolff in her article “After Cultural Theory:  The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy”3 is trying to do just that. Evoking “the turn to affect” and “the (re)turn to phenomenology(and post-phenomenology)”, she is arguing that “at stake is the status of critical theories of culture – sociological, hermeneutic, semiotic, interpretative – which are in some cases explicitly rejected”. Following David Freedberg, she acknowledges that images may indeed have power, but that power is “socially, culturally, perhaps politically” accorded to them and not inherent to them. She then makes reference to your relativization of your own “animistic” theory of images when you call your theory “constitutive fiction”, adding that “Mitchell is clear that ‘what pictures want certainly does not eliminate the interpretation of signs’ ”. Here I have two questions for you: is hers a kind of argument that you wished for, and what do you think of this “phenomenological turn” that Janet Wolff discerns? Is it a next new big thing, after grand theories and theories of representation? Are authors like Lambert Wiesing and Martin Seel on the German side and Paul Crowther on the Anglo-American side creators of a new phenomenology of pictures that now draws on both Hans Belting’s anthropology of images and on your desiring pictures, as much as it draws on the classical phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty? TM: I think Janet Wolff identifies an interesting strand in recent theoretical work on images – she calls it a phenomenological, neurological, and (paradoxically) a magical or animistic view of images, one that tends to minimize interpretation and the use of historical and political context in the understanding of images. But I don’t think Wolff

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Krešimir Purgar provides the focused critique that I was hoping for. She tends to lump me with a very broad and schematically described group of thinkers, while admitting that I don’t quite fit her pattern since, despite my flirtations with animism, I am so clearly still interested in interpretation, and in political and social contexts for images. I also consider myself a phenomenologist, but of a very eccentric sort in that I do not allow phenomenology to prevent me from using Freud or Marx or Lacan or Benjamin to unpack the lives of images. I also want to explore a phenomenology of media that grows out of Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler. Belting’s anthropology of images is important for me, but so is Fraser and Durkheim on totemism, and Michael Taussig on mimesis. Iconology has always worked best for me when it has functioned as a promiscuous gathering of ideas, ancient, modern, and postmodern, a bricolage of methods, frameworks, and questions. The best critique of my work is Jacques Rancière’s marvelous essay, “Do Pictures Really Want to Live?”.4 This essay is all that any author could dream of. It is rigorous, comprehensive, and detailed, betraying a thorough knowledge of my work, and tracing very precisely the trajectory of my arguments. Rancière has some reservations about my claim that the invention of cloning has produced a new form of image-making that literalizes the ancient dream of fabricating a living image (anticipated in myths of creation, including golems, Frankenstein’s monster, and the robot and cyborg). He claims that “the reign of the image comes to an end at the point where a body is the replica of a body in flesh and bone. The cloned sheep is no longer an image”.5 It looks to me as if this is where I part company with Rancière, and I have laid out some counterarguments in “The Future of the Image”, my essay that follows his in The Pictorial Turn. It may well be that our debate is finally a question of sensibility more than one of logic, for Rancière seems prepared to concede that, for a great variety of images, it is enough to say that it is “as if” they were alive, and wanted things. Our debate would then come down to a far-reaching discussion of the relation between literal and figurative meaning, between real and imagined entities, and ultimately perhaps between what Wittgenstein distinguished as “seeing” and “seeing as”. At the end of this debate I think there would be a strong convergence and agreement between us on the need to think through the ontology of images in terms of life and desire, not to mention factors of affect, emotion, cognition, and re-cognition. As for the clone, I can only say that if it looks like an image, walks like an image, behaves like an image, and (most important) produces in us the same kind of sense of the uncanny elicited by an image, then I think we have to call it an image. Rancière is not the only one to have offered a stimulating critique of my work. Norman Macleod (also in The Pictorial Turn) provides

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KP:

a very strong dissent on precisely the issue that I am prepared to concede to Rancière, namely, the escape hatch provided by the “as if”. Macleod, a distinguished biologist, and one of the world’s leading researchers in micro-paleontology, thinks that I  am being too cautious and hesitant in retreating from a strong claim for the relation of images and life-forms. Macleod seizes on my analogy between the picture/image distinction, on the one hand, and the specimen/ species distinction on the other. He points out that the proper object of biological science (or of any science, for that matter) is not really the individual specimen, but the class of things to which that specimen belongs. The botanist does not study a tree, except insofar as it belongs to a very large group of related and differentiated entities known as trees. And as a paleontologist, he notes that the real subject of paleontology are the fossilized images of life-forms; the actual living forms are extinct, therefore not available to direct observation. More important, he suggests that the best definition of an image is similarity plus reproducibility, exactly the same criteria that apply to species. He concludes therefore that the image, understood as the name, likeness, and reproductive capacity of a specimen, is exactly the object of the life sciences. He chides me (very nicely) then for being too tentative and cautious, and urges that iconology (the general study of images) embrace its scientific character and recognize that biology proper is nothing but the study of images of life-forms – how they appear and how they propagate. I  have put my toe very hesitantly into these deep waters in my latest book, Image Science (Chicago, 2015).6 Finally, I would say that a whole range of friends, colleagues, and students have provided all the ruthless criticism that anyone could ask for. My editorial group at Critical Inquiry, especially Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Françoise Meltzer, and Joel Snyder, never lets me get away with anything. And if I started naming all the students who have found ways to set me straight or turn me onto a new path, I  would have to fill up many pages. In fact, many of them, along with the translators who have labored so hard to make sense of my thought in other languages, are in this very volume. This seems like the right place to thank them. Your books and articles in the last five years or so show your deeper interest in the politics of images in a stricter sense. How would you explain your engagement in commenting on political movements and the role pictures play in them? Is it because today images are more decidedly linked to visibility and to the outcome of any political endeavor (hence the need for this type of intellectual scrutiny)? Or is your interest in protest movements, “the arts of occupation”, motivated by the belief that real authenticity in images today can only be found outside institutions or even against them – literally on

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the streets? Can visual imagery, flown out of various Occupy movements, find any serious theoretical reflection other than within visual studies? Is this type of ad hoc popular viral imagery the perfect alibi for visual studies to further establish itself in showing interest in vernacular visuality? Is this the road you’ve personally taken “after the pictorial turn”? TM: Actually, I think my interest in images has always been political, and grounded in what I would call “vernacular theory”, a reflective practice that trusts ordinary language to provide a rough guide, or at least a starting point, for understanding the world. My first book, Blake’s Composite Art, was devoted to an artist who was among the radical revolutionaries of his era, the period of the French Revolution. I  saw Blake as a political artist of the highest order, relentlessly satirizing the atrocious conditions of his time  – the dominance of vicious, exploitative empires, the reign of patriarchal religions that rationalize the tyranny of the patriarchal family and monarchical government. At the same time, Blake was a visionary and utopian prophet of the highest order, positing an awakened humanity that would throw off its chains and fulfill the potential of our species to build “Jerusalem”, the shining city of our dreams, in “Englands green and pleasant land”, and then throughout the world. Blake’s poetic and pictorial images rank, in my view, with the greatest works in the English language, with Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer, Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot, and with the major visual artists of any era. His central commitment as a radical humanist was to the power of the human imagination, the power of invention, creativity, and (of course) quite literally the faculty that makes human beings capable of producing and finding images. His medium for accomplishing this work was a “composite art” – of words and images, poetry and painting, in illuminated books – that echoes the great masterworks of the medieval illuminated manuscript, while looking forward to the advances in technology that would make possible the work of the pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists, the Surrealists, and to the work of the visionary artists in all the technical media of our digital age. All of my work as an iconologist begins with Blake, and particularly with his critique of rationalist philosophy and the reign of doubt and abstraction. My notion of “image science” takes its cue not from a merely positivist or empiricist standpoint (though I would acknowledge the great achievements of both these traditions), but from what he called “sweet science”, the kind of recognition expressed by Einstein that scientific theory itself is framed and elaborated in terms of metaphors and images. This form of “higher reason”, a wisdom which goes beyond mere calculation, is itself a political commitment of the sort Blake expresses when he concludes this epic poem, The Four Zoas, by prophesying a time when “the war of swords, and the

