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 under-
stand key terms in visual studies – pictorial turn, metapictures, literary
iconology, image/text, biopictures or living pictures, among many oth-
ers – 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 devel-
opment 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 xi
Acknowledgments xii

Introduction 1
K R E Š I M I R   P URGA R

PART I
Toward a Critical Iconology 25
1 The Changing Patterns of Iconology: Seven Questions
to Mitchell from the Twentieth Century 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 URGA R

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 C N A MA RA

PART II
(Post)Disciplinary Context 115
6 From Image/Text to Biopictures: Key Concepts in
W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory 117
M I C H E L E   C O ME TA
x Contents
7 The Birth of the Discipline: W.J.T. Mitchell and the
Chicago School of Visual Studiesᇫ 138
I A N VE 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   HIGGIN 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 URGA R

Resources 272
List of Contributors 283
Index 287
List of Illustrations

Figures
2.1 “Family Tree of Images” 42
2.2 “The Diagram Image X Text” 43
2.3 “Structure of the linguistic sign” 45
2.4 “Table of tripartitions” 46
2.5 Paolo Chiasera, Choreography of Species: Rosa
Tannenzapfen, 2013 56
4.1 Dinosaurs fighting in prehistoric landscape 85
4.2 A close-up of Dolly in her stuffed form 88
4.3 Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf 94
11.1 Moyra Davey, Copperhead Grid, 1990 209
12.1 “Hooded man from Abu Ghraib” 225
12.2 Hildegard von Bingen, Imago Mundi; Latin codex,
eleventh–twelfth century 227
13.1 Guy Fawkes mask, from the film V for Vendetta; Musée
des miniatures et décors de cinéma, Lyon, France 245
13.2 Movie still from V for Vendetta, directed by James
McTeigue, 2005 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 pos-
sible, 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 refer-
ees gave very positive assessments of the initial concept of the book, and
I am grateful to them for having given the green light.
newgenprepdf

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
2 Krešimir Purgar
advances – will prove inseparable. However, it should be mentioned that
when disciplinary questions of image science are concerned, it is not nor-
mal to receive the credit for one and the other at the same time. The rea-
son 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 disci-
pline 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 accomplish-
ments: the creation of turbulences on the borders of various established
disciplines and its efforts to address the issue of their purported self-
sufficiency. 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 gen-
der studies per se, or that when these disciplines were applied to dif-
ferent 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 incar-
nations. 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 vis-
ual 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 differ-
ent 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 theo-
ries. 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 the-
ory, 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 postmod-
erne (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 cli-
mate in which it became much easier to perform any kind of interdisci-
plinary 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 impor-
tance 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 semioti-
cian: 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 the-
ory of the time was therefore played by scholars of literary theory – of
which Mitchell himself was one, along with Norman Bryson and Mieke
4 Krešimir Purgar
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 theoretical-
methodological 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 (semi-
otics, 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 lin-
guistic 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 recon-
ceptualize 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 mid-
dle 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 abso-
lute loss of place”.7 According to Krauss, during the 1950s this “siteless-
ness” 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/not-
architecture. 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 “analyt-
ical lines of modern art” – as had been masterfully presented by Filiberto
Menna in the 1970s10 – and not in order to question any of the natural-
ized 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 cul-
tural 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 his-
tory 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,
6 Krešimir Purgar
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 nas-
cent discipline of visual studies, the book was not, nevertheless, offered
by its author as an advance in art history. Whether art historians felt par-
ticularly 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 conse-
crated 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 disci-
plines 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 dis-
cursive practices and yet focuses on the sensuous and semiotic peculi-
arity 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 Anglo-
American world (as well as the Bildwissenschaft that was rooted in the
German-speaking countries), found just as firm ground in the methodol-
ogy of the most prominent European art historians as in the deconstruc-
tivist methods of poststructuralism; but in spite of that, visual studies was
 Introduction 7
in the beginning largely seen as alien formation. Horst Bredekamp con-
vincingly 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 interdiscipli-
nary scope but primarily by their demonstration of a general interest
in the functions of all images (Warburg), a very structured methodol-
ogy (Wölfflin), and a sincere interest in the nascent technology of mov-
ing 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 mod-
ern 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, par-
ticularly 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 his-
tory and the retreat of the more conservative members of this disci-
pline 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
8 Krešimir Purgar
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 anthro-
pological 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 ani-
mals or with the human brain or with any other aspect of human
 Introduction 9
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 “purity-
assuming 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 cul-
ture 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 mak-
ing 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 regret-
tably 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 arti-
cle “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 com-
munity 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 dis-
tinct 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.
10 Krešimir Purgar
Does it come as a surprise, then, when in one of his subsequent arti-
cles 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 out-
dated – 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 meaning-
generating processes and, more importantly, is visual studies the best can-
didate for the assignment? It is my understanding, and hopefully this
book will prove it, that Mitchell has in fact never cared about disciplinar-
ity, 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 help-
lessly unstructured picture of the contemporary world. Mitchell’s pro-
posal 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 “lin-
guistic turn”, “it does seem clear that another shift in what philoso-
phers talk about is happening, and that once again a complexly related
 Introduction 11
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 dis-
cipline 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 pur-
pose of the pictorial turn as a conceptual matter was never to become
a theory proper, to organize a body of knowledge or to represent some-
body’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 vis-
ible 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 represen-
tation, 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
12 Krešimir Purgar
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 for-
mation that aims to know the overarching system or conceptual totality
within which all the disciplines are related”, and the kind of “compul-
sory” interdisciplinarity characteristic of studies in gender, sexuality and
ethnicity “improvised out of a new theoretical object and a political pro-
ject 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
 Introduction 13
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 vis-
ible 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 stud-
ies. 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 prob-
ably never be able to make its parallel tasks intersect is precisely its radi-
cally 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 iconol-
ogy as a general image science and his personal, fundamental antion-
tological position:  he said that if iconology were to answer questions
on the ontology of images, then the best way to approach it would be
14 Krešimir Purgar
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 argu-
mentation as developed and (auto)criticized over time.
 Introduction 15
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 rea-
son 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, follow-
ing the traces that the American scholar has left in: (1) developing critical
iconology as a general science of images; (2) creating a sort of postdis-
ciplinary 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 iconol-

ogy. 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
16 Krešimir Purgar
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 perspec-
tives – genealogical in Szőnyi’s essay, cultural in Purgar’s. They give read-
ers the opportunity to construct a trajectory from his first collection of
essays “The Language of Images”, the title of which “still bore the ‘lin-
guistic 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 metaphysi-
cal 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)disci-
pline 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 meth-
odologies 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 hap-
pening 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 aforemen-
tioned 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
 Introduction 17
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 appar-
ent 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
18 Krešimir Purgar
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 object-
oriented 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 moti-
vations 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 tre-
mendous 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 phe-
nomenon clearly visible in German Medienwissenschaft, which was tak-
ing 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, show-
ing 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 path-
ways 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 phenom-
ena 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 overemphasiz-
ing a single aspect of its technical determination. Stubblefield argues that
sometimes – and especially when it comes to digital culture and digital
 Introduction 19
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 writ-
ing, is Chapter 12, in which Hannah Higgins discerns a sonic alternative
to our overwhelming infatuation with pictures and the spectacle of visu-
ality. 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 dif-
ferent 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 ico-
nology. 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 pop-
ulism as a sin can be regarded as the perfect modern example of clas-
sical 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 man-
ner: 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”.
20 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 unac-
ceptable 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 con-
temporary 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 “unsta-
ble uses”. Calabrese argues that “the phenomenon of instability appears in ‘neo-
baroque’ 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 land-
scape because they were treating landscape as an inverse shape of their sculp-
tures, 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 21
fact resides outside of art proper: namely, in the ideological position (or lack
thereof) of a single art historian.
10 Filiberto Menna defines the aniconic line as being focused on the pictoriality
of the surface, while the iconic line is addressed to tableau and represen-
tation (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 exam-
ine the conditions of the creation, reception and visibility of art objects in
themselves. Menna, however, provocatively observes that even the best-
known “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.
11 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.
12 Ross Woodrow, “Reading Pictures: The Impossible Dream?”, Analysis and
Metaphysics, Vol. 9, 2010, 64.
13 Ibid., 63.
14 To get an idea of how art history started to gradually modify its approach
from object-centered discipline to the understanding of processes and mech-
anisms 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 instruc-
tive: Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London
and New York: Routledge, 2001).
15 Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture:  The Study of the Visual After the
Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 49.
16 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 semi-
nal piece was a revised version of the presentation he gave at the international
22 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 strik-
ingly 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 con-
cludes 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 philoso-
phy, but it has the advantage of keeping the question open” (ibid., 227).
17 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.
18 Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Studies:  Interviews with Key Thinkers
(London: SAGE, 2008), 200–201.
19 Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture”, Journal of
Visual Culture, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2003), 6.
20 Ibid.
21 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.
22 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.
23 Ibid., 342–343.
24 W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol.
4, No. 2 (2005), 258.
25 Ibid., 260.
26 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.
27 Ibid., 16.
28 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.
29 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 breath-
taking. 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 intellec-
tual history reified by disciplinary division. Little in contemporary cul-
ture 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 interdiscipli-
nary 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 interar-
tistic 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 sepa-
rate the motif of the gesture (the actual lifting of the hat) from its tra-
ditional conventional meaning or theme (politeness). He calls his first
impressions of the gesture primary, factual, and expressional, and dis-
tinguishes 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 com-
posite 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 protag-
onist 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 sym-
bolic form.3 To understand the basic principles of iconographic produc-
tion 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 condi-

