The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies 3030718298, 9783030718299

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies Edited by  Krešimir Purgar

The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies “Krešimir Purgar has assembled a striking collection of essays on Image Studies. I have not been able to stop reading them. They cover a huge range and represent intelligent and well informed opinions containing important topics of interest to all its students. Anyone interested in this relatively recent field of study will find access to some of its essential methods and theories.” —Keith Moxey, Barbara Novak Professor Emeritus, Barnard College/Columbia University, New York “Enormous and fundamental collection: histories, essential theories, interdisciplinary connections and many main thinkers. A must have for all interested in images.” —Oliver Grau, Center for Image Science, Danube University, Krems

Krešimir Purgar Editor

The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies

Editor Krešimir Purgar Academy of Arts and Culture Josip Juraj Strossmayer University Osijek, Croatia

ISBN 978-3-030-71829-9    ISBN 978-3-030-71830-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 18th Construction, 1915, oil on canvas, 53 × 53  cm. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam;  photo  by  Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

 Introduction: Between the Creation and Disintegration of Images  1 Krešimir Purgar Part I Essential Histories  21  The Concept of the Image in the Old and New Testaments 23 Michael Shaw  Mimesis and Simulacrum in Aristotle and Plato 37 Nickolas Pappas  Iconoclastic Disputes in Byzantium 51 Konstantinos Giakoumis  Perspective, Space and Camera Obscura in the Renaissance 75 Ian Verstegen  Immanuel Kant and the Emancipation of the Image 93 Mojca Kuplen Formalism and Kunstwissenschaft: The “How” of the Image109 Andrea Pinotti  Aby Warburg and the Foundations of Image Studies131 Steffen Haug and Johannes von Müller  Early Interactions of Static and Moving Images147 Mirela Ramljak Purgar v

vi 

CONTENTS

 Iconoclasm and Creation of the Avant-Garde167 Nadja Gnamuš  Planarity, Pictorial Space, and Abstraction187 Jeffrey Strayer The Postmodern Image203 Luca Malavasi  Digital Images and Virtual Worlds221 Rebecca Haar  The Martian Image (On Earth)233 Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie Part II Fundamental Concepts 247  Intentionality, Phantasy, and Image Consciousness in Edmund Husserl249 Claudio Rozzoni Aura, Technology, and the Work of Art in Walter Benjamin265 Žarko Paić  Image and the Illusion of Immanence in Jean-­Paul Sartre281 John Lechte  Trait, Identity, and the Gaze in Jacques Lacan295 Andrei Gornykh  Symbolic Exchange and Simulation in Jean Baudrillard313 Gary Genosko  Historicity of Observing and Vision in Jonathan Crary327 Łukasz Zaremba  Male Gaze and Visual Pleasure in Laura Mulvey343 Patricia Stefanovic and Ana Gruić Parać  Reality, Fiction and Make-Believe in Kendall Walton363 Emanuele Arielli

 CONTENTS 

vii

 The Technical Image in Vilém Flusser379 Dario Vuger  Im/pulse to See in Rosalind Krauss395 Filip Lipiński  The Power of and Response to Images in David Freedberg415 Maxime Boidy Part III Frequent Subjects 431  Ontological Dispute: What Is an Image?433 Andrea Rabbito  Representation and the Scopic Regime of (Post-)Cartesianism449 Donal Moloney The Iconic (In)difference467 Pietro Conte  Seeing-as, Seeing-in, Seeing-with: Looking Through Pictures483 Emmanuel Alloa Varieties of Transparency501 John Kulvicki  Photographic Images in the Digital Era515 Koray Değirmenci Images and Invisibility533 Øyvind Vågnes  How to Make Images Real547 Wolfram Pichler Images and Ethics557 Asbjørn Grønstad  The Beholder’s Freedom: Critical Remarks on the “Will to See”575 Mark Halawa-Sarholz

viii 

CONTENTS

 Surveillance and Manipulation Versus Networking and Sharing589 Elio Ugenti Mobile Images609 Gaby David Part IV Related Disciplines 623  Phenomenology of the Image625 Harri Mäcklin Visual Semiotics641 Angela Mengoni  Literary Iconology: Tropes and Typologies655 Liliane Louvel  French Theory: Poststructuralism and Deconstruction671 Iris Laner  Anglo-American Theory: Representation and Visual Activism687 Andrea Průchová Hrůzová German Theory: Bildwissenschaft and the Iconic Turn703 Žarko Paić  The Image and Neuroaesthetics719 Matthew Rampley Visual Sociology735 Carolina Cambre Images and Architecture759 Vlad Ionescu, Maarten Van Den Driessche, and Louis De Mey  What is Design Theory?779 Oliver Ruf

 CONTENTS 

ix

Part V Contemporary Thinkers 799  J. T. Mitchell801 W. Krešimir Purgar Michele Cometa823 Valeria Cammarata Paul Crowther841 Elena Fell Hans Belting857 Luca Vargiu Klaus Sachs-Hombach873 Lukas R. A. Wilde Dieter Mersch889 Marcel Finke Horst Bredekamp905 Yannis Hadjinicolaou Lambert Wiesing921 Yvonne Förster Gottfried Boehm937 Rahel Villinger Georges Didi-Huberman951 Andrzej Leśniak Index965

Notes on Contributors

Emmanuel  Alloa  is Professor in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of Resistance of the Sensible World. An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (2017), Partages de la perspective (2020), and of Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media (2021). He has (co)edited a dozen volumes, among which the most recent is Dynamis of the Image. Moving Images in a Global World (2020). Emanuele Arielli  is Associate Professor in Aesthetics at the IUAV University, Venice, Italy, and Permanent Research Fellow at the Berlin Center for Knowledge Research, Technical University Berlin, Germany. He is the author of The Aesthetics and Multimodality of Style (with M.  Siefkes) (2018), Farsi Piacere. La costruzione del gusto (2016), and Unkooperative Kommunikation. Eine handlungstheoretische Untersuchung (2005). Maxime  Boidy is lecturer in Visual Studies at Gustave Eiffel University, France; and member of the Research Laboratory LISAA. He is the author of Les Études visuelles (2017), the first introduction to Anglo-American Visual Culture Studies published in the French area. He has also translated into French W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Carolina  Cambre is an Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her work explores vernacular visual expression investigating the social, cultural and pedagogical work/ings of images. She is the author of The Semiotics of Che Guevara: Affective gateways (2015–2016); and the co-­ author of Towards a Sociology of Selfies: Filtering the Face. Valeria  Cammarata  is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Palermo. She is the author of Donne al microscopio. Un’archeologia dello sguardo femminile (2013), Breve storia femminile dello sguardo and is the co-author of Archaeologies of Visual Culture. Gazes, Optical Devices and Images from 18th to 20th Century Literature with Michele Cometa and Roberta Coglitore (2016). xi

xii 

Notes on Contributors

Pietro Conte  is Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on illusion, hyperrealism, and the many different practices of un-framing, a thematic cluster he first explored in the monographs Unframing Aesthetics (2020) and In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo (Flesh and Wax: The Aesthetics and Phenomenology of Hyperrealism, 2014). Gaby David  is a Franco-Uruguayan visual sociologist. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts (Paris 8) and a PhD from the EHESS in Paris. She is a fellow researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (IRCAV) à la Sorbonne Nouvelle, within the Mobile Creation group and she pursues research on mobile visual cultures. She is coediting two special issues—one on Shame, Shaming, and Online Image Sharing, and another one on #Foodporn: The mobiles of desire. Koray Değirmenci  is Professor of Sociology at Erciyes University in Turkey. He is the author of two books, Images of Photography: Representation, Reality and Photography in Digital Era (published in Turkish), and Creating Global Music in Turkey. He has written several articles in journals mainly about music and photography including World of Music, South African Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Photography. Louis  de Mey is assistant at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning (Ghent University). He is conducting doctoral research into the recent proliferation of constructed images in architectural culture. Elena Fell  is Associate Professor at Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia. She is author of Duration, Temporality, Self: Prospects for the Future of Bergsonism (2012). She has also co-authored (with I.  Kopsiafti The Cognitive Basis of Aesthetics: Cassirer, Crowther, and the Future (2016). She contributed to projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Russian Science Foundation. Marcel  Finke is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of Prekäre Oberflächen: Zur Materialität des Bildes und des Körpers am Beispiel der künstlerischen Praxis Francis Bacons (2015). He has co-edited Materialität und Bildlichkeit (2012); Periphere Visionen. Wissen an den Rändern von Fotografie und Film (2016), and State of Flux: Aesthetics of Fluid Materials (2017). Yvonne  Förster  is Research Professor at Shanxi University Taiyuan, China. She is the author of Zeiterfahrung und Ontologie. Perspektiven moderner Zeitphilosophie (2012), and recently coedited a volume Perceiving Truth and Value. Phenomenological Deliberations on Ethical Perception, with David A. Gilland and Markus Mühling, Göttingen (2020). Her research focuses on philosophy of technology, posthumanism, aesthetics and fashion theory.

  Notes on Contributors 

xiii

Gary Genosko  is Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Back Issues: Periodicals and the Formation of Critical and Cultural Theory in Canada; The Reinvention of Social Practices: Essays on Félix Guattari; Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect; When Technocultures Collide: Innovation from Below; Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW; Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO, 1927–75; Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction; Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction; McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion; Contest: Essays on Sports, Culture & Politics; Undisciplined Theory, and Baudrillard and Signs: Signification Ablaze. Konstantinos  Giakoumis  is Associate Professor of History and Arts at the LOGOS University College, Tirana, Albania. He is a doctoral degree holder from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, The University of Birmingham. His research in the field of image studies delves into the interface between images, texts, homiletics and other religious or political actions. As an academic teacher, he has tested his ideas on image studies in a variety of courses like Art History, Conceptual Art, Meaning in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art, and Art Theories and Methods. Nadja Gnamuš  has worked as an independent art critic, scholar and a high school art history teacher. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television at the University of Ljubljana, where she teaches courses in Film analysis and Criticism. She is the author of several articles and essays on modern and contemporary art and theory, and a book Slikovni modeli modernizma (Pictorial Models of Modernism) (2010). Andrei  Gornykh  received his PhD in Philosophy from the St Petersburg State University, Russia. He is Professor at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. His published works include, Formalism: from Form to Text and Beyond (2002) and Media and Society (2013). Asbjørn  Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author/editor of eleven books, the most recent of which is Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity (Palgrave, 2020). He is founding director of Nomadikon: The Bergen Center of Visual Culture. Rebecca Haar  received her PhD from the University of Tübingen, Germany. She conducted research on simulation and virtuality in theory, as well as technology and media representations in postmodern society. She is the author of Simulation und virtuelle Welten: Theorie, Technik und mediale Darstellung von Virtualität in der Postmoderne (2019). Yannis  Hadjinicolaou  is a Research Associate at the international research project “Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology,” Warburg Haus/Institute of Art History, University of Hamburg. Hadjinicolaou has authored a monograph (in German and English), four edited volumes and

xiv 

Notes on Contributors

numerous articles on art and art theory of the early modern period, the political iconology of falconry and the theory and history of art history as well as synagonism in the arts. Mark  Halawa-Sarholz is a Research Assistant at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and is the author of numerous publications on image studies, semiotics, and aesthetics, such as Die Bilderfrage als Machtfrage. Perspektiven einer Kritik des Bildes (2013), and Materialität und Bildlichkeit. Visuelle Artefakte zwischen Aisthesis und Semiosis (ed. with Marcel Finke) (2013). Steffen Haug  is a Research Associate at The Warburg Institute in London. He is a member of the research project “Words to Images – Images to Words. Aby Warburg’s Art History and the Politics of Language”. He is the author of Benjamins Bilder. Grafik, Malerei und Fotografie in der Passagenarbeit (2017). Ingrid Hoelzl  is an independent scholar specializing in digital and environmental image theory and director of the General Humanity collective bringing together theory, poetry, and performance. She holds a PhD from Humboldt University and a Diploma in Fine Arts/Visual Culture Studies from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her research on the soft- and postimage has been published widely in journals and anthologies. Previous monographs include Der autoporträtistische Pakt (2008) and—with Remi Marie—Softimage (2015). Andrea  Průchová  Hrůzová is a researcher collaborating with Charles University in Prague and The Czech Academy of Sciences. She is a founder of an educational platform Fresh Eye. She has written in European Journal of Cultural Studies (2020) and Springer Publishing House (2017). She has translated Mirzoeff’s H ​ ow to See the World​, Mitchell’s Picture Theory​ and John Berger’s W ​ ays of Seeing i​nto Czech. Vlad  Ionescu  is Associate Professor in art theory and architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts (Hasselt University / PXL MAD). He has written on art historiography, image analysis and the adaptive reuse of architecture. John Kulvicki  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.  He is the author of On Images: Their Structure and Content (2006), Images (2014), and Modeling the Meanings of Pictures (2020), in addition to many articles on the philosophy of images. Mojca  Kuplen  is a Visiting Professor of philosophy at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Her research areas include Kant’s philosophy, the philosophy of art, and aesthetics. She is the author of Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination: An Approach to Kant’s Aesthetics (2015). Her current project aims to understand the social and epistemic value of artworks in light of Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas.

  Notes on Contributors 

xv

Iris Laner  is Full Professor of Fine Arts and Art Education at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg, Austria. She is conducting the research project Aesthetic Practice and the Critical Faculty, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She is the author of Ästhetische Bildung  – Zur Einführung (2018),  and Re-Visionen der Zeitlichkeit  – Zur Phänomenologie des Bildes nach Husserl, Derrida und Merleau-Ponty (2016). John Lechte  is Emeritus Professor in Social Theory at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and Its digital Future (2012). He has recently written on Agamben, Bataille and Kristeva and the image. His most recent book is The Human (2018). Andrzej Leśniak  is Associate Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He has published on French image theory, among other subjects. More recently, he has edited a collection of texts by Rem Koolhaas which was published in Polish in 2017. Filip  Lipiński  is Assistant Professor at Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is the author of The Virtual Hopper. Images in a Remembering Look (2013, in Polish) and numerous chapters and articles on American art, art theory and methodology in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, RIHA Journal and Artium Quaestiones. Liliane Louvel  is Emerita Professor at the University of Poitiers. Among her many books on word and image are Poetics of the Iconotext (2011); The Pictorial Third. An Essay into Intermedial Criticism  (2018); L’OEil du texte  (1998); Texte/images, images à lire, textes à voir (2016); Le tiers pictural. Pour une critique intermédiale (2016). She is Honorary President of ESSE and President of IAWIS/AIERTI. In 2011, she received the French national award Chevalier dans l’ordre de le Legion d’ honneur. Harri  Mäcklin  is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He works on phenomenological aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the history of modern aesthetics. His recent research has focused on the phenomenology of aesthetic immersion. He also works as an art critic in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. Luca Malavasi  is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa, Italy. Among books he has written are Mulholland Drive (2008), Realismo e tecnologia. Caratteri del cinema contemporaneo (2013), Il cinema. Percorsi storici e questioni teoriche (with G.  Carluccio and F.  Villa, 2015), Postmoderno e cinema (2017), and Il linguaggio del cinema (2019). Remi Marie  is an independent writer and editor of the French online journal Art Debout. His work has been shown in museum, galleries, and theatres such as the Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris, and Montevideo, Marseille, and published in reviews such as Nioques and Le Quartanier. Since 2014, he has collaborated with Ingrid Hoelzl, coining the terms softimage and ­postimage; their joint

xvi 

Notes on Contributors

research has been published in Digital Creativity, Visual Studies, and Leonardo, among others, and in the book Softimage (2015). Angela  Mengoni  is Associate Professor in Semiotics at IUAV University of Venice, Italy. Her research interests include the representation of the body in late modernity and its relationship with biopolitics (Ferite. Il corpo e la carne nell’arte della tarda modernità, 2012) as well as the visual strategies of montage in contemporary art. On this latter topic, she edited Berlinde de Bruyckere (2014), co-edited Interpositions: Montage d’images et production de sens (2014) and Sul mostrare: Teorie e forme del displaying contemporaneo (2016). Donal  Moloney is Head of Subjects (Visual Arts) at Liverpool Hope University, UK. He has received numerous awards including the John Moores Visitors Choice Award (2016). His writing includes the article, “Visual Slippages between the Picture Plane and the Painting Surface: Richard Estes”. He has co-edited Teaching Painting: How Can Painting Be Taught in Art Schools? Žarko  Paić  is Professor of Aesthetics, Visual Communication and Fashion Theory at the University of Zagreb. His publications in English include the co-edited collection Theorizing Images (2016) in which he wrote an article titled “Technosphere  – A New Digital Aesthetics? The Body as Event, Interactivity and Visualization of Ideas”. Books he authored includes White Holes and the Visualization of the Body (2019). Nickolas  Pappas  is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of the Philosophical Guidebook to Plato’s Republic (1997, 2003, 2013) and other books and articles, mainly on topics in ancient philosophy: most recently, Plato’s Exceptional City, Love, and Philosophers (2020). Ana  Gruić  Parać  is a PhD student at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, Croatia. Her field of research is fashion theory, while the main focus has been on how the theoretical aspects of fashion theory, image and visual studies provide new insights into understanding of contemporary fashion photography and vice versa—how photographic practice urges theory to constantly revise its fundamental premises. Wolfram  Pichler is Professor at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the co-author of Bildtheorie zur Einführung (together with Ralph Ubl, 2014) and has edited Image and Imaging in Philosophy Science, and the Arts (together with Richard Heinrich, Elisabeth Nemeth, and David Wagner, 2010). Andrea Pinotti  is Full Professor in Aesthetics at the State University of Milan. He is the author of the volumes Estetica della pittura (2007) and Empathie. Histoire d’une idée de Platon au post-humain (2016). Together with Antonio Somaini he has co-authored Cultura visuale. Immagini sguardi media disposi-

  Notes on Contributors 

xvii

tivi (2016)  and co-edited the anthology Teorie dell’immagine. Il dibattito contemporaneo (2008). Krešimir Purgar  is Associate Professor at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, Croatia. He is the author of Pictorial Appearing: Image Theory After Representation and Iconologia e cultura visuale: W.J.T. Mitchell, storia e metodo dei visual studies (2020). He has edited W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures and The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-figurative Images and the Modern World (2020). Mirela  Ramljak  Purgar  is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia. She has written extensively on the topics regarding visual culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Among her published work is “Strategien der Ornamentierung. Einfühlungsdrang und Abstraktionsdrang in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari und in der Grafik von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner” (2019). Andrea Rabbito  is Associate Professor at the University of Enna—Kore, Italy. He is the author of a tetralogy on illusion: L’onda mediale, Il cinema è sogno, Il moderno e la crepa, L’illusione e l’inganno (2010–2015). He has edited La cultura del falso (2020), La cultura visuale del XXI secolo (2018), and the new Italian edition of Edgar Morin’s L’esprit du temps (2018). Matthew  Rampley  is Professor at the University of Brno, Faculty of Arts, Department of Art History. Among his recently published works are “Theories of agency in art” (Journal of Art Historiography, 2019), The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution and Neuroscience (2017), and “Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks” (2012). Claudio Rozzoni  obtained his PhD in Aesthetics and Theory of Art from the University of Palermo. Between 2019 and 2021, he was a Researcher in Aesthetics at the New University of Lisbon Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA). He is currently a Senior Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan, Italy. He edited the first Italian edition of the Husserlian manuscripts on Image and Phantasy (2017). Oliver  Ruf is Full Professor at Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He is the author of The Digital University (2021), Storytelling for Designer (2019), Media Aesthetics of the Hand (2014), Writing and Swiping (2014), and Aesthetics of Provocation (2012). His edited books include Design Aesthetics (2020), The Medium Cinema in Literature and the arts (2018), Aesthetics of Smartphone (2018), How Theory Becomes Practice (2016), and a critical edition on Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime (2019). Michael Shaw  is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Christianity in Society. He has degrees in theology from Oxford University and law from Durham University. He is the author of Identity in Christ and is a peer reviewer for The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society.

xviii 

Notes on Contributors

Patricia  Stefanovic is Adjunct Associate Professor at Palm Beach State College, Boca Raton, Department of English, and Adjunct Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Department of Communication and Multimedia Studies. She has written extensively and presented conference papers on film, feminism, and identity issues. Jeffrey  Strayer  is Continuing Lecturer Emeritus in Philosophy at Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA.  He is the author of Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction (2007)  and Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction (2017). Strayer is also an artist, and his work in art and philosophy is an interactive and mutually supportive exploration of fundamental issues relevant to each. See www.JeffreyStrayer.com. Elio  Ugenti is Research Fellow in film and media studies at Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy. His main research area lies in the relation between cinema and new digital media in contemporary visual culture. He is the author of Abbas Kiarostami. Le forme dell’immagine and Immagini nella rete. Ecosistemi mediali e cultura visuale (2016). Øyvind Vågnes  is Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. His published works include Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture (2012). He recently co-edited the volume Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture with Asbjørn Grønstad and Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing with Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson (2018). Maarten Van Den Driessche  is Associate Professor in Theory of Architectural Design and Architectural Theory at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning (Ghent University). He has published on architectural design and architectural practice. He was editor of Robbrecht en Daem architecten: An Architectural Anthology (2017) and Bovenbouw Architectuur. Living the Exotic Everyday (2019). Luca  Vargiu  teaches Aesthetics at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Among books he has authored are Prima dell’età dell’arte. Hans Belting e l’immagine medievale (2007)  and Hermeneutik und Kunstwissenschaft. Ein Dialog auf Distanz – Emilio Betti und Hans Sedlmayr (2017). He has recently co-edited Abitare. Approcci interdisciplinari e nuove prospettive (with Luciano Boi and Andrea Cannas, 2019). Ian  Verstegen  is Associate Director of Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Arnheim, Gestalt and Media: An Ontological Theory (2018)  and Cognitive Iconology: When and How Psychology Explains Images  (2014), and is the editor of Alberto Argenton’s Art and Expression (2019). Rahel  Villinger  is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Department of German Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland. From 2013–2017 she was co-research leader of the module “Form and Image in Modernity” at the SNF

  Notes on Contributors 

xix

research center “Bildkritik/Iconic Criticism” (eikones), located at the University of Basel. She is the author of Kant und die Imagination der Tiere (2018) and a series of articles that address issues of ionic criticism and image theory. Johannes von Müller  is coordinator of the “Bilderfahrzeuge Project” at The Warburg Institute in London. His research focuses on political imagery from the Middle Ages to Modernity. He has written widely on political photography in the twenty-first century, the perception of images in twentieth century historiography and comic book art. Dario Vuger  is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He obtained MA degrees in philosophy, art history and heritage studies from the Faculty for humanities and social sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. He has delivered conference presentations and papers, notably in The Iconology of Abstraction  – Non-figurative Images and the Modern World (ed. Krešimir Purgar) and Image and Anti-image – Julije Knifer and the problem of representation (ed. Krešimir Purgar). Lukas  R.  A.  Wilde is a Research Associate at Tübingen University’s Department for Media Studies, Germany. His dissertation on the functions of pictorial ‘characters’ (kyara) within contemporary Japanese society received the Roland-Faelske-Award in 2018. His main areas of interest are visual communication, picture theory, media theory, and comic book narratology. Łukasz  Zaremba  is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw; editor of the academic journal “View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture” and translator into Polish of books by Jonathan Crary, W.J.T. Mitchell, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Hito Steyerl. He is interested in conflicts over images, with a special emphasis on contemporary forms of iconoclasm.

List of Figures

Introduction: Between the Creation and Disintegration of Images Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7

Paleolithic depiction of a bison in Altamira cave (Santillana del Mar, Spain). Fourteen to eighteen thousand years ago. Photo by Museo de Altamira and D. Rodríguez. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 Banksy, Girl with Balloon or There is Always Hope, version near Waterloo Bridge in London, 2002. Photo by Dominic Robinson. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 Master of Taüll, Depiction of Christ Pantocrator, Apse of San Climent de Taüll, fresco, 1123 (in public domain) Giotto di Bondone, The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas), 1304-1306, fresco, 200 x 185 cm. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (in public domain) (a, b, c, d) Dennis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049, 2017, screen captures. Pictured are Ana de Armas (as Joi), Ryan Gosling (as replicant K) and Mackenzie Davis (as Mariette) Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, 1982, screen capture. Pictured is Sean Young (as Rachel) Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434, oil on oak plate, 82.2 x 60 cm. National Gallery, London (in public domain)

6 7 8 10 14 15 18

The Concept of the Image in the Old and New Testaments Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633–1634, oil on canvas; 154 × 214 cm. National Gallery, London (in public domain) Sandro Botticelli, The Holy Trinity (Pala della Convertite), ca. 1493, tempera and oil on panel; 215 × 192 cm. Courtauld Institute of Art, London (in public domain)

26 33

Iconoclastic Disputes in Byzantium Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Jon Watts, Spider-Man: Far From Home, 2019, screen capture. Pictured are Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio/Quentin Beck and Tom Holland as Spider-Man (fair use) Unknown, Cross overlaying the Holy Theotokos with the Child, mosaic, ca. 730 A.D., apse. St. Eirene, Constantinople (in public domain)

52 64 xxi

xxii 

List of Figures

Fig. 3

Unknown, John VII, the Grammarian Whitewashing Jesus’ Face, shortly after 843 A.D., manuscript illumination, f. 67, Chloudov Psalter. State Historical Museum, Moscow, Cod. 129 (in public domain)

65

Perspective, Space and Camera Obscura in the Renaissance Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Raphael, Spozalizio (The Engagement of Virgin Mary), 1504, oil on roundheaded panel; 170 × 117 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (in public domain) Lavinia Fontana, Mars and Venus, 1595, oil on canvas. Fundación Casa de Alba, Madrid (in public domain) Saint Francis Master, Legend of St Francis: 5. Renunciation of Wordly Goods, 1297–99, fresco; 270 × 230 cm. Upper Church, San Francis, Assisi (in public domain) Leon Battista Alberti, From De Pictura: a diagram showing perspective lines leading to a vanishing point (up); diagram showing pillars in perspective on a grid (bottom), 1435/1450 (in public domain) Athanasius Kircher, Illustration of “portable” camera obscura in Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbra, 1646 (in public domain)

78 80 82 83 88

Formalism and Kunstwissenschaft: The “How” of the Image Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow, Red, Blue, 1925, oil on canvas; 128 x 201.5 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (in public domain) Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas; 46 x 46 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich (in public domain) Fra Angelico, Madonna of the Shadows, 1450, detail of the lower part of the picture (left) (in public domain); Jackson Pollock’s studio-floor in Springs, New York: visual result of being his primary painting surface from 1946 until 1953 (right). Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

117 118

124

Aby Warburg and the Foundations of Image Studies Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Aby Warburg at Coronado Beach, USA, 1896. © The Warburg Institute, London (reproduced with permission by the copyright holder)132 Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929, panel 79. © The Warburg Institute, London (reproduced with permission by the copyright holder)141

Early Interactions of Static and Moving Images Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Joseph Plateau, phenakistiscope which incorporated his own research and that of Faraday and others, 1830 (in public domain) 155 Ernemann Universal Stereoscope, around 1900. Ernemann A.G., Dresden. Built for formats up to 9 x 18 cm (in public domain) 156 Lemiare, from a series of daguerreotype stereo images of James Pradier’s statue—Baigneuse aux Papilleten, 1852–1855 (in public domain)156

  List of Figures 

Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8

xxiii

Sweden’s Capital City, short movie, 1917, screen capture (in public domain)158 Handicraft Fair in Falkenberg, short movie, 1907, screen capture (in public domain) 158 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Nude with a Black Hat, 1911–1913, woodcut, 66 x 21.5 cm (in public domain) 159 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Women at Potsdamer Square, 1914, woodcut, 50 x 37 cm (in public domain) 161 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Portrait of a Young Girl (Double exposure), 1919–1923, photography, silver gelatine (modern print), 15 x 10 cm (in public domain) 164

Iconoclasm and Creation of the Avant-Garde Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9

Jean Tinguely, Gears, 1967; scrap old metal components (part of Le Paradis Fantastique). Photo by www.cgpgrey.com. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 170 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoisselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 244 × 234 cm. Museum of Modern Art—MoMA, New York (in public domain)173 Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit, 1961. Photo by Jens Cederskjold. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 175 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 88.7 × 71 cm. In a private collection (in public domain) 176 Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–1986. Photo by Douglas Tuck. Wikimedia Commons, CC By-SA 4.0 177 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (in public domain) 178 Joseph Kosuth, Self Described and Self Defined, 1965, light installation at MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019. Photo by Thiago Cardoso and Unsplash.com (in public domain) 180 Daniel Buren, striped columns in Domaine National du Palais-Royal, October 2019. Photo by iStock 181 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (in public domain) 183

Planarity, Pictorial Space, and Abstraction Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

J. M. W. Turner, Landscape with River and Distant Mountains, ca. 1840–1845, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (in public domain) Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1902–1904, oil on canvas, 60 × 72 cm; Kunstmuseum, Basel (in public domain) Cy Twombly, Untitled, from Hommage a Picasso (Bastian 41), 1973, grano-­lithograph and collotype in colors, on woven paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Photo by Wikimedia Commons (fair use) Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793, oil on canvas, 165 × 128 cm; Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels (in public domain)

189 191 192 195

xxiv  Fig. 5

List of Figures

Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0, 2002; photo courtesy of the author. Each instance of the repeated circular text reads: that of which one cannot form a conception in conceiving of that of which one cannot form a conception…

202

The Postmodern Image Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Peter Greenway, Drowning by Numbers, 1988, screen capture. Pictured are Bernard Hill (as Madget) and Joan Plowright (as Cissie Colpitts 1) (fair use) David Lynch, Blue Velvet, 1986, screen capture. Pictured are Denis Hopper (as Frank) and Isabella Rossellini (as Dorothy) (fair use) Brian De Palma, Blow Out, 1981, screen capture. Pictured is John Travolta (as Jack) (fair use)

214 215 217

The Martian Image (On Earth) Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fra Carnevale (attributed), Veduta di città ideale, ca. 1480–1484, oil and tempera on panel, 77.4 cm × 220 cm; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (in public domain) Trevor Paglen, Canyon Hangars and Unidentified Vehicle; Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance approx. 18 miles; 12:45 pm. 2006, C-print, 30 × 36 in. Photo by Trevor Paglen; Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco SWARMIX: Drones, dogs, and humans cooperating in a search and rescue operation, http://www.swarmix.ch. Image created by the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL, Lausanne. SWARMIX stands for Synergistic Interactions in Swarms of Heterogeneous Agents. Permission granted by project leader Prof. Bernhard Plattner, ETH Zurich Color Variations on Mount Sharp, Mars (White Balanced), 10 November 2016. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21256, accessed 12 February 2017 (in public domain)