After the Pictorial Turn 271 dark religions are parted / and Sweet Science reigns”. I think that the political has continued to be a major thread in my work on images, then, straight through all the subsequent work, from Iconology, which works its way through the iconological figures (the camera obscura and the fetish) in Marxism, to Picture Theory (where the ideological implications of the “pictorial turn” were first worked out), to Landscape and Power (grounded in my work on imperial and colonial landscapes), to The Last Dinosaur Book (a critical and historical investigation of the totem animal of modern capitalist culture). The more recent work on war, racism, and activist politics, then, has simply focussed that early work on particular political issues more precisely. And yes, I think these issues, and many more, provide the right home for visual studies, and of course for art history, literary criticism, media studies, and the humanities more generally. I would not rule out institutions such as museum, galleries, and movie houses, but iconology and visual culture also need to live “on the street” as you suggest. For me, the best slogan for visual studies would be “to the barricades” that separate disciplines into noncommunicative enclaves. Specialization is fine. In fact there is something quite special about seeing the world. But it is not all there is, and it needs to learn how to see more, and to see beyond seeing.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2002): 165–181. 2 James Elkins, Gustav Frank and Sunil Mangani (eds.), Farewell to Visual Studies (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 3 Janet Wolff, “After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2012): 3–19. 4 Jacques Rancière, “Do Pictures Really Want to Live?”, in Neal Curtis (ed.), The Pictorial Turn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 5 Ibid., 35. 6 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Resources

Books Authored or Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell All books listed are published by the University of Chicago Press unless otherwise noted. 1977 – Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) 1980 – The Language of Images, ed. 1981 – On Narrative (also in Japanese translation) 1983 – The Politics of Interpretation, ed. 1985 – Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. 1986 – Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology; Japanese translation; French translation by Maxime Boidy and Stéphane Roth (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2009); Korean-language edition (Seoul: Sizirak Publishing Company, 2004); Croatian translation by Sabine Marić (Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2009) 1994 – Art and the Public Sphere, ed. 1994 – Landscape and Power, ed.; 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, with a new preface (2001) 1994  – Picture Theory; Spanish translation by Yaiza Hernández Velásquez as Teoría de la Imagen (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2009) 1998 – The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon 2005 – Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, with Homi Bhabha; Turkish translation by Hayrullah Dogan as Edward Said ile Konusmaya Devam (Koc University Press, 2011) 2005  – What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images; French translation by Maxime Boidy, Nicolas Cilins, and Stéphane Roth as Que veulent les images? Une critique de la culture visuelle (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2014); abridged German translation by Achim Eschbach and Mark Halawa as Das Leben der Bilder (Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2008) 2007 – The Late Derrida, with Arnold Davidson 2008  – A Kepek Politikaha:  W.  J. T.  Mitchell valogatott irasai, ed. György E. Szőnyi and Dora Szauter, a reader of collected essays translated into Hungarian (Szeged: Jate Press) 2008  – Bildtheorie, a collection of essays translated into German, with an afterword by Gustav Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp) 2009  – Holy Landscape, ed. Larry Abramson, a collection of essays translated into Hebrew by Rona Cohen (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing)

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2009 – Pictorial Turn: Saggi di Cultura Visuale, ed. Michele Cometa, a collection of essays translated into Italian (Palermo: Edizioni Duepunti) 2010 – Critical Terms in Media Studies, ed. with Mark Hansen 2010 – The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis, a collection of essays on Mitchell’s work by Gottfried Boehm, Jacques Rancière, Susan Buck-Morss, Martin Jay, Norman MacLeod, Lydia Liu, Robert Morris, Michael Taussig, Larry Abramson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Stephen Daniels, including an interview with Marq Smith and a gallery of original drawings by Antony Gormley (New York: Routledge) 2011 – Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present; Italian translation by Francesco Gori as Cloning terror. La guerra delle immagini. Dall’11 settembre ad oggi (Lucca: Casa Usher, 2011); French translation by Maxime Boidy and Stéphane Roth as CLONING TERROR ou la guerre des images du 11 septembre au présent (Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2011); German translation by Michael Bischoff as Das Klonen und der Terror (Suhrkamp, 2011) 2012 – Seeing Through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 2013  – Occupy:  Three Inquiries in Disobedience, with Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt 2015 – Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and Visual Culture

Special Issues of Critical Inquiry Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell 1986 – “Pluralism and Its Discontents”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Spring) 1989 – “The New Art History”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter) 1990 – “Public Art”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Summer) 2005 – “Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter) 2007 – “The Late Derrida”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter)

Other Special Issues of Critical Inquiry The titles listed were enlarged and reissued as books during Mitchell’s editorship. 1979 – On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks 1982 – Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel 1984 – Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg 1985 – “Race”, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1986 – Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson 1987 – Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Philippe Desan 1988 – The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, ed. Françoise Meltzer 1994 – Questions of Evidence, ed. James Chandler, Arnold Davidson and Harry Harootunian 1996 – Identities, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1997 – Front Lines/Border Posts, ed. Homi Bhabha 2000 – Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant 2004 – Things, ed. Bill Brown 2007 – On the Case, ed. Lauren Berlant 2011 – Saints, ed. Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner 2014 – Comics and Media, ed. Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda 2014 – Around 1948, ed. Leela Gandhi and Deborah Nelson

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Essays by W.J.T. Mitchell These include contributed chapters and articles, as well as selected reviews and interviews. 1970  – “Blake’s Composite Art”, in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David Erdman and John Grant (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1970), 57–81 1973 – “Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton”, in Blake’s Sublime Allegory, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Wittreich, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 281–307 1973 – “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s Book of Urizen”, Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 1969), 83–107; revised and reprinted in The Visionary Hand, ed. Robert Essick (Los Angeles, CA:  Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973) 1973  – “Style and Iconography in the Illustrations of Blake’s Milton”, Blake Studies, Vol. VI (Fall 1973), 47–72 1975  – “Blake’s Vision of the Last Judgment”, special supplement to Blake Newsletter (Fall 1975) 1976  – “Language and Vision in the Eighteenth Century:  Ronald Paulson’s Emblem and Expression” (review essay), Modern Language Notes, Vol. 91, No. 6 (December 1976), 1627–1634 1977 – “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction in Romantic Art”, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 1977), 145–64 1979 – “Critical Inquiry after Sheldon Sacks”, Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association (Spring 1979), 32–36 1980 – “Intellectual Politics and the Malaise of the Seventies: A Reply to Gerald Graff”, Salmagundi, Vol. 47–48 (Winter-Spring 1980), 57–77 1980 – “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring 1980), 539–567 1981  – “Diagrammatology”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring 1981), 622–633 1982 – “Dangerous Blake”, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 21 (Fall 1982), 410–416 1983 – “Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Blake, and Turner”, in Articulate Images, ed. Richard Wendorf (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 125–68 1984   –  “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s  Laocoön”, Representations, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 1984), 98–115 1984 – “What Is an Image?” New Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring 1984), 503–537; German translation in Bildlichkeit (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990), 17–68 1985 – “Pragmatic Theory”, introduction to Against Theory, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 1986 – “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Three Theories of Value”, Raritan, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 1986), 63–76 1987  – “Going Too Far with the Sister Arts”, in Space, Time, Image, Sign, ed. James Heffernan (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); published alongside Louis A. Renza, “A Response to W. J. T. Mitchell”, 11–15, and W.J.T. Mitchell, “Enough, or Too Much: A Postscript on Louis Renza”, 15–17 1987 – “Pluralism as Dogmatism”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring 1986), 494–502

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1987 – “Wittgenstein’s Imagery and What It Tells Us”, New Literary History, Vol. 19 (1987–1988), 361–370 1987 – Interview with Kate Hartley, editor of Antithesis, literary magazine of the University of Melbourne (May 12, 1987) 1988  – “Iconology and Ideology:  Panofsky, Althusser, and the Scene of Recognition”, Works and Days, Vol. 11/12 (Spring-Fall 1988); reprinted in Image and Ideology:  Modern/Postmodern Discourse, ed. David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991); revised as an epilogue to Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 292–300 1988 – “Tableau and Taboo: The Resistance to Vision in Literary Study”, College English Association Critic, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Fall 1988), 4–10 1989  – “Post-Colonial Culture/Post-Imperial Criticism”, Chronicle of Higher Education (April 19, 1989); expanded version in Transition, Vol. 56 (1992), 11–19 1989 – “Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation”, Poetics Today, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 1989), 91–102 1989  – “The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay”, AfterImage, Vol. 16, No. 6 (January 1989), 8–13; revised as “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies”, chapter 9 of Picture Theory (1994); reprinted in Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 521–563; Portuguese translation by Mariza Correa in Cadernos de Antropologia e Imagem, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2003) 1989  – “The Golden Age of Criticism”, London Review of Books (June 21, 1987); translated into Dutch in Krisis, Vol. 37 (Fall 1989); reprinted in Writing Outside the Book:  Contemporary Essays on Literary Periodicals, ed. David Carter (Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1991), and in a collection of critical essays from Croom Helm Publishers 1989 – “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter 1989), 348–371; French translation by Charles Penwarden in Les cahiers du Musee National d’art moderne, Vol. 33 (Automne 1990), 79–95 1990 – “Against Comparison: Teaching Literature and the Visual Arts”, Teaching Literature and the Other Arts, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Joseph Gibaldi and Estelle Lauter (Modern Language Association, 1990) 1990 – “Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude”, ELH, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Fall 1990), 643–664 1990  – “Looking at Animals Looking:  Art, Illusion and Power”, in Aesthetic Illusion, ed. Fred Burwick and Walter Pape (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 65–78 1990  – “Representation”, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1990); German translation in Was heisst “Darstellen”, ed. Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994) 1990  – “The Violence of Public Art:  Do the Right Thing”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Summer, 1990), 880–899; reprinted in Views: The Journal of Photography in New England, Vol. 12-4/13-1 (Winter 1992); in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, ed. Mark Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); in So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995); in Beauty  is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art  and Design,