tions, 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 cul-
tural history, a distancing evidence even at the level of the anecdote. In
part because the affect latent in the story Panofsky tells is so unpromis-
ing, 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 iconol-
ogy 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 inacces-
sible 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 symp-
tomatic 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 discov-
ery 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 dif-
ferent 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 deter-
mining 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 ani-
mal spirits. The laundry industry employed fully a quarter of the metro-
politan 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 contempora-
neity of the image is the fact that laundresses were available subjects for
painting mainly because they bent to their tasks in overheated ground-
floor 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 semi-
otics. “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 fol-
lows 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 practi-
cal 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 modern-
ism, 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 occa-
sions when the somewhat opposed accents of the sister arts are mis-
construed 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 pro-
fessional. 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 anal-
ogy. 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 criti-
cal 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 dis-
course 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 conscious-
ness. 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 differ-
ence between the mental image and verbal imagery, Mitchell rehearses
the status of the image during the eighteenth century, since it is the discus-
sions of Hobbes and Locke, of Hume and Reid, which even today deter-
mine 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 oppo-
sitions 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 essential-
ist 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 opposi-
tions 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 ideo-
logical for all that, Marx. Even the best of dialecticians, Mitchell sug-
gests, 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, figura-
tive 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 per-
spectives, the pictorial analogy is probably still most often discussed in
impressionistic touchstone fashion. Yet there are signs that interdiscipli-
nary 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 tradi-
tion. 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 resist-
ance to the interartistic analogy, particularly in mixed media where the
arts have already joined forces, as in film and theater; (2) more sociohis-
torical 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 determi-
nants 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 schol-
arship 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 disappear-
ance 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 prac-
tice 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 catego-
ries of Heinrich Wölfflin. The sharp distinction Panofsky draws between ico-
nography 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 dimin-
ish 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
the Quattrocento”, in Norman Bryson (ed.), Calligram: Essays in the New Art
History from France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8–26.
11 Ernst Gombrich remarks that Panofsky “never renounced the desire to dem-
onstrate 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 multi-
ple roles is 1968; and these phenomena are often cited as midwives of post-
modernism.) Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Philip Maurice
Deneke Lecture) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 20.
12 Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern
Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
13 Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives:  Popular Imagery in the
Reformation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 8.
14 Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art (Chicago, IL:  University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 19.
15 Jean Starobinski, “On the Fundamental Gestures of Criticism”, New Literary
History, Vol. 5 (1974): 491–514, 514.
16 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 1.
17 A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (New York: Random House, 1985), 17.
18 Ibid., 10.
19 Ibid., 16.
20 Mitchell, Iconology, 27.
21 Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis:  The Humanistic Theory of Painting
(New York: Norton, 1967).
22 Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts:  The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and
English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago
Press, 1958).
23 Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).
24 Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic:  Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port
Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), xii.
25 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.
26 Mitchell, Iconology, 156–158.
 The Changing Patterns of Iconology 39
27 “It can be seen that the iconoclasts”, writes Baudrillard of the seventeenth-
century 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 corre-
spondence 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? 41
images from pictures:  the image “is a perception of likeness or resem-
blance 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 associat-

ing … 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
42 Francesco Gori
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 imme-
diately 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 under-
stand 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? 43
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
44 Francesco Gori
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 sensory-
semiotic “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 per-
formative “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, aes-
thetics 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 technol-
ogy 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 psycho-
analytic 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 com-
munication. 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 ani-
mal, from the smoke to the fire, from the symptom to the disease, etc.
 What is an Image? 45
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 “pic-
ture 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 con-
cept 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
46 Francesco Gori
All these triadic systems can be represented in a “table of triparti-
tions” 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 “iconi-
cally”  – 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 Similarity Cause–effect Convention
Saussure Signified Bar Signifler

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

 What is an Image? 47
can be displayed as the dynamic evolution from the a-dimensional time-
less 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 the-
ory: “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 ele-
ments 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 “image-
indexes” (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
48 Francesco Gori
sign can also be interpreted as an icon by the very fact of its being vis-
ible (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 regis-
ters 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 vegeta-
tive life, where our receptor organs are constantly pervaded by stimuli,
of which only a small part is selected as the bearer of meaning. The semi-
otic 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 fur-
ther, up to the threshold between man and animal, culture and nature.
The word “sense” itself expresses iconically such a “threshold of indis-
tinction”, as Giorgio Agamben has called it,23 between men and other liv-
ing 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 ani-
mals, 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
 What is an Image? 49
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 semiot-
ics, 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 con-
nected. 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 com-
puter 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 vis-
ible”, 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 hear-
ing, 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 with-
out seeing it:  although spoken words and music can also evoke men-
tal images (memories, scenes of our past, desires, fears, etc.), we cannot
50 Francesco Gori
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 mate-
rial 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 indi-
rectly linked by way of sight and hearing. This does not mean, of course,
that they are “lower” senses, and that people have not developed super-
fine 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 self-
representations 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 metapi-
ctures – 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
 What is an Image? 51
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 under-
stood. And yet, within a cultural system, images are also very “literate”,
that is, coded. For example, we could not interpret a monochrome paint-
ing 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 paint-
ing 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 galler-
ies, private residences) and the discourses of which it is the subject (criti-
cal 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 par-
ticular, 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 grad-
ually 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 eso-
teric diagrams, like Gurdjieff’s “enneagram”, which to be comprehended
demands a lifelong initiation. At any rate, in the actual praxis of commu-
nication 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
52 Francesco Gori
knowledge, like Plato’s hyperuranical ideas, or the fabulous “tableaux”
of the classical age,34 but only pictures, images “incarnated” in the mat-
ter 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 pho-
tography 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 men-
tion 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, can-

not 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 oth-
ers 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
 What is an Image? 53
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 mean-
ing 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, geo-
metrical 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
54 Francesco Gori
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 pic-
tures, 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 ori-
gin 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 enti-
ties 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 kin-
ship. Mitchell is the first to “put these three ideas together in historical-
conceptual 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 scien-
tific 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 anthropologi-
cal 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 pecu-
liar “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
 What is an Image? 55
is located in the limbic system, the “middle brain” we share with the
other mammals. Abstraction, language, coding, sense of duty are situ-
ated, 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 self-
preservation 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 intel-
lectual symbol (neocortex).
As usual, such parallelism does not claim any scientific legality: from
a neurological standpoint, in fact, all three semiotic registers can be con-
sidered 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 reg-
isters: 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 (intel-
lectually) 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, similari-
ties, 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 exag-

gerated tendency of schizophrenics to see imaginary connections of
meaning, more recently the term has been used to define “the perva-
sive tendency of human beings to see order in random configurations”
56 Francesco Gori
(Brugger [2001: 196]) or “the experience of seeing meaningful pat-
terns 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
 What is an Image? 57
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 mim-
icry 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, apo-
phenia 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.
58 Francesco Gori
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 liv-
ing 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, immedi-
ately – 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”,
 What is an Image? 59
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.
33 Mitchell, Image Science, 6.
34 For a critique of the classic-age ideal of a perfect representation of phe-
nomena in a “tableau”, see Foucault’s analysis in The Order of Things
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1970).
35 On the problematic issue of realism in photography see W.J.T. Mitchell,
“Realism and the Digital Image”, in Image Science, 49–64.
36 Mitchell, Image Science, 39.
37 This may be a “speech” act, an “image” act or the “indexical” act of pointing
at something.
38 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.
39 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).
40 See W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Surplus Value of Images”, in What Do Pictures
Want? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76–109.
41 Mitchell, Image Science, 43.
42 Ibid., 67–8.
43 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 10.
44 Mitchell, Image Science, 68.
45 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 97–98.
46 Ibid., 195.
47 Ibid.
48 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.
49 P.D. MacLean, A Triune Concept of the Brain and Behaviour (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1974).
50 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.
51 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).
52 M. Meschiari, “Roots of the Savage Mind:  Apophenia and Imagination as
Cognitive Process”, Quaderni di semantica, Vol. 30 (2009): 185.
53 Cited in C. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes:  Clues and
Scientific Method”, History Workshop, No. 9 (Spring, 1980): 31.
54 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
60 Francesco Gori
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.
3 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 iconol-
ogy”, which was founded by Aby Warburg and crystallized in his famous
discovery of the decan motifs that decorate the Palazzo Schifanoia fres-
coes 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
62 György E. Szőnyi
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 rela-
tionship 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 crea-
tivity 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 con-
ventionalist 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 arti-
cle, “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial
Representation”, which was seen by radical conventionalists as an apos-
tasy 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 semiot-
ics 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 stand-
point “extreme conventionalism”, to which I would add “radical icono-
clasm 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 criti-
cal 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, semiol-

ogy 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 photo-
graphs:

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 conven-
tionalism. 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
64 György E. Szőnyi
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 philoso-
pher 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 con-
cerning 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 pin-
pointed 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
66 György E. Szőnyi
(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) imita-
tion 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 refer-
ring 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 pragmati-
cal scheme: iconophobia – iconophilia and fetishism – iconoclasm – idol-
atry. 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 cer-
tain 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 lan-
guage 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 relation-
ship 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 sub-
vert 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
68 György E. Szőnyi
the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representa-
tion 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 intro-
duction 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 represen-
tation, 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 vis-
ual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading
(decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experi-
ence 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 construc-
tion remains unmatched in both its sweep and its nuanced detail. …
Panofsky manages to tell a multidimensional story of Western reli-
gious, 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 psycho-
logical aspects of iconophobia and iconophilia. Among these I  would
highlight what he has to say about an important genre of textual pic-
tures, 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 ekph-
rasis 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 dif-
ference cannot have any other basis but ideological.36 These ideologems
70 György E. Szőnyi
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 tex-
tual 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 pos-
sible 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 illus-
trate 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, accord-
ing to which neither pictures nor words can exist in their pure realiza-
tion: 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 dona-

tions 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
72 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 con-
vincing; 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 antago-
nistic 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 contra-
dictory 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 aes-
thetical 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
74 György E. Szőnyi
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 fol-
lowers of the German master accepted the notion of eternal and essential
aesthetic values without problematizing it, the interpretation of the his-
torical 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-an-
sich 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 mean-
ing 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 human-
ities 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 biol-
ogy and climatology (August Comte, Hyppolite Taine and the followers
of Darwinian evolutionism), the linguistics-oriented structuralism main-
tained 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 nou-
menon as the objects of natural scientific research, because it constantly
changes in relation to the context and cannot be unambiguously deter-
mined. In the beginning, structuralism aimed to offer a scientific method-
ology 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 modifica-
tions and refinements, which increasingly diverted from the original prin-
ciples 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 interpre-
tation 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: iconol-
ogy and the mediality of culture. Iconography and iconology started
with an optimistic program, hoping to arrive at an unambiguous clari-
fication 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 logi-
cal 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 dem-
onstrated 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 cul-
tural iconology with psychology and cognitive research in order to be
able to explain certain modes of understanding that could be derived
76 György E. Szőnyi
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 postmod-
erne:  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 com-
munication, Roman Jakobson, also had initial hopes that he would be
able to precisely define “what is poetry”. But his structuralist analy-
sis led him only to the “poetical function”, and by the 1930s he was
ready to admit that no scientific method could answer his original ques-
tion, 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 out-
sider scholar’s attitude with a much more ambiguous insider/outsider
dynamic.
It would appear that poststructuralism was the first theoretical move-
ment to give up the long-pursued illusion of essentialism and reconstruc-
tionism by replacing them with a pragmatic turn. This meant recognizing
that all cultural phenomena are context-dependent and that they func-
tion 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 overshad-
owed 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 his-
tory 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, postsemiot-
ics 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 differenti-
ate 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 conclu-
sions 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 demarca-
tions 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” inter-
changeably, 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 rep-
resentations. 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 manu-
script (London, British Library, MS Additional 23195). See a partial transcrip-
tion: 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.
78 György E. Szőnyi
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)) devel-
oped 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 (pri-
marily 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 (perma-
nently) 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 con-
nected, 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.
80 György E. Szőnyi
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 infatu-
ated 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
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 83
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 judg-
ments but to try to explain why things are the way they are, why spe-
cies 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
84 Krešimir Purgar
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 spe-
cies, 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 representa-
tion.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 paradoxi-
cal 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 sim-
ilarities 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 repre-
sentational 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 the-
ory 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
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 85

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

Want? from 2005, in which he introduced the concept of images as desir-

ing 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
86 Krešimir Purgar
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 dino-
saurs 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 char-
acter of dinosaur images. The dinosaur is more than just contemporary
object of commercially induced desire; it is “the totem animal of moder-
nity”.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
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 87
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 exem-
plar of what Clement Greenberg called ‘kitsch’ than the dinosaur’s link-
ing 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, dinoma-
nia 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 cul-
ture, be it high or low; there is only a visual construction of the media-
tized 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
88 Krešimir Purgar
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 sug-
gests, the quite unremarkable image of it became the epitome of our
all-time unconscious fears: for many people it represented physically pal-
pable 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)
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 89
actually possible. Besides the fact that replicating things ௅ whole organ-
isms 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 con-
ceivable 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 turn-
ing 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,
90 Krešimir Purgar
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 formu-
late the dilemma of whether this mechanism of action/reaction was to
be found in beholders as human beings incapable of rationally compre-
hending what he calls “the surplus value of images”, or images, with all
the technology invested in their creation, really took on some substan-
tially 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 epistemolo-
gies 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 ico-
nology and cultural history have always been better equipped to grasp
recurring patterns of human behavior than the exact sciences that scruti-
nized 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 ideo-
logical 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,
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 91
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 origi-
nally 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 reproduc-
tion: the shift from photography, cinematography or print to the bio-
logical reproduction of life itself.28
There is extensive evidence coming from the art world of the post-
modern 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, appro-
priation art, trans-avant-garde and many examples of ironic rework-
ings 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 sub-
ject 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 representa-
tion 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 clon-
ing 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 knowl-
edge, mass media and the like ௅ in fact precedes the actual biological
92 Krešimir Purgar
cloning.30 Seen from this perspective, ideological cloning was a prerequi-
site 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 clon-
ing 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 paradoxic-
ally 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
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 93
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 some-
how 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 picto-
rial 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 lay-
ers 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
94 Krešimir Purgar

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 fear-
some 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 under-
stand that iconoclasm is not about the fear of any type or group of pic-
tures, 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.
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 95
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 his-
tory, 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 consump-
tion; 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.
96 Krešimir Purgar
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 liv-
ing theory. While every visual studies scholar knows that this discipline
draws upon numerous concepts and tools coming from various knowl-
edge 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 knowl-
edge? 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 iconopho-
bia. 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 phe-
nomenal 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 par-
ticular 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 tri-
adic 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
 Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology 97
creatures are his way of going beyond the disciplinary borders that exist
between different approaches and interests pertaining to the arts, human-
ities, 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 mak-
ing 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 picto-
rial 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 eas-
ily 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 encoun-
tered 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 disci-
pline 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.
98 Krešimir Purgar
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 vis-
ual representations, as both “mental” and “verbal” images (metaphors and
ekphrastic utterances) on the one hand as well as through physical, represen-
tational, “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 authen-
tic 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 land-
scape panorama spanning 170  million years of geological time. The dino-
saurs’ 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 fet-
ish” (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 99
21 Ibid., 16.
22 Ibid., 15.
23 Ibid., 12–13.
24 Ibid., 15.
25 Ibid., 32.
26 W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror:  The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 25–29.
27 Ibid., 27.
28 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 318.
29 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 29.
30 Ibid., 31. See also: Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), 25.
31 Ibid.
32 Exodus 32:1–4, Holy Bible, New International Version. Available at www.
biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2032&version=NIV, accessed
October 2, 2014.
33 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 69.
34 David Friedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of
Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 397.
35 Ibid., 384.
36 Mitchell, “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”, 17.
37 Ibid., 19.
38 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 spec-
trum there are physically “invisible” ௅ mental ௅ images that exist only in
our minds, like dreams, memories and ideas; and verbal images, like meta-
phors and ekphrastic utterances. Between visible and invisible images there
are perceptual images ௅ “phantasmatic sensual data” ௅ occupying a bor-
der 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