237

239

241

243

Trait, Identity, and the Gaze in Jacques Lacan Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Jacques Lacan, The concept of the Gaze, 1964. From The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”. Illustration by the author, according to the reproduction in the book Albrecht Dürer: Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman, woodcut, ca. 1600; 7.7 × 21.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (in public domain) Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, oil on oak; 207 × 209, 5 cm. The National Gallery, London (in public domain)

306 307 308

  List of Figures 

xxv

Male Gaze and Visual Pleasure in Laura Mulvey Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7

Yvonne Reiner, The Men Who Envied Women, 1986, screen capture (fair use) Alfred Hitchcock, The Rear Window, 1954, screen capture. Pictured is James Stewart (as Jeff) (fair use) Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958, screen capture. Pictured are Kim Novak (as Madeleine/Judy) and James Stewart (as Scottie) (fair use) Robert Doisneau, a photograph from the series Un regard oblique, 1948 (fair use) Federico Fellini, Juliet of the Spirits, 1965, screen capture. Pictured are Sandra Milo (as Susy/Iris/Fanny) and Giulietta Masina (as Giulietta Boldrini) (fair use) Alfred Hitchcock, The Rear Window, 1954, screen capture. Pictured is Grace Kelly (as Lisa) (fair use) George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015, screen capture. Pictured is Charlize Theron (as Furiosa) (fair use)

346 349 352 356 357 359 361

Im/pulse to See in Rosalind Krauss Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

David Smith, Voltri XV, 1962, steel sculpture, 228 × 196 × 57.4 cm. Photo by Jeff Kubina, Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Sherrie Levine, Fountain (Buddha), 1996, cast bronze, 30.5 × 40 × 45.7 cm. Photo by Hesperian Nguyen. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself (installation, detail), 2007. Photo by Sascha Pohflepp. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

397 400 410

The Power of and Response to Images in David Freedberg Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1534, oil on canvas, 119 × 165 cm; Uffizi Gallery, Florence (in public domain) Peter Lely, Portrait of a young woman and child, as Venus and Cupid, ca. 1668, oil on canvas, 123.8 × 156.8 cm (in public domain) Cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamiyan valley, Afghanistan. Photograph is taken on 2 August 2006, by Alessandro Balsamo. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0 Detail from a photo published in 1914 (before the repairs) showing damage done to Diego Velázquez painting Rokeby Venus by Mary Richardson. The photo was released to the press and published on 11 March 1914. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

420 421 422

425

Representation and the Scopic Regime of (Post-)Cartesianism Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Francisco de Zurbarán, Metalware and Pottery, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 46 × 84 cm; Museo del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, 1661, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 117.5 cm; Mauritshuis, The Hague. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

453 455

xxvi  Fig. 3

Fig. 4 Fig. 5

List of Figures

Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Trompe l’oeil Letter Rack with an Hourglass, Razor and Scissors, ca. 1664, oil on canvas, 102 × 83,4 cm; Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Lucy McKenzie, Quodlibet XXVIII (Unlawful Assembly I), 2013, oil on canvas, 90 × 61 cm; Artist’s collection. © Lucy McKenzie. Image courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London Helene Appel, Plastic Sheet (3), 2013, watercolor on linen, 188 × 119, 5 cm; © Helene Appel 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York

459 460 461

The Iconic (In)difference Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, screen capture Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld, 2016, screen capture

468 480

Seeing-as, Seeing-in, Seeing-with: Looking Through Pictures Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, 84.1 × 152.4 cm; Art Institute of Chicago. Artstor (in public domain) Joseph Jastrow, Rabbit and duck optical illusion, from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter (in public domain) Hermann Rorschach, Inkblot test (bat, butterfly, moth), 1921. Artstor (in public domain) Ludwig Wittgenstein, A blueprint for a combustion chamber for aero-engine, Manchester University, 1908–1911 (in public domain)

484 486 490 495

Images and Invisibility Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Peter Lam, Landscape of Chernobyl, photograph, undated. Photo by: unsplash.com (in public domain) Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a detail from the comic book, chapter 6—“Mouse Trap”, p. 148; Penguin Books, 1973 (fair use) Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, a detail from the comic book, p. 36; Drawn and Quarterly, Montreal, 2004 (fair use)

536 540 541

How to Make Images Real Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Head of an old man, Egyptian, ca. third century BC, siltstone, 31.3 × 15 × 14.5 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ÄS 42 Jean-Siméon Chardin, Basket with Wild Strawberries, ca. 1761, oil on canvas, 38 × 45.7 cm. Private collection, Paris. Photo: Bridgeman Images

549 551

Images and Ethics Fig. 1

Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches. A photo from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, taken between 2003 and 2004. US Government copyright (in public domain)

559

  List of Figures 

Fig. 2

xxvii

Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during the 1934 rally in Nuremberg, photograph, 1934. Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2004-0312-503. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE 564

The Beholder’s Freedom: Critical Remarks on the “Will to See” Fig. 1

The “hooded man” standing on the box with wires attached to his left and right hand. A photo from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, 2003. U.S. Government copyright (in public domain)

582

Surveillance and Manipulation Versus Networking and Sharing Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Brian De Palma, Redacted, 2007, screen capture (fair use) Brian De Palma, Redacted, 2007, screen capture (fair use) N. Chadwick, Warren Street Underground Station, photograph, 2018. Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (in public domain) Gavin Hood, Eye in the Sky, 2015, screen capture (fair use)

592 592 595 600

Mobile Images Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Souradeep Rakshit, photograph taken with GoPro camera, 2018. Photo by unsplash.com (in public domain) Anders Jacobsen, Taipei City, 2020, photograph taken with drone camera. Photo by unsplash.com (in public domain) Hamada Elrasam, anti-coup protesters in Nasr City, Cairo, photograph taken Oct. 11, 2013. Voice of America (in public domain)

610 611 616

Anglo-American Theory: Representation and Visual Activism Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Joseph Paxton, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, Crystal Pallace, 1851; British Library, London (in public domain)692 Arvida Byström, Self-portrait, from the series Virtual Normality, 2017. Photograph: courtesy of the author 696 Extinction Rebellion Switzerland, Flight Strike, September 2019. Photography of the performance: courtesy of the author 700

Visual Sociology Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

A Study in Chinese Faces, print on card; mount 9 × 18 cm, stereograph. Group of Chinese people posing. Keystone View Company. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain) Lewis Wickes Hine, 10 year old picker on Gildersleeve Tobacco Farm, Gildersleeve, 1917, Connecticut USA. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain) Lewis Wickes Hine, Still cheerful in spite of being driven from their homes by the German invaders. These two refugees, grandmother and grandchild, are cared for at the free canteen maintained at the Gare de Lyons, the Bon Accueuil, a French relief organization, with the aid of the American Red Cross, June 1918. American National Red Cross collection. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

739 740

741

xxviii  Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Fig. 7

List of Figures

Walker Evans, Tengle Children, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Office of War Information, Photograph Collection. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain) 743 Pearl Jephcott, examples from Jephcott’s notebooks. Courtesy of John Goodwin745 W.E.B. Du Bois, Pharmaceutical laboratory at Howard University, ca. 1900, Washington DC. African-American Photographs assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)750 W.E.B. Du Bois, a nested pie chart shows 25 years of the taxable value of African-American property, 1900. Pointing into a black core through vivid rings marking time spans, the red, white, yellow, blue and beige spears show 149% increase over that period. The multimillion dollar figures on this chart visually force the discourses of African-American property value from one of “nothing” to one of prosperity. The colors get brighter and the spears become larger in correspondence with the increasing amounts. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain) 752

Images and Architecture Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8

El Greco, View and Plan of Toledo, ca. 1610–1614, oil on canvas, 132 x 228 cm. El Greco Museum, Toledo (in public domain) Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Veduta dell’Anfiteatro Flavio, detto il Colosseo, 1757, drawing, 44.4 x 70 cm. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Claude Perrault, Jean Marot, The Principal Façade of Louvre, 1674–1676, engraving, 39.3 x 72 cm. Bibliothèque Municipale de Valenciennes (in public domain) Joseph Michael Gandy, Soane Royal Academy lecture drawing showing different styles of churches, 1824, watercolor. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (in public domain) Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Berlin Theater, 1818, print. Buch Sammlungs Architektonischer Entwürfe 1819–1840 (in public domain) Le Corbusier, the Punjabi government building at Chandigarh, 1955; photo by Lian Chang, 2006. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project—Berlin, 1921, charcoal and graphite on paper mounted on board, 173.4 x 121.9 cm. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Frank Gehry, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2003; photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 2005. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

761 763 765 766 768 770 771 774

  List of Figures 

xxix

W. J. T. Mitchell Fig. 1 Fig. 2

The cover of the Life Magazine, September 7, 1953 (fair use) (up) New York World Trade Center, the photo taken in 1995 by Karl Döringer. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; (down) United Airlines Flight 175 hits New York WTC south tower on September 9, 2001. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

812

815

Michele Cometa Fig. 1 Fig. 2

William Hogarth, Tailpiece, or The Bathos, 1764, etching and engraving, 31.8 × 33.3 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Unknown author, The Triumph of the Death, fresco in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, ca. 1446, 600 × 642 cm. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

830 832

Lambert Wiesing Fig. 1 Fig. 2

J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 91 × 121,8 cm; National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Hergé, The cover of the magazine Le petit “vingtième”, announcing “The Adventures of Tin Tin”, 1934, no. 32. Wikipedia (fair use)

924 925

Georges Didi-Huberman Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 73.5 × 112 cm; Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker, ca. 1669–1671, oil on canvas, 24 × 21 cm; Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain) Harun Farocki, Respite (40 min.), 2007, screen capture (fair use)

954 955 958

Introduction: Between the Creation and Disintegration of Images Krešimir Purgar

Our world is every day more and more permeated with different kinds of images: from the simple and often trivial visualizations present on social networks to complex visual constructions available throughout the realm of the digital universe. While many contemporary visualizations cannot even be considered images any longer, we still don’t know what images are and how we should respond to them: should we fear them or embrace them with confidence? This volume wishes to bring together the most current and the most hotly debated topics in studies about images today and to become a reference point for future editorial projects of this kind. Until recently, art history has been considered a master-discipline for all things visual, from highly esteemed works by the Old Masters to the fugitive productions of popular culture. But after cultural studies were established during the 1970s, their visual “complements”—visual studies or Bildwissenschaft— became the next big thing within the humanities. This is probably the first time in history that the practice of image-making has almost instantaneously required its theory proper. The practice itself can no longer be understood without immediate theoretical reflection of that very practice, thus creating a sort of user counter-narrative. On the disciplinary borders of semiotics, art history and phenomenology, a new inter- or trans-discipline has been born that approaches images without any ideological, subjectivist or essentialist agenda of its own. But this only makes things for image studies more complicated: the objects of study are at the same time technologically advanced and philosophically relevant, widely available and culturally important, visually stunning and

K. Purgar (*) Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek, Croatia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_1

1

2 

K. PURGAR

theoretically intricate. No single discipline pertaining to the traditional nomenclature of post-structuralism (let alone those that strictly claimed the field of pictoriality) is capable of grasping the contradictions of the technical, artistic and political aspects of contemporary visual culture. This interdisciplinary book wishes to fill the evermore visible gap. Although image studies—as a discipline specifically dedicated to the analysis of images and their functions—is a relatively new phenomenon within the humanities, its firm institutional foundations being not much older than a couple of decades, the incontestable fact remains that people’s interest in pictures is very much older than that. The first organized attempt to understand the world of visual representations was made by art history more than two centuries ago, while individual attempts to understand pictures, their ontological role and communicative function go back to antiquity. Therefore, even though image studies does not strictly follow the methodology of historical sciences, it certainly puts relevant phenomena in a diachronic perspective, as will this handbook. The concept of this book wishes to stress the faculty of images to produce meaning for us now, as a multifaceted kind of knowledge influenced by the terms of production, the terms of perception and the terms of theorization—which speaks for images’ heterochrony. “Image heterochrony” therefore reflects the changes that occur within image types (or “species”, as contemporary biopolitics of images most often refers to them) and are most easily detected by noticing alterations over time in style, media basis and usage of images. In the same way, the capacity of images always to produce new meanings over time speaks for their anachronism. “Anachronism” in the context of image theory draws our attention to the fact that the modern observer does not have to and most often does not want to interpret images in their diachronic development, but interprets them in a kind of radical synchronicity, as if all existing images were created for an ever new present. The most important ensuing consequences that this book brings to the fore are therefore threefold: first, that a possible understanding of images lies in the deconstruction of this paradoxical shifting ontology; second, that images cannot be defined as such, that is, as entities extrapolated from the complex entanglement of materiality, temporality and perception; third, and probably most important insight for the future assignments of image (and visual) studies is that images are neither a reflection nor a product of any kind of “natural consciousness” or metaphysics. They are the outcome of technologies of production and human perception, both of which are historically created and anachronistically used. The title of this introduction is also the program outline for image studies, which in any real sense has been constituted only at the moment when the objects of its investigation—images—are paradoxically less and less present and are increasingly giving way to technically produced visual phenomena that are no longer images. This insight will at the same time help us to demarcate more precisely several key meta-theoretical concepts that are important for the understanding of the themes covered in this book, their breadth and their kind.

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

3

After the definitive swerve of the discipline of art history in the direction of the Hollywood star system, in which the notion of authorship became privileged over the value of the social circulation of works of art, at the border of the extremes marked with the nomenclature of art history on the one hand and by the techno-imagination on the other hand, an interest in pictures and visual phenomena developed that reflected their importance in all areas of life: visual culture, visual studies, image science and image studies. The attentive reader will find in this book a multitude of well-grounded approaches that clearly indicate the divergences and interweavings of these approaches in the domain of images and visual communications. Precisely because this book has, for entirely good reasons, taken on one name—image studies—not as a sort of new master-discipline for the whole area of visuality but because of the need for a clearer definition of the actual concept of the image, in this place nevertheless it is worthwhile explaining by way of preliminary the divergences and intersections of these disciplines. The concepts of image/picture and visuality are not interchangeable, although they are often used as synonyms. If we follow the interpretation of the American theorist W.J.T Mitchell, the term image denotes mental or all other visual representations that have acquired cultural legitimacy throughout history. Image may be constituted both from imagination and from physical creation. On the other hand, a picture signifies materiality; it is usually the physical witness we invoke when we are interested in the archeology of human knowledge and history. Thus, although the difference in the use of the terms image and picture primarily refers to the specific circumstances in which we operate with them, image is a broader term as it does not presuppose the physical materiality of the object. This will prove to be its key feature in modern times when we often confuse images with other, artificially produced visual phenomena that are no longer images. Although an image can be both a mental representation and a physical object as well as a depiction on a screen, its basic feature is that it differs from reality. In other words, an image establishes a visible cut or discontinuity vis-à-vis the observer’s visual field. When we are talking about the image/picture, irrespective of what is seen or identified in it, the observer knows that he or she is looking at a certain pictorial phenomena, for if they thought they were looking at a real thing and not a representation of it, then in a technical sense this would not be a picture but a sheer physical object in the domain of visual reality. For example, when we see a tree, we see just one physical thing with the aid of our visual perception. When we see a tree in a photograph or on a screen, we see and imagine that we are seeing in a simultaneous process—as Kendall Walton once put it—two physical things: first, we see the photograph, that is, the object that prompts the linking of the visual perception of a symbolic tree with a tree as a physical thing, and then we imagine that we see a physical thing that is not just this thing but its media substitute—a photograph or a depiction on a screen. Pictures naturally do not always stand in for absent objects. For example, the pictures of abstract art are not a perceptual replacement for what we see outside

4 

K. PURGAR

the picture; rather, the traces of paint on the canvas constitute the pictorial object that refers only to itself and nothing else at all beyond itself. Accustomed to the cultural history of the west, which has favored the imitation of reality, we will certainly find it paradoxical that the picture can represent just itself and nothing beyond itself, but in an ontological sense, pictures that refer only to themselves are to the greatest possible extent pictures. Why is this the case? Because abstract pictures to the greatest possible extent instruct us to look upon them as objects (not something outside them; they do not force us to imagine that we are seeing), and for this reason the difference between pictorial object and visual phenomenon is the most salient thing about them. In pictures made to realistically represent visual facts of the world that difference is more difficult to grasp. Now the reasons for which the concepts of the image/imaginary, picture/ pictorial and the visible/visual are not interchangeable are perhaps getting clearer. Although they themselves are visual phenomena, images understood as perceptual and cultural facts establish a clear boundary between imagination and reality. On the other hand, visuality refers to everything we see irrespective of whether we are capable of defining some visual phenomenon as physically real or as a mere trick of the mind. Holographic displays and visualizations of virtual reality are for the moment the best examples of phenomena that are constituted only in the visual domain. These visual phenomena are dematerialized images. But does this mean that the discipline of visual studies, in comparison to image studies, has a narrow scope because it deals only with dematerialized, visual phenomena? Just the opposite, in fact, of the four disciplines mentioned above, the concept of visuality is technically and ontologically more encompassing because it includes visual phenomena that we can differentiate extremely well from the extra-pictorial reality as well as those we are not always able to. As the technology of the virtual develops, this distinction will come increasingly to the fore. In this book we will engage primarily with the cultural and historical construction of pictures: more precisely, with pictures that eventually have become images. We will deal here with a sort of “trans-substantialization” during which a specific kind of physical objects and phenomena acquire major roles in our cultural imaginary. These objects and phenomena will sometimes imitate reality and sometimes will not, but they always enter into some kind of debate with reality, accept it, dispute, build upon or negate it. In this handbook we have not, naturally, been able to bypass digital visualizations, but we do this not because of the conviction that virtual creations of the visual field are the future of pictorial communication but only so that we should be able to more clearly delimit where images begin and where they end, and what the academic subject that deals with them (still broad, and for some too broad) derives from. Once again paradoxically, The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies gives, for the first time, the clear features of an area the basic theoretical object of which is in fact vanishing in the face of digital visualizations of another reality, in which there are no longer any pictures; rather, there are just visual phenomena

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

5

that make the discernment of the borders of the physical world impossible. Since at this moment we do not know where the borders of the virtual world will be in the future—although we do know with a good deal of confidence the ontological borders of the image—the discipline of visual studies in the future will have to take in both visual and pictorial phenomena, like that biggest babushka that conceals within her a smaller, and she a still smaller, and so on. As this Handbook will show, it is the belief of the editor that image studies, as discipline that primarily engages with images, can serve as a kind of theoretical umbrella beneath which there can be a dialogue among disciplines with more precisely defined agendas, irrespective of whether they are ontological or ideological, like the German Bildwissenschaft on the one hand and the Anglo-­ American concept of visual culture on the other hand. As for the latter, inherent in it is the terminological hint of expansion toward all visual phenomena, which will permit techno-visualizations of the future to be found beneath its ideological fold. In this way the academic conflict of visual studies and visual culture in the domain of digital visualizations will probably feed back into the further profiling of the disciplinary study of pictures as both material and social facts. We can best explain the concrete position of image studies, the disciplinary and methodological framework of which we are presenting in this introduction, in two ways: (1) by delineating the historical and modern status of the image, we shall prove that thinking about what an image is and how it works, and not only what it means, is much older than contemporary theories and (2) by a brief image and visual theory of the film Blade Runner 2049, we shall show from an example understandable to everyone what we mean by saying that images will simply vanish the moment when we completely replace pictorial communication with two high-tech technological concepts: iconic simultaneity and virtual visualizations. To do with the first, the picture theorist will note in art history several names and works about which this discipline has already talked much but, understandably, in a manner and with objectives totally different from ours. Some paradigmatic examples of modern art of the west can show us that in the development of pictorial art, alongside the historical, stylistic and anthropological components, that which interrogates the status of pictorial representations in comparison to the extra-pictorial reality is equally important. We are given best insights into this status of images by art, but only on condition that the classical discourse about style and form is replaced by a discussion of the essence of the pictorial object—what it is in itself and how during history the pictorial object changes position within the markedly unstable model of observing and interpreting. This particular kind of seeing we might provisionally name cultural perception. Perceiving images culturally enable us to articulate expectations that we have of them and tasks that we assign them, in the context of the time and place of analysis of the concrete image. Unlike art history, which strongly privileges the historical dimension of pictures, in a general study of the image we endeavor to establish the meaning of the analyzed object with the application of a kind of triangulation: W.J.T. Mitchell proposed three key methods essential for contemporary work

6 

K. PURGAR

with pictures—historicization, decontextualization and anachronization (cf. James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What Is an Image, p. 40). Historicization tells us not to lose sight of the historical time in which the pictorial object came into being. Decontextualization forces us to depart from the normative conventions of use and evaluation—from which it usually follows, for example, that art pictures have to be observed only in the context of art—and to follow the unpredictable slippages of pictures out of their mainstream disciplinary purviews into interdisciplinary networks of multiple meanings. And anachronization encourages us to look at a picture from the perspective of our own time and to see “what pictures want”. But the real question is what this actually means and whether it is not just a matter of the application of the decades-old principles of cultural studies to the area of the visual. Are we thinking primarily of an analysis of notorious cases of cultural appropriation and decontextualization that are no longer a novelty in the human sciences; for example, when we see Leonardo’s Mona Lisa printed on towels and mugs? Have we progressed enough in anachronization if we compare the Paleolithic proto-artistic interventions on the walls of Altamira with the interventions of the contemporary artist Banksy on the walls in the suburbs of a metropolis? Although they are divided by twenty thousand years of human history, both Paleolithic man and Banksy are anonymous individuals about whose motives for pictorial expression we can only speculate; on the other hand, we can connect the representations of wild animals in Altamira (Fig. 1) and the Girl with Balloon on a wall in London (Fig. 2) without hesitation with the help of the aura of the work of art. These dilemmas, of course, are

Fig. 1  Paleolithic depiction of a bison in Altamira cave (Santillana del Mar, Spain). Fourteen to eighteen thousand years ago. Photo by Museo de Altamira and D. Rodríguez. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

7

Fig. 2  Banksy, Girl with Balloon or There is Always Hope, version near Waterloo Bridge in London, 2002. Photo by Dominic Robinson. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

framed mistakenly since, for it to have any meaning, the Mitchell method has to be consistently carried out from the said triple vision. It is not enough to take a radical diachronic leap and offer arguments of a single concept—art in this case—and think that it is equally applicable to Paleolithic visualization and Banksy’s graphic stylization. Even if some other arguments might perhaps justify this—like the anonymity and the assumed engagement (it is thought that Paleolithic drawings had some particular function, just as does contemporary politically committed art)—it is needful to establish the kind of reciprocal relationship between such disparate phenomena that will give more convincing reasons than just anecdotal coincidence. The role of image studies is actually to reveal which scholarly contributions of history, art history, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, film and gender studies, theology, anthropology, digital studies and many other disciplines is the best possible way we can contribute to the understanding of communicating with pictures, yet outside the disciplinary scope of any individual one of them. Naturally, it is not easy to establish feedback among the different disciplines that enjoy their academic ring-fencing. This Handbook endeavors to overcome these divisions, but not so as to propose a new master-discipline for the area of pictorial communication or to insist on the porosity of disciplinary boundaries. We believe that neither one nor the other is feasible today, in spite of the much vaunted need for interdisciplinarity and collaboration between, for example, neuroscience and the aesthetics, digital technology and the history of art, painting and philosophy. If it was once the case, the contemporary study of pictures must no longer depend on collaboration of academic disciplines that

8 

K. PURGAR

in a happy combination of two or more produce new insights, rather on the enduring intellectual need for decontextualization and anachronization (historicization is already well covered institutionally). To make it clear what we mean precisely can best be shown by an example. One of the earliest and most common motifs in medieval iconography is a depiction of Christ Pantocrator, almighty and omnipotent ruler. The depiction of Christ Pantocrator was long retained in Orthodoxy, or Eastern Christianity, while in the Western tradition it migrated to other iconographic and symbolic variants—Christ in Majesty or the Last Judgement—which have a clear origin in the iconic disposition of Byzantine and later of the Orthodox Almighty Christ. The traditional iconographic motif always involves the central figure of Christ in the pose of benediction, irrespective of whether we are speaking of the Roman mosaic in the Basilica of Santa Costanza of the fourth century, the frescos in the Church of Sant Climent de Taüll of 1123 (Fig.  3) or even

Fig. 3  Master of Taüll, Depiction of Christ Pantocrator, Apse of San Climent de Taüll, fresco, 1123 (in public domain)

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

9

contemporary productions of the motif. However, what is also common to all these depictions is that Christ is always addressing observers outside the picture; he does not communicate with the figures that surround him inside the picture but with the real people who actually look at him (as depicted), and at whom he is looking. In a theological sense, in these depictions Christ is not revealed to his followers in an epiphany, a brief revelation, but is permanently present before them in a fixed visualization/presentation. The observers are humble in his presence; they enjoy his favor and feel immediate participation in the act of divine grace. If we look at one of the derivations of this motif in Western Christianity, the Last Judgement of Fra Angelico of about 1430, we shall see that Christ is not any longer communicating with the reality outside the picture, rather, his final judgment is directed to the intra-pictorial reality; Christ is no longer visibly present, but is just represented; he is still symbolically in the position of the almighty King of Heaven, but his status as representation in a pictorial and ontological sense is the same as the status of all the other figures. The observer of the Fra Angelico painting does not attend the actual event but a depiction of the event. Within art history, iconography and semiotics—disciplines, then, that are most closely concerned with art pictures—there is discussion of variations of motif, stylistic changes and the structural system of signs, but there is no question of whether perhaps Christ’s look toward the observer, his very characteristic invitation to the observer to take part (or perhaps to refrain from taking part) provides a new insight into older art, this time from the perspective of contemporary image theory. May the changes in the motif of Christ Pantocrator be symptoms not only of a different ontological status of pictorial representations—the status of which these disciplines do not anyway engage with—but also of a different understanding of the artistic value of old pictures, of that, then, which is their “core business”? German philosopher Lambert Wiesing in his book The Philosophy of Perception of 2014 (original German edition 2009) provides an extremely interesting interpretation of the pictorial essence according to which it is only when we look at pictures that are we able not to take part in the events depicted in the pictures. According to this, the function of the picture and its essential characteristic is not to bring us closer to what the picture depicts, but to liberate us from the imperative for personal participation. From this it follows that only through looking at images is the observer not immersed in the world they represent. According to Wiesing’s thesis, images are essentially non-immersive, and this is in accordance with the propositions of Gottfried Boehm and Jean-Luc Nancy that images are determined by a cut from reality, not by merging with extra-pictorial reality. If we look now at the frescos by Giotto di Bondone in the Chapel degli Scrovegni in Padua or at the walls of the Church of San Francesco in Assisi, the first thing that we will notice is his proverbial realism (Fig. 4). But does this realism really owe its particular pictorial nature above all to the faithful reflection of reality in consequence of Giotto’s painterly genius, his naturally depicted portraits, authentic mise-en-scènes and technical skill? It seems to us that these

10 

K. PURGAR

Fig. 4  Giotto di Bondone, The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas), 1304-1306, fresco, 200 x 185 cm. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (in public domain)

characteristics are not so crucial for the impression of the reality of Giotto’s paintings as the critical fact that for the first time in the history of painting the concept of the ontological otherness of the picture was consistently carried out. The observer, as Wiesing would say, is not taking part in the event depicted; he is a passive observer of a scene that is outside his world, just as is the contemporary viewer of some cinematic representation. Giotto’s figures never correspond with the observer and never address that observer; they are enclosed in their own non-immersive world into which it is impossible to penetrate. They possess, even then, at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, all those characteristics that define the modern concept of the picture; it is from this that they draw their proverbial realism, not from the painter’s mimetic style that, in our opinion, is a secondary characteristic of Giotto’s frescos. But we were able to arrive at these concrete insights not either with the separate use of the methods of art history or with the phenomenology of Lambert Wiesing

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

11

but only by linking together apparently incompatible disciplinary areas. This is the essence of the study of pictures and of this book. Earlier we mentioned that an important function of this book—which, probably not entirely accidentally, appears precisely at the moment when virtual reality increasingly conquers vast areas that stretch from science and technology to entertainment and popular culture—is to determine when and where images cease to exist. In a scientific and in a very practical sense, what constitutes them is equally as important as what breaks them down. And so in the Handbook we touch on themes that tell of the deconstruction of the image in virtual worlds, a kind of technological iconoclasm. The reason we have partially entered the area of visual simulacra with few of the entries is that it is easiest to understand this ontological otherness of the picture—its difference from reality and the process of deconstructing its alterity—in the places at which the physical body and the holographic projection suffuse each other. A new theory of digital images has to take it into consideration that technology already today, from the point of view of engineering and production, enables much more than the creators of visual contents, artists, designers of computer games and the scriptwriters of interactive experience are capable of imagining. Since virtual reality is not in itself content, but only the condition for the possibility of experiences beyond physical reality, what happens in it will soon not be a problem of technical feasibility but of the projection of desire; it is no longer in accordance with the Microsoft slogan from the early days of the Internet age, “where do you want to go today?”, but with the much more dramatic “who do you want to be today?”. Our basic intention was to show in this book that in order to understand images it is necessary to accept the not-so-comforting thesis that history does not give all the answers (although it gives more than we can understand) and that the future does not have to be as we imagine it (although we like to believe that human imagination has no limits). In the first and third parts of this book, “Essential Histories” and “Frequent Subjects”, we want to show how the creation, perception and interpretation of images developed, both from a historical and from different individual perspectives that set completely different tasks for images. Just as in countless depictions of Christ Pantocrator, we can see the development of fundamentally different religious goals, and thus the development of pictorial representation—as we have seen, this motif was even iconographically corrected to align with changes in the dogmatic foundations of the Eastern and Western Christian churches—so one contemporary blockbuster movie in just over two hours sublimates two key image positions today: on the one hand there is the millennial power of images and on the other their vulnerability to the technologies of the future. Through several visually very striking sequences of the futurist film of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, we can detect the degrees, or the intensities, of the conversion of the classical two-­ dimensional tableau into three-dimensional virtual experience via which the protagonists of the film are able to produce hybrid physical forms composed of people and holographic projections. Below the relatively simply told tale of the