276

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ed. Richard Roth and Susan King Roth (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 1998); and in several other anthologies 1991  – “Realism, Irrealism, and Ideology:  A  Critique of Nelson Goodman”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 1991), 23–35, published alongside a response from Catherine Z. Elgin, 89–96 1991 – “Seeing Do the Right Thing”, a response to Jerome Christensen’s “Spike Lee, Corporate Populist”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Spring 1991), 583–608 1992  – “From CNN to JFK”, AfterImage (May 1992); French translation by Julien Deleuze as “De CNN a JFK”, Trafic, Vol. 7 (Été 1993), 46–61 1992 – “The Pictorial Turn”, ArtForum (March 1992); German translation as first chapter in Privileg  Blick: Kritik der visuellen Kultur, ed. Christian Kravagna (Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv, 1997), 15–40; a retrospective on this article appears in ArtForum’s series surveying the first thirty years of its history (March 2002) 1993  – “Imagery”  and “Iconology”, articles for a new edition of Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) 1993 – “In the Wilderness”, a review of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, London Review of Books (April 8, 1993) 1993  – “The Historian as Icarus:  A  Review of Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes”, ArtForum (1993) 1994 – “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method”, in Interfaces: Image/ Texte/Langage, Vol. 5 (1994), 13–38; Spanish translation as “Más allá de la comparación: Imagen, texto y método”, in Literatura y Pintura, ed. Antonio Monegal (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2000), 222–254 1994  – “Imperial Landscape”, in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Japanese translation in 10+1, Vol. 9 (Spring 1997), 149–69; excerpted in The Cultural Geography Reader, ed. Tim Oakes (New York: Routledge, 2008) 1994 – “Narrative, Memory, and Slavery”, in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 199–222 1995  – “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, Art Bulletin, Vol. 77, No. 4 (December 1995), 540–544. German translation in Diskurse der Fotografie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003) 1995 – “Schapiro’s Legacy”, a review of Meyer Schapiro’s Theory and Philosophy of Art, in Art in America (1995), 29–31 1995  – “Translator Translated:  W.  J. T.  Mitchell Talks with Homi Bhabha”, ArtForum (March 1995), 80–83, 110, 113 1995 – “What Is Visual Culture?” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky’s 100th Birthday, ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) 1996 – “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing”, in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1986) 46–95; reprinted in Blake, ed. David Punter (London: Macmillan, 1996) 1996  – “What Do Pictures Really Want?” October, Vol. 77 (Summer 1996), 71–82; longer version (“What Do Pictures Want?”) in a collection entitled In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith (Sydney: Power

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Institute Publications, 1997), reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 1998; Dutch translation as lead article in De Witte Raaf (The White Raven), the Dutch-language bimonthly art journal (May–June 1997). See also “Was Wollen Bilder?” an interview with Georg Schoellhammer in Springerin, Vol. IV, No. 2 (1998), 18–21, reprinted in an anthology entitled Widerstande:  Interviews und Aufsatze aus der Zeitschrift springerin 1995–1999 (Vienna:  Folio Verlag, 1999); “Vad vill bilder?”, Tidskrift for Litteraturvetenskap, Vol. 1 (2008): 39–58 1996 – “Why Comparisons Are Odious”, World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Spring 1996), 321–324 1996 – “Word and Image”, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47–57; Danish translation as “Ord, billede og rummet imellem” (Word, Image, and the Space Between) in Passepartout, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1995) 1996 – “Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image”, an interview with Andrew McNamara, in Eyeline magazine, No. 30 (Autumn-Winter 1996), 16–21 1996  – Response to Jean Klucinskas’ critique of Picture Theory in Études Littéraires, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1996), 139–142 1997  – “Chaosthetics:  Blake’s Sense of Form”, Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 58 (Spring 1997), 441–458 1997  – “Nature for Sale:  Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape”, in The Consumption of Culture, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1997) 1997  – “The Last Formalist, or, W.  J. T.  Mitchell as Romantic Dinosaur:  An Interview with Orrin Wang”, Romantic Praxis (June 1997), available at www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/mitchell/mitch-cover.html, accessed August 19, 2016. 1998  – “The Panic of the Visual:  A  Conversation with Edward Said”, in Boundary 2 25, No. 2 (1998), 11–33; reprinted in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 31–50 1999 – “Über die Evolution von Bildern”, translated by Reiner Ansen, in Blick, ed. Hans Belting and Dietmar Kamper (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999), 43–54; English version published in the proceedings of Nature’s Treasurehouses, a conference at the Natural History Museum, London, May 1999 1999 – “Vim and Rigor” (a retrospective on Nelson Goodman), ArtForum (May 1999), 17–19 1999 – Interview on The Last Dinosaur Book with The Front Table, newsletter of the Seminar Coop Bookstore, Chicago, IL (May 1999), 14–17, 66–69 2000  – “Essays into the Imagetext:  An Interview with W.  J. T.  Mitchell”, by Christine Wiesenthal and Brad Bucknell, Mosaic, Vol. 33, No. 2 (June 2000), 1–23, available at www.umanitoba.ca/publications/mosaic/mitchell.pdf 2000  – “Holy Landscape:  Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter 2000), 193–223; reprinted in Landscape and Power, 2nd edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 261–290. An earlier, shorter version of this essay appears as “Landscape and Idolatry: Territory and Terror”, in The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Roger Heacock and Khaled Nashef (Ramallah: Birzeit University Publications, 1999), 235–253

278

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2001 – “Museums and Other Monsters”, Bulletin of the Smart Museum of Art, Vol. 12 (2001), 9–16 2001  – “Offending Images”, in Unsettling “Sensation”:  Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, ed. Lawrence Rothfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 115–133; German translation by Margit Pumpel as “Anstoszige Bilder”, in Bilder-Verbot und Verlangen in Kunst und Musik, ed. Christian Scheib and Sabine Sanio (Saarbrucken: Pfau, 2001), 91–98 2001 – “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images”, in special issue “Things”, ed. Bill Brown, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Fall 2001), 167–184 2001 – “Seeing Disability”, Public Culture, Vol. 13:3 (Fall 2001) 391–397 2001 – “The End of American Photography: Robert Frank as National Medium”, in What Do Pictures Want? (2005); German translation by Joanna Hofleitner as “Das Ende der amerikanischen Fotografie:  Robert Frank als nationales Medium”, in Image:/Images:  Positionen zur zeitgenossischen Fotografie, ed. Tamara Horokova and Ewald Maurer (Vienna:  Passagen Verlag, 2002), 189–204; Spanish translation as “Los fines de la fotografía americana: Robert Frank como icono nacional”, Papel Alpha:  Cuadernos de fotografía, Vol. 8 (2010): 3–23 2001  – “The War of Images” (on the media coverage of September 11, 2001), in The University of Chicago Magazine (December 2001), 21–23, at www. alumni.uchicago.edu/magazine/0112/features/remains-2.html 2002  – “911:  Criticism and Crisis”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 2002), 567–572; reprinted in Situation Analysis: A Forum for Critical Thought & International Current Affairs, Vol. 1 (2002): 5–9 2002  – “Bilder besser als ihr Rug” (an interview conducted by Julia Voss), Frankfurter Allgemeine (June 16, 2002), 74 2002  – “Dinosaurs and Culture”, in From Energy to Information, ed. Linda Henderson and Bruce Clarke (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) 2002 – “Revolution and Your Wardrobe: Fashion and Politics in the Photography of Jane Štravs”, in Jane Štravs: Photographic Incarnations (Ljubljana: Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts, 2002), 79–82 2002 – “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture”, in Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, MA:  Clark Institute of Art, 2002), 231–250; simultaneous publication in Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 2002), 165–181; reprinted in the second edition of Nicholas Mirzoeff, Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2002), 86–101; Spanish translation by Pedro A. Cruz Sanches in Estudios Visuales, Vol. 1 (November 2003), 17–40; Hungarian translation by Beck Andras in Enigma, Vol. XI, No. 41 (2004) 17–30 2002 – “Space, Place, and Landscape”, preface to 2nd edition of Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2002), vii–xii; reprinted, along with excerpts from “Imperial Landscape”, in Territories, ed. Anselm Frank (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003), 170–175 2002  – “The Surplus Value of Images”, Mosaic, Vol. 35, No. 3 (September 2002); French translation by Paul Batik as “La Plus-Value des Images”, Études Littéraires, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Automne 2000–Hiver 2001), 201–225; Danish translation as “Billeders mervaerdi” in Passepartout, Vol. 15, No.