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 lit-
erary 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 “hard-
wired”: 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 mis-
sals, 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 “lin-
guistic” and the “visual” can’t be neatly distinguished because their
relation is not one of binary opposition, negation, logical antinomy,
 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 rela-
tion 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 “pic-
ture”? 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 impera-
tive, “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, like-
ness, 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 rela-
tively more closely tied to the visual than “image” (which can refer
to nonvisual likeness or similitude in any medium or sensory chan-
nel) 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 incorpo-
real. 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 per-
haps 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 twenty-
first century is the problem of the image? What is the problem? Does
the image present an ethical concern, a political difficulty or an epis-
temological 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 sepa-
rates 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 prop-
aganda 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 invisi-
ble, 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 pornog-
raphy 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 worksta-
tions 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 propo-
sition, 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 domi-
nance of the visual”, but to remark on the way that images and visu-
ality have emerged as a specific point of irritation in contemporary
theory, an unsolved problem or anomaly. This problem is just as for-
midable 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 sub-
stitutes, fetishes, is certain to continue. One side of this is simply mis-
placed 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 out-
rageous 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 survi-
vors 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
AM: Can you indicate how you approach these issues differently?
TM: 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 for-
mer 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 sado-
masochistic 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 perver-
sion). 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 cri-
tique. 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 ques-
tion 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 hierar-
chy between high and low art. It aims to understand what Adorno
called “the culture industry” virtually from the position of its con-
sumption. 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 his-
tory is that your work would seem to sit more comfortably within
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 pro-
cesses). 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 cul-
ture 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 audi-
ence 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 pas-
sion, 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 con-
troversy 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 filmmak-
ers. 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 con-
cerned 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 cul-
ture 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 aesthet-
ics 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, disap-
pear, only to be rediscovered or reinvented under the most unpromis-
ing 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 distinc-
tions. The power of images is preconceptual, fundamental to the for-
mation 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 lan-
guage, and of course they infiltrate language everywhere, percolating
up through its rough basement in the form of metaphors, descrip-
tions, and formal gestalts. The nature/convention distinction is dura-
ble, 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 cul-
tural studies long enough now to seem like the point of keenest inter-
est 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 contin-
ues 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 men-
tion 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 “revela-
tion” 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 per-
ception. 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 repre-
sentations, 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 acous-
tical 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 distinc-
tions like nature/convention, resemblance/difference, motivated/arbi-
trary 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”, funda-
mental 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 inter-
esting 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 fol-
low your advice and not dispose of the nature (resemblance) empha-
sis, 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 dif-
ference between convention (the arbitrary sign) and nature (resem-
blance). 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 rep-
resent 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 differ-
ence 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 dura-
ble 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 under-
lies 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 distinc-
tion between space and time (Lessing’s favorite), the sensory division
between the eye and the ear, or grammatical distinctions like the ana-
logical vs. the digital (Nelson Goodman). The fact that so many pow-
erful 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 cul-
ture, 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 opposi-
tion. 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 con-
flicts, 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 ques-
tion, 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 nominal-
ism. 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 con-
structed by a convention? One of the things I admire about Rosalind
Krauss’ The Optical Unconscious is the way its obsession with lan-
guage 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 implica-
tions. 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 uni-
versals”. 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: per-
haps 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 meta-
languages. 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 rela-
tivism? 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 relativ-
ism, but as a kind of hard-headed faith in the progressive, historically
evolving character of human understanding, coupled with consider-
able 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 possi-
ble in the blind faith that it will be useful to do so. I want to intervene
in academic, professional discussions of symbols and visual repre-
sentations 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 consid-
ers 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 – vis-
ual 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
118 Michele Cometa
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 dis-
cipline, 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 “vis-
ual 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 defini-
tions: 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, happen-
ings 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, sub-
cultures, costume and fashion, hair styling, body adornment, tattoos,
landscape and garden design. Performing arts and the arts of spec-
tacle:  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, illumina-
tions 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 repro-
ductions, illustrated books, magazines, cartoons, comics and news-
papers, 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 cer-
tainly many of the media that have established the very notion of moder-
nity, 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, Disney-

land, 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, con-
temporary 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, mar-
bled 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 orna-
ments, 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
120 Michele Cometa
pornography, Daguerre’s dioramas, the first images of lightning, the
history of pinhole cameras, and womens’ photography from Julia
Margaret Cameron to Claude Cahun, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin,
Sally Mann, and Catherine Opie.11

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 stud-
ies 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 propo-
nents of a dialogue between traditional disciplines and cultural stud-
ies, 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 seven-
teenth century, art history of the nineteenth century and visual studies
of the twentieth century. Mitchell’s deep historicism (and antiessential-
ism)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 differ-
ent and irreducible.
However, it is worth noting that in this context visual studies is stig-
matized 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 represen-
tation, 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 vis-
ual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading
(decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experi-
ence or “visual literacy” might not be fully explicable on the model
of textuality. Most important, it is the realization that while the prob-
lem 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, show-
ing that “life”, “circulation” and “consistency” are not mere metaphors.
122 Michele Cometa
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 con-
temporary 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 meet-
ing 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 sub-
title 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/simi-
larity 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 irreducibil-
ity 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 prac-
tices 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 dis-
persive culturalist approach, since the questions he poses are quite similar
and parallel to those posed by European Bildwissenschaft, as it has devel-
oped in German-speaking countries and eventually, but certainly not sub-
ordinately, 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 deic-
tic, that is, on the “power of showing” (die Macht des Zeigen) as a spe-
cific property of images. I am referring to Gottfried Boehm,25 the father
of the iconic turn (Ikonische Wendung) who, starting from philosophi-
cal 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 signifi-
cance. 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, aesthet-
ics 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
124 Michele Cometa
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 ekph-
rasis 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 litera-
ture, 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, “alter-
native 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 securi-
ties, 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 representa-
tion. 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 neces-
sary 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 simi-
larity, antagonism as crucial as collaboration, dissonance and divi-
sion 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 interpre-

tations, 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
126 Michele Cometa
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 pro-
gressive 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) – dramatic-
ally 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 ten-
sion between “popular culture” – the subject of cultural studies – and the
“high culture” of art history, distances him from some of the simplifica-
tions 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:

• The issue of the relationship between mental image and material pic-
ture 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 some-
thing 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 emanci-
pated 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 his-
tory.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 illustra-
tion of this concept can be found in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
beautiful fable dedicated to the “puff pastry of time”,56 a clever medi-
tation on “anachronism” defined not as an error but as a fundamen-
tal 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 “deg-
radations” (in Aby Warburg’s sense) – continuously expose us to an
overlapping, rather than to a sequence, of scopic regimes. The most
128 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 tech-
nologies, 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 herme-
neutical 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 classi-
cal 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” tech-
nique63 that is the basis for an original “look” at the deep mechanisms of
Western visuality – a kind of phenomenological rethinking of visual cul-
ture. 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 unimagina-
ble 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 nones-
sentialist 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 back-
ground 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 inter-
pretation, 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 limi-
nality) of the unspeakable and unimaginable, a formulation that mim-
ics – 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 dis-
cuss the connection of the classical ekphrasis72 with the Barthian “obvi-
ous 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 ter-
rorism is thus revealed to be totally inadequate because it resoundingly
misses the true bone of contention:  images. This is an important and
130 Michele Cometa
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 ter-
rorist (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 repro-
ducing 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 techni-

cal horizon, and this possibility has re-awakened many of the tra-
ditional 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 sci-
ence 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 frame-
work, 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 digi-
tal 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 reg-
ister, 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.
132 Michele Cometa
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 coun-
scious 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 bio-
cybernetic body (or his/her own body, as in the case of Stelarc) is incom-
parably 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 cen-
tury, Mitchell wants to propose a sort of “paleontology of the present”,85