12 

K. PURGAR

quest for proof that by sexual relations between android and man a real human being can be created, the film deals with the complex relation of people and humanoid machines, and at one moment we might intuit that the hero—the replicant K played by Ryan Gosling—is himself perhaps a product of the technology of appearing, on the elusive border between man, clone and robot. The human and the non-human, that is, representation and simulacrum in Blade Runner 2049, are presented as being highly unstable phenomena moving uncertainly in between two extreme positions of the human and the pictorial. In traditional understanding, this fissure is still clearly determinable, but in the period that Žarko Paić calls the technosphere, it takes on an entirely new dynamic. As today we have entirely accepted the intermediate spaces of gender identities, so we shall have to accept the unpredictable outcomes of the transformation of man into cyborg and material and screen images into non-­material visuality. Art and media history as well as Mitchell’s concept of the pictorial turn show us that every period in history, like every change in technology, is just a continued transition from one manner of representation into another, one technology of visualization into another. Art historians like Horst Bredekamp and, still earlier, Aby Warburg suggest that art history should be the science of the picture so that the latter should be able to encompass a much more complex history of epistemological turns within the “conditions of looking” that painting, photography and film have faced us with during the civilization of the image. What such a science would instruct us—to the transitive property of the image that appears in various technological and ontological intensities—is in Villeneuve told through the metaphor of the changing intensity of human knowledge and the (un)natural body. We can experience Blade Runner 2049 as an allegory of the role of the image in human civilization and as a kind of indication of what the world is going to be like when there is no longer any difference at all between original and replica, reality and imagination, physical object and its visualization as simulacrum. As for the history of the image and its allegorical depiction in this film, we will observe clearly that our human history of pictures in this film is told in exactly the same order as in the history of representation. In the film, it starts at the moment when our civilization is in fact coming to an end. During the whole of known history, the Western canon has been ruled by the imitation of nature, the classical ancient concept of mimesis, which always comes back up again in various historical epochs. However, as we show in this Handbook, it was exactly when they were most similar to nature that pictures were not in their “natural” state: only at the beginning of modern art, in the exemplary case of Kazimir Malevich, had been finally restored the concept of the picture to its totally imaginary, abstract, Platonic framework, in which it had never existed before. After more than two thousand years, the domain of ideas had at last been resigned to the image. The general acceptance of this radical gesture of Malevich enabled throughout the whole of the twentieth century creators of pictures (not only artists) to experiment with varying degrees of intensities and various technologies of appearing (cf. Krešimir

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

13

Purgar, Pictorial Appearing, 2019). Because of this, we can speak today of pictures as a historical survival that set up a clear border between reality and imagination, even in such perfectly made illusions as the monumental ceiling fresco from the end of the seventeenth century of Andrea Pozzo in the Church of San Ignazio in Rome. But with Villeneuve too it all begins with the “degree zero of representation”; in a scene in Chinatown, we see the replicant KD6-3.7 (or simply, K) watching ordinary digital photographs of the place in which there might be proofs that will be able to change the fate of the human race (Fig. 5a). The next form of transition is the “impossible touch” of him and his holographic girlfriend Joi on the terrace of his flat one rainy night (b). The next degree is the amalgamation of holographic Joi and the human Mariette so that machine K should be able to feel a real corporeal union, not merely a visual simulacrum (c). After that K experiences a disappointment that is brilliantly staged in the scene in which Joi addresses him from a holographic, three-dimensional billboard in a classic advertising “call to action” (d). K then realizes that he has not fallen in love with a person, even if she was only a trick of technology, but with a whole species, with a product from the production line, with a product of the kind that, after all, he is himself. The strongest metaphor of appearing is that in the final sequences of the film when the aged Rick Deckard (the original cast from the 1982 part of the movie directed by Ridley Scott) and the replicant K meet, but with the version of him that has already developed the awareness of his possible human origin. Between the old and the young blade runner then a conversation develops that is closer to some hybrid genre of a futuristic bildungsroman than to a conversation between a man and a human replica. All of these degrees or intensities of image-as-difference already existed in Western culture but only state-of-the-art virtual reality technology allowed the transition between human and non-human to be completely imperceptible. In the example of the depictions of Christ, we can best see that Christianity never really cared about realistic visualizations, although “the culture of mimesis” has been with us for two thousand years. Particularly during the iconoclastic conflicts of the eighth and ninth centuries, and also during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the symbolic value of what was depicted was much more significant. In the same way, we appreciate abstract paintings by Malevich, Pollock, Kline, Rothko and many others for two key symbolic reasons: the first is that they show the invisible that no known visualization technology is able to stage, and the second reason stems from the first “guaranteeing” that abstract images show nothing but themselves. Thus, unlike virtual reality and the unlimited technologies of production of other worlds in the near future, abstract images—but also classical, realistic ones—keep us from losing contact with this physical world of ours. A very significant sequence in the 1982 Blade Runner is that when Rachel comes to Rick Deckard’s apartment; as she sits at a piano, she notices photos of his family, which she observes with a mixture of nostalgia for what she never had and longing for something she will never have (Fig.  6). This (pseudo)

14 

K. PURGAR

Fig. 5  (a, b, c, d) Dennis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049, 2017, screen captures. Pictured are Ana de Armas (as Joi), Ryan Gosling (as replicant K) and Mackenzie Davis (as Mariette)

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

15

Fig. 6  Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, 1982, screen capture. Pictured is Sean Young (as Rachel)

emotion of intelligent replicants is turned in BR 2049 into a much broader allegory of the disappearance of the image and its transformation into different intensities of simulacrum visualizations. Very significantly, we see a physical image, that is, a photograph as an object, in a film only when it refers to people who were once alive and who we assume were of the human origin. For example, at the very beginning of the film when K looks at photos taken by a drone of the place where the bones of his alleged mother, the replicant Rachel from the first film, were found. Then, a little later, when K finds a photo taken during the time of the first film (it’s about 2019) that shows Rachel holding one of her children in her arms. The photographic images in the film are very consistently associated with the human race; photographs were used in their rudimentary sense, as in the second half of the nineteenth century when they were irrefutable proof that something had indeed happened. When it comes to the disciplinary position of image studies, the scene of the merging of the holographic representation of Joi and human Mariette is particularly interesting: it is a moment of interaction between physical reality and virtual reality, a moment of almost imperceptible transition, an allegory of unstable existence at the crossroads of the physical—image as difference, and the visual—that is, representation as immersion. In this book, we primarily deal with what we consider to essentially determine the ontological nature of images, and that is a cut toward extra-pictorial reality, not merging with it.

16 

K. PURGAR

But this is not just about practical reasons and the need to establish disciplinary boundaries, but about something much more substantial. What does Villeneuve’s imagination really reveal about the technologies of pictorial appearing, and then, indirectly, of the unstable ontology of the picture after representation? Among other things, that appearing—as the unstable state of the picture—is in fact an “error” in representation; just as the unstable state of the robot and his desire to be a man is an error of the technology. Every technical device, from the simplest to the most complicated, has its own function; it is programmed for something and has to carry out a certain action set in advance (although these actions do not have to lead to a result known in advance). Accordingly, technical devices are constructed in such a way as to avoid, as far as possible, the possibility of error. And if an error arises, we speak of an anomaly, an unacceptable state of a machine that is not behaving according to rules set in advance. A machine is not out of order if it does what we do not like, but only if it does not do what it is programed to do. It is easy to find another example from popular film culture. The Terminator of James Cameron, 1984, departs from the premise that digital technology has advanced so far that computer systems can develop their own consciousness and become a threat to the survival of the human race. Although the Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) was created by an undesirable computer deviation, it is a completely functional machine for the tasks intended it, until the opposing side destroys it. This cyborg killer does not possess moral scruples, for this is not expected from a machine. On the other hand, the replicant K suffers from an excess of the human, from a kind of humanoid glitch because of which he is neither a good machine nor a bad man; he continues to accept in the cleft of a society and a technology that are radically changing. Like the ideal Renaissance picture, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, or the perfect mimetic illusion of Andrea Pozzo, replicant K has the same problem: he is too real to be human, and yet not perfect enough to be natural. But unlike Renaissance and Baroque paintings that are going to remain (physically) the same in the foreseeable future, the advances of the reality simulation technologies have at this moment no end in sight. Our interest in studying pictures still-as-differences is articulated here interdisciplinarily as image studies in full awareness that it is actually the matter of a kind of contemporary archeology, an undertaking of the historical, practical and theoretical penetration into the culture of the image. This book is structured according to the need to present the new field of inquiry in a logical way: from historical facts all the way to the more specific methodologies, subjects and themes developed within image studies, and to finally put an emphasis on the most prominent contemporary scholars that have helped delineate major trajectories in this field. The companion therefore starts from giving readers a historical overview and a basic diachronic explanation of the term image including the ways it has been used and theorized in different periods. In the second part we try to explain the fundamental concepts that have to be mastered should one wishes to enter competently into the field of image studies. The

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

17

third part is dedicated to major and hotly debated topics that define the contemporary discourse on images. In the fourth part we show how existing disciplines relate to images and how one should construct the new field using already existing approaches and insights. In the fifth part we bring ten chapters about the most important contemporary thinkers; this is the first time that the theses of the most prominent scholars of image studies—coming this time predominantly from the “continental” side—are critically analyzed and presented in one place: W.J.T. Mitchell, Michele Cometa, Paul Crowther, Hans Belting, Dieter Mersch, Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Horst Bredekamp, Lambert Wiesing, Gottfried Boehm and Georges Didi-Huberman. The editor of this book is fully aware of the fact that the thematic and disciplinary range it encompasses goes beyond the notions of traditional approaches in image analysis and understanding. This is both its advantage and disadvantage. Our intention was to offer universal tools by which one can completely “disassemble” an image and reach its deeply hidden, multifaceted meanings— just as we wanted to offer the latest insights necessary to construct new meanings. However, this book also has one goal that needs to be viewed less in its didactic, academic purpose and more in one generic sense. Like a photographic negative, depicting the reverse of the world to allow us to get to its true face, this Handbook seeks to accurately map the time that without any nostalgia or regret should be recognized as a time of disappearing of images and replacing them with virtual visual experiences that are perhaps more fascinating and realistic but that are no longer images. Is there a better way to enter virtual worlds than consulting a comprehensive, thoroughly researched and competently written companion to good, old images? If each of us should choose one image that in his or her opinion unites everything that image studies stands for and what it deals with, probably different disciplinary or ideological preferences would lead us to different epochs, historically important or to examples of modern, often banal representations from a wide range of popular and media culture. We hope that this book offers tools with which we can approach each of these types of images and individual research interests with sufficient scientific rigor. Yet to the editor of this book, one particular early Renaissance work of art speaks to the very nature of pictorial representation much more than we expect from a painting tableau from the fifteenth century. It is a painting by Jan van Eyck The Arnolfini Wedding from 1434 (Fig. 7). This small oil on oak plate has already been reproduced countless times on the covers of books; it owes its popularity to the fact that a seemingly simple depiction opens up to a multitude of symbolic utterances, but primarily because it goes far beyond its iconographic and symbolic meanings. That is, it functions as an image that speaks about the nature of pictorial representation, about the way observers see it and about the set of conventions that need to be followed in order for the image to function at all in the tradition of Western representation. But it is most interesting because it both constitutes itself as a tableau and nullifies its own otherness as image; it simultaneously establishes a difference from the extra-pictorial reality and draws the observer

18 

K. PURGAR

Fig. 7  Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434, oil on oak plate, 82.2 x 60 cm. National Gallery, London (in public domain)

into the world of the image. Moreover, it follows the laws of spatial organization and the figurative style of its own epoch, but like an anachronistic intruder it enters into space and time that are not its own—the space and time of the present. With the Arnolfini painting, van Eyck created a metapicture that questions the ways of looking at images, and most of all he addresses the nature of the critical relationship between the producer and the consumer of the image across centuries. The extremely contemporary problem of reality and alterity, and their constant interchangeability (which Blade Runner 2049 best testifies to on the example of the creation and dissolution of the image), was articulated

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE CREATION AND DISINTEGRATION OF IMAGES 

19

by the Dutch painter almost six centuries ago. On the other hand, this painting experiments with establishing meanings outside of strict symbolic codes, although it is these codes that abound in it, and although it is precisely symbolic meanings that have most intrigued art historians. If we removed from the picture all those elements that carry very specific iconographic symbolism—for example, a lighted candle, a pregnant woman, a dog, fruit, a double bed, scenes of Christ’s passion on a mirror frame, and so on—the elements that construct and deconstruct the painting as image would still be retained: it is because of the implied gaze of the two observers outside the picture who are reflected in the mirror on the wall inside the picture. As if van Eyck wanted to say that the observer, the spectator and, consequently, the interpreter are always in the picture and although without their presence the picture as a physical object would still exist, its meaning can only be produced by reflection: in this case by the optical reflection of the two observers in the mirror. With this book, we want to interpret the depiction of their presence in the painting as a metonym of intellectual reflection on all images.

PART I

Essential Histories

The Concept of the Image in the Old and New Testaments Michael Shaw

It is notoriously difficult to define the term image. Is it an idea, an artifact, an event, or another phenomenon altogether? W.J.T. Mitchell’s influential essay “What Is an Image?” developed a “family tree” of images, including graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal images (Mitchell 1987). James Elkins, building upon this model, has suggested an even more diffuse genealogy of image types (Elkins 1999). Sunil Manghani synthesized both approaches and has proposed an “ecology of images”, through which one can examine the full “life” of an image as it resonates within a complex set of contexts, processes, and uses (Manghani 2012). For the purposes of this analysis, we shall accept this model of an ecology of images, encompassing the graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal images. The fundamental question, then, is this: How do the Old and New Testaments conceptualize the category of image? We shall examine the concepts of “graven images”, theophanies (appearances of God), and the “image of God” within the biblical canon, and argue that the conceptualization of image within the Judeo-Christian scriptures contains both a potent iconophobia on one side and iconophilia on the other. The importance of the Bible for the field of image studies lies in its cultural and historical impact, quite apart from its status as a source of religious doctrine. The influence of the Bible as a foundational document for Western literary, artistic, and cultural achievements need not be restated here. For example, it is obvious that many substantial artistic works of the Renaissance period were inspired by biblical scenes, a fact well documented in the field of art history

M. Shaw (*) Center for Christianity in Society, Belfast, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_2

23

24 

M. SHAW

(Baxandall 1988; Blunt 1999). There remains, however, a notable lacuna in image studies concerning the form, perception, theorization, and meaning of images within the biblical texts in the context of ancient Israel-Palestine. Significant debate exists concerning the exact dates of composition of the Old and New Testaments. Estimates range from as early as the third millennium B.C.E. for the Sinaitic covenant (Kitchen 2003, 286). However, critical scholars date much of the Old Testament literature to the fifth century B.C.E, with the earliest book being composed in the eighth century B.C.E (Radine 2010, 46). Notwithstanding the precise dating of each of the sixty-six biblical books, ancient Hebrew cultic rituals and material culture undoubtedly formed the setting in which both the Old and New Testaments were composed. Yet the people of Israel seldom lived and operated in complete isolation from neighboring peoples and civilizations. An investigation of images within the Bible therefore aids our understanding not only of ancient Hebrew culture itself but also in conducting a comparative analysis of the concept of image within the literature of contemporaneous ancient Near Eastern cultures. Ancient Hebrew culture has typically been misconceived as being predominantly iconophobic. This is in part due to a superficial reading of selected pericopes from the Old Testament, such as the famous command in Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below”. While there is a degree of validity to this conception, the presence of iconophilia must not be overlooked in the biblical texts: the sanctity and ornateness of the Temple as a visual representation of God’s dwelling place (2 Chronicles 3:4–7); the idea that humanity is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27); and the purported divine appearances all demonstrate a measure of veneration for the category of the image, if not for the images themselves. The term image, translated as tselem in Hebrew and eikön in Greek, appears 172 times in the Bible. The ancient Jewish and Christian scriptures therefore provide a wealth of data concerning the conceptualization of image in ancient Israel-Palestine. That ancient Hebrew culture is characterized by both iconophobia and iconophilia thus produces a more complex and nuanced theorization of images than is sometimes articulated by biblical scholars.

1   Graven Images In ancient Near East cultures, images were widely believed to mediate the presence of a person or deity who was physically absent (Grenz 2004, 621). Thus Assyrian kings often constructed statues of themselves in regions they had conquered as a way of mediating their presence in the newly occupied land. Indeed, the connection between the image and the monarch himself was so close that insulting or defacing a royal image was a treasonous act. The representational power of an image was even greater when an image was designed to portray a deity. In the context of ancient Near Eastern cultic worship, a god’s spirit was thought to indwell an idol or image. An image therefore primarily functioned

  THE CONCEPT OF THE IMAGE IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 

25

as the perfect representative of a person or deity as it was believed to be in spiritual union with the one it represented (Clines 1968, 93). It is important to note that this was not merely a secondary function of an idol, in addition to providing some other purpose such as aesthetic appeal. Rather, its primary function was to provide a physical and visible manifestation of an immaterial and invisible deity. Perhaps the most famous of the commands concerning images in the Old Testament is a variation of “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4, KJV, cf. Deuteronomy 5:8). Two words for idol appear here: pesel (“idol”) and temunah (“likeness”), the use of the two synonyms suggesting “any sort of idol”. Does this one statement rule out the possibility of image veneration of any description, divine or otherwise, in ancient Hebrew culture? It is sometimes insinuated that the Israelite experience with Yahweh was so “spiritual” that any dependence on physical images was strictly prohibited. However, this view is not an accurate depiction of the Hebraic conceptualization of images. For example, the Hebrew people had sacred objects, such as the ark of the covenant (Exodus 25:10–22), which were venerated images symbolizing the presence of the divine. The ancient Hebrew understanding was that Yahweh himself had provided a sufficient reflection of his character through the created order, and indeed in humanity as the imago Dei to make “graven images” of himself unnecessary (Dyrness 1985). A vital distinction between the Israelites and other ancient Near East cultures was that the former did not consider carved images or inanimate objects to partake in the divine nature itself. Rather, they functioned as objects surrounding Yahweh’s self-manifestation and artifacts which provided a degree of localization to his presence (Stuart 2006, 450). Conversely, Near Eastern cultures typically assumed that the presence of a god was guaranteed by the presence of an idol, because the idol itself was believed to embody the deity rather than merely representing it. Moreover, the concept of image as a totally prohibited category in the Old Testament makes little sense when one considers that God’s progressive revelation of himself was mediated through a succession of visual experiences, or theophanies. Thus the category of “divine image” is not strictly forbidden in the Old Testament. Rather, it forms an integral part of progressive divine revelation, functioning as the visible representation of the transcendent. Later in the Exodus narrative, the Hebrew people crafted an idol of a golden calf from the earrings of their women and children and proceeded to worship it (ref: Exodus 32:1–4) (Fig. 1). The term, masseka, already used in verse 4, is used to refer to the idol in Exodus 32:8, literally meaning, “metal-plated young bull idol”. An idol in the shape of a young bull correlated far more closely with the ancient Egyptian concept of deity worship than with Israelite worship. To the Egyptians, a vigorous young bull seemed an appropriate way to portray an immensely powerful god (Oswalt 1973). However, the Hebrew god, Yahweh, had chosen to manifest himself in a series of ways (fire, a pillar of smoke, a

26 

M. SHAW

Fig. 1  Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633–1634, oil on canvas; 154 × 214 cm. National Gallery, London (in public domain)

burning bush, etc.), but never as an inanimate idol or object. Yahweh insisted on being believed in rather than seen. And yet the Israelites were increasingly drawn to a physical image of God to which they could bring their worship and sacrifices. Clearly the worshipping of a golden calf breached the religious law which prohibited the production of idolatrous images and demanded exclusive worship of Yahweh. The principle of images being forbidden to be worshipped was further developed in the exilic literature of the Old Testament. In Daniel 3:1–6, King Nebuchadnezzar created a large golden image (tselem) which he instructed his subjects to worship. Three Hebrew men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, disobey the royal order to worship the image. Whether it was an image of Nebuchadnezzar is not clear from the text itself, but the likelihood is that it was either an image of himself or a Babylonian god (cf. Isaiah 46:1–2). Regardless, it was in contravention of the command concerning the production and worship of images (Exodus 20:4). The king discovers their refusal to worship the image and states that they will be thrown into a blazing furnace unless they comply. Upon a second refusal they are thrown into the furnace (Daniel 3:18, 21). As ones reaches the climactic point in the story, there is a miraculous deliverance: when they emerge from the furnace, “the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hair of their heads singed” (Daniel 3:27, NIV). This divine rescue functions not only as a commendation of the three non-compliant

  THE CONCEPT OF THE IMAGE IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 

27

Hebrew men but also as a condemnation of the practice of idolatrous worship through the form of images. Thus we find clear evidence of iconophobia throughout the Old Testament which is fundamentally based upon a divine prohibition of image worship.

2  Appearances of God Theologians use the term theophany (θεοφάνεια theophaneia, meaning “appearance of God”) to refer to occasions recorded in Scripture where the divine appears in some form to human beings. These divine appearances do not necessarily constitute the fullness of God’s essence, but rather are events in which the invisible God is made visible. Many of the Old Testament theophanies are found in the patriarchal narratives and Exodus, but they also appear in the conquest events and in the book of Judges. The prophetic literature features the use of theophanies, often in association with the divine call of the individual prophet to his vocation. It is important to note that while these theophanies are depicted as supernatural events, they are often occasions in which the divine appears using natural phenomena such as earthquakes, fire, cloud, wind, thunder, and smoke. One of the more interesting observations concerning the theophanies of the Hebrew scriptures is that Yahweh’s appearances are often accompanied by, or represented as, fire: a pot of fire (Genesis 15:17); a burning bush (Exodus 3:1–3); a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21); descending in fire at Sinai (Exodus 19:18); explicitly identified as fire (Deuteronomy 4:24); appearing as a fiery shape (Ezekiel 1;8); and as a being seated on a throne of fire (Daniel 9:7). And yet there were many other ways in which the various writers of the Old Testament portrayed the appearances of the divine. Sometimes God appeared as “the angel of the Lord”, and more frequently the phrase “glory of the Lord” is used to describe a theophany (e.g. Exodus 24:16–18). The ark of the covenant features prominently throughout the exodus-­ conquest narratives in the Old Testament. Until this point in the Hebrew literature, God had revealed himself to the individual patriarchs, but with the creation of Israel as a nation and the introduction of the tabernacle as the dwelling place of God, divine manifestations would usually be associated with the ark or the tabernacle. The ark of the covenant and the tabernacle functioned as a portable representation of Mount Sinai, the holy place where Moses was purported to have received the Decalogue (Exodus 19:11–16, 20:1–17). The “glory” of God filled the innermost part of the Mosaic tabernacle at its dedication, referred to as the “holy of holies” (Ex 25:22; 40:34–38). The pillars of cloud and fire and the other heightened forms of natural phenomena at Sinai were understood to be sense-perceptible representations of God’s presence (Exodus 13:21–22; 14:19; 16:7, 10; 24:16. C.f. “The cloud” with the definite article in: Exodus 24:15–18; 40:34–38; Numbers 9:15–23). The visual representation of Yahweh holds in tension the immanence and transcendence of the divine in ancient Hebrew thought and culture. God is depicted as utterly transcendent and beyond human comprehension (Psalm 145:3; Isaiah

28 

M. SHAW

40:13–14; Job 42:3), and yet the appearances of God in a sense-perceptible form communicate the immanence of Yahweh within the doctrine of divine revelation. While the majority of the theophanies feature in the Old Testament, the New Testament contains a series of appearances of God. The New Testament writers certainly conceive of Jesus as the ultimate theophany, a matter which shall be explored in further detail when considering Jesus as the imago Dei (the image of God). In the postexilic period the theophanic cloud was given the name Shekinah, indicating God’s “dwelling” among his people (Exodus 25:8). The Shekinah is associated with the first and second comings of Christ (Matthew 17:5; Acts 1:9; Revelation 1:7; 14:14). Furthermore, the Holy Spirit also descended on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4), a direct parallel of the theophany of Yahweh at the completion of the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34–35). The book of Revelation contains the final theophany in Judeo-Christian scripture, depicting the eschaton, the future moment when the “glory” of God described in the Old Testament will eventually appear to all humanity (Revelation 20–21). While these theophanies always consist of visual appearances of the divine, there is a constant and crucial connection between the verbal and visual. In each theophanic event, Yahweh not only represents himself visually but also speaks to an individual or group. Some scholars have even described the phenomena accompanying such theophanies as “mere accessories” to the divine pronouncement which follows the appearance (von Rad 1962, 2.19). This somewhat underestimates the inherent theological value of the theophanies themselves as manifesting particular characteristics of the divine. Nevertheless, the visual representations of God are often accompanied by verbal explanations, and without the words accompanying the theophany, the phenomena and meaning of the theophany would remain unexplained. Thus in Genesis 15:17–21, Yahweh states that the vision given to Abram entailed the establishment of a divine covenant. In the first Sinaitic theophany in Exodus 3:1–10, the appearance of Yahweh is accompanied by a verbal explanation that Moses would lead the Hebrew people out of captivity in Egypt. The appearances of God are theologically significant, inasmuch as they provide a theological basis for understanding particular divine characteristics. For example, the incomprehensibility and omnipotence of God is reflected in the considerable degree of divine concealment in each theophany. In every theophany God does not reveal the fullness of his being or power, but conceals himself from human beings, due to the mortal danger inherent in merely observing God’s appearance. In any encounters with Yahweh, the survival motif is constant. Thus Moses is allowed to witness aspects of God’s character and presence, namely his mercy, kindness, and favor, but is unable to see God’s “face”, because “No one can see me and live” (Exodus 33:18–20). This understanding is also reflected in the first appearance of the angel of the Lord, when the angel appeared to Hagar, who thereafter asked, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” (Gen 16:7–13). The theophanies contained in both the

  THE CONCEPT OF THE IMAGE IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 

29

Old and New Testaments therefore provide a rich seam of theological data when examining divine attributes and properties.

3   The “Image of God” in the Old Testament There is little consensus amongst biblical and systematic theologians surrounding the concept of the imago Dei: humanity being made in “God’s image”. This lack of consensus is exacerbated by the difference in methodological approaches adopted by biblical and systematic theologians: the former are accused of being too narrowly focused on Genesis 1:26–27 and ignoring the implications of the rest of Scripture, particularly the creation narrative of Genesis 1–3, while the latter are often viewed as treating the immediate context of Genesis 1:26–27 as relatively unimportant for determining the meaning of those verses. The tension concerning this alleged decontextualization is captured in Snaith’s statement: “Many ‘orthodox’ theologians through the centuries have lifted the phrase ‘the image of God’ right out of its context, and … have made the word mean just what they choose it to mean” (Snaith 1975, 24). There are numerous interpretations of the imago Dei, including the structural, relational, and functional models, which we shall briefly survey. The term imago Dei finds its exegetical basis in the Old Testament (Genesis 1:26–27, 5:1 and 9:6) and in the New Testament, (1 Cor 11:7, 2 Cor 3:18, 4:4, Eph 4:24, Col 1:15, and James 3:9). Given the heavily contested nature of the imago, how then should we begin to conceive of this concept? Marc Cortez has offered a set of criteria for understanding the image of God, which has received a degree of consensus among scholars of theological anthropology (Cortez 2010, 16–17). In summary: (1) the image reflects God in creation, (2) image and likeness are mostly synonymous, (3) the image includes all humans, (4) the image is affected by sin, (5) the image is Christological in nature, and (6) the image is teleological in nature. One criterion which can be contested is that image and likeness are virtually synonymous. Western theology does not usually focus on the distinction between image and likeness (similitudo) as a major theme of Christian progress and salvation. However, many patristic and medieval theologians maintained that there was an important theological distinction intended by the use of selem and demut in Genesis 1:27–28. And indeed, some theologians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition would still argue that there is a distinct difference between image and likeness: the former being concerned with the nature of human beings, while the latter pertains to the process of assimilation to God (Louth 2013, 9). However, as our task is to examine the image, rather than the likeness, of God, overall this is a useful set of criteria by which to assess the various models of imago Dei. We shall delineate three approaches: (i) the Structural view; (ii) the Functional view; (iii) and the Relational view.