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8 (2000):  275–303; German translation by Gabriele Schabacher as “Der Mehrwert von Bildern” in Die Addresse des Mediums, ed. Stefan Andriopoulos, Gabriele Schabacher and Eckhard Schumacher (Cologne:  Dumont, 2001), 158–184 2002 – “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction”, ArtLink, Vol. 22, No. 1 (March 2002), 10–17; longer version published in Modernism/ Modernity, Vol. 10, No. 3 (September 2003), 481–500; Portuguese translation by Ana Soares in the Proceedings of the 22nd Meeting of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies; Hungarian translation by Sandor Hornyik in Magyar Építõmûvészet 2003  – “Art and the Word:  Visual Literacy and Visual Culture” (interview with Karen Raney, Middlesex University and the Arts Council of England, April 7, 2000), in Art in Question, ed. Karen Raney (London:  Continuum, 2003), 40–66 2003  – “Benjamin and the Political Economy of the Photograph”, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2003), 53–58 2003  – “Remembering Edward Said”, The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 10, 2003), Section B, 10–11 2003 – “The Commitment to Form: Still Crazy After All These Years”, PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 2 (March 2003), 321–325 2003 – “The Obscure Object of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 2003), 249–252 2003 – “The Serpent in the Wilderness”, in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 146–156 2004 – “Echoes of a Christian Symbol” (on the Abu Ghraib torture photographs), Chicago Tribune (June 27, 2004), Section 2, pp. 1, 3 2004 – “Medium Theory”, preface to Critical Inquiry symposium, “The Future of Criticism and Theory”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2004), 324–335 2004 – “Migrating Images: Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry”, in Migrating Images, ed. Petra Stegmann and Peter Seel (Berlin: House of World Cultures, 2004), 14–24 2005  – “Intellectuals and the Perspective of Criticism” (interview with Lydia H. Liu), Wen Yi Yan Jiu (Literature and Art Studies), Vol. 10 (2005): 87–99 2005 – “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity”, first published in Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 27 (Winter 2005), 913–925; revised version, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), 277–290 2005  – “Secular Divination:  Edward Said’s Humanism”, in special issue of Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2005), 462–471; reprinted in Edward Said:  Continuing the Conversation, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell and Homi Bhabha (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2006), and in Edward Said:  A  Legacy of Emancipation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) 2005 – “The Unimaginable and the Unspeakable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror”, ELH, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Summer 2005) 291–308; reprinted in Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination:  The Image between the Visible and the Invisible, ed. Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf (New  York:  Routledge, 2008); reprinted in September 11, the catalogue for Peter Eleey’s MOMA/P.S.1 show on 9/11 (2011)

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2005 – “There Are No Visual Media”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2005), 257–266; reprinted in Media Art Histories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 395–406 and in Digital Qualitative Research Methods, ed. Bella Dicks (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2012) 2006 – “Gilo’s Wall and Christo’s Gates”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Summer 2006), 587–600 2006  – “Media’s Critical Space”, conversation amongst Mark Hansen, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Bernard Stiegler, with Kristine Nielsen, Jason Paul, and Lisa Zaher of the Chicago Art Journal in a special issue on “Immediacy”, Vol. 16 (2006), 83–99 2006 – “Sacred Gestures: Images from Our Holy War”, AfterImage, Vol. 34, No. 3 (November 2006), 18–23 2006  – “Utopian Gestures:  The Poetics of Sign Language”, preface to Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature, ed. H. Dirksen Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson and Heidi M. Rose (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), xv–xxiii 2006  – “What Do Pictures Want?”, an interview with Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes in online magazine Image and Narrative, November 2006 2007 – “Dead Again”, introduction to “The Late Derrida”, special issue of Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), 219–228; reprinted in The Late Derrida, ed. with Arnold Davidson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 2007 – “Image Science”, in Scientific Images and Popular Images of Science, ed. Bernd Huppauf and Peter Weingart (New York: Routledge, 2007) 2007  – “Landscape and Invisibility:  Gilo’s Wall and Christo’s Gates”, in Sites Unseen:  Landscape and Vision, ed. Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pitttsburgh Press, 2007), 33–44 2007  – “The Abu Ghraib Archive”, in What Is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith (Williamstown, MA:  Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, 2007); reprinted, with an introduction by Scott Loren, in Melodrama After the Tears:  New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, ed. Scott Loren and Jorg Metelmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015) 2007 – “World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture”, Neohelicon, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2007):  49–59; reprinted in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 253–264 2008  – “Back to the Drawing Board:  Architecture, Sculpture, and the Digital Image”, in Architecture and the Digital Image:  Proceedings of the 2007 International Bauhaus Colloquium, ed. Jorg Gleiter (2008), 5–12 2008 – “Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9–11 to Abu Ghraib”, in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmud Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 2008), 180–207 2008  – “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Trauma Photographs:  A  Response to Griselda Pollock”, in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmud Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London:  Tate Gallery Publications, 2008), 237–240 2008  – “Havana Diary:  Cuba’s Blue Period”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring 2008), 601–611 2008 – “The Fog of Abu Ghraib: Errol Morris and the ‘bad apples’”, Harper’s Magazine (May 2008), 81–86

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2008 – “The Spectacle Today: A Response to Retort”, Public Culture, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2008), 573–581 2008 – “Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy”, and “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, in Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 11–30 2009 – “Art, Fate, and the Disciplines: Some Indicators”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4, “The Fate of Disciplines”, ed. James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson, 1023–1031 2009  – “Que veulent les images?” (dialogue/interview with Jacques Rancière by Patrice Blouin, Maxime Boidy and Stéphane Roth), ArtPress, Vol. 362 (December 2009), 33–41 2009 – “The Future of the Image: Rancière’s Road Not Taken”, in “The Pictorial Turn”, special issue of Culture, Theory, and Critique, ed. Neal Curtis, Vol. 50, No. 2–3 (Fall 2009); reprinted in The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis (New York: Routledge, 2010) 2010 – “Bilder sind ‘Lebenszeichen’” (interview with Oliver Zybok), Kunstforum International Bd, Vol. 205 (November–Dezember 2010), 140–151 2010  – “Binational Allegory:  Israel-Palestine and the Art of Larry Abramson”, in Larry Abramson: Paintings 1975–2010, catalogue of an exhibition curated by Ellen Ginton (Tel Aviv, 2010); reprinted in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter 2010), 659–669 2010  – “Country Matters”, commissioned article on the English countryside for the Romantic period volume in the new Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. James K. Chandler (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 246–270 2010  – “Headless, Heedless:  Experiencing Magdalena Abankanowicz”, in Learning Mind: Experience into Art, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Jacqueline Bass, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) 2010 – “Migration, Law, and the Image: Beyond the Veil of Ignorance”, in Images of Illegalized Immigration, ed. Christine Bischoff, Francesca Falk and Sylvia Kafehsy (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 13–30; in The Migrant’s Time, ed. Saloni Mathur (Williamstown, MA: Clark Institute Publications, 2011) 2010 – “Realism and the Digital Image”, in Critical Realism and Photography, ed. Jan Baetens and Hilde van Gelder (Leuven:  Leuven University Press, 2010); Italian translation by Federica Mazzara as “Realismo e immagine digitale” in Cultura Visuale:  Paradigmi a Confronto, ed. Roberta Coglitore (Palermo:  Duepunti Edizione, 2008), 81–99; reprinted in Travels in Intermedia:  ReBlurring the Boundaries, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Aachen:  Mellen Press, 2011; and Hanover, NH:  Dartmouth College Press, 2012) 2011  – “Idolatry:  Nietzsche, Blake, Poussin”, in Idol Anxiety, ed. Joshua Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 56–73; reprinted in Iconoclasm and Text Destruction in the Ancient Near East and Beyond, ed. Natalie Naomi May (Oriental Institute Seminars, University of Chicago, Number 8, 2012), 501–515; in Things:  Religion and Materiality (New  York:  Fordham University Press); Italian translation by Dario Cecchi in Alla fine delle cose, ed. Daniele Guastini, Dario Cecchi, and Alessandra Campa (Florence:  VoLo, 2011), 132–144; German translation in Trajekte:  Zeitschrift des Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin

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(ZfL) (May 2011); slightly revised version published in W.J.T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) 2012 – “Image X Text”, introduction to The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures, ed. Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) 2012 – “Report from Morocco”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer 2012), 892–901 2012 – “Skipping Gates and Breaching Walls”, afterword to the 25th anniversary edition of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 2013 – “Palestinian-Israeli Totemism: The Case of Asim Abu Shaqra”, in Asim Abu Shaqra, ed. Nira Itzhaki (Milan: Edizione Charta; Tel Aviv: Chelouche Gallery, 2013), 39–44 2015  – “El deseo de las imágenes” (interview with Nashemi Jiménez del Val), Código:  Arte, Arquitectura, Diseño, Moda, Estilo, Vol. 86 (Abril–Mayo 2015), 92–96 2015 – “Nous sommes des créatures productrices d’images” (interview with Omar Berrada), Diptyk: L’art vu du Maroc, Vol. 27 (Fevrier–Mars 2015), 76–78 2015  – “Robert Morris and the Spaces of Writing”, in Investigations:  The Expanded Field of Writing in the Works of Robert Morris, ed. Katia Schneller and Noura Wedell (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2015) 2015 – “Screening Nature (and the Nature of the Screen)”, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (July 2015), 231–248 2016 – “Art and Public Life: A Conversation between Theaster Gates and W. J. T. Mitchell”, in print in ASAP (forthcoming 2016); online in Critical Inquiry (forthcoming)

List of Contributors

Timothy Erwin is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He obtained his PhD in 1984 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of W.J.T. Mitchell. Among a variety of courses that he teaches is “Jane Austen and Visual Culture”. He is the recipient of awards from the Clark Library at UCLA, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Yale Center for British Art. His most recent book is Textual Vision:  Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2015). Francesco Gori received his PhD from the University of Palermo, Italy. He translated into Italian Mitchell’s book Cloning Terror (La Casa Usher, 2012), to which he also wrote a substantial afterword entitled “Towards an Iconology of the Present”, situating Mitchell’s work in a very wide context of the politics of images. His interests embrace archaeology of visual culture and its contemporary ramifications. György E.  Szőnyi is a Visiting Professor of Cultural History in the Department of History and Medieval Studies at CEU, Budapest. He is also a Professor of English and Hungarian Studies at the University of Szeged. He has a special interest in the Renaissance, early modern and postmodern culture, with emphasis on the relationship of words and images. He was the organizer of the international conference Image/Text with Hans Belting and W.J.T. Mitchell (Szeged, 2005). Krešimir Purgar is founder and head of the Center for Visual Studies in Zagreb. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies, Art History and Semiotics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Among his recent titles are Theorizing Images (ed. with Ž. Paić) (2016); “What is not an Image (Anymore)? Iconic Difference, Immersion, and Iconic Simultaneity in the Age of Screens”, in Phainomena  – Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (2015); and “Literature as Film:  Strategy and Aesthetics of ‘Cinematic’ Narration in the Novel Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammaniti”, in Graziella Parati (ed.), New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies:  The Arts and History (2013).

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Andrew  McNamara  is a Professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Sydney. He heads the Visual Arts in the Creative Industries Faculty of QUT. His publications include:  “The modern primitive and the antipodes:  The visual arts and Oceania”; in Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (eds.), The Modernist World (Routledge, 2015); Sweat  – the Subtropical Imaginary (2011); An Apprehensive Aesthetic (2009); Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad (2008). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Michele Cometa is Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo, Italy. He has received the Beinecke fellowship at the Clark Art Institute (2015) and was an Associate Research Scholar at the Italian Academy of the Columbia University (2016). Among various earlier books, he recently authored La scrittura delle immagini. Letteratura e cultura visuale (Cortina, 2012)  and co-edited Al di là dei limiti della rappresentazione. Letteratura e cultura visuale (2014) as well as Rappresentanza/rappresentazione. Una questione degli studi culturali (2014). Ian Verstegen received his PhD from Temple University. He is a Lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and his current writing and teaching are focused on the picture and its special characteristics. He is the author of Cognitive Iconology: When and How Psychology Explains Images (2014), and co-editor of The Art of the Real: Visual Studies and the New Materialism (2015). Recently he authored “The Anti-Sign:  Anti-Representationalism in Contemporary Art Theory” (2016), while his current writing projects center on Rudolf Arnheim’s media theory and the Vienna School of Art History. Jens Schröter is currently a Professor of Medienkulturwissenschaft at the University of Bonn, Germany. Before that, he held the Chair of Theory and Practice of Multimedia Studies at the University of Siegen. He is the author of 3D: History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Technical-transplane Image (2014) and co-author of Die Fernsehserie als Agent des Wandels (2015). His areas of research include theories and history of digital media, theories and history of photography, intermediality, three-dimensional pictures and media theories. Luca Vargiu is Researcher in Aesthetics at the University of Cagliari, Italy. His research interests comprise the medieval and contemporary theories of images, the relationship between aesthetics and hermeneutics, theories of art history and the philosophy of landscape. Among his publications are Prima dell’età dell’arte. Hans Belting e l’immagine medievale (Aesthetica Preprint:  Supplementa, no.  20, 2007)  and Esplorare nel passato indagare sul contemporaneo. Dare senso al paesaggio vol. I (ed., Mimesis, 2015). In 2009 he won the “Premio Nuova Estetica”.

List of Contributors

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Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. Among his recent books are Seeing Whole:  Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight (co-edited with Mark Ledbetter, 2016), Cinema and Agamben:  Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (co-edited with H.  Gustafsson, 2014), Ethics and Images of Pain (co-edited with H. Gustafsson, Routledge, 2012), and Screening the Unwatchable:  Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (2011). Øyvind Vågnes is presently affiliated with the research project “The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic” and is a co-founding member of the Nomadikon research group. He is the author of Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination  Film in Visual Culture (2011) and “Lessons from the Life of an Image”, in Frances Guerin (ed.), On Not Looking:  The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture (Routledge, 2015). Thomas Stubblefield is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. He earned a PhD in visual studies from the University of California-Irvine and a master’s in art history from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the author of 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (2014) and “Ars Oblivionalis:  Umberto Eco and Erasure”, in J. Elkins (ed.) Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (Routledge, 2013). Hannah B  Higgins is a Professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her research and course topics examine twentieth-century avant-garde art with a specific interest in Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus, performance art and early computer art. She wrote Fluxus Experience (2002) and co-edited Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (2012). She has received the UIC University Scholar Award, DAAD, and Getty and Philips Collection Fellowships. Maxime Boidy received his PhD from the University of Strasbourg, France. His dissertation deals with the artistic and visual construction of sociological knowledge. As a graduate in linguistics and art history, he has done research on the epistemology of social sciences and on the relations between art and language. He has co-translated into French several of W.J.T. Mitchell’s books, including Iconology, What Do Pictures Want? and Cloning Terror. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the University Paris 8, Vincennes–Saint-Denis. John Paul Ricco is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in the theory and criticism of art history at the University of Chicago (1998) under the supervision of W.J.T. Mitchell. He was a contributor to the first anthology of essays in gay and lesbian art history (edited by Whitney Davis, 1994). His

286

List of Contributors book The Logic of the Lure (2003) holds the distinction of being the first published monograph in queer art history. Recently he authored “Pornographic Faith: Two Sources of Naked Sense at the Limits of Belief and Humiliation”, in T. Dean, S. Ruszczycky and D. Squires (eds.) Porn Archives (2014).

Index

absorption 219–21, 224–5, 226–7, 244 Abu Ghraib images 126, 130, 208–9, 224–5, 226 actions 53, 55, 207 The Adoration of the Golden Calf (Poussin) 93–5, 94, 235–6, 237–8 aesthetic judgements 105–6 aesthetics 9, 41–42, 44, 73–5, 107, 120–1, 123, 141, 143, 148; of images 152, 172, 178, 191; black bloc 236, 241, 244–245 “After Cultural Theory” (Wolff) 267–8 agency: of images 84, 87–8, 95–7, 127, 192; quasi-beings and 145, 148; of technology 203, 209–10 Alain cartoon 256 alienation 221, 223, 240; nonalienation 140–1, 149 Althusser, Louis 242, 244 The Americans (Frank) 219 analogy 36, 44; of language 62–64, 125, 184, 187–8 Andaloro, Maria 171 animals 82–3, 95–7 animism of images 53–4, 85–90, 132, 148, 184–5, 267–8 anthropology of images 126–7 The Anti-Aesthetic (Foster) 4–6 antifoundationalism 17, 145–6 apophenia 55–7 apparatus 4, 11, 14, 68, 121, 153, 178, 191, 197–203, 207, 221, 230 art history: broadening of 3–4; conceptual difficulties 109; deskilling of 240; German and American 173; ideology of 70–3; visual studies and 7–8, 120–1, 266 artificial perspective 144–5

artworks as ideological/cultural constructs 31, 71 astute relativism 113 authorial intention 61 avant-garde 10, 21n10, 118, 265–6 Bagman icon 226 Bal, Mieke 3–4, 8–9, 182, 183–5, 109, 203 Balme, Christopher 176 Bamboozled (Spike Lee film) 188–9 Barthes, Roland 44, 46, 51, 63, 131, 199–200, 218 Baudrillard, Jean 36, 73, 91–2, 104, 140–141 beauty 73, 83, 95, 107, 215 beliefs 187–8, 241 Belting, Hans 17–8, 32, 70–3, 85, 127–9, 138, 171–4, 267–8 Benjamin, Walter 91, 106–7, 132, 193, 268 Bild 128 Bildakt 192 Bildwissenschaft: 6, 71; Mitchell and 118, 122, 126; too early to write history 171–2, 178; visual studies and 2, 7, 17–18, 21n16; Warburg’s 14, 127 biocybernetics 130–2, 193 biology 48–9, 269 biopictures 83, 90, 123, 130, 193; see also living images black bloc aesthetics 236, 243–7 Blake, William 142, 230–1, 270 Blake’s Composite Art (Mitchell) 27, 62, 100, 270 Blumenberg, Hans 175 body 53, 85, 91, 253–4, 257–60 Boehm, Gottfried 13–14, 118, 122–3, 128, 171–8, 191