a discipline that would begin by acknowledging that contemporane-

ity 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.
 From Image/Text to Biopictures 133
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, Bildwis-
senschaft:  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.
134 Michele Cometa
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 visu-
ale:  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 Communi-
cation, 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 moderni-
dade”, 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.
136 Michele Cometa
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 cen-
tered on Mitchell’s seminar on media theory and included, among others,
Snyder, Elkins and Hans Belting (then teaching in Chicago), not to men-
tion 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 … medi-
evalist 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 rela-
tionship 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 col-
lective 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 “ver-
nacular” (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 sup-
ported 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.
140 Ian Verstegen
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 per-
fect 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 inclu-
siveness lives on in Elkins’ work, which remains open to any number of
senses of image. For example, in the introduction to his recent edited vol-
ume, 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, how-
ever, 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 nonal-
ienation. 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.
 The Birth of the Discipline 141
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 rid-
dle of induction, and was an enemy of logical confirmation. Technically,
he proposed a form of pure descriptivism, a plurality of worlds.11 In aes-
thetics, 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 dis-
jointed, 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 any-
thing. As Mitchell wrote:
142 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 “habitua-
tion” 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 bal-
ance vision “as a cultural activity” with vision in “its non-cultural dimen-
sions”. 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 fore-
stalls 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 rethink-
ing 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 para-
graphs, is drawn by a history of practical differences in the use of differ-
ent 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 interpreta-
tion of literature” and “instead of viewing space and time as antithetical
modalities, we ought to treat their relationship as one of complex inter-
action, 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 paint-
ing.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 invo-
lution 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 natural-
ism 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 unrec-
ognizable from human experience, stop-action shots in sports photogra-
phy for instance. This critique was important in deflating the scientistic
pretensions of photography, raised to such a high level by defenders, such
144 Ian Verstegen
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 resem-
blance in general, was in Snyder’s words already given an “analytic dem-
olition” 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 geom-
etry 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 rela-
tionship 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 incoher-
ent. 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 con-
sonance 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 under-
written by a theory of perspective.27 Although he does not treat exten-
sively 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 “accul-
turated 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 per-
spective 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 dif-
ferent 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
146 Ian Verstegen
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 cri-
tique 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 accusa-
tion 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 stim-
ulus 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 prac-
tices. 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 “essen-
tialist”. As has become clearer in recent years, thinkers like Feyerabend
and Goodman (and Quine, and Kuhn) fatefully kept in play many prem-
ises 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 identifica-
tion 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 predic-
tions.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 real-
istic 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 instan-
tiation (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 theo-
retical commitments on paper. The most interesting successor to posi-
tivism, 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 dif-
ference between saying that works are in practice mixed and saying that
each modality has tendencies that exclude the other. To refuse to see the
148 Ian Verstegen
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 pre-
cludes 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 underesti-
mates 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 differ-
ent 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 frame-
work can provide a limiting horizon beyond which it is impossible to
think alternative politics. If true politics is impossible in a state of non-
alienation, 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, meth-
odologically, 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 theoreti-
cal 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).
150 Ian Verstegen
5 Mitchell, Iconology, 8.
6 Ibid., 14. Later, he opposes scientism that defers to a “social system commit-
ted 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 pic-
tures” 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 contribu-
tion. 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
 The Birth of the Discipline 151
Pictura; The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in
Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 74.
28 Mitchell, Iconology, 38.
29 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1994), xv.
30 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.
31 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 176.
32 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Cloning Terror”, Iconoclash symposium, Karlsruhe, 2002.
33 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 46.
34 Mitchell, Iconology, 90.
35 Martin Jay, “Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn”, Journal of Visual
Culture, Vol. 1 (2002): 267–278.
36 Mitchell cites Paul Feyerabend, Against Method:  Outline of an Anarchistic
Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975).
37 Christopher Norris, Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific
Realism (London: Routledge, 2004), 165.
38 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.
39 The watershed book was Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds:
Leeds Books Ltd, 1975).
40 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.
41 Ian Verstegen, “Dispositional Realism and the Specificity of Digital Media”,
Leonardo, Vol. 47 (2014): 167–171.
42 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.
43 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.
44 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
 What Discipline? 153
“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 (techni-
cal, 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,
154 Jens Schröter
there is that moment before the routine or ritual is reasserted, the
moment of chaos or wonder when a discipline, a way of doing things,
compulsively performs a revelation of its own inadequacy. This is the
moment of interdisciplinarity that has always interested me. I think
of it as the “anarchist” moment, and associate it with both public and
esoteric or professional forms of knowledge.12

And therefore it is not surprising that he differentiates three forms of

interdisciplinarity:

In these terms, I  would distinguish three kinds of interdisciplinar-

ity: (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 com-
pulsory 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,
 What Discipline? 155
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 theoreti-
cal 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 dem-
onstrates 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 ques-
tion relevant to, and already (partially) addressed by, various disci-
plines. 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
156 Jens Schröter
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 “indis-
cipline” (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 contra-
dictions merit a more detailed exploration.
The foreword to Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft empha-
sizes the fact that the development process for the discipline had, up to
1988, “not yet led to any widely accepted epistemology of media stud-
ies”.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 fol-
lowing 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 con-
stant 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 opportu-
nity 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
 What Discipline? 157
development of media studies as an independent subject – and the ques-
tion 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
158 Jens Schröter
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 outvot-
ing” 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 develop-
ment of academic science and research. And in fact this council did pre-
sent, 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 Medienwissens-
chaft, 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 evolv-
ing 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 none-
theless continue to be, as a matter of necessity, media research in other
 What Discipline? 159
disciplines as well”.49 On the one hand, media research in the neighbor-
ing disciplines can function as a point of intersection with media studies,
but on the other it can also threaten to make media studies superflu-
ous. 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 disci-
plines 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
160 Jens Schröter
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 stud-
ies” 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 eco-
nomic 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 stud-
ies”.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 success-
ful 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, fac-
ulty) 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 pro-
fessorships 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 differen-
tiation 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 sec-
tion corresponding to this on the GfM’s website. There again, the tension
Table 8.1 Core areas of media studies

Media theories and Theories and Theories and

their methods methods of methods of media
media history aesthetics
History of media Aesthetic forms and
Society Actor Network
systems and the social structures:
Theory
public sphere
Deconstruction
Discourse analysis Pop culture, mass
Functional and culture, etc.
Gender theories
structural history of Visual
Communication
media communication
theory Constructivism
Critical theory
Institutional history Theory of form
Media economy
of media and genre, esp.
Media psychology
Media politics for film and radio
History of media
Media law
"programming"
Semiotics
Systems theory
Media Network theory History of media of Aesthetics of
archaeology storage, transmission production
and Media archaeology and broadcasting, and reception
technogenesis and technogenesis as well as (conditions of
separate media perception)
Universals of media technologies:
Technology Formal aesthetics of
print, media technologies,
photography, film, research into
radio, television, intermediality and
computer, interactivity
Internet; history
of information
technology
Culture Cultural studies Histories of the Media-arts,
Media anthropology form and content of media philologies,
Media philosophy individual media: aesthetics of
Psychoanalytic individual media
cultural print, images, forms: photography,
theory film, television, sound, film, text,
Theories of individual radio, computer, visual culture,
media Internet; history aesthetically based
General media of transmedial theories of general
theories and/or intermedial and individual
genres, forms and media; game
discourses studies, visual
communication,
intermedial forms

Source: adapted from Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM),

www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de
162 Jens Schröter
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 vari-
ous 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 docu-
ment 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 “indisci-
pline” of media studies might relate to more traditional disciplines, both
conceptually and practically, was harshly criticized by nearly all repre-
sentatives of German media studies. It was not put into practice, and cur-
rently there are various bachelor programs in media studies in Germany.
It is important to mention specifically the relation between these pro-
grams 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 pro-
grams of study that directly qualified students for jobs. For media stud-
ies, 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 gradu-
ate 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
 What Discipline? 163
kulturwissenschaftliche Medienwissenschaft, whose discursive norms are
ultimately derived from the humanities?
Finally, large externally funded research facilities, such as the collabo-
rative research centers (Sonderforschungsbereiche) and research train-
ing 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 determin-
ing 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, web-
sites, 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 dis-
cipline”. 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 interdis-
ciplinary 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 clear-
cut content, methods and tasks”,65 and for an “integrative form”.66 There
164 Jens Schröter
are also calls for “media studies … as a unified discipline”,67 for the “cen-
tering of a terminology that comprehensibly describes its field in the cir-
cle 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 forma-
tion 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 discipli-