30 

M. SHAW

3.1   The Structural View The structural view states that the imago Dei involves an attribute which is fundamental to the nature of human beings. It is an approach which was adopted by patristic theologians including Irenaeus and Augustine, and has continued to be applied in various forms by Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and contemporary theologians. As such, it has been the most prevalent view in church history and could therefore be categorized as the “classic” definition of the imago Dei. The most common articulation of this approach has been to identify the imago as humanity’s capacity for rational thought, reflecting the image of a rational God. In the vast majority of the Christian writers up to Aquinas (1225–1274), we find the image of God conceived as man’s power of reason (Cairns 1953, 110). Although rationality was the primary capacity proposed by proponents of the structural view, several other capacities were suggested as signifying the distinguishing features of human beings, including self-­ determination, moral agency, conscience, immortality, and freedom (Cortez 2010, 18). After Aquinas, different versions of the structural view started to emerge, beginning with the theologians of the Reformation, who attempted to modify the emphasis on a substantialistic analogy (i.e., image as soul or mind) with a relational notion of the image as a response of obedience to God. Martin Luther (1483–1546) rejected the metaphysical interpretation in favor of a reading of the imago Dei as “original righteousness”, which was lost through sin and restored through Christ (Pelikan 1958, 1.55–65). John Calvin (1509–1564) attempted to hold together a version of the substantialist interpretation with a relational, ethical interpretation, leading to the differentiation in Reformed theology between the humanitas (broad) and conformitas (narrow) senses of the image (Middleton 2005, 21). This approach has been criticized for its lack of an exegetical basis in both the Old and New Testaments. There is no explicit link in Judeo-Christian scripture between the imago Dei and any innate qualities of human beings, such as the capacity for rational thought. It was thus criticized as a speculative notion which was not based on an exegesis of Genesis 1:26–27 (Barth 1958, 193). This view also ignores the growing body of knowledge that we have about the cognitive capabilities of the animal kingdom. Many of the qualities which we once suspected were unique to human beings are now recognized as present in other animals to some extent (Barrett and Greenway 2017, 65). It is nearly impossible to find a structural capacity which is applicable to all human beings. For example, the criterion of “capacity for reason” does not apply to many disabled people or infants. One could make the case that this criterion applies only insofar as it pertains to people who are fully developed or functioning according to a certain ideal. Nevertheless, this test faces the significant problem of excluding a substantial number of people from possessing the imago Dei and therefore from being fully human. The structural view focuses on the capacity for rational thought at the expense of other attributes and functions of human

  THE CONCEPT OF THE IMAGE IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 

31

beings, and thus represents the imago Dei in a disembodied fashion. This has resulted in some supporters of the structural approach arguing that the body was not part of the imago Dei because only the immaterial part of the person was a direct image of God (Cortez 2010, 21). This reductionistic approach ignores other important aspects which define the human person, and indeed rationality cannot be divorced from other fundamental facets of human identity: the human as a relational, cultural, spiritual, and political being. 3.2   The Functional View If the structural view focuses on what humans are, the functional view focuses on what humans do. This view is based on two factors. The first is an exegesis of Genesis 1:1–2:3, which highlights the mandate given to mankind to rule and subdue the earth and its creatures (Genesis 1:26 and 1:28). This exegetical argument suggests that just as God has dominion over all creation, so God has appointed mankind to be vice-regents on the earth. Humanity is created like this God, with the special and unique role of reflecting God’s rule in the world. Second, it has been suggested that the ancient Near Eastern conceptualization of the imago Dei can shed further light on image in the Genesis account. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, kings were often designated the image or likeness of a particular god, such as Marduk or Amon-Re. This designation served to describe their function of representing a particular deity in the earthly realm (Middleton 2005, 27). In ancient Hebrew culture, this pattern is contrasted with God appointing all of humanity, not only the king, with the functional role of bearing God’s image. The functional approach has been criticized for its narrow focus on the first chapter of Genesis in determining the meaning of the imago Dei. It does not consider the function of that passage within the wider context of Genesis and the rest of Scripture. The second chapter of Genesis makes no explicit reference to the imago Dei. However, it continues the Genesis account of humanity’s creation and introduces several important themes that should be into consideration when defining and describing the “image of God”. For example, in addition to having rule over creation (Gen 2:19–20), Adam, as the archetype of all human beings, is depicted as having moral responsibility for his actions (2:16–17) and enters into meaningful relationships with God and other human beings (2:21–22). 3.3   The Relational View The relational view proposes that the imago Dei is best understood in terms of relationships: human persons are essentially relational beings (in relationship with God, creation, and other human beings), and it is this relationality that reflects the image of the relational Creator himself. Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Emil Brunner (1889–1966) are prominent supporters of this position, with Barth’s view being summarized in the following statement: “Man is

32 

M. SHAW

created by God in correspondence with this relationship and differentiation in God Himself: created as a Thou that can be addressed by God but also an I responsible to God” (Barth 1958, 198). The central argument for the relational approach looks to the larger context of the creation narratives, in which Genesis 1–3 is read as a unit. Even if there is no direct reference to relationality in Genesis 1, the continuation of the creation account in the following two chapters of Genesis points in that direction. Thus in Genesis 2, the human person engages first in a relationship with God (v8–17), then with creation (v15, v18–20), and finally with other human beings (v21–25). The issue for proponents of this view, as with the structural view, is the accusation that the relational framework is an eisegesis of Genesis 1 as much as it is an exegesis: there is a danger that any feature or capacity of humanity can be highlighted over and against another (rationality in the structural view and relationality in the relational view). The final approach to understanding the imago Dei contends that it is a multi-faceted concept which cannot be restricted to a set of capacities, relationships, or functions. Rather than restricting the interpretation of the imago Dei to one approach, this view appeals to the insights of all three views. This approach highlights the fact that the Genesis creation account applies the imago Dei to the entirety of the human person, rather than isolating one particular feature. Therefore the action of creation “in God’s image” encompasses a broader range of capacities, functions, and relationships.

4   The “Image of God” in the New Testament The New Testament writers set forth a Christocentric understanding of the image of God which radically altered the Old Testament concept of the imago Dei. Thus for these writers, Jesus Christ was the ultimate fulfillment of the image of God. In the New Testament, Jesus is described as being the “glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3, John 1:14, John 14:8–9), a status which the Hebrew scriptures conferred to humanity as a whole (c.f. Psalm 8:5 wherein the author declares that God has crowned humankind with “glory and honour”). Yet when this theme is developed in the New Testament, the emphasis shifts from humanity in general to the figure of Jesus in particular. Indeed, the concept of Jesus as the imago Dei is further outlined in numerous texts throughout the New Testament. The Septuagint translators rendered the Hebrew term tselem found in Genesis 1:26–27 as the Greek term eikön. The imago Dei references in the New Testament set forward Jesus as the one who manifests the reality of God (Fig. 2). This is particularly evident in the Pauline corpus: Paul views Jesus as the one who pre-existed in God’s form (morphe in Philippians 2:6) and whose incarnation represented the ultimate image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; cf. John 1:1, John 1:14, John 1:18; 14:9; Hebrews 1:3). Indeed, it is primarily the apostle Paul who develops the New Testament theology which articulates Jesus Christ as the image of God. In the Pauline literature the term

  THE CONCEPT OF THE IMAGE IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 

33

Fig. 2  Sandro Botticelli, The Holy Trinity (Pala della Convertite), ca. 1493, tempera and oil on panel; 215 × 192 cm. Courtauld Institute of Art, London (in public domain)

“image” (eikön) had a range of meanings embracing “representation, reflection, likeness” (Kleinknecht 1967, 2.388–389) and which Plato had used in that sense for the cosmos as the visible “image” of God (Timaeus 92c). The concept of eikön was able to bridge the gulf between the Creator and created, and was an attempt to put into words the self-revelation (becoming visible) of the invisible God. We shall more closely examine two key texts within the Pauline corpus: 2 Corinthians 4:4 and Colossians 1:15. In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul links Christ as the imago Dei with the glory-Christology evident elsewhere in the New Testament. He emphasizes Christ’s glory as the image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4) and proclaims that Christ, as the imago Dei, radiates the very glory of God (2 Corinthians 4:6). The text includes an implicit reference to the creation of

34 

M. SHAW

humanity in the divine image narrated in Genesis 1:26–27, which is now understood through the paradigm of Christ as the Second Adam, a theme Paul develops more explicitly in Romans 5:12–21. Colossians 1:15–20 describes Christ’s preeminence over the created order, and central to this concept is the statement at the beginning of the hymn: Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). The essence of Christ as the imago Dei is rooted in the repetition of prötotokos, which brings together the themes of the two phrases: the “firstborn of all creation” (v. 15 NRSV) and the “firstborn from the dead” (v. 18 NRSV). The second instance of prötotokos in this hymn conveys Christ as the “Second Adam”. This parallels the Pauline argument in Romans 5:12–21 in which the life and actions of the “one man” (Christ) supersede and atone for the life and actions of the original “one man” (Adam). This aspect of Pauline theology is therefore heavily dependent upon the concept of the image of God being equally present in both Adam and Christ. Thus the theme of Christ as the primary “image of God” can be traced throughout both the Old and New Testaments. This concept begins in the Genesis account of humanity being created the imago Dei and is fulfilled through the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ as the “true” image of God. It ultimately climaxes in the eschatological new creation (Revelation 21:1–8) which Christ himself will purportedly usher in. When the New Testament refers to the new creation, it is speaking of the restoration of the image (cf. 1 Cor. 15:49). Christ is held to be the pattern of redeemed humanity, and the principle emphasis in Pauline anthropology is the restoration of the image (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 8:29; Ephesians 4:24; and Colossians 3:10). In Paul’s view, those who believe in Christ are renewed in the image (eikön) of God. They are therefore expected to live as renewed people, with a new standard of ethical behavior (2 Corinthians 3:18; Ephesians 4:22–24; and Colossians 3:9–10), in order to reflect the “image” of Jesus, who is the image of God himself (1 Corinthians 15:49; Ephesians 4:13; and Philippians 3:21). Thus a key motif in New Testament theology is that of regeneration and sanctification serving to renew the believer into the restored image of his Creator (Feinberg 1972, 235). In redemption, the divine image is restored and perfected in humanity.

5   The Significance of image in the Old and New Testaments The iconophobic dimension of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, particularly the Old Testament, has had a profound impact upon subsequent Jewish and Christian attitudes toward the production and destruction of religious images. In the mid-twentieth century, Mircea Eliade proposed the concept of cosmicization to describe the participation of Christian missionaries in image destruction (Eliade 1957). For centuries, holy places such as Rome and Jerusalem were seen as the epicenters not only of religion but of civilization itself, with a

  THE CONCEPT OF THE IMAGE IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 

35

direct link to the divine. Conversely, what lay beyond the known world of Christendom was perceived as barbaric and chaotic. It had to be purified and incorporated through ritual activities which would domesticate the perceived chaos (Eliade 1957). This was primarily achieved through the construction of churches, often on indigenous sacred places, the erecting of heraldic signs, and the planting of flags. In the early sixteenth century, an uncompromising campaign of image destruction was carried out by a succession of Spanish conquistadors and Franciscans in Meso-America (Gruzinski 1988). Indigenous ritual artifacts were replaced by Christian imagery and native gods were systematically incorporated into Christian iconography by recasting them as devils and demons. This campaign of image destruction was largely rooted in an understanding and application of the Exodus 20:4 command concerning graven images. Yet to present the Old and New Testaments as solely, or even predominantly, as iconophobic would be to neglect the high value placed upon humanity being made in the “image of God” (Genesis 1:26–27), and Christ as the person who perfectly “images” and represents the fullness of God (Hebrews 1:1–3). Further research in the field of image studies into the Old and New Testaments must therefore observe and investigate these two dimensions simultaneously in order to avoid a reductionistic view of Judeo-Christian scripture in relation to the form, theorization, and meaning of images.

References Barrett and Greenway. 2017. “Imago Dei and Animal Domestication: Cognitive-­ Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Uniqueness and the Imago Dei”. In: Pederson, Daniel and Lilley, Christopher (eds.) Human Origins and the Image of God: Essays in Honour of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. Grand Rapids: Eerdsmans. Barth, Karl. 1958. Church Dogmatics, Vol III: The Doctrine of Creation. Edinburgh: Clark. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blunt, Anthon. 1999. Art & Architecture in France 1500–1700, revised ed. London and New Haven. Cairns, David. 1953. Image of God in Man. London: SCM Press. Clines, D.J.A. 1968. “The Image of God in Man”. Tyndale Bulletin, 19, no. 93. Cortez, Marc. 2010. Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T&T Clark. Dyrness, William A. 1985. “Aesthetics in the Old Testament: Beauty in Context”. JETS, 28 (4): 421-432. Eliade, Mircea. 1957. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated from French: W.R. Trask. Harvest/HBJ Publishers. Elkins, James. 1999. The Domain of Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Feinberg, Charles Lee. 1972. “The Image of God”. Bibliotheca Sacra, 129: 235–246. Grenz, Stanley. 2004. “Jesus as Imago Dei: Image-of-God Christology and the Non-­ linear Linearity of Theology”. JETS, 47 (4): 617–628. Gruzinski, Serge. 1988. La colonisation de l’imaginaire: Sociétés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard.

36 

M. SHAW

Kitchen, Kenneth A. 2003. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Kleinknecht, H. 1967. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Louth, Andrew. 2013. Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology. London: SPCK. Manghani, Sunil. 2012. Image Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Middleton, J. Richard. 2005. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1987. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Oswalt, John. 1973. “The Golden Calves and the Egyptian Concept of Deity”. Evangelical Quarterly, 45: 13–20. Pelikan, Jaroslav (ed.). 1958. Luther’s Works. St Louis: Concordia. Radine, Jason. 2010. The Book of Amos in Emergent Judah. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Snaith, Norman. 1974–1975. “The Image of God”. Expository Times, no. 86. Stuart, Douglas. 2006. Exodus: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture. Holman Reference. von Rad, Gerhard. 1962. Old Testament Theology. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row.

Mimesis and Simulacrum in Aristotle and Plato Nickolas Pappas

The theories of art in Plato and Aristotle focus on poetry (including song and drama) and comment on music. What they find specific to pictures and visuality appears in a few evocative but often difficult passages.

1   Aristotle Aristotle first, because he offers something closer to a theory of what we call art than Plato does. Aristotle tries to produce a naïve account, what you might say about art on the basis of the facts, descriptively not tendentiously. In this theory the visual image is the paradigm. Despite using mimêsis “imitation, emulation, representation” as a category embracing literary, visual, and performing arts, Aristotle puts the visual image at its center. The Greeks had analogized poetry to image since the making of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, with that ecphrastic passage’s catalog of incidents found in Homeric epic (Iliad 18.479–609); and explicitly since the archaic poet Simonides writing that painting is silent poetry, poetry painting that speaks (Plutarch The Glory of the Athenians 3.1, 346f–347a). In these first analogies poetry comes out ahead of painting. Homer’s ecphrasis lets epic verse replace the fictitious shield. Homer’s words by themselves suffice to put the shield before the hearer’s consciousness even in the absence of the thing. While seeming to adore the visual experience, the words in Homer position themselves as the master discourse. As for Simonides, he may purport to describe poetry and painting as species of each other, but it is revealing that he uses the same differentia in both definitions. Poetry possesses speech;

N. Pappas (*) The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_3

37

38 

N. PAPPAS

painting lacks it. Therefore these are not fellow species but hierarchically ranked, poetry the completion of what painting might have been. Aristotle’s Poetics touches on visual art when offering a general account of mimêsis, again as if for the sake of analogy in the same tradition as Homer and Simonides (Eden 1982; Halliwell 1998, 109–137). After arguing for mimêsis as the characteristic of poetry (Poetics 1 1447a13–1447b29), Aristotle justifies the mimetic impulse. Mimicry is sumphuton “inborn” in humans, who do their first learning by imitating others (4 1448b6). This impulse to mimic seems to refer to children’s copying their elders’ movements and speech. It attains its fullest expression in the performance of tragedy. Even though this mimêsis can take place without words, it belongs in the Poetics as the motive behind dramatic performance. Aristotle adds a second justification that initially appears to continue from the first. Everyone enjoys a mimêma “representation”, the result of imitation. Production and consumption alike have a natural basis. Only where the tendency to produce mimicry shows up in its universal human form in performance, Aristotle uses visual images to illustrate the tendency to consume mimicry (Halliwell 2002, 178). Enjoyment enters here too. Even objects we would be distressed to look at in life, chairomen “we are pleased” to see in an accurate eikôn “likeness” (Poetics 4 1448b12). For human beings all love to learn (4 1448b14; see Metaphysics 1.1 98a21). As the Poetics’ title indicates, it concerns itself with works of language. So it is all the more significant to find Aristotle’s defense of poetry, which is his epistemological defense of poetic mimêsis, basing itself on the visual image. Children’s mimicry may account for drama in the sense that it explains why human beings stand up and act as others do, but that kind of mimicry is not said to make them learn. The Poetics makes clear that defending an art form means discovering knowledge to be communicated in it, not in the weak sense that one might learn something from studying the art object—as one learns from stones and by looking at animals—but more strongly in that imparting knowledge is something the art object does typically and under normal conditions. (The weak sense does not hold trivially. Plato argues that mimetic arts fail to impart knowledge even in this way.) This is surely the point of Aristotle’s calling poetry “more philosophical” than history. Tragedy, the poetic form most worth studying, will meet the epistemological requirement, but the general knowledge and moral instruction in tragedy emerge only from a theoretical account of a plot, of the passions it arouses, and somehow the katharsis “cleansing” of the passions. So tragedy illustrates by a complex mechanism that we need the Poetics to explain something that occurs in all mimetic arts. And if it occurs in all mimetic arts, there must be some art forms in which it occurs more elementally and perspicuously. Aristotle uses visual mimêsis to provide the elemental and perspicuous case, with the combination of straightforward learning and pleasure at having learned. Treating the visual likeness as paradigmatic reverses the explanatory

  MIMESIS AND SIMULACRUM IN ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 

39

order in the saying of Simonides. Aristotle treats painting not as a vestigial version of poetry but as the clear case that poetry elaborates. In this clear case everyone grasps that the defining pleasure to be taken in a likeness depends on recognizing its reference to the thing it is like. “That’s Abraham Lincoln!” (tall, bearded, and stovepipe-hatted). The connection between image and object is simplicity itself. Aristotle’s phrase houtos ekeinos “This [is] he” (on other translations “This [is] that”) juxtaposes likeness with original (Halliwell 2002, 178n.3; Belfiore 1992, 46–48). There is this, the drawing in front of me, and there is its object, and I connect them. This drawing, that President. To pair the two, the viewer must be aware of both. “If you should happen not to have seen [the object] before, it won’t create the pleasure as a representation but because of the workmanship or coloration or some such other cause” (Poetics 4 1448b18–19). So the process of appreciation needs explaining. If the pleasure requires that one have known the object, in what respect does the pleasure follow from learning? The answer to this question ought to be direct and clear if Aristotle is to use the visual likeness as his explanatory analogue. I can’t be learning from a drawing that this is what Lincoln looks like if I antecedently have to know what he looks like to enjoy the drawing. Can I be learning globally that this is what visual images are like? Yes, but only with the first few drawings I see. We grasp the idea of pictorial representation and then appreciate pictures for a lifetime. Or is it that I am marveling at the artistic skill that captures the look of Lincoln? But then my pleasure derives from the “workmanship [apergasia]”, and Aristotle treats that pleasure as distinct from (implicitly less than) the one caused by mimêsis. Somehow that this picture is Lincoln needs to be both obvious and informative. What I know makes it obvious. What it teaches me makes it informative. Perhaps it teaches as any likeness does. One notices that all these small animals are insects, then that they resemble one another in having six legs, compound eyes, and separate head, thorax, and abdomen. Noticing the likeness prompts closer scrutiny. One generalizes and distinguishes. Where the likeness is mimetic, one can compare the picture to the person (Halliwell 2002, 154–155). Aristotle’s example may also be referring to the fact that an image lets itself be looked at more closely than the object depicted does. The drawing of Lincoln might reveal how high his cheekbones were and his lower lip’s slight push to the right. In all cases the learning calls for the viewer to have recognized the likeness and to have thought about it. I knew enough to recognize the drawing. Then thanks to that likeness I came to know more. The two go together the many times we say “That’s X!” and ask ourselves, “What makes me recognize the portrait right away?” If you cite hairline, smile, or squint as what makes the likeness, you are learning something simultaneously about the image and about what it is an image of. The scrutiny that enhances knowledge might not be possible without a drawing, or might be undesirable. Aristotle says an image may bring pleasure even when one would not enjoy looking at the thing depicted—a corpse, an ugly animal (Poetics 4 1448b11–12). A drawing can also be better to look at

40 

N. PAPPAS

when it clarifies the sight. A large schematic flower drawing can differentiate petal from sepal or magnify stamen and pistil in flowers that have tiny versions of those organs. Despite the recognition, the image must be understood to be an image and thought of as distinct from what it resembles, in order for it to afford an occasion for learning. Looking at a drawing or painting creates the satisfying experience of beholding a more contained, hence more comprehensible version of the world one normally experiences. In other words mimêsis does not imply virtual reality (Sörbom 1966; Nehamas 1988, 219). The theory may strive for naivety of description, but it’s not childish. The painting does not fool viewers into believing they see Lincoln. Here Aristotle differs from those before him who would equate representation with verisimilitude, as the satyrs do in Aeschylus’s Theoroi (Oxyrhynchus papyrus frag. 78a1–22, in Radt 1985); that passage is taken to reflect fifth-century Athenians’ interest in “realistic” art (Stieber 1994). Later in the Poetics Aristotle again refers to visual art as the basic mimetic practice, this time to explain why plot matters more than character to tragedy. “If someone dabbed the most beautiful paints in a smear, that wouldn’t be enjoyed in the way that a white-outline drawing is. Likewise a tragedy is the representation of an action” (6 1450b1–4). A visual image’s self-evident virtues explain the virtues of the complex dramatic object. Plot is to character as outline is to color because plot and outline organize the attractive materials of character and color, respectively. In tentative terms Aristotle calls plot the “soul”—he says it is hoion psuchê “sort of a soul”—of tragedy, meaning the genre’s vivifying form (6 1450a38). So color and character occupy the place of body: what is to be put in order and brought to life. The outline is the form of the painting. Surely the comparison additionally means that plot and outline convey information as character and color cannot. The outline pleases as any visual representation characteristically or essentially does, because of the knowledge in it. Hence what organizes mimetic work contains the knowledge in that work, and hence the knowledge to be taken from a tragedy will come from its organization of events. Because outline and color-smears function as extreme opposites, both of them assumed to be inferior to the cooperation of color and drawing in a painting, we must not conclude too much from the comparison. Neither extreme performs the full function of a painting. Still it seems that Aristotle thinks of the information one takes from a visual image as the product of attention to its lines. Less sensually inviting, intellectually more instructive, the line drawing shows better what the represented object really is, because the thing’s proportions and drawn details contain more truth than its colors. It is worth repeating that visual likeness here is the mimêsis that needs no explanation. Inverting Simonides, Aristotle might say that painting is visible poetry, while poetry is unseen painting. The picture explains the thousands of words in a tragedy. Aristotle’s use of the visual as explanatory does have the negative effect of leaving drawings and paintings without an account of their

  MIMESIS AND SIMULACRUM IN ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 

41

own, and readers having to infer how such images work. Part of the sense of a naïve theory of the visual in Aristotle follows from his decision about what explains what. But then he could only have made such a decision if he had reason to believe that visual representations work by a perspicuous mechanism. Aristotle’s theory of perception (Sorabji 1974; Everson 1997; Shields 2016) suggests a basis for how visual mimêsis operates. The eye (or perhaps the sense of sight) takes in the visible form of an object. In an approximate parallel to digestion, which begins with consuming the matter of food, perception absorbs an object’s form. Look at a blue egg and its blue color colors the vitreous humor in your eye. The soul reflects upon the visible forms taken in through the sense of sight, recognizing an object as a ball or egg or stone, then reasoning from the visible forms to generalizations about balls, eggs, and stones (De Anima 2.5 416b33–35, 418a3–7). The thinking soul thereby contains the egg’s intelligible form. It seems to follow that for someone to learn from a picture, the picture must contain elements of the visible form of the object. The painting of a blue egg would contain the color blue and an oval shape. Up to a point, and depending how much of the visible form appears in a painting, looking at the painting will offer the experience to be had from looking at what it is a painting of. So the soul that has taken in some of the object’s visible form from the painting can reflect on these visible features and arrive at general knowledge approximating to the knowledge one arrives at after inspecting visible objects. The possibility of taking in a form to reflect on explains the possibility of seeing likeness between the image and its subject. Aristotle does not spell out the relationship between picture-viewing and vision in general. Given his own theory, he should not have to. The healthy human constitution learns naturally, and the learning one can do with visual images must follow the same natural principles. That is what the pleasure in viewing pictures demonstrates. Nature underwrites image-viewing as it underwrites the inquiry into nature. Even without the picture’s functioning as a simulacrum of the reality it represents, it gives the eyes a visible form to learn from comparable to the visible form given off by ordinary objects of inquiry.

2   Plato To go back to Plato and identify the problematic elements in his own account of pictures, one could do worse than to ask: What must have driven Plato about mimêsis that Aristotle seeks to deny, for Aristotle to oppose the Platonic critique of art with an ostensibly simple and sanguine theory? For example, Plato can’t be saying only that images are lesser things than the objects they imitate, for Aristotle does not deny such a thing. Does Plato even imbue images with positive malevolence? A rare rebuke from Plotinus implies as much. Writing centuries after Aristotle and generally adhering to Platonic principles, Plotinus takes issue with Plato’s attack on the visual image. “If anyone disrespects the arts on the grounds that they work by

42 

N. PAPPAS

imitating nature, first it must be said that natural things too imitate something else” (Ennead 5.8.1). Being ontologically low, lacking truth, and possessing a “lesser reality”: These properties of pictures do not suffice to explain the vehemence in Plato’s attack on mimêsis, for these properties are shared by pictures and the things they picture. The Republic’s metaphysical schema sets the visible world below and cognitively at odds with forms and mathematical objects (6.509d–510e). Within the realm of the visible Socrates distinguishes plants, animals, and artifacts from their reflections and shadows. That mirroring/shadowing relation, a relation between greater and lesser, is extrapolated to hold between the intelligible world and its likeness the visible world. Given this schema, Plotinus wonders how to justify condemning any image within experience, given the image-­ status that all experience has. If a painting replicates the mere appearance of its object, one way or other it belongs among shadows and reflections too. And yet the arguments in the Republic, and in a passage from Plato’s Sophist, would subject the visible things made by artists to criticism that does not apply to most visible things. The two sights associate with two kinds of sight. As other dialogues do, the Republic contains divergent treatments of vision. Always wanting by comparison with the philosopher’s intellectual power, nevertheless vision sometimes resembles knowledge and can lead to knowledge (Republic 6.508a–509b). Socrates praises the eye as being, of all sense organs, the one “most in the form of the sun”, the sense of sight as “costliest” sense for the creator to make (6.507c). The anthrôpos “human” stands apart, in the speculative etymology of Plato’s Cratylus, as the unique beast that anathrei “scrutinizes” what it opôpe “has seen” (399c). And other dialogues likewise pay tribute to the sense of sight (Timaeus 45b–c; Phaedrus 250d). At other times, however, the Republic groups vision with the other senses as combatants against knowledge. Socrates pictures women in the Republic’s new city, exercising with men—therefore exercising nude, as the Greeks did. People will laugh to see women jumping around naked, but Socrates scorns consideration of what is “funny to the eyes” (Republic 5.452d; Pappas 2015, 49). Eye and soul have different senses of humor, and the eyes that mock do not only lack knowledge but attack it. Those eyes block their ears against the truth. Republic Book 10 forces the question of determinedly ignorant vision in connection with visual art, this time starting not with the sense of sight but with the different sights presented to it. Here too painting enters the discussion as something to compare with poetry. As Aristotle will, Plato treats painting as the default mimêsis that illuminates mimêsis in poetry (Golden 1975; Nehamas 1982; Belfiore 1984; Moss 2007). Consider couches and tables. Carpenters make them and painters make couch- and table-paintings (10.596a–598b). When making a table the carpenter refers to and thinks about the genuine article made by “the god”. A table’s top must be flat and parallel to the floor, so carpenters take pains to keep the top flat on tables they make of wood. They cut the legs to ensure that this top remains parallel to the floor. The lone true unseen table generates any number

  MIMESIS AND SIMULACRUM IN ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 

43

of wooden examples at the hands of working carpenters, as a recipe for olive paste will generate bowls full of the edible version. Each table or couch, for that matter every bowl of olive paste, calls for the expert’s knowledge. A single couch or table also inspires many visual images, but the parallel ends there. The tables made by carpenters ideally resemble one another because of their shared resemblance to the form. A painter however may show the couch from its left side, its right, the foot, the head, or from above or below. As Socrates gets Glaucon to say, the paintings give the appearance of a couch, not a couch (10.596e). Hence the painter possesses no knowledge comparable to the carpenter’s. Even imperfect, the wooden object is something you can call a couch. The couch in the painting only looks like one. That one does not learn about couches and tables this way goes without saying. But then one does not learn about them from looking at their shadows either. And plenty of people sit at wooden tables all their lives without gaining knowledge about them, so it is not as though objects of mimêsis do such a great job of improving knowledge. Yet it is the painting of the couch that Socrates specially accuses of propagating ignorance. He observes that Homer never governed a city, for all his admirers’ belief in his wisdom. Those who practice either visual or verbal mimêsis are ignorant (10.598d–601b). Thus far the argument has not borne the weight being loaded on it. Something worse seems to be at work in mimetic art and poetry than the absence of knowledge that usually characterizes the ignorant. The three-tiered hierarchy of tables gives a godforsaken meaning to the painter, who as maker of a table in a picture occupies the place furthest from the divine maker of the table itself. Far from godly—in fact as far from godly as it’s possible to be— mimêsis draws its audiences down to its level. In Book 10’s clearest recognition of this temptation, Socrates attributes kêlêsis to the vocabulary and rhythm employed by mimetic verse (10.601b); as its English equivalent “charm” also does, the word kêlêsis means both “appeal” and “magic spell” (Shorey 1903, 64n.500), and (like the painter’s polar opposition to the god) serves as recognition that mimetic works are worse than ordinarily ignorant. (Thus again at Euthydemus 289e–290a the speechwriter’s profession is called the kêlêsis or enchantment of jurors, assemblymen, and mobs.) But rather than explain that condition that does something worse than nothing to knowledge, the language in this passage demonstrates the need for an explanation. How does the charm of the painting operate—and what would it mean for something to be worse than ignorance? In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger says that an inspired playwright gives characters things to say that contradict what is said by other characters (4.719c–d). When Clytemnestra and Electra hear simultaneously that Orestes has been killed (Sophocles Electra 680–763), the scene combines Clytemnestra’s relief (774–787) with Electra’s anguish and despair (788–790, 804–822). Understanding the scene calls for recognizing how both women can be speaking truly from their positions.