288

Index

bracketing: of real/unreal 228; of senses 214 brain 54–5 Brandi, Cesare 174 Bredekamp, Horst 7, 22n17, 176–8, 192 Bryl, Mariusz 173 Bryson, Norman 3–4, 38n25, 108–9, 203 Burke, Edmund 214–17 Calabrese, Omar 3, 20n4 camera obscura 197–203, 271 Camille, Michael 138, 171 “Candy Store – New York City” (Frank) 219, 220 Cassirer, Ernst 29, 33, 37n6 cause-effect 45 central vanishing point 29, 46 Chandler, James 153, 158 Chaplin, Sarah 118–20 Chiasera, Paolo 56, 57 Chicago (Man with Sousaphone) (Frank) 222–3 Chicago School 138–9, 146–7 Choreography of Species: Rosa Tannenzapfen (Chiasera) 56, 57 church, the 70–2 circulation 208–10 class 202, 229, 240, 248n8; of things 269 cloning 88–92, 130–2, 193, 223–4, 256–7, 268 Cloning Terror (Mitchell) 88, 91–2, 197–8, 223–4, 251 codes 41–2, 51–2, 64, 204–5 communication: in contemporary age 223–4; excess of 216; pictures and 71–2; signs and 47, 53 comparativism 124–5 comparison 148 complexity 100–1 composite art 27, 125, 143, 270 confusion 255–7 constant conjunctions 147 “constant cross-echo” 204 constitution, written or oral 215–7 constructed images 84 context 74–5, 76–7, 90, 97n4, 101, 121, 123; cultural 120, 122, 205; disciplinary 118, 171–8; transcultural 129, 268 control 86–7

conventional aspects 28, 30, 41 conventionalism 62, 63–4, 65, 111–12, 142 Copernican revolution 175 Copperhead Grid (Davey) 208, 209 Crary, Jonathan 10, 201–2 critical iconology 11–12, 15–16, 40, 83, 90, 97 Crow, Thomas 240 cultural codes 51–2 cultural history and ideology 30 cultural literacy 55 cultural representations 64, 77 cultural studies 105–106, 118–120, 123, 126, 185, 191, 266 cultural symptoms 11, 29, 83, 96 Danto, Arthur C. 173–4, 225 Debord, Guy 22, 103–104, 190, 228–9 Degas, Edgar 31 density of representational acts 34, 65, 141 descriptivism 69, 141, 144, 147 desires of images 86, 184–5, 242 deskilling 240, 242 destruction of images 186–7, 188, 192 digital photography 203–7, 210 digital turn 198, 205 dinosaurs 16, 83–7, 95–7, 98n13, 105, 122 directness 218, 223 disciplines: definition 153; formation of 165–6; practice within 162–3; unity within 156, 158, 163–4; see also in/interdisciplinarity “distorted images” of populace 237–8 “Do Pictures Really Want to Live?” (Rancière) 268 doctoring of images 204–5 dolls 105, 187–8 Dolly the Sheep 87–92 double consciousness 187–9 double perception 52, 73 Du Bois, W.E.B. 188–9 Eco, Umberto 63, 65 ecology of images 177 ekphrasis 36, 66, 69, 79n31,  189–90 elitism 241 Elkins, James 7, 13, 17, 138, 140, 144–5, 147, 264

Index emblems 217 Eminem 246–8 empathy of images 54–5 employment and academia 162–3 “empty signifier” 238–40, 245 engaged objectivity 30 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 127 epistemology 29, 90 essentialism 8–9, 18–19, 76, 147, 201, 203 ethics 90, 130, 177 excess 3, 20n4, 53, 130, 216–18, 221, 260 exhibitionism 19, 253, 259–61 experiential difference 27 extreme conventionalism 62, 65 fabula 189–90 Farocki, Harun 228 fetishism 12, 54, 66, 105, 108, 112, 126, 145–146, 184, 198, 200, 207, 242–243 Feyerabend, Paul 147–148, 150n6, 151n36, 185 figures of difference 111 “firstness” of images 4, 41–2, 52, 55, 203 flags 247 flashing 253–4, 258–60 Focillon, Henry 84 form 20n9, 28, 33, 36, 38n25, 47, 83– 84, 93–95, 104, 118, 143, 154, 159, 183, 185, 187, 205, 217, 219–220, 228, 255, 260, 269 Foster, Hal 3–8, 36 Foucault, Michel 6, 46, 49, 73, 108–9, 125, 175, 241, 252, 255, 259–261n3 and 4, 265 “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science” (Mitchell) 12, 93–4, 97n1, 98n11, 266 Frank, Robert 219–23 Freedberg, David 7, 59n48, 93, 129, 174, 186, 267 French Revolution 215–7 Fried, Michael 10, 51, 201, 219–20, 244 gaze 29, 68, 101, 121, 126–7, 129, 142, 188, 229, 244, 260 gender 69–70, 124, 143, 146, 160, 237, 244, 254–9, 263n23

289

German Ideology (Marx) 197–9 Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM, Society for Media Studies) 159–63 gestures 28, 30, 32 Golden Calf 93–5, 104–5, 126, 235–8 Gombrich, Ernst 27, 34, 37n3, 38n11, 61–6, 70, 75–6, 78n6, 79n16, 144–8, 256 good/bad art 106–7 Goodman, Nelson 27, 34, 45, 62–3, 64–6, 69, 77, 79n14, 111, 122, 141–5, 147, 150n10, 183 grammar of images 122–3 Greenberg, Clement 10, 51, 87, 201, 213–4 greeting, story of 28–9, 30, 244 Guy Fawkes mask 244–6 habituation 142 hammers, philosophizing with 186–7, 229–31 hearing (sense of) 44, 49–51, 218 Hegel, G.W.F. 73–4 Heidegger, Martin 36, 173, 186, 218 Hickethier, Knut 158 high/low culture 87, 105–6, 126, 139 Hildegard von Bingen 225–6, 227 Hirsch, Robert 204 historicism 65–6, 74, 120 Holly, Michael Ann 18, 21n14, 22n17, 30, 37n3, n9, 120 homophobia 257–8 Hooded Man image 126, 224–5, 226 human body 53, 85, 91, 253–4, 257–60 iconic gravitation 177–8 iconic panic 126, 130, 176 iconic signs 41–2, 51, 55, 57 iconic turn 123, 171, 173–8, 191 iconoclasm: critique and 105–6, 192; depictions of 93–4, 185–6; French Revolution 217; idolatry and 104–5, 107–8, 145–6 Iconologia (Ripa) 61 iconology: in art/literature 27–8; critical 16, 40, 83, 90; definition 40; historical background 61– 2, 73–7; iconography and 37n3; of Mitchell 32–4; of Panofsky 28–32; role of 82–3, 193, 235

290

Index

Iconology (Mitchell): 3–6; ideology 62, 140, 146–7, 198–203; interartistic study 27–8, 32–4, 36, 67, 214; interdisciplinarity 3, 5–6 iconophilia 66, 69, 146 iconophobia 66, 69, 92, 93, 96, 129– 30, 186, 256–7 icons 19, 44, 47, 55, 63, 93 iconic (aniconic) line 21n10 identity 224–5, 256–9 ideology: art history and 70–3; as camera obscura metaphor 198–203; creating meaning in pictures 82– 3; critique of 177–8; of cultural history 30; essentialism and 8–9; of interpreter 65–6; literary history canons 35–6; Marx and 140, 198– 203; representation and 76–7 idols: iconoclasm and 104–5, 107–8, 145–6; icons and 54, 63; Old Testament 93, 95; populism and 236–40; sounding of 186–7, 229–30 image science: background 1–2, 7; definition and scope 126–7, 128– 32, 251; science of exhibitionism 260, 263n28; as site of interdisciplinary turbulence 191–2; terminology problems 118, 172, 178, 185, 191–2 Image Science (Mitchell) 213–4, 228–231, 235, 240, 242–3, 266, 269–270 images: in consciousness 33–4; definition 35, 41; distinct from pictures 40–3, 101–2, 128, 269; effect on society 126, 177; era of 172; family tree of 42; as iconological unit 40–1; as interpretation 52; as living beings 53–4, 85–90, 96–7, 187–8, 247, 268; nature of 264; as originary surplus 53; over/underestimation 54, 104, 188; power of 70–1, 93; problem of 102–3; as products of nature and culture 84 image-text relations: “all media are mixed” 10, 68, 70–1, 108–9, 125, 213–14; beyond comparisons 124–5; ideologicalpolitical struggle between 67, 69– 70, 213; image X text 235; imagetexts 69, 70, 108, 125, 143;