nary unity is triply false:  minimizing or denying differences that
exist across the plurality of specialties grouped loosely under a sin-
gle 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 institu-
tional integration for the performance of a discipline. This is crucial, par-
ticularly 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 contin-
gent 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
 What Discipline? 165
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 consti-
tute 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 often-
problematized 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 vol-
ume 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 infor-
mation 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 actu-
ally 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”
166 Jens Schröter
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 sci-
ence, especially to Kuhn’s concept of the “paradigm shift” and the re-
establishment 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 disci-
plines. 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, depart-
ments”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2009): 729–746, here 737.
12 Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”, 541.
13 Ibid.
 What Discipline? 167
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 542.
16 Ibid., 543.
17 Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?”, 210.
18 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/henkilo-
kunta/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.
19 Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”, 16–18.
20 Ibid., 19.
21 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 habili-
tation: Ute Holl and Claus Pias (eds.), “Insert. Aufschreibesysteme 1980/2010.
In memoriam Friedrich Kittler”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Vol. 6
(2012): 114–192.
22 Rainer Bohn, Eggo Müller and Rainer Ruppert (eds.), Ansichten einer künfti-
gen Medienwissenschaft (Berlin: Sigma, 1988).
23 Paech, “Die Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft”, 52.
24 Bohn, Müller and Ruppert, Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft, 7.
25 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.
26 Ibid., 9.
27 Ibid., 8.
28 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.
29 Cf. Bohn, Müller and Ruppert, “Die Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter ihrer technis-
chen Fingierbarkeit”, 19.
30 Ibid., 21.
31 Ibid., 22.
32 Leschke, “Von der Erfindung der Medienwissenschaft als regelmäßiger Übung”,
67.
33 Pias, “Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften?”.
34 Kübler, “Auf dem Weg zur wissenschaftlichen Identität und methodologischen
Kompetenz”, 31.
35 Ibid., 35.
36 Ibid., 32; emphasis added.
37 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.
168 Jens Schröter
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 Kommunikations-
und 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 kün-
ftigen Medienwissenschaft (Berlin: Sigma, 1988), 51–74, here 51, 52.
44 Ibid., 55.
45 Cf. Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?”, 210: “An organization of the curricu-
lum 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 exam-
ple 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 Medienwis-
senschaft. 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 discipli-
nary 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 Kommunikations-
und Medienwissenschaften in Deutschland, 8; see also 89–90.
 What Discipline? 169
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  Medienwissens-
chaft.Ein Strategiepapier der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft. Available at
www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de/gfm/gfm/kernbereiche_der_medienwissen-
schaft.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.
170 Jens Schröter
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 reconstruc-
tive 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 orig-
inated within medieval studies has its strongest and most meaningful
172 Luca Vargiu
motivations within this discipline, beyond the parallelisms, the simi-
larities 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 consid-
erations 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 pal-
ladia, 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 them-
selves 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 Bildwissens-
chaft 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 differ-
ence in research approach between the two regions. While this may sim-
ply 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 fundamen-
tal 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 his-
tory”, 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 wander-
ers … who had traversed the same, scarcely-known continent of picto-
rial 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
174 Luca Vargiu
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 exam-
ples 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 vol-
ume 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 philo-
sophical 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 rev-
olution.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 refer-
ence 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 pos-
sibility 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 con-
temporary 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 corre-
spondence 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 increas-
ing 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 multiplica-
tion 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.
176 Luca Vargiu
To better frame Mitchell’s observations and their context, we should
begin to ask ourselves whether the number of turns that we have wit-
nessed 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 optimis-
tically, 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 broad-
ens 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 diag-
nostic 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 reaf-
firming 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 tech-
nique 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 circula-
tion 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
178 Luca Vargiu
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 con-
text 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 consti-
tutive 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 supplemen-
tary 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 investiga-
tion 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
 Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue 179
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 refer-
ence 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 Image-
Making 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 ‘linguis-
tic 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”, introduc-
tion to Cesare Brandi, Duccio (Siena: Protagon, 2003), 9.
180 Luca Vargiu
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 atti-
tude, 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.
 Mitchell and Boehm – a Dialogue 181
33 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 115.
34 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 241.
35 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 115.
36 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 con-
troversy 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.
37 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, 241.
38 Bredekamp, “Drehmomente”, 23.
39 Willibald Sauerländer, “Iconic turn? Eine Bitte um Ikonoclasmus”, in Maar
and Burda (eds.), Iconic Turn, 422 and 425.
40 Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 107.
41 Mitchell in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 120.
42 Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 106.
43 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.
44 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.
45 See Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”.
46 Boehm in Boehm and Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn”, 103.
47 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

ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD AND 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 anxi-
ety 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 “pictural-
ity” as such. This third meaning implies, of course, that any picture
whatsoever (a simple line-drawing of a face, a multistable image like
 Images and their Incarnations 183
the Duck-Rabbit, Velázquez’s Las Meninas) can become a metapi-
cture, a picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures.
The ever-present potentiality of the metapicture has several impli-
cations for the rest of your question. First, it suggests that any pic-
ture 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 com-
patible 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 peda-
gogical aim is to slow down the reception of the image, to encour-
age 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 metalan-
guage for the understanding of pictures. And the aim of the metapi-
cture 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 semi-
otics, 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 seem-
ingly 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 per-
sistence 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 philosophi-
cal 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 stagger-
ingly 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 anti-
gens 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 invo-
cation 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 “indiscipli-
narity”, moments of breakage, failure, or deconstruction of existing
disciplinary structures accompanied by the emergence of new forma-
tions (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 narra-
tives” 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 icono-
phobia and iconoclasm has become itself the object of a second-order
set of metapictures. Martin Jay’s book, Downcast Eyes, was a fun-
damental breakthrough in putting the antiocularcentric philosophi-
cal 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 phenom-
enon 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 reso-
nate, 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 “phi-
losophize 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 meta-
phor 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 theoreti-
cal 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 some-
one 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 anal-
ogy (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 organ-
isms 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 can-
not be sequestered in the savage mind, or in the minds of children,
neurotics, etc. The whole effort to deny the vitalist/animist metapi-
cture in favor of modern rationalism, materialism, or secular, criti-
cal realism, I want to suggest, is precisely a form of disavowal that
inevitably generates the “double consciousness” I have been outlin-
ing 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 primi-
tive 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 conscious-
ness, 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 pathologi-
cal 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 “dou-
ble 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 per-
ceived as an image, through a screen or “veil” of racist misrecogni-
tion, 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 stereo-
type, 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 reappropria-
tion (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, “want-
ing” 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 refer-
ence 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 “fab-
ula” that we need to look at carefully in order to find out how it
“desires” something new for each narrative. The concept of ekphra-
sis, 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 con-
nected 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 lack-
ing. 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 open-
ness 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 paro-
dies, 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 jour-
nalistic 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 funda-
mental 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 coun-
termyth 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 every-
day 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 picto-
rial 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 appreci-
ated. 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 over-
hasty truncation of two different ways of framing historical periodi-
zation. 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 postmod-
ern, 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 spec-
tacle, 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 com-
monplace 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 picto-
rial 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 surveil-
lance comes along. Thus, the invention of artificial perspective, or
alphabetic writing, or moveable type, or photography are accom-
panied 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) threaten-
ing an atavistic return to tribalism, irrationality, superstition, illit-
eracy – 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 sci-
ence” 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 sci-
entific 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, stud-
ies of word and image, audio-visuality and performance; visual-
verbal 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 common-
place 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, oppos-
ing, 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, psychologi-
cal sciences. On the other side, a group of ethical, political, socio-
cultural, 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 spe-
cific 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 sci-
ences, epitomized by the highly controversial and publicized pro-
cess 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 picto-
rial 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 theol-
ogy, 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 technosci-
entific and cultural conditions of the image have changed. So when
I am asked to name the cultural-historical period that we are enter-
ing 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.
194 Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes with W.J.T. Mitchell
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 privileg-
ing of practice over the technical agency of the apparatus. Unlike, for
example, Vilém Flusser who regards the camera as containing precon-
stituted 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 interpreta-
tions. 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 cer-
tainty 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 methodol-
ogy to bear on the digital camera, Mitchell similarly presents the elec-
tronic 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, contextual-
izing 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 pho-
tographic 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 scien-
tific 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
 What Do Photographs Want? 199
the apparatus is repeatedly conjured as the embodiment of rational pro-
cesses and concrete materiality. While Rousseau and Descartes are criti-
cal 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 dis-
cover, 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 conjunc-
tion 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 perfor-
mance 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 capi-
talism, 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 cen-
tury, 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
 What Do Photographs Want? 201
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 tech-
nical 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 specific-
ity 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 posi-
tion 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 fash-
ion, 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 devel-
oped 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 iconol-