44 

N. PAPPAS

The best poet, writing under the best (inspired) conditions, will get the characters right in the sense that the characters say what people in their situations say, not in some sense that truth exists about the question and that the playwright offers a viable proposal about that truth. At best one of the characters might speak the truth. The inspired poet does not speak, but writes a drama in which the debates and discussions among characters come before the audience absent a master judgment. Whereas Aristotle’s Poetics attributes general even philosophical statements to tragedy in the form of tragedy’s plots, the Laws focuses on the characters in a play to show why a rational enterprise can’t even begin. What will you call the claim that Sophocles makes when Clytemnestra asserts “A” and Electra says “Not-A”? It seems that dramatic mimêsis foils inquiry. By analogy pictorial mimêsis might offer a sight that prevents vision from doing what it does best and is better off doing, namely using what it sees to arrive at knowledge. Plato’s Sophist shows such a mimetic effect at work in monumentally large sculptures (235d–236c). Built to be looked up at, such statues have the wrong effect if the sculptors cut them to normal human proportions. The head and shoulders will appear small when seen from below and spoil the gravitas of the statue’s sight. So a canny sculptor gives the very tall statue an oversized upper end, and the spectator below receives the visual impression of a properly proportioned body. The statue looks right by virtue of being wrong-looking (Philip 1961; Notomi 2011). Whether true or not as an account of sculptural practice, compensating for optical illusions seems to have been a folk-theoretic explanation in antiquity. Vitruvius says the thickening of a temple’s columns in their middle section makes up for the clumsy look of a straight column (On Architecture Book 3, 3.13); he recommends that columns lean in order to seem to stand straight (Book 3, 5.13). As in the example that Plato’s Eleatic Stranger gives in the Sophist, the object swells so as not to appear to swell and leans so as to appear not to. Picture yourself looking up at a tall bronze Athena. Everything about her looks perfect. You wonder what this says about proportions for sage governing women. You will not discover the answer by measuring the statue. The sculptor’s effort to create the right appearance prevents the statue from disclosing reality. As a result you don’t measure and you don’t find out. You do not engage your highest faculties. You content yourself with having the visual experience of the effectively proportioned woman. The sight you see does not lead toward knowledge but remains at the level of sensory perception. The thought from the Laws that a mimetic product will not permit inquiry, working together with the Sophist’s special observation about visual mimêsis, completes the argument in Republic 10 about appearances and the soul. In the Republic Socrates says that painting presents a single-angled image of its objects; he also says that it exploits optical errors and distortions like the refraction of light in water or perspectival narrowing (10.602d). Together these descriptions say that the act of capturing what a thing looks like manipulates

  MIMESIS AND SIMULACRUM IN ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 

45

visual effects as the Sophist’s tall statues do. These images convey not what the thing looks like, but—as rival to that—what looking at such things is like. (Incidentally the question sometimes arises whether this argument covers all painting or only one type. The passage refers generically to a zôgraphos “painter” and to graphikê “art of painting” [596e; 597b; 598a, b, c], but it also cites the particular technique skiagraphia [602d; Phaedo 69b, Parmenides 165c–d]. The answer may depend on what skiagraphia is, and that issue is still contested (Keuls 1974; Demand 1975, 5–7; Petraki 2018). People know what to do with optical confusion. When the senses take in what they can’t comprehend reason is “summoned” to assess the perception (Republic 7.524b). Book 10 says the calculating part of the soul measures an object to determine its size or shape. What is best in the soul “trusts in measurement and calculation”, while “that which opposes, resists, refuses this would be among the worse things in us” (10.602e–603b). If the soul has something more to go on than perception in everyday epistemic situations, that additional something is exactly what mimêsis omits. The act of depiction reduces experience to a partial simulation of sensory experience in which there is no recourse for intervention. Indeed this may be where the delight of mimêsis comes in. In drama it lets us watch a crisis with a vicarious attentiveness that would be grotesque in daily life. In visual art the reductive mimêsis lets a viewer stare with a sense of completeness. Nothing more needs to be done. As on Aristotle’s account, one finds a more comprehensible version of the world. Even when you know that measuring lengths and angles in a painting will reveal what size something actually is, part of you resists assessing the painting that way. Socrates adds that visual art-making is “engaged with what is far from practical wisdom” (10.603a–b). Like the bad company that a miser’s son falls in with, these friends who distort his values and erode any integrity left in him (8.559d–560e), the artist’s skill entices a soul into preferring error over truth. Not just error, it offers error for which there is to be no thought of correction. Suppose a painting depicts an elegant couch and you wonder, “What makes this such exquisite furniture?” The mensural methods that human beings possess for answering such questions fail to apply. Measuring the proportions of the painted couch won’t reveal the proportions of the thing whose representation this purports to be. Nor can you discover what arrangement of crossbars and supports holds the couch together. If you turn it over to look, you will only see the bottom edge or back of the painting, not the underside or back of the represented couch. “Everyone knows that. As Socrates says, a child might be fooled by a painting (10.598c), but he doesn’t pretend that art’s normal adult audiences get misled. That deception is mentioned just for the purpose of getting it out of the way, to ask what harm can be done even when is not fooled. And with a little experience, the amount that everyone gets in childhood, people  know how to accept the picture on its own terms”. Indeed. One accepts picture-­ viewing on its own terms as one accepts the terms of watching drama. That is

46 

N. PAPPAS

just the problem. In life one counsels a mourning man to buck up and control himself; in the theater where such involvements are impossible, one forgets them and watches (Republic 10.603e–606b). This is how tragedy worsens good people’s souls. For its part painting worsens when it renders other normal responses impossible. You know not to measure the painted couch’s proportions as you know not to lie on the couch. Nothing would be an act of lying on the couch shown in the painting, not even if the painting is big and you set it flat on the floor and lie down on it. You might (though peculiarly) lie on a painting, but you (logically) can’t lie on the couch in it. Nor would anything you did be an act of measuring that couch (Republic 10.598a–b). People catch on enough not to mistake the depicted object or person for an object or person in life. And so we avoid considerable rumpus in theaters and museums. Whether this catching-on deserves the name of “learning” is Plato’s point. For what familiarity with theater seems to teach most of all is how not to act from the moral principles instilled in us. Likewise familiarity with painting teaches how not to inspect and gauge an object of attention. Consider children who learn to draw a table by ignoring what they know about the legs’ equal lengths and the corners’ all being right angles. “Look at the table”, says the well-meaning teacher, meaning: “Forget what you know. Duplicate what you see”. Thus does corruption of the youth acquire the honorific name “learning”. To assert that mimetic art requires ignoring what one knows is to make Plato’s case for him, that mimêsis results in something worse than ignorance, for where there is mimêsis there is systemic incuriosity: the perverse embrace of ignorance and a belligerent stance against inquiry. The divergent treatments of vision in the Republic correspond to Socrates’s distinction between what is better and worse within a soul. Vision makes a good metaphor for knowledge when the soul does its best, judging what the eyes report. For a soul inclined to calculate, seeing promises knowing. But when the soul dismisses its own critical faculties and relishes the illusion presented to it, it loves the image without thought of its object. Prizing visibility for visibility’s sake, the one who sees treats vision as a sense that needs no correction by the soul. In this situation rather than standing apart and resembling the thoughtful soul, eyesight associates with the other senses in a collective attachment to ignorance. Thanks to the division within the soul, the seeing promissory of knowing can cohabit with the seeing emblematic of ignorance. The visual image that elicits the worse kind of vision—that is, the mimetic image—deserves the critique that ranks it below visual signs by means of which one attains knowledge and even below shadows that leave their viewer neither worse nor better off.

  MIMESIS AND SIMULACRUM IN ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 

47

3   Aristotle contra Plato At some points we can ferret out how Aristotle and Plato take shared premises about mimêsis and bring them to incompatible conclusions. Where drama is concerned, they both begin by saying that it imitates or represents prattontas “people doing things” (Plato Republic 10.603c; Aristotle Poetics 2 1448a1, 3 1448a28). They parse that participle oppositely. Plato takes “people doing things” to mean the people being imitated, while Aristotle reads it as the things those people do. So Aristotle can interpret plot as the object of poetic mimêsis, hence a general statement, while Plato comes to see the same process as an absorption into individual perspectives that prevents the achievement of truth claims. In the case of visual art, there is no single word from which Plato pivots in one direction, Aristotle in another. Yet the writings of both allow for vision that leads to knowledge, on the one hand, and to vision that impedes knowing, on the other hand. Plato sometimes describes progress from sight to that highest knowledge that is reserved for philosophers, as when Diotima in the Symposium spells out the steps by which someone in love with a young man’s bodily beauty ascends to the Form of Beauty (211c–d)—less ambitiously with cases of good visual depictions (Republic 3.401a). The steps leading from visible to intelligible appreciation are treated as normal and healthy (White 1989). For his part Aristotle can find representational imagery distracting (Poetics 6 1450b16–20, 14 1453b1–10). He calls the opsis spectacle or “sight” of a production, like its scenery and masks, the least important element in tragedy (1450b17, 1453b1, 7). Aristotle treats the visual presentation as external to the real business of tragedy—“less of a skill” (1450b16, 1453b8)—and dispenses with it in his analysis. When the visual elements produce what is not terrifying but “only monstrous”, they have nothing in common with tragedy (1453b9–10). Another passage even seems to contradict the Poetics’ claim about pleasure one takes in drawings of unpleasant sights. In Parts of Animals, while describing the beauty to be found in the study of despised animals, Aristotle sounds a frustrated note. It would be irrational to enjoy the images of animals, solely because of the apergasia “workmanship” put into those images, more than one liked looking at those same animals (1.5 645a11–15; see Halliwell 2002, 181). Logically speaking the passages are compatible. The Poetics observes that people would prefer to see a skillful sketch of a leech than see a leech; Parts of Animals grumbles that they are wrong to do so. Still the passage in the Poetics seems to endorse attraction to drawings. Looking is learning. When you look in the absence of knowledge, you are probably just admiring the workmanship. In Parts of Animals Aristotle voices an almost Platonic worry about the mimetic image distracting from its referent. The true student prefers examining natural objects over images even when those images depict the natural objects. So an obsession with the image could impede progress toward knowledge.

48 

N. PAPPAS

Thus for both Plato and Aristotle there is a point to saying that visual images can teach, and a point for both to worrying that images distract from learning. Plato’s arguments take interference with learning to be the image’s principal effect. He associates mimêsis with prestidigitation and sorcery (Republic 10.598d, 10.602d). It mainly confuses and mainly deceives. But if on both philosophers’ understanding of visual images such things capture what an object looks like (or some of what it looks like), Plato finds a gap in learning where Aristotle does not. The crucial difference between them may lie here. Plato treats “what an object looks like” as removed from what it is like. “It almost seems [in Alexander Nehamas’s words] as if he believes that the painter lifts the surface off the subject and transplants it onto the painting” (Nehamas 1982, 62). When the Republic and Sophist analyze pictorial mimêsis, they conceive the appearance captured in art as separable from reality. They find visual images to traffic, as it were, in appearances to viewers as opposed to appearances of their objects (Barney 2010; Kosman 2010). For Aristotle the visual artist’s skill and technique might distract, but when the skill is used for the purpose of capturing the appearance, it results in a reliable reference to the object, inasmuch as that appearance is part of the object’s visible form. In the normal case, visual artists seek to get the appearance right, for after all the pleasure that representations bring is a delight in seeing something correctly depicted. Visual images would not have come into this world if not for the possibility of such delight at recognition. And because that delight presumes knowledge of the referent, it builds in a criterion of truth. A civilization’s visual arts reflect the human animal’s ways of learning. When it comes to the visual arts, in other words, Aristotle does not present a hermeneutics of suspicion. Platonic critiques of mimêsis presuppose that an entire culture can have created a toxin with which it then sickened itself. Socrates may have grown up loving Homer, as he says (10.595b), but in the Republic’s city, mental health and wisdom will require that the Homeric epics be banned. Could Greek civilization have been wrong to esteem Homer, and at fault as a civilization insofar as it put Homer at the heart of its education? In one of the extreme instances of the countercultural antagonism for which he is known, Plato accepts this conclusion. In the same countercultural spirit, Plato can imagine visual images as agents of deception. If pictures do not corrupt their viewers with the same arousal of passions that tragedy does, they still foster a perverse inclination toward ignorance. Part of the value that Plato’s dialogues had for early Christianity, and the value to early Christians of the Socrates portrayed in his dialogues, flows from their expressions of dissatisfaction with everything in one’s native culture. And it might have been this Platonic influence, in the Church of the Eastern Roman Empire, that inspired the long-running and only painfully settled dispute over the Christian eikôn, which we translate “likeness” as in classical Greek but also as the distinctively Christian “icon”. Together with the Biblical Second Commandment against graven images (Exodus 20.4), Platonic concerns about the image’s capacity to distract made the Iconoclasts uneasy about icons’ role

  MIMESIS AND SIMULACRUM IN ARISTOTLE AND PLATO 

49

in worship. When the Christian’s thoughts should fly up to unseen powers, they might remain below if the Christian’s eyes keep the soul enchanted with visibility and with the present world that eyes take in. The Eastern Church debated the place of icons during the eighth and ninth centuries, outlawing them for 85 years altogether. The Platonic legacy especially arises when the opponents of visual imagery find danger lurking in its uses. Maybe ultimately in a contradictory spirit, Plato combines the ignorance in which an artist makes a picture with the picture’s uncanny ability to render its viewers ignorant. Empty yet enchanting—but then this might be the combination of responses to images that we should expect from a philosopher who could propose swift action on the faults in his culture even while finding its corruption everywhere.

References Barney, Rachel. 2010. “Notes on Plato on the kalon and the Good”. Classical Philology, 105: 363–377. Belfiore, Elizabeth. 1984. “A Theory of Imitation in Plato’s Republic”. Transactions of the American Philological Association, 114: 121–146. Belfiore, Elizabeth. 1992. Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Demand, Nancy. 1975. “Plato and the Painters”. Phoenix, 29: 1–20. Eden, Kathy. 1982. “Poetry and Equity: Aristotle’s Defense of Fiction”. Traditio, 38: 17–43. Everson, Stephen. 1997. Aristotle on Perception. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Golden, Leon. 1975. “Plato’s Concept of Mimesis”. British Journal of Aesthetics, 15: 118–131. Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle’s Poetics (with a new introduction). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keuls, Eva. 1974. “Plato on Painting”. The American Journal of Philology, 95: 100–127. Kosman, Aryeh. 2010. “Beauty and the Good: Situating the Kalon”. Classical Philology, 105: 341–357. Moss, Jessica. 2007. “What is Imitative Poetry and Why is it Bad?” In: The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic. Ed. by G.  R. F.  Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1982. “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10”. In: Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts. Ed. by Julius Moravcsik and Philip Temko. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Nehamas, Alexander. 1988. “Plato and the Mass Media”. Monist, 71: 214–234. Notomi, Noburu. 2011. “Image-Making in Republic X and the Sophist: Plato’s Criticism of the Poet and the Sophist”. In: Plato and the Poets. Ed. by Pierre Destrée and Fritz-­ Gregor Hermann. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Pappas, Nickolas. 2015. “Women at the Gymnasium and Consent for the Republic’s City”. Diálogos, 98: 27–54.

50 

N. PAPPAS

Petraki, Zacharoula. 2018. “Plato’s Metaphor of ‘Shadow Painting’: Antithesis and ‘Participation’ in the Phaedo and the Republic”. Classical Journal, 114 (1): 1–33. Philip, J. A. 1961. “Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato”. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 92: 453–468. Radt, Stephan. 1985. Tragicorum Graecorum, vol. 3. Vandenhoeck: Göttingen & Ruprecht. Shields, Christopher. 2016. “Aristotle’s Psychology”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/aristotle-­psychology/ Shorey, Paul. 1903. The Unity of Plato’s Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sorabji, Richard. 1974. “Body and Soul in Aristotle”. Philosophy, 49: 63–89. Sörbom, Göran. 1966. Mimesis and Art. Bonniers: Scandinavian University Books. Stieber, Mary. 1994. “Aeschylus’ Theoroi and Realism in Greek Art”. Transactions of the American Philological Association, 124: 85–119. White, F. C. 1989. “Love and Beauty in Plato’s Symposium”. Journal of Hellenic Studies, 109: 149–157.

Iconoclastic Disputes in Byzantium Konstantinos Giakoumis

Two powerful dialogues in the Spider-Man, Far from Home film (2019) between Quentin Beck, the movie’s evil character, and Peter Parker (Spider-­ Man), the movie’s goody superhero, point to the power of images in believing. Having created Mysterio, a new superhero, by combining hologram technology invented by him and combat drones developed by his colleagues, Quentin Beck, while combatting Peter Parker with both real beats and holographic illusions, explains why he needed to create Mysterio, the new, fictional and half-­ illusionary superhero: “I created Mysterio to give the world someone to believe in. I control the truth … Mysterio is the truth!” In the second instance, toward the end of the film, after exposing Mysterio’s deception, Spider-Man defeats Beck in London (Fig. 1). As Beck passes away, he gives this reason to the question why he needed to employ illusion and weaponized drones even after he gained what he wanted: “You’ll see [my emphasis], Peter. People, they need to believe. And nowadays, they’ll believe anything”. Both dialogues pointing to the necessity of seeing in believing, the entire film disturbingly blends images and optical illusions with reality that confuse both heroes and viewers and invites deliberations on the relation of images with illusion or reality. In spite of the new dimensions given to this question by new hologram technology, the issue of the role of images in faith is not new. The matter of whether images are conducive to believing or blasphemy haunted the great

K. Giakoumis (*) LOGOS University College, Tirana, Albania © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_4

51

52 

K. GIAKOUMIS

Fig. 1  Jon Watts, Spider-Man: Far From Home, 2019, screen capture. Pictured are Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio/Quentin Beck and Tom Holland as Spider-Man (fair use)

Eastern Roman (i.e., Byzantine) Empire for more than a century (ca. 726 to 843 A.D.) and shook it from its foundations (cf. Brubaker 2012). This chapter is thus surveying iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium in an attempt to provide some historical background to the use, misuse or abuse of images for religious and political purposes, thereby unfolding an important chapter of image studies’ history. Hence, the topic in question contributes to our understanding of how images are deeply ingrained in both cognition and memory. To this end, the chapter is structured in definitions and overall interpretation of the iconoclast controversy, its historical circumstances in their ideological, geographic and theological background, as well as examples from artworks from the period, before recapitulating how the topic contributes to the broader field of image studies.

1   Definitions In order to penetrate the complexity of the matter at hand, one needs to acquire a clear understanding of a number of terms. Such terms pertain to the names of the controversy, the names of the opposing parts, as well as the terms used to describe the theological essence of the controversy, relevant to visual studies. The semantic development of these terms is not only essential in understanding the nature and narrative of the iconoclastic altercation but also a genuine contribution to the theory of images. The controversy under discussion has been termed as iconoclasm or iconomachy. Both terms have been used to describe a period of political-­religious controversy on whether or not the use of images in worship constitutes idolatry and, as such, should be banned, as well as the very controversy (Brubaker and Haldon 2015, 7; Bogdanović 2020, 199). The difference between these terms is subtle. Iconomachy (Gk. εἰκονομαχία), as the Byzantines more often than not called the controversy, denotes struggle (Gk. μάχη; machy) over icons

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

53

(Gk. εικών; icon), while iconoclasm (Gk. εἰκονοκλαστία) is the phenomenon of breaking the icons. Those in favor of venerating icons called themselves iconophiles (Gk. εἰκονόφιλοι), literally “friends (or lovers) of icons”, while the proponents of the opposing camp called them iconolatres (Gk. εἰκονολάτρες), that is, worshippers of icons, or even iconodules (Gk. εἰκονόδουλοι), meaning “slaves of icons”. Conversely, those against the use of icons in worship were called by their opponents, among other names, as iconomachs or iconoclasts. Derivative terms were used to describe the practices of each camp as a pheno­ menon: iconophily was thus used to denote the phenomenon and practice of using icons in church services, which was termed as iconoduly or iconolatry by the opponents of such practices. Though both factions claimed they strove for orthodoxy, for reasons related to the scarcity of iconoclastic sources, it is not clear how the iconoclasts called themselves. It is therefore evident that the prevailed referent terms of the controversy reflect the victory of the iconophiles over the iconoclasts. All of these terms revolve around their first particle, the word icon (Gk. εἰκών), whose definition is of paramount importance in this chapter. The word translates both as icon and as image and denotes the mental, mirror-like reflection of a real or imaginary object, or its material representation. It stems from the verb εἴκω, meaning “to liken” or εἰκάζω, used in the sense of becoming similar to something or someone, representing by imitation or making someone’s portrait (Liddell and Scott 2007, “εἰκών”, “εἴκω” and “εἰκάζω”). In view of the virtually neoplatonic premises of the iconoclastic controversies in Byzantium (Florovsky 1950, 94–95), one needs to turn to Plato’s theory of forms, partly unfolding in his dialogue on the Sophist, to gain a first theoretical grasp on the dispute. In Plato’s Sophist, the “icon” is found at the antipode of the “phantasm”, though both classified in the image-making art. The dialogue is between Theaetetus and a Stranger, in which they are trying to construct a definition for the sophist. Considering that, after the six first definitions provided to distinguish the sophist from the politician and the philosopher, the boundaries between the sophist and the philosopher were blurred; they switched focus to the image-making art (Gk. εἰδωλοποιικὴν τέχνην: literally, idol-making art) (Plato, Soph., 216a-242b). Image-making art is thus divided in likeness-making, whereby the artist creates a likeness (icon being the term used in the original text) strictly adhering to the symmetries of his model or protype, and phantasm-making, whose creator only seemingly looks like the beautiful protype, yet careful observation reveals he virtually does not (Plato, Soph., 236a-c; cf. 264c-d). This dichotomy between images leading to the protype (icons) or misleading (phantasms) becomes central to the iconoclastic debate, as it did in Plato’s distinction between the sophist and the philosopher. By the advent of Christianity, the term idol no longer signifies image. Stemming from the verb εἴδω, meaning to resemble to an imaginary hypostasis, the idol now becomes synonym to phantasm and the term ξόανον (simulacrum), an idol made of timber (Liddell and Scott 2007, ξόανον; cf. Georgiadis

54 

K. GIAKOUMIS

2011, 111). Accordingly, in patristics, an idol is different from an icon not in their material nature, but rather on account of it portraying demons. The history of this latter term’s semantics, too, changes from ancient Greek, when demon  means god or spirit (Liddell and Scott 2007, δαίμων) to medieval Greek, in which the word signifies the evil spirit or the devil (Kriaras 1975, 405). Thus, in patristics, while an icon represents historical reality, an idol represents imaginary creatures and unreal persons or facts. Such sort of distinction is made in a homily written by Stephen, bishop of Bostra (Alexakis 1993, esp. 51–55), which was used by the legates of Pope Hadrian in the Nicaea II Council (787) in support of his defense of the use of icons (Georgiadis 2011, 106–113). Another pair of terms used extensively in the debate is “symbol” and “sign”. Stemming from the Greek verb συμβάλλω (to contribute), in patristic literature the noun “symbol” bears the meaning of a topos—built or unbuilt, material or spiritual—where God meets human. This presupposes not only physical presence of the human in that topos, but a conscious movement to meet God. Hence, symbols are considered to be the liturgical media for the worship of God, such as the Cross, the Gospel and others, including the holy icons, once humans genuinely use them as links to the divine prototype and approach them as worship media (Georgiadis 2011, 106–113). In the context of iconoclasm, symbols refer the historical types or shadows of God, that is, effects through which His presence is felt. The Lamb, for instance, is a type (τῦπος), that is, an image or a figure of the coming Grace signifying the true Lamb, Jesus Christ, thereby pointing to a hidden relationship between the Old and the New Testaments (Florovsky 1950, 93–94; Barasch 1995, 259; Karlin-Hayter 2002, 154–155; Georgiadis 2011, 114 and n. 143). The “symbolical” in this period is not meant in opposition to the “real”, but rather belongs to a worldly ontological category, the symbol being understood not only as means to perceive and comprehend (cognition) what cannot be known otherwise but also as a means of participation, for knowledge depends on participation. Hence, the symbol’s function, in the understanding of the church fathers of the iconoclastic period, is to unify knowledge and existence (Schmemann 1998, 4, 31, 139, 141). While a symbol requires human motivation and motion, physical and spiritual, the word “sign” (signum) is used in the biblical context to denote a mark, a signal or a proof (cf. Mt. 12:39 “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah”). In this sense, everything in the world is considered to be a revelation of God, that is, a mark of His presence. Thus, every symbol contains a sign. The relation between the sign in the symbol and what this sign signifies is neither semantic nor causal and nor representative, but rather an epiphany (Schmemann, 58, 112, 140–142; cf. Belting 1994, 155–163). The student of iconoclasm in the context of image studies should also be aware of a few other terms used in the literature of the period. The word morphe (Gk. μορφή), as visually perceptible presence, usually translates in English

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

55

as form, although the term in Greek conveys both what is understood as form, as well as visual perception (Gk. εἶδος / eidos, that which is seen, a figure) (Barasch 1995, 259–260). By the word schema (Gk. σχῆμα / scheme), theological treatises of the iconoclastic period relevant to image studies usually refer to the organization and structure of a visually perceptible presence and in particular, as will be shown below, shape and colors (op. cit.). Finally, by the word character (Gk. χαρακτήρ), the defenders of the icons referred to both, a seal and its impression, implying that the icon faithfully renders the prototype (op. cit., 260–261).

2  Interpretations The section above being devoted to definitions of key-terms engaged in the context of iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium may mislead students of image studies into believing that the nature of the altercation was purely philosophical, theological or intellectual. The scholarship over iconoclasm is vast, partly owed to increased interest on this matter by Calvinist theology, theology of other Protestant denominations, or by non-religious, yet, iconoclastic movements such as the French Revolution (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 153) or Mao’s Chinese cultural revolution. In it, one finds views of the dispute as a controversy between the eruditi professing a noetic form of God and the simpliciores (Giulea 2015; cf. Florovsky 1950, 88). In reality, the iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium were much more complex and encompassed all spheres of life (Bryer and Herrin 1977; Brubaker 1999 & 2012; Brubaker and Haldon 2001, 2015). This fact gave impetus to a variety of theories over the genuine motives of the altercation. The overall interpretations of the iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium range from politics and economics, to theology, religion, philosophy, superstition or a clash of civilizations. Several scholars have viewed the choices of iconoclast emperors to shake religious practices of their times at their foundation primarily as a pursuit of pro-eastern policies, after decades of warfare with the Arab world, decisive defeats and territorial losses of the empire’s eastern provinces. Toward the end of the seventh century, the advances of Arab forces in the empire’s eastern territories not only were a threat to its integrity but had also left its cultural imprint of aniconism on compact populations of the eastern provinces, including the armies of the Anatolikon and Armeniakon themata (provinces) of the empire (Herrin 1977, 16–17). It also seems that these parts of the empire contained a greater percentage of heretics and others strongly impacted by Jewish (Aron-­ Beller 2017) and Muslim perceptions of icons as idols (Brubaker and Haldon 2015, 337–348; Alhassen 2019), thereby presenting the altercation as some sort of civilization clash (cf. Brown 1973). The pursuit of Leo III (r. 717–741), the first emperor to actively pursue iconoclastic policies, has thus been interpreted as an attempt to control domestic affairs of the state (Ahrweiler 1977; cf. Boeck 2015) in the course of the empire’s introversion, in an attempt to contain damage in the eastern frontiers of the empire and concerns

56 

K. GIAKOUMIS

encountered both on the first (Brubaker and Haldon 2015, 348–364) and on the second iconoclastic period (Codoñer 2014). As stated from the start of this chapter, the iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium centered around matters of a doctrinal religious nature (cf. Giakalis 2005), which also affected the conduct of politics (Henry 1976; Hardy 2019). As will be shown further below, iconoclasm was virtually a doctrinal controversy, an appeal to antiquity and the aniconic Judaic tradition which was erroneously portrayed as conflicting with the Hellenization of Christianity. In reality, the viewpoints, arguments, concepts and terms of both, the iconomachs and the iconophiles, derived from platonic, neoplatonic, Aristotelian and Hellenistic traditions (cf. Elsner 2012; Anagnostopoulos 2013; Dalkos 2016; Erismann 2016), as both tendencies stemmed from Hellenistic traditions (Florovsky 1950, 95–96). To illustrate the significant variety of interpretations suggested for the iconoclastic controversies in Byzantium, one should also quote two rather less plausible theories. The first is perhaps not void of a Marxist agenda to underplay the religious background of the controversy. This theory was briefly supported by historiography in the former socialist bloc, which portrayed religion as a mere parapet to veil economic issues at stake and oppressive fiscal reforms (cf. Florovsky 1950, 77). Maintaining a much more moderate and rational rapport, Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, in recognition of the material forces behind every socio-political development, devoted an entire chapter to the economics and finances of the entire iconoclastic period (2001, xxiv and 116–128). The second theory maintains that the pursuit of iconoclastic policies by Leo III was owed to popular pressures exerted from superstitions attributing the eruption of the Thera volcano (726) and subsequent earthquakes as some sort of divine retribution for the dogmatic deviation of the empire (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 155). Though the role of collective popular fears, conspiracy theories and superstition in exerting significant domestic political pressure in times of shaky political, economic, social and state security circumstances should never be underestimated (cf. Brubaker and Haldon 2001, 327–337), the pragmatic nature of politics always finds ways to manipulate masses through various stick and carrot policies.