Mitchell’s early work 143; subjective dimensions 34–5 image/word theory 66–70, 100–1 imagination 57, 84, 88–92, 103, 126–7, 144, 185, 199, 216, 230, 270 Imago Mundi (Hildegard von Bingen) 225–6, 227 imitation 32, 53, 64, 66, 69, 87, 222, 264 immagine 128 indexes 44–9, 55, 58n31, 208 indexical signs 47, 52–3, 58n31; indexical aspects 203; indexical processes 208 infinity 183 in/interdisciplinarity: media studies and 155–7, 165–6; Mitchell and 3, 11–13, 32, 152, 153–5, 185; visual studies and 9, 16–18, 139–40, 152–3, 178, 191 institutionalization 160–2, 164, 266 intellect 55 intention 21n10, 61, 62, 74, 221 intentionality 74 “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture” (Mitchell) 12–13, 152–5 intermedium 214 internet as landscape 229 interpretation 52, 55, 74–7, 108, 121–7, 129, 143, 153, 173, 175, 181n36, 183, 197, 200, 205, 218, 236, 267–8 interpretive iconology 61 intuition, theoretically informed 36, 66 inversion 139, 198–9, 202 invisible made visible 225, 252 iPod graphics 226 isolationism 30 Jakobson, Roman 76 Jay, Martin 126, 146, 180n27, 186 Jeanpierre, Laurent 241 JFK (Oliver Stone film) 189–90 jukeboxes 219, 220–1, 223 kitsch 87 knowledge 214–15, 240–1, 260–1 Krauss, Rosalind 4–8, 20n9, 108, 112, 152, 166n5, 240, 249n17 Kübler, Hans-Dieter 157 Kuhn, Thomas S. 73, 147, 166, 175

Index Laclau, Ernesto 237, 238–9, 245 landscape 20n9, 235 language, visual dimension of 34–5 The Language of Images (Mitchell) 16, 62 Languages of Art (Goodman) 64, 141 Laocoön (Lessing) 69, 213–14 Laocoön group 138, 143 The Last Dinosaur Book (Mitchell) 84, 86, 132, 271 laws: constant conjunctions 147; spoken origins 215–16 legisigns 44 Leonardo da Vinci 214–15 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 69, 143, 213–14 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 76, 184 limbic system 55 line 65 linear perspective 144, 147 linguistic signs 40–1, 45, 51 linguistic turn 4, 62, 74, 108–9, 122 linguistics 74 Lipton, Eunice 31 ‘listening eye’ 219–23 living images 85–90, 96–7, 130, 182, 187–9, 247, 268 Locke, John 34, 199 logic 34, 177–8 logocentric views 63, 66, 71 logos 68, 118, 123, 174 Looking into Degas (Lipton) 31 low/high culture 87, 105–6, 126, 139 Lyotard, Jean-François 3, 76 MacLean, Paul D. 55 Macleod, Norman 268–9 Mad magazine cover 253–61 magic lanterns 200–1 Magritte, René 257, 259, 260 Mâle, Émile 37n3, 61–2 Maley, Corey J. 206 manipulation of images 204–5 Manovich, Lev 207 maps 143, 217 marching bands 222–3 Marx, Karl 140, 145–6, 148–9, 197–9 masculinity 143, 257–8, 263n23 materiality in digital practice 205–6 McLuhan, Marshall 68, 223, 226, 268 meaning 28, 55–7, 61, 74–5, 83

291

media: analog v digital 205–6; context and 201–2, 228–9; hybridity 142– 5; as material practices 128; singularity and 201–3 media history 127–8, 164, 201 media personae 221–2 media studies: external pressures 162–3; history in Germany 155–9, 164–5; internal and external differentiation 156–7, 158–62, 163–4, 166; subdisciplines of 158–60, 161 medial performance 163–4 mediality: of culture 68–70, 73–7; of media studies 164–5 Medienwissenschaft see media studies medieval studies 171–2 memory 185, 192 Menna, Filiberto 5, 21n10 mental imagery 33–4, 95, 97n1, 98n38, 127 metanarratives 76, 148–9 metaphor 1, 19, 29, 31, 35, 44, 47, 65, 70, 87, 90–1, 95, 99n38, 100, 102, 107, 121–8, 186, 197–203, 229, 237, 270 metapictures: examples 84–5, 95, 124, 239; implications of 83, 183–5; importance of 109, 251–3; queer 253–61; types of 182–3 metasigns 52–3 mind-world problem 29, 30 Mitchell, W.J.T.: influence on field of visual culture 117–18; intellectual background 100; politics and 128–32, 271; scope/aims of work 2–3, 113, 127–8; wish for critique 190, 267–9 mixed media 10, 47–8, 125, 142, 213–14, 270 mixed pictorial-textual representations 67–8 modernism 5, 20n9, 32, 38n25, 68, 76, 191, 220, 265 modernist narratives 30, 185–6 modernity 86, 95, 119, 122, 126, 186, 193, 243 Mosh (Eminem video) 246–8 motifs 28, 94 Moxey, Keith 6, 21–2n16, 31–2, 120 music 44, 218, 219–23, 227–8

292

Index

natural-conventional distinctions 34, 63–4, 107, 109–13, 145–6 neo-baroque paradigm 3, 20n4 neocortex 55 Neuman, Alfred E. 253–6, 258–60 neurology 54–5 Nicaea 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich 186–7, 229–31 nominalism 111, 139–142, 147 nonfigurative painting 51 nudism 253–4, 258–60 objectivity 30, 65–6, 198–9, 202, 214–15 objects as facts 33 Occupy movement 238–9, 243 ontologies: of digital photography 197, 203–4, 207, 210; of images 12–14, 21n10, 125–6, 264–5, 268; of medium 147 optimization 205 oral traditions 215–16 originality 91 originary surplus 53 “otherness” 70, 124, 188–9, 257 outside 252–3 over/underestimation of images 54, 104, 188 Paine, Thomas 216–17 Panofsky, Erwin 7, 10, 28–9, 30–4, 37n3–6–9, 38n11, 61–2, 66, 68, 70, 75, 78n8, 80n56, 94, 145, 244, 262n11 paradigm shifts 166, 175 “paradoxical absent presence” of images 94 paragone 36, 112, 214–15 “parasocial” media 221–2, 223 passing 257 Pathosformeln 55, 75 patterns 27, 54–7, 90, 96, 210 pedophilia 258 Peirce, C.S. 4, 41–3, 44–5, 47–9, 52, 54, 58n31, 63, 97n1, 120 perception 40–2, 48–52, 53, 55, 63–4, 73, 99n38, 108, 111, 113, 131, 177, 183, 199, 213, 257, 262n11 perspective 29–30, 64, 144–5, 147 phenomenology 74, 120, 267–8 photography: analog v digital 203–4, 205, 207; digital 203–7; epistemology of 143–4, 147–8;

message without code 63–4; Mitchell’s work and 197–8, 208–10; music and 219–23; social transformations and 202 Pias, Claus 155–6 The Pictorial Turn 268 pictorial turn: contemporary 84–5, 88–9, 96, 103–4, 113, 176–7, 213; function of 265–6; iconic turn and 173–4; in language and philosophy 3; Mitchell’s work on 97n1, 121–2, 123–4; overview 10–12, 68, 98n11; popular and academic 82, 176, 191–3; through history 86, 92–4, 125–6, 129–130, 176, 190 “The Pictorial Turn” (Mitchell) 11–12, 201 pictorialist critic 36 pictura-poesis debate 34, 63–4, 77 picture theory: of meaning 33; of language 64; as practice 47, 55, 214, 217; sound and 231; in relation to Foucault 252, 262n3 Picture Theory (Mitchell) 4, 6, 20n4, 43, 66–70, 84–5, 121, 182–3, 190, 197, 213–4, 242–3, 251, 271 pictures: definition 41; importance compared with text 66–7; of meaning 33; as Other 69–70; senses and 50 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) 217 Podro, Michael 29 political philosophy 19, 35–6, 235 politics: Blake, William and 270–1; of images 70–2, 104, 269–70; of knowledge 241–2; Mitchell and 66, 177–8, 270–1; revolutionary movements 238–9, 243–7, 266; the senses and 218–19; spectacle and 228–30; of visuality 35, 139, 143 Popper, Karl 147 popular culture 85, 87, 89, 98n13, 126, 160, 191, 254 populism 19, 236–43, 245–6 populist democracy 239, 245–6, 248 positivism 74, 111, 147–8, 151n38 postmodernism 3, 10, 32, 36, 38n11, 190, 193 poststructuralism 6, 76–7, 141 poststructuralist turn 62; theories of 67