ogy, failing to heed many of his own warnings about overgeneraliza-
tion 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 ori-
gin of the photographic camera. As many photo historians have pointed
out, the birth of photography makes for particularly messy historiogra-
phy. 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 photogra-
phy 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 centu-
ries. 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 neces-
sarily 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 trans-
formations that came about in conjunction with these changes.
Given the indebtedness of the camera obscura’s successor to the capi-
talist 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 ideol-
ogy 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
 What Do Photographs Want? 203
Mitchell’s engagement with the camera obscura metaphor illustrates
not only his rejection of medium specificity, totalization and technodeter-
minism, 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 pro-
duction 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 drama-
tize 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 relation-
ship 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 presi-
dent’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 out-
side 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
 What Do Photographs Want? 205
the profilmic event would most likely encounter resistance in the con-
temporary 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 con-
texts illustrate two interrelated components of Mitchell’s theory: the his-
torical 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 manip-
ulation 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 real-
ism 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 impres-
sions 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, drag-
ging, 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 under-
lying 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 hand-
made, 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 ques-
tion that inevitably follows from these interventions concerns how one
is to differentiate digital and analog media if their operation is so heav-
ily 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 dig-

ital (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
 What Do Photographs Want? 207
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 semi-
otic 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 rela-
tion 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.
208 Thomas Stubblefield
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 circula-
tion 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 object-
world, progeny of the close-up and the zoom. They are obsolete,
throwaway vestiges, but also keepsakes, collectors’ items, the use-
less 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 pro-
cesses of circulation. The transformative power of these images of torture
 What Do Photographs Want? 209

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

and humiliation confirms for Mitchell that “the main relevance of digiti-
zation 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 sug-
gests that the rampant immobilization and containment of human bodies
in the contemporary sphere is countered by the “the rapid, virulent cir-
culation 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, pho-
tography maintains an extensive history of such practices. However, the
acceleration of these processes that occurs at the hand of the digital net-
works 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 synchronic-
ity 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 posi-
tions of Davey and Mitchell, Suns (From Sunset) discloses the digital itera-
tion of photography as rooted in circulation, but does so without positing
these processes as external to the medium. It is not simply that users pro-
duce 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 constitut-
ing 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 main-
tain their position “outside the image itself” within such an environ-
ment. 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 par-
ticles 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.
 What Do Photographs Want? 211
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 exam-
ple 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 effi-
ciency; 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 sur-
face as paradigmatic of “the visual/aural structure of symbols as a nat-
ural 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 apprehen-
sion (the ear, the eye), with literature expressing the passage of time, or
events, and paintings expressing the visualization of space (in Greenberg’s
214 Hannah B Higgins
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 ele-
ments, and all the so-called “visual media” are mixed or hybrid for-
mations 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 215
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 mod-
ern, 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 dia-
lectic 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
216 Hannah B Higgins
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 out-
side 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 dissent-
ers”.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 multi-
tudes” 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 sensa-
tionalized 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 some-
thing besides merely being shrill. The scream becomes active, surpass-
ing 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 217
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 consti-
tution 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, intensify-
ing its capacity to communicate time, motion, action and feeling. Put
218 Hannah B Higgins
differently, the auditory appears within the visual spectacle repeatedly in
Mitchell’s theory as a marker of rhetorical excess, as a means of expand-
ing 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 associa-
tion 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 lan-
guage, would be Roland Barthes’s depiction of music as specifically anti-
linguistic in Image–Music–Text. Barthes asks the reader to “displace the
fringe of contact between music and language”, and replace this inter-
medial 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 pic-
tures, 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 expe-
rience in the here and now. Burke’s effectiveness at evoking horror coun-
ters 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 219
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 rep-
resentation of action and passion, and the causal and instantaneous
220 Hannah B Higgins
mode of unity that came with it, provided the best available medium
for establishing that fiction in the painting itself.30

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 liber-
ated 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.
 The Eyes Have Ears 221
“Frank’s listening eye”, in other words, expresses the sonorous, immer-
sive 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 hor-
rified 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 convey-
ing a sense of separateness (alienation) and togetherness at the level of
the sensory apparatus. The eyes are closed by choice for the closest lis-
tener, 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 experi-
ence 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 com-
munications 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:
222 Hannah B Higgins
To say that he is familiar and intimate is to use pale and feeble lan-
guage 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, experi-

enced 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 per-
sona 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 associ-
ated 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 experi-
ence 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-and-
stripes bunting emerges from the figure with a lean line of fabric hitch-
ing 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 223
wound he [Frank] was sensing in the national character” as a conse-
quence 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 march-
ing 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 vir-
tue 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 physi-
cal 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
224 Hannah B Higgins
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 isolat-
ing 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 iso-
lates 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 men-
acing 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 instru-
ment 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, creat-
ing 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 225

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 con-
taining 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
226 Hannah B Higgins
the nonphysical (or for our purposes digital) copy containing the vis-
ceral 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 pro-
duced by Forkscrew Graphics. He describes the image specifically in terms
that expand on the sensorial range of images that depict utter absorp-
tion: “Perhaps the best way to understand the iPod/iRaq culture jamming
is to analyze the relation between the self-pleasuring dancers, narcissisti-
cally 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 bag-
man 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.
 The Eyes Have Ears 227

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 con-

temporary warfare, blasting rock music figures heavily in producing the
absorptive experience of violent combat, driving the sublime experi-
ence 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)
228 Hannah B Higgins
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 virtual-
reality 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 inten-
sification 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 con-
structs 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 con-
trary, 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 surveil-
lant, 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 229
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 neo-
liberal 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 dema-
gogue 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 meta-
phor), 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 real-
ism, 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 thank-
fully 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
230 Hannah B Higgins
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 thunder-
ous 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 begin-
ning 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 rule-
following 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 231
Blake reappears in the brilliant coda to the book, which argues pas-
sionately 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 descrip-
tions of how this sweet science offers tools to scholars that are more sub-
tle than those we generally procure in the scripting of our scenarios. The
last sentences of the coda weave together the most recent of his music-
infused 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 com-

plex relation of subjects and objects, beholders, artists, pictures and
worlds. Perhaps the two functions of striking and turning are pre-
cisely what gets combined in Nietzsche’s figure of the tuning fork,
which strikes idols without destroying them, making both the instru-
ment 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.
232 Hannah B Higgins
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 exam-
ple, the viewer relies on a deeply acculturated, physically developed sense of
navigating space and touching things with the body and/or the hand (proprio-
ception). 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 com-
mandments, 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 pri-
marily 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 implor-
ing 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 ear-
splitting 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
 The Eyes Have Ears 233
with examples from the time and from both sides of these conflicts, particu-
larly as the rhetoric of revolution found painterly expression by supporters
and detractors. From the pulverized spaces of those sympathetic to revolu-
tionary fervor, such as Goya’s Third of May (1808) and especially Manet’s
Execution of Maximilian (1868–69) to antirevolutionary or nationalist think-
ers (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.
25 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962/2001), 207.
26 Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 181.
27 Mitchell, Iconology, 149.
28 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.
29 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the
Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
30 Ibid., 103.
31 Ibid., 92.
32 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 280.
33 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).
34 Ibid.
35 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 285.
36 Ibid., 287.
37 Ibid., 285.
38 W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror:  The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 99.
39 Ibid., 149.
40 Ibid., 105.
41 Ibid., 104.
42 Ibid., 140.
43 Ibid., 143.
44 Ibid., 106–107.
45 Ibid., 106–107.
46 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.
47 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).
48 Mitchell, Image Science, 114.
49 Ibid., 207.
234 Hannah B Higgins
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/please-
dont-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.bar-
tleby.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 state-
ment. 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 sur-
prise 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 bibli-
cal episode of the Golden Calf constructed by the Israelites in the Sinai
desert. This scene, “so often denounced as the prime example of idola-
try”, but paradoxically depicted in numerous pictures such as Nicolas
Poussin’s famous painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf (Fig. 4.3),
236 Maxime Boidy
“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” show-
ing 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 epi-
sode 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 insti-
tutional 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” tac-
tic – 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 politi-
cal 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 nine-
teenth 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 analo-
gize 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 idola-
trous people driven mad by a “pictorial turn” (to use W.J.T. Mitchell’s
expression): a tendency to mistranslate discourses into images, an inabil-
ity 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 inde-
pendent 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
238 Maxime Boidy
routinely insisted. The fact that the picture is, to some extent, a visual ren-
dering 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 repre-
sentation 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 rep-
resentation 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 sec-
ond 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 repre-
sentation: 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 pro-
posed in the pages of On Populist Reason exemplifies this point very pre-
cisely. 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 con-
dition 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 con-
sideration would be the disagreement of both Ernesto Laclau and W.J.T.
240 Maxime Boidy
Mitchell with Slavoj Žižek about the centrality of the working class in
contemporary movements, and the supposed renouncement of an authen-
tic 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 idol-
atrous 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 lat-
ter, 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 politi-
cal 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 profession-
alization. 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” epis-
temologies. 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 “pop-
ulisms” of knowledge because their very scholarly posture is not about
who is speaking the truth, but who is speaking at all.20 The most interest-
ing 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 politi-
cized 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, aes-
thetics 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
242 Maxime Boidy
are allies. Yet first and foremost, it helps us to recognize that a “popu-
list” 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, com-
bines 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 his-
torian 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 episte-
mology 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 histori-
cal 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 sev-
enteenth 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 redefin-
ition, especially in characterizing the connections between people and
environment beyond the nature/culture divide. It is therefore no coin-
cidence 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 vis-
ual 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
244 Maxime Boidy
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 encoun-
ter, Mitchell proposed getting rid of their respective figures: Panofsky’s
friend taking off his hat and Althusser’s passerby interpellated like a sus-
pect 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 posses-
sion of the space, to challenge both Panofsky’s gaze and Althusser’s inter-
pellation, 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 aes-
thetics 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 prob-
ably 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 block-
buster, 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 con-
struction 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 defini-
tions: 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
 Living Pictures of Democracy 245