3   Historical Circumstances 3.1  Periodization Although clashes over the use of icons in worship in the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire occurred much more frequently than were recorded, iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium are overall classified into two periods. The first iconoclastic period was initiated in 726 or 730, when Leo III the Isaurian, born in Germanikeia, Maraş (modern-day Kahramanmaraş, Turkey), destroyed the icon of Christ Chalkites on the Brazen House (Chalke) of the Great Palace in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and lasted until 787, when the

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

57

Seventh Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (Nicaea II) reversed it with the active role of the Athenian-born empress-regent Eirene (752–803), widow of Leo IV and co-ruler (r. 780–802) with her son Constantine VI. Once iconomachy was settled and icons were restored back in worship, alas not definitively, there followed a period of lull, which lasted until ca. 815, when another iconoclast emperor, Leo V the Armenian (775–820), ordered the removal of the icon of Christ from Brazen House of the Great Palace and its substitution with a cross, thereby initiating the second Byzantine iconoclasm. Iconoclasm was finally suppressed in 843 by another regent-empress, Theodora (ca. 815-after 867), who assumed the rule after the death of her husband, Emperor Theophilos, in 842 as a regent to her underage son Michael III and remained an empress until 867. Although both periods were labelled with the single term of iconoclasm, each of them had its own particularities. The start date of the first iconoclastic period, for example, has been debated. Although the symbolical act of the removal of Christ’s icon by Leo III the Isaurian (726 or 730) has been conventionally accepted as the start date of the controversy, Brubaker and Haldon have argued that already since 650 soldiers of the Byzantine armies had started developing some interest in imperial affairs. In 681 soldiers of the Anatolikon thema (district) assembled at Chrysopolis and demanded that Emperor Constantine IV should concede part of his rule to two co-emperors, in their conviction to the power of the Holy Trinity. This shows the importance of armies as alternative power, which forced Constantine IV to acknowledge the political power in his inaugural address in the Sixth Ecumenical Council of 680 (Brubaker and Haldon 2015, 27–29). The second iconoclasm was more restrained in its style of disputation than in the controversy’s first phase and gave emphasis on certain themes and, most notably, the Christological argument, while iconophiles were no longer called or treated as idolaters (Barasch 1995, 261–266). 3.2  Sources The eventual “triumph of Orthodoxy” resulted in the forceful collection and destruction of iconoclastic literature (cf. Noble 2009, 69). We are therefore left only with a body of unilateral polemical literature depicting the views of the iconophiles. Hence, the stances, refutations and arguments of the iconoclasts are only indirectly revealed to us by conjecture from their refutations in iconophile literature. Yet, one should single out the pioneering work of Brubaker and Haldon (2001), in supplying us with a great variety of annotated sources, textual and material, which, however, does not remedy the partial character of their majority. For the earlier iconoclast views on the use of icons in worship, the sole source in our disposal is a letter of Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339) to Constantia Augusta dealing with the distinction between form and image (Florovsky 1950, 84–87; Gero 1981). For the first iconoclastic period, the

58 

K. GIAKOUMIS

single most important narrative source is the “Chronography of Theophanes the Confessor” (1997), which covers Byzantine history up to 813, followed by the work of Patriarch Nikephoros I of Constantinople (Nikephoros 1990; cf. Alexander 1958). Furthermore, the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council are also an important primary source for the questions and concerns of this first period of iconoclasm in Byzantium (Gouillard 1967; Davis 1983, 186–232; Stauridis 1987). The most prominent theological figure to refute the arguments of iconoclasts both in the first and in the second iconoclastic periods was St Theodore of Studion, whose theological thought (cf. Theodore the Studite 2006) was deeply influenced by the earlier works of St Dionysios the Areopagite and St John of Damascus (Barasch 1995, 185–290; Karlin-Hayter 2002, 154; Dalkos 2006). The homily delivered by Patriarch Photius of Constantinople on the Holy Saturday, 29 March 867 before the Emperors Michael III and Basil I, on the occasion of the presentation of the great mosaic with the image of the Theotokos and Christ at the eastern apse of the cathedral of St Sophia (Mango 1958, 279–296), though almost a quarter of a century off from the 843 restoration of the veneration of icons, is a masterpiece of public theological rhetoric on issues debated throughout the iconoclastic altercations in Byzantium. On the events of the two major iconoclastic periods, from a historiographical genre perspective, one is to refer to the Brief Chronicle (de Muralto 1863) of George the Monk (842–867), a work dated 843–845 (Afinogenov 1999), as well as to Books 15 and 16 of Ioannis Zonaras’ Chronicle (Zonaras 1864, Book 15; 1887, Book 16). One is also to discern diverse theological aspects of the debate intertwined with daily practices, folklore, philosophy, popular feeling and emotions in hagiographical sources of both the first and the second iconoclastic periods. The arduous task of taming the vast critical literature on the subject (Ševčenko 1977; cf. Brubaker and Haldon 2001, 199–232) has revealed a number of hagiographical texts of several saints of the period, their vast majority appertaining to the iconophiles, yet, two or three vitae belonging to saints with iconoclast or, at least, non-iconophile proclivities. Deep insights on the critical aspects of each one’s life, works, praises (enkomia) and texts associated with them, however, are clearly not in the scope of this chapter. 3.3  Context A combination of external threats by rising international powers claiming a share of Byzantium’s glamor with stiff internal strife created conditions of introversion and introspection throughout the period of iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium, thereby favoring the rise of metaphysical quests and divine retribution theories. From the end of the seventh century until the middle of the ninth century, the Byzantine empire had to counter various threats originating from regions close to its borders: from the east by Arabs (Herrin 1977, 15; Bryer and Herrin 1977, 178–179; Haldon 1997, 48–91; Brubaker and Haldon 2001, passim; Karlin-Hayter 2002, 135–136), from north-east by Bulgars (Hupchik 2017, 47–148), from north by Avars and Slavs (Haldon 1997, 33,

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

59

45–48 and passim; Brubaker and Haldon 2001, 253–254) and from the west by Lombards. Such external threats would not have been so dilapidating for Byzantium if they were not accompanied by domestic strife. Phenomena like poor leadership, the engagement of populist policies for petty power gains by many emperors, especially of the pre-iconoclastic period, and the subsequent polarization of the Byzantine society, particularly in the course of the first Byzantine iconoclasm, resulted in a decline of the culture of compromise and ideological synthesis. These, combined with a rather inefficient central government and weakened institutions, caused, at times, a decisive weakening of the Empire. In conclusion, the explosive mixture of domestic uneasiness and external threats created conditions of considerable insecurity for the Byzantine state, which favored scapegoating and the rise of voices attributing the political situation to divine retributions for alleged dogmatic deviations. 3.4   The Events in Their Theological and Ideological Background In this backstage, the question of the use of images in the worship of God became the epicenter of the theological debate. The principal objections of the iconoclasts were that the veneration of icons was idolatrous or resulted in multiple veneration, that the circumscription of Christ is a diminution of God through His depiction in perishable material and that the image can never be a symbol of the sort that the Holy Cross is, on account of what iconoclasts perceived as impossibility of identification of the prototype with the image, thereby leaving only the Holy Eucharist as the sole permissible image of Christ (Dalkos 2006, 25 and 31). To these objections, the principal refutation can be summarized in the words of St Theodore of Studion (the Studite) that “every image does not portray the nature, but the hypostasis of the depicted”, considering that an icon has no hypostasis (Dalkos 2006, 32). When Leo III the Isaurian, the first iconoclastic emperor, came into power in 717, he was perfectly aware of the situation in the eastern borders of his empire, which was heavily influenced by Origenistic Christological ideas of all sorts (Florovsky 1950, 86–87). Leo III was from the eastern provinces and, as a speaker of Arabic, he could directly appreciate the sensitivities of Jewish and Muslim populations in or nearby his home territory predicating aniconic art and considering the veneration of images as idolatry, especially when witnessing people “falling down and worshipping images” (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 157; cf. Deuteronomy 5:9; cf. Vasiliev 1956; Codoñer 2013, 137–140; Sahner 2017). Hence, in 726 (or 730) Leo III gives an order of major symbolical significance, the destruction of the icon of Christ Chalkites which once stood on the Brazen House (Chalke) of the Great Palace, the most prominent artwork placed there (cf. Mango 1959). The subsequent mob action of the iconophiles escalated to the brink of a rebellion suppressed in 727. Three years later, the saintly patriarch Germanos I of Constantinople, an iconophile eunuch, was deposed (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 155) and replaced by Anastasios, who had no

60 

K. GIAKOUMIS

hesitation or remorse to follow the iconoclast policies of the emperor. At the same year (730), Leo III issued an iconoclastic edict culminating a number of similar decisions made since 728. Although Leo III managed to repel the Arab threat out of Constantinople and stabilize its state through reform, not only did he not invest similar efforts to appease the iconoclastic altercation, but he rather polarized the Byzantine society. His successor, Constantine V, his son (741–775), furthered his father’s policies and cemented them by uplifting iconoclasm into a matter of theological discourse. Claiming that image-making was heretical as a practice in its attempt to circumscribe the divine nature, Constantine V organized the Council at Hieria (754), the first of the two known iconoclast Councils, in which the making and veneration of icons was dubbed as a heresy (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 157–158; Dalkos 2006, 33, 37–38). Already since Leo III’s rule, imperial iconoclast policies were enforced with coercion, the persecution of iconophiles, however, intensified from 762 to 768, although primarily on political grounds as exemplified in the case of St Stephen the Younger (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 157–158). The Council at Hieria was not a wholesale rejection of all art forms (Florovsky 1950, 92–93), but rather a condemnation of images on account of the full sensory mobilization they prompted, as I aspire to demonstrate in the last unit of this chapter. As an ordainment of the Council of Hieria stipulated, no one in charge of a church or pious institution shall venture, under pretext of destroying the error in regard to images, to lay his hands on the holy vessels in order to have them altered, because they are adorned with figures, … [as well as on] the vestments of churches, cloths, and all that it dedicated to divine service. (cited in Bogdanović 2020, 201)

The absence of black-and-white reasoning of the Council of Hieria has been interpreted as an attempt of the Synod to compromise between imperial orders and the consciousness of its members (Dalkos 2006, 33–38). With this in mind, one can appreciate why, of all images, iconoclasts would only accept those of the Holy Eucharist (Gero 1981, 467). By extension, it has also been argued that architectural elements portraying the Holy Eucharist were preserved precisely because they can be considered to be an “icon” (Bogdanović 2020). As of 780, in the course of the rule of co-empress Eirini the Athenian (r. 780–802), later recognized as a saint, who ruled intermittently with her son Constantine VI, the development of the iconomach controversy turned to another direction. Initially, the iconoclast Patriarch Paul IV (780–784) was forced to abdicate and was replaced by the iconophile Patriarch Tarasios, later also proclaimed a saint, who prepared for the Seventh Ecumenical Council, alternatively known as Nicaea II Council, in 787. This restored the veneration of icons, which had only temporarily been restored between June 741 and November 742 under the usurper Artavasdos, refuted the theological treatises of iconoclasts utilizing the theological capital of St Dionysios the

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

61

Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius) and of St John of Damascus (d. 749), whose writings set the foundations for the restoration of icons and the subsequent iconophile theological treatises that were to emerge in the course of the lull between the first and the second iconoclast disputes (787–ca. 815), the second iconomachy and the period from 843, the second restoration of icons, thereafter. Theological refutations of iconoclasm started well before the Seventh Ecumenical Council with St John of Damascus (ca. 675–ca. 749), whose teachings became the basis of the Synod’s works. Icons “reveal what is distant, or invisible or to come”, wrote he, thereby manifesting the divine presence. The distinction between the image and its prototype would henceforth become key in subsequent theological thought (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 157; Ivanović 2020, 82; cf. Stauridis 1987, 30). Two other major theological scholarly saints also became the basis of the Nicaean II Council: St Dionysios the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius) and St Maximos the Confessor (Florovsky 1950, 86, 90–91). Dionysios’ thought on the anagogical function of images and the property of symbols to provide a material and sensible support to the knowledge of the immaterial and invisible reality (Mainoldi 2020, 6; Vlad 2017; Tavolaro 2020, 42) became essential parts of Orthodox Christian aesthetics. In addition, his distinction of God’s transcendence (being absolutely unknowable) and immanence (being ubiquitous and all-pervading) through His descent to humanity for the humankind’s ascent buttressed medieval Christian visual culture and prompted the veneration of icons, as well as the developmental arrangement of ecclesiastical architecture. In his gnosiology, cognition does occur not only through human “noetic” functions but also through the senses (Ivanović 2020, 77–81). Dionysios’ “image” does not describe some kind of shadowy imitation of the ideal, but rather has an ontological value. His disinterest in artistic aspects of images is justified: in view of the anagogical function of icons, their purpose is not aesthetic and artistic pleasure, but the revelation of hidden, transcendent beauty, as a sign of God’s will to facilitate human perception of the revelation (Ivanović 2020, 77–81). The Second Nicene Council (787), for instance, incorporated such views to determine what constituted an icon. It highlighted that icons are “just as the figure of the precious and life-giving Cross [and] also the venerable and holy images, as well in painting and mosaic as of other fit materials” (Stauridis 1987, 30), and that icons should be set forth in the holy churches of God, and on the sacred vessels and on the vestments and on hangings and in pictures both in houses and by the wayside, to wit, the figure of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, of our spotless Lady, the Mother of God, of the honourable Angels, of all Saints and of all pious people (Stauridis 1987, 30; Bogdanović 2020, 200). Icons were thus viewed as sacred images (op. cit., 201), thereby encapsulating what St John of Damascus had already seen into the core of the debate: the problem of the Scripture and pictorial representation, resolving it by

62 

K. GIAKOUMIS

considering the Word Itself as “an Image” (Florovsky 1950, 92) and stipulating that, as was also reflected in the Seventh Ecumenical Council, “the honour of the icon is directed to the prototype and who venerates the icon venerates the hypostasis circumscribed therein” (Stauridis 1987, 30). It seems that both the pursuit of iconoclast policies in the period from 780 to 787 and the restoration of icons on that year were mostly based on political decisions of the imperial elite, rather than the maturation of some sort of social and theological consensus. While the “iconic” image of Christ on the Brazen House of the Great Palace was gloriously restored not too long after the Nicaea II Council, even within the iconophile faction, the figure and teaching of St Theodore the Studite would rather divide different iconophile tendencies. In 806 the saintly Patriarch Nikephoros I, an iconophile with anti-Studite convictions, succeeds Tarasios’ patriarchal throne and remains until 815, while in 811 the pro-Studite emperor Michael I Rhangabes (811–813) takes over the imperial throne from emperor Nikephoros I (802–811). In 814, a year after the rise on the imperial throne of the iconoclast emperor Leo V, of Armenian descent, the icon of Christ on the Brazen House of the Great Palace was once again removed and replaced by a cross. As the fragile lull had been abruptly interrupted, the second iconoclast dispute in Byzantium started. This second iconoclast dispute in Byzantium lasted less than thirty years. In 815, the new iconoclast Patriarch Theodotos Melissenos Kassiteras gets elevated into the patriarchal throne, and on the same year, he organizes another iconoclast Council in St Sophia, which issued a new iconoclast edict. Its definition (Horos) remained in force until the end of the reign of the last iconoclast Emperor, Theophilos (829–842), and the patriarchy of the last iconoclast Patriarch, John VII, the Grammarian (in office: 837–843), the Emperor’s personal tutor. Although the second iconoclastic dispute in Byzantium was virtually on the same issues as the first, the debate was significantly more sober and subtle. Though not nominally, the second iconoclast debate introduced the concept of secular art, emphasized and further elaborated the interdependency of the prototype and its material image drawing parallels with the material body and its shadow, matters that were previously raised by St John of Damascus and were thereafter taken up by the Seventh Ecumenical Council. As mentioned, the authoritative theological figure of St Theodore the Studite is now leading the iconophile refutations of iconoclastic teachings. In his understanding, the shadow dwells in the body; hence, shadows originating from a holy body can work miracles (Barasch 1995, 266–271; cf. Erisman 2017). As the defenders of icons stipulated, the image is an object of a dialectical character that distinguished between types and components of images. The first of these distinctions is between what can be understood as a “mental image” (morphe) and the material icons, with their traceable shapes and discernible colors (schemata). The second distinction is between the “pure form” from any particular realization in a concrete work or vision, for whose explanation he engaged the example of a seal, whose multiple impressions on wax are reflections of the original.

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

63

He thus explicated that is possible to have many icons referring to one name and one form (op. cit., 270–276).

4  Iconoclasm in Visual Arts As has already been mentioned, the iconoclastic movement was neither inartistic nor entirely against visual culture. While it would have been impossible for such a major dispute not to leave any traces in arts and, indeed, iconoclasts rejected the representations of Christ, the Mother of God, the saints and biblical events, they actively promoted artistic forms in all media in both religious and secular setting (Barasch 1995, 265). As has been shown (Cormack 1977, 38–41; Cormack 2008, 752), the “breaking” of icons or even the complete banning of icon painting was more rumored than practiced, especially outside the capital center, as evidenced by the surviving examples of figurative art from the period. During the second iconoclasm, even icons of saints were available for veneration, while images high up in buildings were permitted, a concession pointing that iconoclasm was losing ground in the capital (op. cit., 41). The most usual pattern of change was the replacement of figural representations of Christ, the Virgin, saints or events described in the Gospel by crosses. Leo III, for instance, after removing the icon of Christ from the Brazen House of the Great Palace in Constantinople, replaced it with a cross (Moorhead 1985, 165–166). Similar examples one can find in the overlaying by crosses of the mosaics of the Holy Theotokos with the Child in the church of the Dormition of the Virgin in Nicaea, St. Eirene in Constantinople (Belting 1994, 160–161) (Fig. 1), where in the process of restoration of the old church which was destroyed by an earthquake in 740, the apse mosaic of the Virgin was not repeated after the end of the controversy, St Sophia in Thessaloniki and elsewhere (Cormack 1977; Moorhead 1985) (Fig. 2). It should be noted, however, that neither the tendency to replace figural art with crosses nor the prevalence of the cross as a decorative pattern in churches was limited to the iconoclasm period and iconoclasts. The figure of Christ in coinage had not been seen since the reign of Justinian II (685–695 and 705–711), that is, before the outbreak of iconoclasm, and only reappeared in the early ninth century during the reign of Theophilos or shortly thereafter, under the regency of his son, Michael III (Vrij 2016, 132, 244). In the Middle Eastern provinces of the empire, perhaps under restrictions imposed by Islamic rulers or the Jewish urban milieu, iconic images were excised and their gaps were often patched with crosses (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 154–155). In the church of St Sophia in Constantinople, there are many aniconic decorations consisting primarily in crosses dating from the time of Justinian I, thereby antedating iconoclasm (Teteriatnikov 1998, 18). Hence, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual extent of modification that this church (Cormack 2008, 751–752) and others underwent, in order to assess the accuracy of iconophile claims of artistic destruction. Three illuminated Psalters dating shortly after the 843 restoration of icons, produced under the influence of the Patriarchate at St Sophia, provide the

64 

K. GIAKOUMIS

Fig. 2  Unknown, Cross overlaying the Holy Theotokos with the Child, mosaic, ca. 730 A.D., apse. St. Eirene, Constantinople (in public domain)

most palpable exemplars of visual polemics (Corrigan 1992) manipulating visual imagery to accommodate iconophile doctrinal, political, social and ideological convictions. All three Psalter manuscripts are thought to be loosely following a common model (Walter 1987, 217–222) and are called “marginal”, on account of the multitude of marginal images they contain illustrating Old and New Testament scenes directly or indirectly, yet, always liturgically (Walter 1986; Evangelatou 2007) related to the Psalmic verses of the texts they are adjacent to. The manuscripts in consideration are Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Cod. Ger. 20 (Dufrenne 1966, 40–46, plates 34–46), believed to be the first of these manuscripts (Walter 1987, 217–222); State Historical Museum, Moscow, Cod. 129, Chludov Psalter (Ščepkina 1977) and Pantokrator

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

65

Fig. 3  Unknown, John VII, the Grammarian Whitewashing Jesus’ Face, shortly after 843 A.D., manuscript illumination, f. 67, Chloudov Psalter. State Historical Museum, Moscow, Cod. 129 (in public domain)

Monastery, Mount Athos, Cod. 61 (Dufrenne 1966, 7–37, plates 1–33; Pelekanidis et al. 1979, 265–280, plates 180–237; Anderson 1994, 1998). The most fascinating—and relevant—aspect of their imagery to the study of image theory, especially in the illustrations of the Chloudov Psalter, is the way in which they relate biblical events with contemporary politics in the context of the iconoclast altercations. I shall delve into a single, rather well-studied case-­ study from the Chloudov Psalter, State Historical Museum, Moscow, Cod. 129, f. 67r (Fig. 3), which, however, I shall integrate in the context of image theory. The folio contains Psalm 68’s verses 20–27  (after the Septuagint version; 69:20–27 in the Masoretic version):

66 

K. GIAKOUMIS

[Thou hast known my reproach,] and my shame, and my dishonour: mine adversaries are all before thee. 21Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. 22They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. 23Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap. 24Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their loins continually to shake. 25Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them. 26 Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their tents. 27For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten; [and they talk] to the grief of those whom thou hast wounded. 20

Psalm 68 relates to Christ’s passion. It is included in the readings of the Black Thursday, Black Friday and the Holy Saturday. Intertextual references to verse 22 are included in the description of an episode of Christ’s Crucifixion mentioned, with slight variations, by all four evangelists, Matthew (27:34, 48), Mark (15:23, 36), Luke (23:36) and John (19:28–30). This verse was further intensified by an illumination at the right margin of the folio, visually confronting another illustration at the folio’s bottom part, all of which are related to the textual interpretation of the passage. In this first of these illuminations, Christ appears outstretched on the Cross, his head leaning rightward, an indication of his death. Blood oozes from his nail wounds, as well as his right flank, pierced by a soldier named Longinus, after the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus (Elliott 1993, 184; cf. the inscription of the Crucifixion of the Rabbula Gospel). Stephanos (or Stephaton or Steven, cf. Schiller 1972, 93–94; Brubaker 1989, 38), another soldier at the bottom right side of the cross, is lifting a reed with a sponge directing it at the face of Jesus, a visual reference to the torture described in Matthew (27:48, “And straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink”), directly related to verse 22, an event that occurred shortly before Jesus’ death intensifying thirst, pain and agony, thereby accelerating His death. The jar at the base of the Cross is thus the container of the vinegar and/or gall referred to in John’s gospel (19:29) or perhaps water of gall, if one relates this detail with two references by Jeremiah (8:14, “For the LORD our God has … given us water of gall to drink” and 9:15 “Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will … give them water of gall to drink”). Though not unusual as an iconographic convention, the amalgamation of an event shortly before Christ’s death on the cross (the giving of vinegar) with another event after his death (the piercing of his flank) is not casual and is intended to intensify the suggestive meaning of the second illumination at the folio’s bottom. In support thereof, one can quote not only the texts associated with both illuminations but also formal iconographic similarities. I shall begin with the latter. In the second illumination one can see two clerics at the left rendered in caricature, standing before an icon of Christ in a medallion, placed at their right and above them, very close to the Holy Cross’ basement. The

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

67

younger of them, in the front, is presented unkempt, facing the viewer and turning rightwards in a semi-profile pose. He holds a reed with a sponge at its edge and directs it toward the medallion of Christ’s icon in an attempt to wash it out with water and lime, as the inscription informs us. On the grounds of iconographic and stylistic similarities to the identified figure on the illumination on f. 35v, this figure is identified with the iconoclast Patriarch John VII, the Grammarian. The figure at his back belongs to an elderly bishop, another iconoclast, who is passively attending the whitewashing of Jesus’ face. Both of them are inscribed as “iconomachs” (Gk. εικονομάχοι) at their right. The visual parallel is obvious: Patriarch John VII insults Jesus and His human nature in the same fashion as Stephanos dishonored Jesus at the time of His death. From a perceptive standpoint, the viewers were incited to feed similarly negative feelings about John VII, as they would for Stephanos, Christ’s torturer, or the soldiers of the Holy Sepulcher, as deniers of Christ’s Resurrection (Giakoumis 2009). For those who would not figure this parallel outrightly from imagery, the text’s complementarity to imagery (cf. Giakoumis 2017) would leave no doubt regarding to the parallel and its intention. The comparative table below is indicative of the intertextuality between verse two of the Psalmic text and the inscription at the left of the two iconoclast prelates: καὶ ἔδωκαν εἰς τὸ βρῶμά μου χολὴν καὶ εἰς τὴν δίψαν μου ἐπότισάν με ὄξος They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. Psalm 68:22 (Psalm 69:21 in the Masoretic version)

Κ(αὶ) ουτοι μη|2ξαντες ὕδωρ |3 κ(αὶ) ἄσβεσ|4τον ἐπι |5 το πρό|6σωπον And they mingled water and lime over the face State Historical Museum, Moscow, Cod. 129, Chludov Psalter, f. 67r

The inscription on the psalter is perhaps more closely related to the biblical text quoted above relating the offering of gall and vinegar to Jesus. This illustration, as well as many others in the very manuscript and others, would also serve as visual statement of the relation of the image, as represented in the medallion, and its Prototype, displayed in the scene of the Crucifixion. The virtual paradox of an image’s ontology being perceived as another, standardized image will be treated in the next and final section, contextualizing the iconoclastic disputes in Byzantium, into image theory and studies.

5  Iconomachy and Image Studies Iconomachy has been interpreted as a movement toward abstraction (Karalis 2012); yet, the controversy was much more complex in matters related to image theory and studies, as it touched the relations between visibility and materiality and their role as means to attain spirituality through anagogy. The importance of sight and its primacy for sensory experiences is already understood and debated in ancient philosophy (Florovsky 1950; Elsner 2012; Anagnostopoulos 2013; Dalkos 2016; Erismann 2016). After Resurrection,

68 

K. GIAKOUMIS

Christ appeared before His disciples, yet Thomas did not initially believe in his eyes and, in his incredulity, he requested that he touches Christ’s stigmata. Upon his recognition of Jesus, Christ utilized the occasion to address his disciplines in these words: “blessed are they that have not seen [my emphasis], and yet have believed” (John 20:29). Although Thomas had the opportunity to engage other senses beyond sight to believe, Christ in these words acknowledges the value of seeing in believing and passes on to his disciples the legacy of associating sight with record and truth (“And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true”, John 19:35). Although imagery was viewed in suspicion already since the early Christian Church, on account of its break away from the Jewish tradition, it continued being practiced and used in church life (Karlin-Hayter 2002, 154–156). The use of icons toward the latter half of the sixth century, however, would go beyond the mere embarrassment of Jews and Muslims, as they were reported to have been the object of excessive veneration, at the fringes of worship, as in the case of an icon reportedly made godparent to a child (op. cit., 156). Still, the issues raised in the course of the iconoclast disputes in Byzantium were far-­ reaching and touched upon a number of fundamental issues related to modern quests in image theory and studies. The first of these issues relates to the ontological presumptions of pictorial experience, that is, what is at the core of the way toward a general image theory (Purgar 2019, 17). The ontological presumptions of the iconophiles were that every material body can operate like a prototype bearing a representationable hypostasis. The representation of the likeness of God was grounded on the fact of the incarnation of Jesus, which provided a visible and effable face and body to the invisible and ineffable. Over more than a century of dispute in the period of the iconoclasm, Byzantine theology concluded that the veneration of icons does not constitute idolatry insomuch as they are reflections of the hypostasis of the prototype and is thus permissible on account of their anagogical function. The ontological Orthodox Christian theological distinction between icons representing real creatures, persons or facts and idols representing imaginary creatures and unreal persons or facts is also interesting in its presumption that only real creatures can have shadows and reflections. The idea was taken up in such folk stock as Dracula tales, after which ‘demons’ of the sort, like vampires, at the absence of a hypostasis cast no shadow, have no reflection in a mirror and can therefore not be captured in photography. The lore of such beliefs was utilized by cinematography in such films as Dracula (1931), Son of Dracula (1943), Blacula (1972), and so on. Second, since iconoclasm, icons in Byzantium, through the liturgical life to which they were integrated, were standardized as products of technologies of production and perception that would trigger cultural memories. In her pivotal study on senses and sensibility in Byzantium, Liz James (2004) has convincingly shown how the veneration of images in Byzantium would sensually trigger cultural memory by stimulating all human senses. To show her case, James discussed the inauguration of the famous Virgin and Child mosaic at the apse

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

69

of St Sophia, dedicated on Holy Saturday, 29 March 867, a seminal event in the history of post-iconoclasm ecclesiastical art. Patriarch Photius’ homily upon the occasion (Mango 1958, 279–296) would utilize sight (of the mosaic), hearing (of the music performed by the cantors at the start of the patriarch’s homily and of the homily itself), touch (of the veneration of icons), smell (of the incense) and taste (of the artoklasia breads, if such a service was held on the occasion, or of the memory of Holy Communion partaken in the church). The utilization of images in preaching and homiletics in this and in other occasions thereafter (cf. Giakoumis 2017b) seems to empirically recognize the function of images as means of sensory and mental intensity (cf. Purgar 2019, 19–20). The property of icons to trigger a range of sensual experiences and the centrality of the body in the experience of faith would appear too carnal and mundane for iconoclasts to come to grips with. A third issue in modern quests of image theory and studies which iconoclasm touched upon was precisely the programmatic prompting of cultural memories through images and imagery (cf. James 2004, 532). By integrating images into a fully fledged sensual liturgical experience, the iconophiles had solved a basic concern in image science: how to avoid the multiplicity of understandings of an image, as each and every individual comprehends images in a manner commensurate to personal experiences. The strict adherence of icon-­ making to standardized ekphraseis was also intended to provide a homogeneity in Christian imagery necessary for images to become a communication tool throughout the Byzantine territory. Icons thus united what their makers willed to represent with what their viewers could see. By questioning whether the representation of Christ in icons is Christ Himself, or the representation of Christ, the iconoclastic controversy in Byzantium raised a fourth issue in modern image science debates: the ontological nature of images. We have seen above that iconophiles believed that shadows and reflections dwell in the body, thereby giving them the attributes of the body. Hence, in their views, icons and what is represented in them related to each other as a seal relates to its impression. Such views appear to take a stance in the profoundly modernist debate on whether or not the image remains an experience of a difference from reality (cf. Purgar 2019, 18–19). For the post-iconoclasm Byzantines, images, by arousing layers of cultural memory, were reality. As Christ’s hypostasis is inseparable from its Prototype, an icon of Christ was instantly recognized as such by inference to other icons of Christ, with their distinct morphe and schema. Thus, the world of Byzantine religious life merged with image contents, thereby amalgamating what are seen as utmost limits, human and non-human, or, otherwise, human and pictorial.

References Afinogenov, Dmitry. 1999. “The Date of Georgios Monachos Reconsidered”. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 92 (2): 437–447. https://doi.org/10.1515/ byzs.1999.92.2.437. [Accessed 2 May 2020].