Index Poussin, Nicolas 6, 19, 93–5, 235, 237, 246 power: agency and 148; images and 88, 93; of images and fear 94–5; metaphors of 69–70; relational 98n16; totems and 86 practice vs technical agency 197–8, 207 pragmatic turn 76–7 pragmatism 62, 141 propaganda 129, 223 queer metapictures 253–61 “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” 7–9, 117, 152, 166n4, 240–1 Quine, W.V. 147 race 102, 188–9 Rancière, Jacques 16, 19, 235, 237–8, 241–2, 268–9 reading 68, 121, 183 realism 52, 59n35, 64, 66, 111– 12, 142, 144, 147, 197, 203–5, 210, 211n27, 229; critical 187; photographic 198, 204; codes of 205; philosophical 205 “Realism and the Digital Image” (Mitchell) 203–4 reality 33–4, 89–90, 131, 204–5, 228, 264–5 reappropriation 189–90 Reformation, the 71–2 relativism 17, 64, 111, 113, 142, 145–7 representation: analog/digital 65, 206–7; critique of 111, 124–5, 145, 204, 219, 235, 238, 252; differences deconstructed 34, 65; ideology and 76–7; mixed media 68, 70; pictorial 121, 236, 260, 265; process of 238–9, 192, 197; reality and 89–90; senses and 50–1; sequential/gradual 65, 141; traditional theory of 34, 255, 262n11; theories of 121, 142, 267; verbal 189, 213; visual 112–13, 121–2, 144, 189, 213, 232n14, 251, 253 reproduction 91, 132, 193 reptilian brain 55

293

resemblance 41–4, 47–8, 52–5, 57, 58n31, 101, 107, 109–12, 125, 144, 147, 199, 215 Ripa, Cesare 61 Rodowick, D.N. 205 Russo, Luigi 174 sacred images 70–2 Sauerländer, Willibald 177 Saussure, Ferdinand de 40–1, 45–50, 74, 109 science 172, 264, 269 scopic regimes 126, 127–8 secondary beliefs 187–8 semiotics 2, 4, 16, 31, 40–2, 44–9, 55, 62, 63–4, 66, 83, 97n1, 99n38, 101–2, 108, 110, 123, 131, 145, 184, 192, 203; post-semiotics 77 sense modality 142, 147–8 ‘sense’ of images 42, 48–52, 149 senses 42, 48–52, 199, 214, 218–19 Serious Games I–IV (Farocki) 228 sexuality 254–6, 258 “shadow discipline” 153–4, 158 shared space 221, 261 “Showing Seeing” (Mitchell) 139–40 sight (sense of) see vision signatures 49, 53 sign-functions 54, 56–7 signifiers and signified 41 signs 28, 35, 39n27, 41, 42, 64–5, 131, 142, 184, 203, 243, 256–7; visual signs 244; interpretation of 267 similarity 45, 49, 53, 63 simulacra 36, 73, 89, 92, 104, 129–30 simultaneous vs linear aspects 41 sister arts 27, 33 sketch/score/script 45 smell (sense of) 50–1 Snyder, Joel 17, 138, 140–5, 143–5, 148, 150n24–n27, 269 social history 29, 31, 35 Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 103, 228–9 souls (animae) 53–4 sound: absorption and 219–23; in depictions of revolution 216–17; as direct lived experience 218; intensifying/bracketing reality 223– 8; in Mitchell’s image theory 44, 214, 231; visual studies and 266–7 space and time 27, 33, 41, 213

294

Index

species and images 269 spectatorship 68, 101, 107, 121, 140 speech 41, 44, 51, 53, 59n37, 75, 112, 217, 222; speech act 192; figures of 47, 95, 175, 178, 198, 214; power of 224 The Spiral (Steinberg) 252–3 S/s calligram 45 states of affairs 47, 52 Stafford, Barbara 7, 187 Steinberg, Saul 252–3 stereotypes 188–9 Stone, Oliver 189–90 story of the greeting 28–9, 30, 244 structuralism 65–6, 74–5, 76, 120 subdisciplines 158–60, 161 subjectivity 29–30, 92, 207, 257; power of 18–9 sublime, the 5, 104, 215–6, 219, 221, 227–8 subversion 67 Suns (From Sunset) (Umbrico) 209–10 superimage 91 surplus values 53–4, 56–7, 239 surveillance 68, 92, 121, 191, 213, 228–9, 242, 259 “sweet science” of images 231, 270–1 symbolic form 21n10, 29, 31, 200 symbol systems, continuous or disjointed 34, 65, 141 symbolic value 28–9 symbols 44, 47, 55, 217 symptoms 11, 29, 83, 96 synthetic intuition 29 ‘table of tripartitions’ 46, 54 taboo on image-making 93 taste (sense of) 50–1 Techniques of the Observer (Crary) 201–2 technodeterminism 200–1, 203, 207 technologies 126, 127–8, 209–10, 266 temporality: of clones 132; and spatial discourse 27, 33, 41, 213 terror, war on 129–30, 188, 247–8 textual pictures 69 theatricality 220, 244 theology 70–2 theory, Mitchell’s approach to 47, 82–3, 142 thought 54, 185 totems 54, 85–7, 105, 146, 184, 242–3, 245–7

touch (sense of) 49–51, 58n31, 205–6, 267 transitional objects 187–8 transitory concept of images 86–7 triadic models 44–6, 54, 55 tropes 139, 148, 175, 191; visual tropes 89 tuning fork, Nietzsche’s 186–7, 229–31 turns 123–5, 175–6, 191–3; see also iconic turn; pictorial turn; visual turn Twin Towers 89–90, 129–30 uncanny, the 131–2, 184 unseeable/unsayable 251–2, 258–9, 260–1 unspeakable/unimaginable 129–30 V for Vendetta (film) 244–6 value judgements 66 values 53–4, 56–7, 239 verbal icons 93 verbal imagery 34, 35, 97n1 vernacular theory 270 vibration 218 video games 227–8 virtual reality 227–8 vision: as cultural/non-cultural activity 103, 112, 123, 126, 139, 142, 144–5, 200–1, 218, 236–7, 239, 248, 250n35, 257, 267; objectivity and 214–15, 266; relation to other senses 44, 49–51, 87, 103, 107, 210n3, 214–5, 220, 226, 266–7 visual culture 51–2, 112, 117–23, 132, 213 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” 7–9, 117, 152, 240–1 Visual Culture (Walker and Chaplin) 118–20 visual interest of poetry 35 visual literacy 68, 121, 122, 123–8 visual media: dominance of 102–3; shouldn’t be segregated 139; ‘there are no’ 142, 213–14 visual objects 40–1, 82–3, 118–20, 144 visual signifiers 42 visual studies: art history and 7–8, 120–1, 148, 240; Chicago school 138–9, 146–7; disciplinarity and

Index 16–18, 139–40, 152–3, 178, 266; methodology 10, 12, 18, 96, 149; pictorial turn and 265–6; scope of 6–7; terminology 97n4, 172; visual theory and 95–6 visual turn 104, 117, 139 visuality 10–1, 14, 19, 40, 68, 102–3, 112, 118, 121, 123, 126, 139, 145, 173, 178, 182, 190, 248n8, 266; vernacular 6, 270; Western 128 visual-verbal distinctions 34, 69, 70, 77, 122 vitalism see animism of images voyeurism 254–6, 258 Walker, John A. 118–20 war: depictions of 232–3n24; music and 227–8; on terror/of images 129–30, 188, 247–8 Warburg, Aby 7, 14, 31, 55, 59n51, 61–2, 75, 120, 127, 130, 266

295

What Do Pictures Want? (Mitchell) 53–4, 84–5, 87–8, 127, 131, 145, 182, 184–7, 189–190, 198, 219, 223, 239, 242–4, 251, 267 “What Is an Image?” (Mitchell) 42, 140 Williams, Richard 260 Wissenschaftsrat 158, 162 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 33, 47, 51–2, 76, 102, 122, 124, 140, 186, 262n13, 265, 268 Wolf, Gerhard 171–2, 174 Wolff, Janet 267–8 Wölfflin Heinrich 7, 37n3 “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction” (Mitchell) 130–2 X ideogram 47 X-diagram 43–4, 49–50 Zapruder film 189–90