Fig. 13.1. Guy Fawkes mask, from the film V for Vendetta; Musée des minia-
tures 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 occu-
pying 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 aggre-
gates 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
246 Maxime Boidy
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 mes-
sage 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, fol-
low 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 differ-
ence that the individuals composing the “body politics” are not admir-
ing 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 peo-
ple 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 anar-
chism than a style of dress and behavior … Black became the color of
the political void – of the withdrawal of allegiance to parties, govern-
ments, 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
248 Maxime Boidy
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 ico-
nology, Mosh is a moving image picturing its own theory, be it of collec-
tive disobedience or populist democracy. Before it, we, the beholders, are
free to draw our own relations without presuming whatsoever the abso-
lute 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 centu-
ries 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” relation-
ship, 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-ranciere-
on-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 prehis-
tory of this ideological operation can be found in English conservatism dur-
ing 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 mul-
titude 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
250 Maxime Boidy
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.
32 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.
33 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.
34 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.
35 “Visual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social con-
struction of vision”. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 343.
36 Ibid., 16, 105, 123.
37 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.
38 George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social
Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland, CA:  AK
Press, 2006), 90.
39 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.
40 Dupuis-Déri, Who’s Afraid of the Black Blocs?, 3.
41 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 show-
ing. Not, that is, in terms of the representation of that which is other-
wise unseen, but the presentation of the unseeable within the seeable.
252 John Paul Ricco
We might think of this as a certain persistence of the unseeable/outside
“within” the seeable. I derive this notion from Michel Foucault, the phi-
losopher 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 expo-
sure 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 philo-
sophical 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
 Showing Showing 253
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 multista-
bility 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
254 John Paul Ricco
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 discus-
sion 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 deal-
ing with here?)
As we can see, the situation here is already rather tricky when we con-
sider that of Mitchell’s many other examples, the cover of Mad magazine
 Showing Showing 255
is the only metapicture that comes in two parts, in the form of two sepa-
rate 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 rab-
bit) – 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 com-
pletely 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 metapi-
cture 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 chil-
dren’s eyes”, that “leaves men gaping in amazement, even managing to
distract a distant volleyball player who is transfixed in midair”.15 In con-
tinuing his description, Mitchell notes that

whatever Neuman is exposing evokes a set of responses that cycles

between repulsion and attraction, disgust and fascination. The
256 John Paul Ricco
figures seem paralyzed by the awful spectacle, their faces register-
ing a sequence of emotions that range from horror to puzzlement
to gaping amazement. The only “articulate” signs and conventional
gestures in the crowd are those of the man at the left, who points
toward the hidden monstrosity and calls others to come and see.16

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 real-
ize 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 stu-
dents 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 indistin-
guishable and hence terrifying sameness that drives iconophobia. As he
 Showing Showing 257
explains in a chapter titled “Clonophobia”, “the true terror arises when
the different arrives masquerading as the same, threatening all differen-
tiation 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 rec-
ognition are predicated upon presuming that the “other” is unmarked by
difference (by identity) unless proven otherwise. For instance, it is pre-
sumptive whiteness that has enabled nonwhite subjects to pass as white,
and for nonheterosexual subjects to pass as straight. As the critical litera-
ture 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 subjec-
tivity and social identity. While often understood as a question and con-
test 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 homopho-
bia 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 prob-
lem 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 body-
as-picture. This is to say that, in its corporeality, it is the material sup-
port for the various images that are constructed by and projected from a
body. The gay male clone wearing aviator sunglasses, tight-fitting jeans
258 John Paul Ricco
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 spit-
ting 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 ques-
tions 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 com-
plicate 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 ter-
ritory 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 ges-
ture 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 dis-
juncture 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
 Showing Showing 259
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 pre-
senting, 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 nec-
essarily 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, “exhi-
bitionism 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 con-
tamination 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 naked-
ness, 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 pro-
vokes 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 nud-
ism’s proximity to things like voyeurism, exhibitionism, sexuality, gender
260 John Paul Ricco
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 con-
ceals that same body’s nakedness, and exhibitionism (including flashing)
is a showing of the unclothed body that exposes that same body’s naked-
ness, 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 exhibition-
ism 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 show-
ing 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, naked-
ness 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 dis-
course, 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 medi-
eval 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
 Showing Showing 261
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, unify-
ing 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 neces-
sary, 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 aggre-
gate 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.
262 John Paul Ricco
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 pic-
ture 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 euphe-
mism 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 get-
ting 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
 Showing Showing 263
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 knowl-
edge, and hence it is properly titled Le trahison des images (The Treachery
of Images). Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2011), 83.
22 Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 36–37.
23 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 gen-
der – that is, those gender and sexual economies of power, knowledge, desire
and meaning that are structured dichotomously into separate zones of mascu-
line 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 aes-
thetic 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.
24 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 pre-
supposition. Even further, flashing shows that nakedness to have been thor-
oughly demoralized – instantly privative and thus perhaps only disrupted in
an equally instantaneousness flash. Agamben, Nudities, 65.
25 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 80.
26 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”.
27 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 69.
28 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

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 your-
self) 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 histori-
cal, 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 par-
ticular 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 ontol-
ogy? 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,
 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 bod-
ies, 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, actu-
ally 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 sus-
pect that our picture of ontology as a method of getting at true exist-
ence 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 archaeol-
ogy of discourses pioneered by Foucault. In fact, it was Foucault’s
archaeological model of the “sayable” and “seeable” as historical
266 Krešimir Purgar
“strata” that made the relations of language and visuality intelligible
to me. I am not sure whether the pictorial turn needed visual stud-
ies, 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 spe-
cies 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 contempo-
rary 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 pos-
sible 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 emphati-
cally stick to that claim (“If anyone is hardcore visual studies, it’s
me!”, you said in Farewell to Visual Studies2). But, generally speak-
ing: 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 depart-
mental 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 evolv-
ing. 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 sta-
tus 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 foun-
dations 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 theoreti-
cal 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, herme-
neutic, 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, per-
haps 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 pic-
tures 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 theoreti-
cal 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 politi-
cal context in the understanding of images. But I don’t think Wolff
268 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 flir-
tations 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, betray-
ing 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 conver-
gence 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
 After the Pictorial Turn 269
a very strong dissent on precisely the issue that I am prepared to con-
cede 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 cau-
tious 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 speci-
men 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 liv-
ing 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 gen-
eral 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.
KP: 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 politi-
cal 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
270 Krešimir Purgar
the streets? Can visual imagery, flown out of various Occupy move-
ments, 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 ver-
nacular 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 prac-
tice 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 radi-
cal 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 acknowl-
edge 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 ide-
ological implications of the “pictorial turn” were first worked out), to
Landscape and Power (grounded in my work on imperial and colo-
nial landscapes), to The Last Dinosaur Book (a critical and histori-
cal 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 Imme-
diacy”, 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)
 Resources 273
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
274 Resources
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”, Represen-
tations, 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
 Resources 275
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 Resources
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
 Resources 277
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 Resources
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.
 Resources 279
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)
280 Resources
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
 Resources 281
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
282 Resources
(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).
284 List of Contributors
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 285
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 Massa-
chusetts 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; non-
alienation 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

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
Index 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; ideological-
political 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

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
Index 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

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
Index 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

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
Index 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