70 

K. GIAKOUMIS

Ahrweiler, Hélène. 1977. “The Geography of the Iconoclast World”. In: Iconoclasm. Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975. Ed. by A. Bryer & J. Herrin. Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. Alexakis, Alexander.  1993. “Stephen of Bostra. Fragmenta contra Iudaeos” (CPG 7790). Jahrbuck der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, 43: 45–60. Alexander, Paul J. 1958. The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alhassen, Leyla Ozgur. 2019. “Islam and Iconoclasm Ibrāhı ̄m and the Destruction of Idols in the Qurʾān”. Religion and the Arts, 23 (3): 195–216. https://doi.org/1 0.1163/15685292-­02303001. Anagnostopoulos, Thalia. 2013. “Aristotle and Byzantine Iconoclasm”. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 53: 763–790. Anderson, Jeffrey C. 1994. “The Palimpsest Psalter, Pantokrator Cod. 61: Its Content and Relationship to the Bristol Psalter”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 48: 199–220. Anderson, Jeffrey C. 1998. “Further Prolegomena to a Study of the Pantokrator Psalter: An Unpublished Miniature, Some Restored Losses, and Observations on the Relationship with the Chludov Psalter and Paris Fragment”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 52: 305–321. Aron-Beller, Katherine. 2017. “Byzantine Tales of Jewish Image Desecration: Tracing a Narrative”. Jewish Culture and History. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1462169X.2017.1326367. Barasch, Moshe. 1995. Icon. Studies in the History of an Idea. New York and London: New York University Press. Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Blacula. 1972. [film] Universal City, CA: William Crain. Boeck, Elena N. 2015. “Iconoclasm as Narrative Experiment: Religion, Politics, and Memory”. In:  Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316084472.007. Bogdanović, Jelena. 2020. “Controversies Intertwined: Architecture as Icon Examined through the Lenses of the Byzantine Iconoclastic Debates”. In: Transforming Sacred Spaces. New Approaches to Byzantine Ecclesiastical Architecture from the Transitional Period. Proceedings of the International Colloquium held at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, May 2014. Ed. by S. Feist. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. Brown, Peter 1973. “A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy”. The English Historical Review, 346: 1–34. Brubaker, Leslie. 1989. “Byzantine Art in the Ninth Century: Theory, Practice, and Culture”. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 13: 23–93. Brubaker, Leslie. 1999. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium. Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory pf Naziansus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brubaker Leslie. 2012. Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm. London: Bristol Classical Press. Brubaker Leslie. and Haldon J. 2001. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca. 680–850): The Sources. An Annotated Survey. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brubaker Leslie. and Haldon J. 2015. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680–850): A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

71

Bryer, Anthony and Herrin, Judith (eds.). 1977. Iconoclasm. Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975. Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. Codoñer,  Juan Signes. 2013. “Melkites and Icon Worship during the Iconoclastic Period”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 67: 135–187. Codoñer, Juan Signes. 2014. The Emperor Theophilos and the East, 829–842. Court and Frontier in Byzantium during the Last Phase of Iconoclasm. Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Cormack Robin. 1977. “The Arts during the Age of Iconoclasm”. In: Iconoclasm. Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975. Ed. by A. Bryer & J. Herrin. Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. Cormack, Robin. 2008. “Art and Iconoclasm”. In: The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. Ed. by  E.  Jeffreys with J.  Haldon and R.  Cormack.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corrigan, Kathleen. 1992. Visual Polemics in the Ninth Century Byzantine Psalters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalkos, Konstantinos I. 2006. “Εισαγωγή”. In: Theodore the Studite, Λόγοι Ἀντιρρητικοὶ κατὰ Εἰκονομάχων καὶ Στίχοι Τινὲς Ἰαμβικοί. Ed. by K.  I. Dalkos, 2nd edition, Athens: Indiktos. Dalkos, Konstantinos I. 2016. Η Αριστοτελική Κατηγορία των «Προς Τι» και η Θεολογία των Εικόνων. Εικονοστάσιον, 7: 59–71. Davis, Leo Donald. 1983. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787). Their History and Theology. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. de Muralto, Eduardus. 1863. Χρονικὸν Σύντομον ἐκ Διαφόρων Χρονογράφων τε καὶ ἐξηγητῶν συλλεγὲς καὶ συντεθὲν ὑπὸ Γεωργίου Μοναχοῦ τοῦ ἐπίκλην Ἁμαρτωλοῦ. Patrologia Graeca 100. Paris: J.-P. Migne. Dracula. 1931. [film] Universal City, CA: Tod Browning. Dufrenne, Susy. 1966. “L’illustration des Psautiers Grecs du Moyen Âge, 1 (Pantokrator 61, Paris grec. 20, British Museum 40731)”, Bibliothèque des Cahiers archéologiques 1. Paris: Klincksieck. Elliott, James Keith. 1993. The Apocryphal New Testament. A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Elsner Jaś. 2012. “Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium”. The Art Bulletin, 94 (3): 368–394. Erismann, Christophe. 2016. “Venerating likeness: Byzantine iconophile thinkers on Aristotelian Relatives and Their Simultaneity”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 24 (3): 405–425. Erismann, Christophe. 2017. “Theodore the Studite and Photius on the Humanity of Christ: A Neglected Byzantine Discussion on Universals in the Time of Iconoclasm”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 71: 175–191. Evangelatou, Maria. 2007. “Liturgy and the Illustration of the Ninth-Century Marginal Psalters”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 63: 59–116. Florovsky, George. 1950. “Origen, Eusebius, and the Iconoclastic Controversy”. Church History, 19 (2): 77–96. Georgiadis, Konstantinos I. 2011. Πηγὲς καὶ Θεολογία τῆς Ζ´ Οἰκουμενικῆς Συνόδου. Ph.D. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Gero, Stephen. 1981. “The True Image of Christ: Eusebius’ Letter to Constantia Reconsidered”. The Journal of Theological Studies, 32 (2): 460–470.

72 

K. GIAKOUMIS

Giakalis, Ambrosios. 2005. Images of the Divine. The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, revised edition. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Giakoumis, Konstantinos. 2009. “The Perception of the Crusader in Late Byzantine and Early Post-Byzantine Ecclesiastical Painting in Epiros”. In: East and West. Essays on Byzantine and Arab Worlds in the Middle Ages. Ed. by  J.P.  Monferrer-Sala, V. Christides, T. Papadopoullos. New Jersey: Gorgias Press. Giakoumis, Konstantinos. 2017. “Textual Visuality and Visual Textuality in Texts Correlated with Artworks. Nektarios Terpos’ Pistis and Last Judgement Scenes from Myzeqe, Central Albania”. In: Texts, Inscriptions, Images. Art Readings. Ed. by E. Moutafov and J. Erdeljan. 1/Old Arts, 2016. Giakoumis Konstantinos. 2017b. “Nektarios Terpos and the Iconographic Programme of Ardenica Monastery”. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 41 (1): 81–102. https://doi.org/10.1017/byz.2016.30. Giulea, Dragoş Andrei. 2015. “Simpliciores, Eruditi, and the Noetic Form of God: Pre-­ Nicene Christology Revisited”. Harvard Theological Review, 108: 263–288. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816015000164. Gouillard, Jean. 1967. “Le Synodikon de L’Orthodoxie: Édition et Commentaire”. Travaux et Mémoires, 2: 1–316. Haldon, John 1997. Byzantium in the Seventh Century. The Transformation of a Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardy, Sam. 2019. Iconoclasm: “Religious and Political Motivations for Destroying Art”. In: The Palgrave Handbook on Art Crime. Ed. by  Hufnagel and D. Chappell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Henry, Patrick. 1976. “What Was the Iconoclastic Controversy about?” Church History, 45 (1): 16–31. Herrin, Judith. 1977. “The Context of Iconoclast Reform”. In: Iconoclasm. Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975. Ed. by  A.  Bryer and J.  Herrin.  Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. Hupchik, Dennis P. 2017. The Bulgarian-Byzantine Wars for Early Medieval Balkan Hegemony. Silver-Lined Skulls and Blinded Armies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ivanović, Filip. 2020. “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Importance of Sensible Things”. In: Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c. 500–900. Ed. by  F.  Dell’Acqua and E.S. Mainoldi. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. James, Liz. 2004. “Senses and Sensibility in Byzantium”. Art History, 27 (4): 522–537. Karalis,  Vrasidas. 2012. “Breaking the Image, Celebrating the Word: Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Tendency to Abstraction”. Literature & Aesthetics, 22 (2): 13–32. Karlin-Hayter, Patricia. 2002. “Iconoclasm”. In: The Oxford History of Byzantium. Ed. by C. Mango. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kriaras, Emmanuel. 1975. ‘Δαίμων’. In: Λεξικό της Μεσαιωνικής Ελληνικής Δημώδους Γραμματείας, 1100–1669, vol. 4, Thessaloniki: Centre for Greek Language. Liddell, Henry G. and Scott, Robert. 2007. Λεξικό της Αρχαίας Ελληνικής Γλώσσας (Επιτομή του Μεγάλου Λεξικού). Athens: Pelekanos. [online] Index Available at: http://www.greek-­language.gr/Resources/ancient_greek/tools/liddell-­scott/ index.html [Accessed 2 May 2020]. Mainoldi, Ernesto Sergio. 2020. “Reassessing the Historico-Doctrinal Background of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Image Theory”. In: Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Visual

  ICONOCLASTIC DISPUTES IN BYZANTIUM 

73

Culture, c. 500–900. Ed. by F.  Dell’Acqua and E.S.  Mainoldi.  Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Mango, Cyril. 1958. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople. English Translation, Introduction and Commentary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mango, Cyril. 1959. The Brazen House: A Study of the Vestibule of the Imperial Palace of Constantinople. København: I kommission hos E. Munksgaard. Moorhead, John. 1985. “Iconoclasm, the Cross and the Imperial Image”. Byzantion, 55 (1): 165–179. Retrieved June 6, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/44170933. Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople. 1990. Short History. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. Noble, Thomas F.  X. 2009. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pelekanidis, Stylianos; Chrestou, Panagiotis; Tsioumi, Chrysanthi, and Kadas, Sotirios. 1979. Θησαυροί τού Αγίου Όρους, Σειρά Α’. Εικονογραφημένα Χειρόγραφα, vol. 3. Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon. Purgar, Krešimir. 2019. Pictorial Appearing  — Image Theory After Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript. Sahner, Christian C. 2017. “The First Iconoclasm in Islam: A New History of the Edict of Yazı ̄d II (AH 104/AD 723)”. Der Islam, 94 (1): 5–56. Shchepkina, Marfa Viacheslavovna.  1977. Miniatiury Khludovskoi Psaltyri. Moscow: Iskustvo. Schiller, Gertrud. 1972. Iconography of Christian Art Trans. by Janet Seligman, vol. 2 (The Passion of Christ). New York: Graphic Society Ltd. Schmemann, Alexander. 1998. For the Life of the World. Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, New York: St’ Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Ševčenko, Ihor. 1977. “Hagiography in the Iconoclast Period”. In: Iconoclasm. Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975. Ed. by  A.  Bryer and J.  Herrin.  Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. Son of Dracula. 1943. [film] Universal City, CA: Robert Siodmak. Spider-Man, Far From Home. 2019. [film] Los Angeles: Jon Watts. Stauridis, Vasileios T. 1987. Η Ζ’ Οικουμενική Σύνοδος, Νίκαια (β΄), 787 (Η περί των Ιερών Εικόνων Έρις—Εικονομαχία). Thessaloniki: Kyriakidis. Tavolaro, Angelo. 2020. “Eikon and Symbolon in the Corpus Dionysiacum: Scriptures and Sacraments as Aesthetic Categories”. In: Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c. 500–900. Ed. by  F.  Dell’Acqua and E.  S. Mainoldi.  Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Teteriatnikov, Natalia B. 1998. Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul: The Fossati Restoration and the Work of the Byzantine Institute. Washington, D.  C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Theodore the Studite. 2006. Λόγοι Ἀντιρρητικοὶ κατὰ Εἰκονομάχων καὶ Στίχοι Τινὲς Ἰαμβικοί. Ed. by Konstantinos I. Dalkos, 2nd edition. Athens: Indiktos. Theophanes the Confessor. 1997. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vasiliev, Alexander Alexandrovich. 1956. “The Iconoclastic Edict of the Caliph Yazid II, A. D. 721”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 9 (10): 23–47. Vlad, Marilena. 2017. “Denys l’Aréopagite et l’Image Divine: Symbole, Empreinte, Statue”. In:  L’icône dans la Pensée et dans l’Art. Constitutions, Contestations,

74 

K. GIAKOUMIS

Réinventions de la Notion d’Image Divine en Contexte Chrétien. Ed. by K. Mitalaité and A. Vasiliu. Tournhout: Brepols. Vrij, Maria Chantal. 2016.  The Numismatic Iconography of the Period of Iconomachy (610–867), Ph.D. University of Birmingham. Walter, Christopher. 1986. “Christological Themes in the Byzantine Marginal Psalters from the Ninth to the Eleventh Century”. Revue des Études Byzantines, 44: 269–287. Walter, Christopher. 1987. “Latter-day Saints and the Image of Christ in the Ninth-­ Century Byzantine Marginal Psalters”. Revue des Études Byzantines, 45: 205–222. Zonaras, Ioannis 1864. Χρονικόν—Annales, Patrologia Graeca 134, Books 1–15. Paris: J.-P. Migne. Zonaras, Ioannis 1887. Χρονικόν—Annales, Patrologia Graeca 135, Books 16–18. Paris: J.-P. Migne.

Perspective, Space, and Camera Obscura in the Renaissance Ian Verstegen

1   Introduction Contemporary digital media are correlated to spatial GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) coordinates. Spatial information is itself knit together according to absolute coordinates, which may be viewed in conformity with the principles of projective geometry. Such a mode of viewing—relatively recent—has now become completely natural to most electronics users. It is natural to assume that such digital technologies, whose algorithms include projective geometrical processing according to a mobile viewpoint, are descended from the history of western art in the Renaissance. But that genealogy is much contested. Renaissance art, particularly in Italy (and later in Northern Europe), pioneered the convincing depiction of space in painting. The refinements of space led to a series of pictorial innovations related to linear perspective or the technique of coordinating space according to a number of (sometimes contradictory) geometrical rules. Later, through refinements of projective geometry in the seventeenth century (Guidobaldo del Monte and Jean-Pierre Nicéron) and finally true projective geometry in the work of Gaspard Monge in the eighteenth century, the fully realized geometrical system was articulated. In the meantime, natural philosophers and then physicists explained the practical application of such geometric principles in the working of a number of instruments like the camera obscura.

I. Verstegen (*) University of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_5

75

76 

I. VERSTEGEN

It is useful to understand the stakes of debates surrounding space and linear perspective. In visual studies, perspective, space and optical devices have been central for describing pictoriality and modernity. In traditional art historical narratives (e.g., Panofsky 1927/1991), modernity is achieved via the adoption of linear perspective. In revisionist accounts, the relation to modernity is maintained, but the valence is reversed. Perspective and a pictorializing viewpoint still create modernity, but that is greeted with suspicion and regarded as an unnatural condition. In the former approach, vision is celebrated as a vehicle of obtaining truths, which link to larger developments of “progress” and modernization, whereas the latter approach tends to be suspicious of vision (Jay 1993) and regards the rewards of visuality as illusory, allowing instrumental control via surveillance. The genealogy already mentioned is contested in a number of predictable ways. First, how can geometrical (i.e., mathematical) concepts be related to painterly (i.e., pictorial) concepts? If Renaissance linear perspective is not a progressive technology, what is its relation to modernity? If it is, what is its role in ushering in modernity? One way of resolving this question is by asking how spatial seeing is related to affective seeing, that is, normal, culturally loaded seeing. That can then lead to a more tractable discussion of pictorial space and linear perspective.

2  The Early Modern Gaze Looking involves subjects and other subjects. Owing to the salience of social cues, there is a great power accorded to vision, whether it is assumed to issue from the subject (extramission) or the other (intromission). Most early modern visual theory took for granted a folk notion, underscored by medieval theory, of a visible species communicated across space and entering the eye (Clark 2007, 9–38). Only the visible species could explain—so it was believed before the corpuscular theory of Descartes—how one might be able to successfully partake in a person or object experience in one’s mind. Therefore, the viewer could be affected by the essence of the person or object beheld. This means that, in general, the gaze was potent and explains attempts to seek or restrict access to it. Iconically and pictorially rendered personages hold aesthetic and historical priority in the ecology of image culture. Images inherit the power accorded to vision, whether in intromissionist or extramissionist form, in transmitting power across space. Pictorially, attempts were made to restrict the access to images as well, withholding their beneficial or malevolent influence. Traditional perspective describes geometric spaces with a point of projection that can be located (monocularly) at the eye of the beholder. If only in a geometric way, physical and therefore ego location is specified relative to a horizon line such that objects of the same size intersect it invariantly (Gibson 1979). In Panofsky’s old view, modern perspective made possible a departure from the curved geometry of the retina and therefore added a new, subjective element. Perspective simultaneously rationalized space but made it subject to a viewer’s

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

77

position; it was an “objectification of the subjective”. Since Panofsky, authors have sought to investigate the relationship between the located space created by perspective and the sense of selfhood or subjectivity that accompanies modernity (Damisch 1993; Bryson 1983). Much discussion of perspective in visual studies was influenced by Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of the basics of beholding. For Lacan, the “gaze” (le regard) that constructs subjectivity is not visual, but a relationship of reflexive completion via the other. The subject is constructed by its external regard, but always imperfectly, instigating a desire for restoration. Lacan’s condition for general subjectivity was simplified and made optical by subsequent writers. Versions of this account was made popular in film studies (particularly the so-­ called “apparatus” theory) and adopted in Anglo-American accounts of painting and space (Bryson 1983). For Bryson (1983), the pictorial gaze was the solidified view that suppressed the “glance” and made its artistic products follow a rhetoric of unproblematic permanence. To paraphrase Émile Benveniste’s comment that the “Olympic” discourse “writes itself”, the similar visual narrative “paints itself”. Linguists call the ways in which a discourse indicates its particular time and place, either within discourse or by gestures, “deixis”. By its disavowal of such deictic reference, Bryson argued that western painting created a harmful aesthetic practice because it created images that claim permanence and deny their human origin. For Bryson, then, the Renaissance initiated a negative practice in the west of making knowledge appear transparent. The origin of such ideas related to “gaze” and “glance”—both literal and metaphoric—was indeed understood in the Renaissance, through the heritage of Arab optics (Lindberg 1976; Frangenberg 1986). Since ibn al-Haytham (“Alhazen”) it was posited that the series of light rays that entered the eye could only be registered at a right angle, so these “glances” had to be certified into an object (a “view”, akin to “gaze”). Nevertheless, the short-circuits between seeing, pictorial order and subjectivity are difficult to confirm, not least the complicity of pictorial construction techniques and attitudes to selfhood and cultural acquisitiveness. Indeed, the role of absent deixis can be questioned in regard to early modern pictures. Small, easel paintings that are portable do seem to eschew pragmatic anchoring with their environment. However, large-scale murals that acknowledge their surroundings via geometry could be construed as deictic. Therefore, it seems that some images are deictic and acknowledge their “utterer”, or pictorial maker. Transparency is removed. Contrary to some borderline cases, we can affirm that most narration (both linguistic and visual) is context-driven, that is, deictic. Those blank forms taken to be so important for all textuality (the pronomials “I”, “you”) or visual art (Bryson’s example (1988) is Raphael’s Sposalizio [Fig. 1]; Damisch uses the “ideal cities”) are actually rather marginal. The gaze, then, begs for a more concrete discussion because it cannot be a general condition of early modern art tied to a harmful, possessive notion of selfhood. Rather, various patterns of looking, glancing and gazing should be investigated for their degrees of access,

78 

I. VERSTEGEN

Fig. 1  Raphael, Spozalizio (The Engagement of Virgin Mary), 1504, oil on roundheaded panel; 170 × 117 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (in public domain)

asymmetry between groups (classes, ethnicities and gender) and overall positional characteristics. Already in Laura Mulvey’s (1975) classic analysis of the scopic regime in film, the literal tie to Lacanian theory was broken and a condition for all subjectivity was concretized for one form of looking, the voyeuristic male gaze in classical Hollywood cinema as reflective of mid-century American society. Similarly, in the early modern period we have cases of looking in culture more generally and then in regards to art. First, there is the basic question of social circulation and access. Most men—and their gazes—circulated freely, but especially aristocratic women had restrictions on their physical movements and, thus, what they could see. In addition to what married women experienced, women in convents experienced varying degrees of cloistering, some never

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

79

entering society again. While the married, genteel woman risked being subjected to the male gaze in public, and was instructed not to return it, the unmarried woman could resist the male gaze by appearing veiled, thereby blocking any gaze directed at her. Habits of looking could thus place women as objects of mostly male looking within the “Renaissance genderscape” (Randolph 2007). The classic case of gendered looking in painting, investigated by Patricia Simons (1992), involves profile portraits of women who literally cannot return the gaze of the viewer, male or female, in contrast to the frontally depicted men. In the fifteenth century, male portraiture constructed a reciprocal exchange between viewer and portrait whereas women were usually the recipients only. This arrangement supported contemporary ideas of men as carriers of the patrilineal line and woman as merely an accompaniment to that patrilineal line. Yet the woman could be permitted the returned gaze if that same looking could be private and kept within the confines of a single home. A portrait of a chaste wife as Venus both likened a woman to a goddess and transmitted her full subjectivity but was not for general consumption. Thus, the gaze could be returned, if less frequently (Snow 1989). Some female artists like Lavinia Fontana portrayed female nudes in the guise of mythology, a particularly transgressive act, which was an exception to the rule of contemporary standards of decorum (Fig. 2).

3   Space In the same way that late medieval painting was concerned with painted personages rather than projections of bodies, artists were also concerned with recognizable places rather than geometric spaces. Space served above all as recognizable settings for holy and civic actions. Nevertheless, the convincing rendering of space (“naturalism”) and especially perspective is indelibly connected to the narrative of western art history and its exceptionalism. It is in the Renaissance, so the traditional story goes, that naturalization of space, and its coherent rationalization, becomes standard features of spatial visualization (Ivins 1938). The conquest of space in the absence of linear perspective in the works of artists like Giotto, however, points to the cultural interest in convincing spatial representation without strict mathematical tools. This fact forms the background of reassessments of painterly methods and technique in the medieval period, leading to the Renaissance. Much medieval practice in both architecture and painting was oriented to empirical lines of sight and the visibility of forms, either in urban spaces or across architectural interiors (Trachtenberg 1997). The Byzantine tradition reveals a developed practice of optical correction, whereby forms were empirically corrected for oblique viewers (Demus 1948; c.f. in sculpture Lakey 2018). The shortcoming of studying medieval space geometrically is shown precisely in oblique forms where geometric projections are not perceived accurately (geometrically parallel lines are not seen as parallel) and instead empirical corrections create different phenomenal experiences of space. In this case, the

80 

I. VERSTEGEN

Fig. 2  Lavinia Fontana, Mars and Venus, 1595, oil on canvas. Fundación Casa de Alba, Madrid (in public domain)

reverse is true: non-parallel lines appear parallel, perhaps partially explaining “inverted” perspective. Turning to the Latin west and the assimilation of optical knowledge from the Arab tradition, the work of Dominique Raynaud (2016) has presented the paradoxical result that some murals—for example, The Recovery of the Wounded Man of Lerida in the Upper Church in Assisi—present a rigorous correct foreshortening of the ceiling only. It is as accurate as anything produced in the fifteenth century. But it was not presented as the surrogate of a projected space; instead, it was introduced to characterize a coffered ceiling and that is all. Therefore, there is evidence of the circulation of such optical ideas without the projective presumption that the geometry underlying vision creates what is seen. After all, the two vanishing points in such cases do not connect to the

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

81

viewer’s eyes in any meaningful way and we are dealing with a borrowed geometry. In Byzantine art, it has been explained that artists and theologians conceived of the church as a kind of pictorial space in which the icon lived, the “image in space” (Demus 1948). Believers approached icons and painted figures as presences merging into their space rather than receding into an illusionistic, pictorial space, as in the Renaissance. Due to Byzantine influence, this approach was found in churches in Italy as well. Therefore, as painting discourse became more sophisticated, discussion did not think in terms of visual elements in a pictorial field but the “composition of bodies” themselves in real space (Puttfarken 2000). Late medieval Italian artists then accomplished much of their reification of holy figures via immersive spaces or life-size figures that apparently co-occupy the viewer’s space. This kind of “gross” presence produced objects as simulacra and the astounding qualities of the art of Giotto and his contemporaries have to be clarified for its type of presence it sought to create—gross or embodied— rather than relational, which was ideally created by perspective. Medieval art sought to make figures present, sometimes with apparently awkward geometric systems, which in retrospect are coherent empirical, but not strictly geometric, procedures (Fig. 3).

4  Perspective Some authors have assumed that linear perspective was known to the ancients (e.g., White 1957); nevertheless, the great majority of scholars deny this. Panofsky held that the ancients indeed utilized the window metaphor but had not developed a formal perspective, assuming the window was the prerequisite. As noted above with the case of The Recovery of the Wounded Man of Lerida, Arab optical knowledge was already introduced into western art in the thirteenth century, quite exactly in painting, but also circulated in manuscript translations. An epochal point in this formalization is the treatise of Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura (1436/1972). A humanist and friend of the leading painters of Florence, Alberti combined some knowledge of optics and geometry with the techniques of painting for his theoretical work. It is significant, however, that many accounts of Alberti’s predecessor— Filippo Brunelleschi—have reduced Brunelleschi’s procedure to a practical one based on surveying (e.g., Kemp 1989). A large number of scholars (e.g., Kemp and Damisch) have doubted that Brunelleschi had a coherent theory of perspective; however, some have accepted that his cooperation with Masaccio for his Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, may have revealed new geometric practices that made the theory of perspective clear. What is most significant is that, as Jehane Kuhn (1990) notes, “Neither in mid-Trecento Siena nor in Florence around 1400 was there an unsolved problem in painting to which Brunelleschi’s invention was the answer”. Such an ecological approach to innovation suggests that with significant representational tools inherited

82 

I. VERSTEGEN

Fig. 3  Saint Francis Master, Legend of St Francis: 5. Renunciation of Wordly Goods, 1297–99, fresco; 270 × 230 cm. Upper Church, San Francis, Assisi (in public domain)

from the fourteenth century, the basis of the new linear perspective would have to be found elsewhere. Most twentieth-century writers took it for granted that the geometry described by the evolving science of optics was identical with that of the painter’s artificial perspective. This meant that developments in painting were simultaneously advances in general projective geometry, and vice versa. It made, especially in Samuel Edgerton’s (2009) work, the development of perspective into an instrument of the now much-qualified “scientific revolution” (Shapin 1996). In that reckoning, a picture was nothing more than the intersection of the visual triangle, rigorously described by geometry. When Alberti likened

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

83

perspective to the view through an “open window” (finestra aperta), it was assumed that the intersection and the picture were one and the same (Fig. 4). This interpretation, however, raises many problems. Most importantly, Alberti’s intention is clearly not to provide a mathematical treatise but one

Fig. 4  Leon Battista Alberti, From De Pictura: a diagram showing perspective lines leading to a vanishing point (up); diagram showing pillars in perspective on a grid (bottom), 1435/1450 (in public domain)

84 

I. VERSTEGEN

oriented to painters. De Pictura represents an applied geometry, one “mixed” between pure theory and application, like astronomy or mechanics. That is why he called it a “more carnal wisdom” (più grassa Minerva) (Alberti 1435/1950); in Latin the terms are “pinguiore … Minerva” (Alberti 1436/1972, 36–37). Beginning with Joel Snyder (1980), the old interpretation of Alberti was challenged, and the way that Alberti described geometry as already pictorial was stressed. It followed that there was a major disjunction between prospettiva— the medieval science of geometry—and artificial perspective. Turning toward image-making itself, the window metaphor has other problems. For one thing, views out of windows are fixed and can be of no consistent interest. If they were, however, no Renaissance artist was ever content to paint an intersection of a real visual pyramid, even one that was selected carefully (as in photography). Invented perspective views in paintings are almost always fictive, invented from the artist’s imagination, and not transcriptive of any real space (Kuhn 1990). For another thing, even if a fictive scene is constructed with apparently rigorous perspective, upon closer examination there are always deviations from true geometry (Raynaud 2016, ch. 2). Put another way, one needed to insert the semiotic act of signification between optical projection and imagining; even an intersection would require an act of re-presentation for the same intersection to serve as a picture (Maynard 2005). In addition to this semiotic critique of the window, one could follow James Elkins (1994) in a more postmodern vein to add that perspective did not condition early modern pictures but in the contemporary criticism was often likened to a rhetorical element added to it, as when the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari noticed “a perspective” (una prospettiva) at the top of Masaccio’s Trinity Fresco. In such a case, windows could be regarded as meta-pictorial devices, scrambling depth signifiers as emblems of humanist wit rather than underscoring a representational function (Stoichita 1997). The accumulation of meta-­ pictorial details ultimately leads in such an account to a breakthrough in epistemology. The celebrated engraving accompanying René Descartes’ Dioptrics (1637) of a man observing the author’s anatomical demonstration of sight and in particular the projection of the refracted image on the retina is interpreted by Stoichita in the most radical way as fully achieved reflexive subjectivity, as “sight watched” (Stoichita 1997, 156). Stoichita’s interpretation is a strong version of linear perspective as embodying extreme reflexive consequences. However, it is probable that contemporaries—and even Descartes himself—did not fully register such epistemological connotations. Practices of manipulating space via frames, doors, windows, mirrors and ambiguity certainly represent examples of enhanced pictorial sophistication betraying an acknowledgment of subjectivity—the constructed nature of perception—but Stoichita seems to come close to imputing full postmodern subjectivity to early modern subjects, which is not generally convincing. More recent work has historicized the idea of the window itself. Anne Friedberg (2006) notes that for Alberti’s treatise on architecture, De architectura, the window is usually taken for granted to be translucent and therefore

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

85

throws up a problem of opacity for any metaphorical understanding of perspective. Therefore, it is merely a “metaphoric trope” (32). More hopeful for connecting Alberti’s window to actual cases of seeing are examples of open windows onto the landscape. For example, in the giardino pensile of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, open-framed windows look out onto the surrounding valley (Blum 2015). Furthermore, such windows were styled not after all’antica architectural elements but rather altarpiece frames of the day, therefore making the experience of viewing the landscape into one that is pictorial. But this may be less the use of a built metaphor (window) onto painting than the other way around, experience with painting influencing the experience of architecture and nature. Both are artificial and making a painting is still not like recording what is seen through a window. Another recent interpretation is that the conflation of view and picture could be fruitful aesthetically, causing the viewer to doubt her access to the image and its revelation (Grave 2009). The ambiguity is not a flaw and purposeful, then. Such an interpretation is a partial acceptance of the novelty of the perspective image but nuanced for fuller cultural connotations. It fits with a tendency of the past couple of decades to connect convincing space to religious belief (Arasse 2010; Carman 2014). Parallel to the late medieval interest in the incarnation of Christ communicated especially through his Passion, the valorization of lifelike presentation of Biblical events to communicate them became popular. In this specific case, the perspective image—in an Annunciation with a vanishing point midway between the announcing Angel and the Virgin Mary—serves to complement the notion of Christ’s incarnation. Just as a geometric space hosting the annunciation is embodied in a new perspective construction, so too the word of God is incarnated in Christ for the salvation of humankind. If the old approach to perspective and rationalization was a complement to the idea of the “disenchantment” of reality (Max Weber), such approaches open the door to a mixture of concerns on the minds of early modern artists employing linear perspective. In the present cultural moment, these could be interpreted purely culturally, to follow the postmodern relativization of science and belief, or else more subtly to see continuity in the religion-laden culture of the medieval and the way it ushered in new technologies, slowly changing their meaning over time. The “religious” interpretation of perspective, then, can simply look more closely at a period like the fifteenth century where ideas were mixed and interconnected. We are left with the question of what to do with the problem of technological progress. It seems that the most recent discussions wish to find a way not to minimize the technical possibilities that mathematical practices like perspective afford because of their clear consequences in the globalized, neoliberal economy that they have undergirded. Bruno Latour and Lev Manovich, in different ways, already in the 1990s found it impossible to judge the uniqueness of the modern age without the machinic consequences of optical technologies. Paul Virilio (1994) in particular insisted within a French philosophical context the

86 

I. VERSTEGEN

necessity of affirming the instrumental effects of evolving optical technologies. For Virilio, optical technologies cannot be divorced from accelerating technologies of speed. In this way, scholars have begun to dismantle the constructionist approach to vision in favor of one that can register the gains and damage of technology. A compromise position is that the scientific ambitions of the west are indeed in the genealogy of later practices but that at the time they did not necessarily directly connect to those same practices (Bousquet 2018). An Italian architectural drawing may include rigorous dimensioning and scale and reproduce the latest military technology in its design, yet might not be sufficient to overcome other rationalizing practices like logistics, supply trains and work organization. For this reason, Ottoman military power could be superior without technical drawings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The geometric practice cannot do anything alone. Against the conflicting things said about perspective, perhaps we might begin to say what Frederic Jameson said of capitalism: it is “at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst” (Jameson 1991, 47). From the other points of view of perspective pictures and the enunciation of subjectivity, we might also sense a conciliatory point of view. Already in 1987 Hubert Damisch (1993) sought to balance the excesses of the apparatus account of the construction of the film viewer and the empiricist tradition of geometric progress via perspective. He argued that traditional art history should try to deal with the speculative claims of perspective by reconsidering Panofsky’s (1927/1991) ideas about perspective as Ernst Cassirer’s “symbolic form”. Perhaps a new theory of perspective and subjectivity can be constructed, completely demolishing all thoughts about the viewer constrained to the centric point, foreign notions of “deictics”, and built back up again on new foundations.

5  Camera Obscura and Other Instruments In his influential treatment of optical science and subjectivity, Jonathan Crary (1990) looked to the role of nineteenth-century instruments in serving as “techniques” constructing a subject. Instruments abound in the early modern period. Examples are Alberti’s grid or velo, Brunelleschi’s surveying rod, or Piero della Francesca’s string method (Veltman 1979; Kemp 1989, 167–220). Not surprisingly, commentators on perspective and early modern space have discussed instruments in different ways. Progressivist accounts of perspective tend to take the results of instrumentation as coterminous of perspective science itself, thereby conflating the strict mathematical rationalization of perspective not only with other artistic techniques (like foreshortening, shading and “chiaroscuro”) but also instruments aiding naturalistic representation (Maynard 2005). James Elkins (1994), on the other hand, noted this very conflation in contemporary treatises and understanding and took this to speak to the early modern incoherence of that which

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

87

went under the name of perspective. Ultimately, for Elkins, perspective is a modern category projected anachronistically into the past. One way to bring resolution to this interpretive dilemma is to argue that just as linear perspective was ideal for the creation of fictive spaces, those instruments were tied to real-world observation. If, as many believe, Brunelleschi’s perspective method was pioneered with the surveyor’s staff (Kemp 1989), it did not yield perspective but recorded optical appearances that could later be subjected to geometricization. Therefore, although such instruments were compatible with linear perspective, they often had ritualized uses that did not underscore those same principles. Instruments, therefore, present an important challenge to linear perspective because they record dimensions, angles and appearances without necessarily subjecting them to a mathematical system (Kuhn 1990). The issue of instruments heightens the question of the relationship of linear perspective to reality. As a purely mathematical principle, it could best be applied to creating fictive spaces, not clarifying existing spaces (which might be irregular anyway). As noted, if linear perspective as elaborated by theorists was a painter’s perspective, then it very well may be that instruments and practices based upon them have more purchase on reality than the mere geometric procedure. This is a curious result. Instead of instruments being adjuncts to geometrical theory (pace Elkins), in this case it is the geometrical theory that is an adjunct to reality-tuned instrumentation. Another instrument of questionable connection to optics is the camera obscura (Fig. 5). The observation of eclipses via pinhole images goes back to the ancient Greeks and Arabs and was known to the Latin west (Steadman 2001, ch. 1). The camera obscura proper, a closed (dark) chamber for viewing the outside world via a pinhole or lens attached to it (inverted and reversed according to optical projection), became a form of entertainment in the sixteenth century. Crucially, its use as a guiding metaphor is debated for Johannes Kepler for theorization of the projection of light into the eye. For some, it provided the missing link to connect the disparate phenomena of optical projection and the structure of the eye; for others, linear perspective via the medieval tradition of optics was enough to theorize the retinal image (Lindberg 1976). The later twentieth century inherited from Marx the idea that the camera obscura was an apparently natural device (German Ideology) that, however, like ideology inverted reality from its material base. This made it an appropriate metaphor for transformed or falsified information, not unlike the views of perspective as misleading presentations of a centered, unproblematic ego position. In any case, Marx and Walter Benjamin after him took for granted a great deal of continuity from the logic of perspective, the camera obscura and on to photography. In a Foucauldian vein, Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of the Observer (1991), resisted Benjamin and saw the camera obscura as a continuation of the logic of perspective. What is different is that Crary wished to strengthen the notion that the mode of knowing suggested by (perspective and) the camera obscura was

88 

I. VERSTEGEN

Fig. 5  Athanasius Kircher, Illustration of “portable” camera obscura in Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbra, 1646 (in public domain)

extremely impersonal, disembodied. This was important for his alternative emphasis placed on the moves toward subjectifying vision in the nineteenth century, when the biological basis of vision was finally embraced and optical effects definitively moved to the subjective sphere. One of Crary’s important exhibits was stereoscopes, which in requiring binocular vision firmly placed the viewpoint in a unique standpoint, and indeed, optical instruments were suggested by Crary to help observers understand the subjective origin of their perceptions. Crary’s book was important for shaking the progressive assumptions of media history, which regarded the camera obscura merely as a stepping stone from perspective to photography. Nevertheless, he also reinforced new progressive assumptions by reinforcing a fundamental break between pre-­ modernity and modernity. In response, it has been corrected that the subject-dependence of sensation was not absent from early modern perspective though it was not dominant (Hatfield and Descartes 2003). Freedberg furthermore argued that the mode of visuality supported by the camera obscura did not simply disappear in the nineteenth century. Although stereoscopes invited the viewer to reflect on her own optical construction of experience, the passive experience of movies was not altogether different from the pre-modern experience of the camera obscura. Therefore, one can say that the camera obscura moved in parallel with perspective theory and painterly practice, without embodying either. To be sure, increasingly in the seventeenth century specialists understood the commonality in its working with optical theory. Yet the camera obscura largely remained entertainment. From the other end, even painters used the camera obscura as

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

89

a complement to painting but not as a new basis. In conclusion, occasionally, early modern instruments developed in tandem with perspective theory, but they also often developed independently. Instruments not only interfaced with the external world, they could also automate results (as in calculations with a sector). Therefore, the practitioner did not need to know or understand the root principle exemplified by the instrument, simply how to record its results and act upon them. Reflection on space and perspective was understood in the past in terms of the “power of images”. This, however, has yielded more recently to its “materiality” (c.f. Hicks 2010). Martin Jay (1993) already noted the denigration of vision in much critical thinking from Lacan to Lyotard. Much of this strain of thought was posed against a simplistic caricature of Descartes and the unproblematic nature of “clear and distinct perceptions” (never mind that these were actually of the intellect—not, as we would understand it today, sense perception). In recent years, such ideas have morphed into a vitalist ontology in which the behavior and connotations of things as opposed to images has become more interesting. Sight is just one of all the senses—especially touch—that informs us of the material world. In this case, space and perspective become relatively unimportant in the order of things. Once the continuity of thought is pointed out, it can nevertheless be seen that the contemporary emphasis on materiality continues to maintain a relationship to the visual as seductive yet false. Here, the discourses of space and perspective are instructive. It should be noted that even if we emphasize material elements of objects—their material or weight—they are still apprehended visually, as perceptual and experiential phenomenon, and not as raw material. In other words, the “material” is really the “expanded perceptual”. The radical unknowability of objects (in Object Oriented Ontology), intended to forestall phenomenal reduction, is actually no different than the fallible knowledge of a visual image. To the degree that the material turn does not present a truly, irreconcilable alternative to prior visual regimes, it requires the kind of reckoning already mentioned in the form of machinic vision (Virilio) and visual subjectivity (Damisch). That is, materiality needs to be understood not as its imagined extreme case, absolute non-visuality and pure materiality (or physicality), but as an inflection of visuality, its expansion into a wider sensory and spatial field still acknowledging the adaptive and historical preeminence of vision. It can safely be said that today the way in which space is regarded is under negotiation within image studies, with the political connotations of either point of view being reconsidered. It is no longer accepted that linear perspective is a clear way to the Scientific Revolution, while at the same time it is no longer accepted without discussion that the Renaissance period eye provides a pacifying and even harmful sense of mastery. The reassessment of “science” coincides with the political questioning of critique and alienation of the cutting edge of Marxist polemics that had been buried in the postmodern turn.

90 

I. VERSTEGEN

References Alberti, Leon Battista. 1435 [1950]. Della Pittura. Firenze: G. C. Sansoni. Alberti, Leon Battista. c. 1436 [1972]. On Painting and on Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua. Ed. and trans. by Cecil Grayson. London: Phaidon. Arasse, Daniel. 2010. L’Annonciation Italienne: Une Histoire De Perspective. Paris: Èditions Hazan. Blum, Gerd. 2015. Fenestra prospectiva. Architektonisch inszenierte Ausblicke: Alberti, Palladio, Agucchi. Berlin: de Gruyter. Bousquet, Antoine. 2018. The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bryson, Norman. 1983. Painting and Vision: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan Press. Bryson, Norman. 1988. “The Gaze in the Expanded Field”. In: Vision and Visuality. Ed. by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press. Carman, Charles. 2014.  Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Clark, Stuart. 2007. Vanities of the Eye. Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Damisch, Hubert. 1993. The Origin of Perspective. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Demus, Ott. 1948. Byzantine Mosaic Decoration. London: Trubner. Edgerton, Samuel. 2009. The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Elkins, James. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Frangenberg, Thomas. 1986. “The Image and the Moving Eye: Jean Pêlerin (Viator) to Guidobaldo del Monte”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 49: 150–171. Friedberg, Anne. 2006. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gibson, J. J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Grave, Johannes. 2009. “Reframing the finestra aperta. Venetian Variations on the Comparison of Picture and Window”. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 72: 49–68. Hatfield, Gary C. and René Descartes. 2003. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations. London: Routledge. Hicks, Dan. 2010. “The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect”. In:  The Oxford Handbook of Material Studies. Ed. by Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ivins, William M. 1938. On the Rationalization of Sight. New York: Da Capo Press Inc. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press Kemp, Martin, 1989. The Science of Art: Optical Themes from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kuhn, Jehane. 1990. “Measured Appearances: Documentation and Design in Early Perspective Drawing”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 53: 114–132.

  PERSPECTIVE, SPACE, AND CAMERA OBSCURA IN THE RENAISSANCE 

91

Lakey, Christopher. 2018. Sculptural Seeing: Relief, Optics, and the Rise of Perspective in Medieval Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lindberg, David. 1976. Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Maynard, Patrick. 2005. Drawing Distinctions: Varieties of Graphic Expression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen, 16: 6–18. Panofsky, Erwin. 1927 [1991]. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Trans. by Christopher Wood. New York: Verso. Puttfarken, Thomas. 2000. The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press. Randolph, Adrian. 2007. “Renaissance Genderscapes”. In: Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women. Ed. by Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. Raynaud, Dominique. 2016. Studies on Binocular Vision. Optics, Vision, and Perspective from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Shapin, Steven. 1996. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Snow, Edward. 1989. “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems”. Representations, 25: 30–41. Simons, Patricia. 1992. “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture”. In: The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. Ed. by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. Boulder: Oxford Westview Press. Steadman, Philip. 2001. Vermeer’s Camera: The Truth behind the Masterpieces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stoichita, Victor. 1997. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-­ Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press. Snyder, Joel. 1980. “Picturing Vision”. Critical Inquiry, 6: 219–46. Trachtenberg, Marvin. 1997. Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Veltman, Kim. 1979. Military Surveying and Topography: The Practical Dimension of Renaissance Linear Perspective. Lisbon: Publicações do Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. Trans. by Julie Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. White, John. 1957. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. London: Faber and Faber.

Immanuel Kant and the Emancipation of the Image Mojca Kuplen

1   Introduction Kant’s aesthetic theory (i.e., theory of aesthetic judgment or taste) has often been invoked when explaining the emergence and our appreciation of modern art, that is, art arising in the period from 1860 to 1970, and includes tendency toward abstraction and rejection of representational qualities (Stallknecht 1968; Greenberg 1982; Cheetham 2001). On the one hand, this is surprising considering that Kant’s theory of art did not represent any radical departure from the standards of representation or mimesis that dominated the art theory and practice of his time. For example, his definition of artistic beauty as a “beautiful representation of a thing” (Kant 2000, 189) and his description of the art of sculpture as being “almost confused with nature”  (Kant 2000, 190) clearly commit him to a representational theory of art, that is, art as a direct representation of the external world. However, Kant’s theory of pure aesthetic value as embedded in his notion of the free harmony and in the idea of a disinterested pleasure due to the purposive form of the object nevertheless represented a substantial change in aesthetic standards of his time and thereby made an important contribution to the development of modern art and the accompanying idea of aesthetic formalism. According to aesthetic formalism, an object can be appreciated (aesthetically) due to its visual form alone independently of the content of the object. Kant explains the aesthetic value of the mere form of an object by means of his notion of the free harmonious play between the cognitive faculties of

M. Kuplen (*) Alfred University, Alfred, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_6

93

94 

M. KUPLEN

imagination and understanding, the same faculties that are also responsible for our ordinary perceptual experience of an object. In short, it is Kant’s view that our ordinary perception is necessitated by the mental activities of imagination, whose function is to synthesize the manifold of intuition in order to bring it into an image, and of the understanding, which unifies this manifold under the concept of the object. For example, we recognize a certain object as a flower by the application of the concept of the flower to the manifold of intuition. Such harmonious activity between the faculty of imagination and understanding is required for our ordinary perceptional experience of an object and is universally communicable, because without it “human beings could not communicate their representations and even cognition itself”  (Kant 2000, 170). Presumably, our aesthetic appreciation is based on such harmonious relation of cognitive powers as well, the difference being that while in ordinary perception harmony between imagination and understanding is constrained by the concept of the understanding, in aesthetic appreciation, no such concepts restricts imagination and thus their harmony is in free play. This relation is merely subjective as it refers only to the mutual relation between cognitive powers in the subject, without its relation to the object and it results in a universally communicable feeling of pleasure alone. This feeling of pleasure is the means by which we come to make aesthetic judgment of the beautiful. Beautiful object exhibits purposiveness without purpose, that is, object has its own aesthetic value or significance as a mere visual appearance, without regard what its purpose or function in the world is. Before looking at the specific terms that Kant uses to defend his idea and furthermore, how it influenced the development of modern art, one must first consider his account of ordinary empirical perception and theory of image formation.

2   Kant’s Theory of Perception and Image Formation Kant explains his theory of perception and image formation in his doctrine of the three-fold synthesis (synthesis of apprehension, synthesis of reproduction and synthesis of recognition) as put forward in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). What he means by the synthesis in the most general sense is “the act of putting various presentations with one another and of comprising their manifoldness in one cognition” (A77/B103). Contrary to the empiricist’s idea, Kant holds a view that in order to perceive an image, the mere receptivity of sense impressions (i.e., sensibility) is not sufficient, and that what is needed is the synthesis of sense impressions, namely to combine together intuitions received through the sensibility into an image. In other words, even though sensibility affords us with the manifold of intuitive representations, these representations are still isolated, separated and indistinguishable from each other in our mind, and in order to have a representation of an image, we must take up these different intuitive representations together as they occur in time and space. He calls the first synthesis the “synthesis of the apprehension in intuition” and it is performed by the faculty of imagination:

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

95

There must therefore exist in us an active faculty for the synthesis of this manifold. To this faculty I give the title, imagination. Its action, when immediately directed upon perceptions, I entitle apprehension. Since imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form of an image, it must previously have taken the impressions up into its activity, that is, it must have apprehended them. (A120)

The function of the synthesis of apprehension is to bring together different intuitive representations received through sensibility into one whole representation. The result of such synthesis of apprehension is the formation of an image. For example, to have an image of a dog, my imagination must gather together different representations of the dog as they occur in time and space, for example, the initial representation of the head, then representation of four legs, fur, tail, barking, and so on, into one holistic representation of the dog from different viewpoints (see also Matherne (2015) for a fine explanation of the image formation in Kant). Yet, the synthesis of apprehension itself is not sufficient for the formation of an image; it must be complemented by the imaginative synthesis of reproduction. As Kant argues, it is not enough to combine the intuitions, but since they occur in time, we must be aware of how each intuition occurs before or after the other. That is, one must remember or keep in mind how each intuition proceeds: If I always lost from my thoughts the preceding presentations (the first part of the line, the preceding parts of the time or the sequentially presented units) and did not reproduce them as I proceeded to the following ones, then there could never arise a whole presentation. (A102)

If I would not be able to keep in mind the succession of intuitions that I have apprehended, then the apprehension would be useless, since I would forget how each representation follows the other. Accordingly, the reproductive power of imagination is necessary for the successful act of apprehension: Even this apprehension of the manifold would, by itself, produce as yet no image and no coherence of impressions, if there did not also exist a subjective basis for summoning up a perception from which the mind has passed to another (and bringing it) over to the subsequent ones—and for thus exhibiting entire series of perceptions. i.e., in addition to apprehension we need a reproductive power of imagination. (A121)

In order to have a complete representation of an object I must remember (reproduce) how each representation that I previously apprehended occurs before the other, together with the occurrence of the present apprehension. The final synthesis is the synthesis of recognition in a concept, which is performed by the faculty of understanding. Kant begins his exposition of this synthesis by saying,

96 

M. KUPLEN

Without the consciousness that what we are thinking is the same as what we thought an instant before, all reproduction in the series of presentations would be futile. For what we are thinking would in the current state be a new presentation, which would not belong at all to the act by which it was to be produced little by little. Hence the manifold of the presentation would never make up a whole, because it would lack the unity that only consciousness can impart to it. (A103)

The unity of the manifold is conveyed by the consciousness which Kant identifies with the concept, and with the understanding, as the faculty of producing concepts. A concept, Kant writes, provides “this one consciousness [that] unites in one presentation what is manifold, intuited little by little, and then also reproduced” (A103). We attain conceptual consciousness when we recognize the synthesized sense impressions as falling under a particular concept. Only when we have applied the concept to the various intuitive representations (e.g., applying concept of a dog to various intuitive representations of a dog that we have apprehended and reproduced) can we attain the consciousness of what it is that we are perceiving (e.g., the image of a dog). However, Kant has a twofold definition of a concept. A concept is not merely that which provides consciousness of what it is that we are perceiving; it also functions as a rule: “A concept, in terms of its form, is always something that is universal and that serves as a rule” (A106). That is, a concept serves as a rule for the synthetic unity of a manifold of intuition: “This unity is impossible, however, unless the intuition can be produced according to a rule” (A105). In other words, a concept is not merely responsible for distinguishing different sense impressions from each other, for example, that dog-intuitions such as perceiving tail, head, four legs all belong together, but also for organizing these dog-intuitions in a specific way. In order to have an image of a dog it is not sufficient only to have an awareness of the content (matter) of the concept (e.g., that a concept of a dog is a set of marks such as animal, four legs, fur, barking, etc.). Rather, what is also required is to organize these sense impressions in a specific way: Recognizing this as a dog implies recognizing that I ought to synthesize my representations in one way rather than other, for example, that I ought to see the tail as belonging with the head and legs rather than with the tree in the background, or that I ought to reproduce prior perceptions of barking, rather than, say, mewing or neighing. Recognizing the applicability of a concept, then, is recognizing a normative rule which governs the activity of my imagination in its reproduction of the manifold. It is because concepts serve in the first instance to specify ways, in which the manifold ought to be synthesized, not just ways in which the manifold is synthesized, that they can be identified with rules for the synthesis of the manifold. (Ginsborg 1997, 51)

Accordingly, the concept prescribes how the synthesis should be carried out and how the discrimination among the sense impressions should proceed. The concept serves as a plan for the synthesis of sensible manifold, determining the

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

97

way we come to construct the image (see also Paton 1965; Pippin 1992; Ewing 1967; Guyer 2006; Matherne 2015). For the opposite view, namely that formation of images can occur prior to conceptual synthesis, see Young (1988), Gibbons (1994) Allison (2004) Rohs (2001) and Hanna (2005). How exactly concepts serve as rules for the synthesis of the sensible manifold, Kant explains by means of his notion of a schema. A schema is a “mediating presentation” that connects concepts with intuitions (A138/B177). It is a result of the productive imagination, representing both sensibility and understanding. Like sensibility, schema is a kind of a sensible presentation, a mental image of some sort, and like understanding it represents unity of the sensible manifold, that is, it has a characteristic of generality or universality. Schema, as Weldon nicely describes it, is “a quasi-concept and a quasi-picture” (1947, 143). A schema has two distinctive features. First, it is a “wavering sketch” (A570/ B598) or a “monogram” (A142/B181), and second, it is a “rule for determining our intuition in accordance with such and such a general concept” (A141/ B180). Accordingly, a schema is a sort of an image and a rule at the same time, that is, a rule for linking a set of sense data with its appropriate concept. For example, Eva Schaper describes schema as a diagram or a blueprint, which prescribes how a certain activity must proceed (Schaper 1992, 307), while Matherne defines it as a “monogram of a concept, i.e., a mental sketch that holistically represents the marks involved in a particular concept” (Matherne 2015, 764). Kant illustrates the function of a schema in the following way: The concept of a dog signifies a rule in accordance with which my imagination can specify the shape of such a four-footed animal in general way, without being restricted to any single particular shape that experience offers me or any possible image that I can exhibit in concreto. (A141/B181)

A concept of a dog specifies general characteristics of a dog involved in a concept, such as being a four-footed animal. A schema, on the other hand, represents an abstract image of the general properties of a dog (such as head, body, four legs, tail, fur in their typical size and shape) and the arrangement of these properties (such as, that the head is attached to the body, the tail to the back side of the body, the legs to the bottom part of the body, etc.). Even though there are different kinds of dogs, they all entail this rule in virtue of which they are recognized as dogs. Kant writes that it is through a schema that “images become possible in the first place” (A142). A concept must always be schematized in order to produce a particular image: “the images must always be connected with the concept only by means of the schema that they designate” (A142/B181). Schema makes possible the perception of an image by determining the apprehension of sensible manifold. Based on the given sensible manifold, a schema selects which properties are to be picked up and combined together. For example, perceiving features such as a tail and four feet will activate the schema animal or more specific schema dog and organize sensible manifold in accordance with this schema (that the features such as head, body,

98 

M. KUPLEN

fur ought to follow, and arrange them in their specific relations). Although Kant formulates both concept and schema in the same way, that is, as being a rule for the determination of intuition, it is in fact the schema that is the rule at work. While a concept is an intellectual representation that involves set of marks common to different instances of the same kind, a schema on the other hand is a “sensible presentation of that concept” (Matherne 2015, 756) that prescribes how the synthesis of the sensible manifold must proceed so that the concept can apply. Robert Pippin nicely describes the relationship between the schema and a concept in the following way: “the imagination gives the concept a figure, a shape, […] a form, a recognizable character by virtue of which correct or incorrect inclusion can be discussed” (Pippin 1992, 298). We come to recognize a particular image when we recognize the universal form (schema) in the manifold of intuition. In sum, the formation of an image proceeds by the synthesis of imagination (apprehension and reproduction), which on the other hand is governed by a schema, that is, the rule for the synthesis of the imagination in accordance with a specific concept. This implies that the concept must precede the synthesis. That is, if schema governs the synthesis of the imagination, the product of which is the image formation and schema itself is conducted in accordance with a certain concept, then this suggests that concepts are required for the image formation. Perception does not begin with some image on which we apply the concept. Rather, this procedure begins with the concept, determining the way we come to construct the image. One will come to perceive the image in a certain way, that is, one will perceive a particular combination of sensible manifold as a dog, for instance. Hence, concepts determine how we will come to perceive the object. We can see that there is a distinction between the two ways that understanding as a faculty of concepts operates in the activity of perceptual cognition. Understanding not merely provides the rule according to which the synthesis is performed, but it also recognizes this rule in the specified concept. The latter act of understanding refers to the explicit judgment of cognition, and it is dependent on the former activity (Longuenesse 2001, 50–63). For example, when one makes an explicit cognitive judgment “X is a dog”, one is explicating the rule inherent in his perception of the dog. To judge that X is a dog, as Paton states: “we are conceiving the general plan or rule which is manifested in the synthesis of imagination” (Paton 1965, 272). Such an interpretation explains why Kant defines the final act of the synthesis as recognition in the concept. The term recognition suggests that we must already have some acquaintance with the thing which is being subsumed under or recognized. Hence, to recognize the manifold in the concept (i.e., to make a cognitive judgment) means to recognize the rule (schema) inherent in the perceptual synthesis.

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

99

3  Aesthetic Perception and the Aesthetic Image of the World We know so far that the product of the synthesis of imagination is an experience of a particular image (say, an image of a dog). This synthesis is made possible by what is given in empirical intuition and apprehended by the imagination, and by the concept, serving as a rule for the synthesis. Thus, in synthesizing the manifold of intuition, imagination is not free; rather, it is constrained or subordinated by concepts of the understanding. Imagination must synthesize the sensible manifold according to the specification of the concept. The form of the object (i.e., combination of sensible manifold) is determined by the concept to some degree. In order to recognize a particular object, say a dog, the imagination must follow the dog-rule, that is, it combines specific features such as a tail, four legs, a head, and so on, as the dog-rule prescribes. Without this cooperation or harmony between the imagination and understanding there would be no perceptual experience of an object. However, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant introduces a possibility of experiencing an image without being related to the concept of the object. What this means is that we can come to apprehend an image not as a particular determination of a concept (e.g., an image of a dog or an image of a flower), but simply as a complex configuration of colors, lines, shapes and forms. Kant explains the possibility of apprehending the mere image of an object with his notion of the free harmonious play between imagination and understanding. Presumably, the imagination has the ability to synthesize (apprehend) the sensible manifold without being governed by any determinate concepts of the understanding, while, however, being in accordance with the general need of the understanding to bring order and unity to the sensible manifold (for the review of different interpretations as to how exactly imagination can reflect on the object freely without being governed by any determinate concepts, see Guyer 2006). The experience of such free (non-conceptual) harmony between imagination and understanding is distinctive in that it is felt through the feeling of pleasure and in making an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful. Kant’s concept of free harmony can be analyzed by breaking it down into two constitutive elements, the free play of imagination and the lawfulness of the understanding. Let me begin with the first one. The notion of the free play of imagination refers to the ability of imagination to conjure up and combine together the sensible manifold without being governed by any conceptual rules. That is to say, the imagination does not need to synthesize the sensible manifold in light of a particular concept (as it is the case in ordinary empirical perception where the imagination is governed by a determinate rule as to how the combination ought to proceed), but is free to synthesize or combine together sensible manifold in different ways. Kant claims that the subject of aesthetic judgment is the mere form of the object, without the consideration of what the object represents. In other words, the subject of aesthetic judgment

100 

M. KUPLEN

is the mere combination of sensible manifold (apprehension), that is not restricted to a particular rule, and it is therefore free as to how it ought to synthesize the manifold. For example, he writes that pleasure in aesthetic judgment “is connected with the mere apprehension (apprehensio) of the form of an object of intuition without a relation of this to a concept for a determinate cognition” (Kant 2000, 76 Kant seems to have a view that what we perceive in aesthetic judgments is the combination of sensible manifold (i.e., form) without this form being conceptually determined, that is, without the empirical content of a specific concept. As he writes, aesthetic judgment relates the representation by which an object is given solely to the subject, and does not bring to our attention any property of the object, but only the purposive form in the determination of the powers of representation that are occupied with it. (Kant 2000, 113)

It is this form alone that carries an aesthetic quality as it is mere apprehension of this form alone that can bring our cognitive faculties in a free harmony that is inherently pleasing. We must first clarify what exactly Kant means by the mere form of the object. On a more straightforward and restrictive view, mere form of the object refers to the synthesized play of sensations (i.e., material qualities of an object) in time and space, without conceptual determination. For example, as Kant writes: “All form of the objects of the senses (of the outer as well as, mediately, the inner) is either shape or play: in the latter case, either play of shapes (in space, mime, and dance), or mere play of sensations (in time)” (Kant 2000, 110). While the mere play of sensations in time refers to the temporal composition of tones (art of music), the play of shapes, on the other hand, denotes the spatial arrangement of lines and figures (i.e., drawing): In painting and sculpture, indeed in all the pictorial arts, in architecture and horticulture insofar as they are fine arts, the drawing is what is essential, in which what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste is not what gratifies in sensation but merely what pleases through its form. (Kant 2000, 110)

According to Kant, mere tones, sounds, colors and textures are mere sensations (Kant 2000, 108) that we passively receive through sensibility and as such they cannot be the subject of pure aesthetic experience. While sensations can be a source of pleasure or displeasure (one of the agreeable or disagreeable), they are not source of the pleasure or displeasure of the beautiful or ugly. On this view, Kant’s notion of the mere form of the object refers to the spatial or temporal configurations of perceptual features such as tones, shapes and lines without any conceptual content, that is, what the object is supposed to be or represent (Uehling 1971; Neville 1974; Berger 2009). However, as pointed out by various Kant’s scholars (Allison 2004, 131–138; Guyer 1977; Rogerson 1986, 156–165), nothing in the account of the free

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

101

harmony determines what kind of features of the manifold are allowed to be apprehended and unified by the imagination and understanding. All that is required for the free harmony to occur is some “arrangement or ordering of sensible content, that is, an organized manifold of some sort, and not an isolated sensation” (Allison 2004, 136). Presumably, this means not merely spatiotemporal manifold such as shape or drawing, but any sort of manifold of intuition, including manifold of colors (Guyer 1977, 205–206), as in Mark Rothko’s paintings, as well as manifold of intellectual or semantic representations (Kuplen 2019) as in narrative art. Kant furthermore distinguishes between pure and impure examples of formal qualities. As pure examples of formal qualities he considers natural objects such as flowers, seashells and birds, “which are not attached to a determinate object in accordance with concepts regarding its end, but are free and please for themselves” (Kant 2000, 114). Natural objects evoke pure aesthetic experience; that is, they belong to the category of free beauty because they do not depend on the concept of the purpose, which would merely restrict the freedom of the imagination: Flowers are free natural beauties. Hardly anyone other than the botanist knows what sort of thing a flower is supposed to be; and even the botanist, who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste. (Kant 2000, 114)

The purpose or the function of the flower is extrinsic to the form of the flower, which allow us to engage with flowers as pure visual formal configurations, that is, as complex wholes of related parts. We can simply enjoy the relation of shapes and colors in some formal configuration for its own sake alone. On the other hand, impure examples of formal qualities are artifacts and artworks that are made with an aim to perform a function of some sort and hence they “presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty” (Kant 2000, 114). For example, a vase is an object made with the purpose to hold cut flowers. In order to judge aesthetically the formal qualities of a vase, we must first take into account what the vase is and this means to take into account its purpose. Accordingly, the form of the vase is determined by the purpose it is supposed to fulfill, that is, its form must be in accordance with its purpose. The consideration of the purpose of the object restricts the range of the appropriate forms, that is, it restricts the freedom of the imagination. However, the concept of the purpose does not preclude the free play of imagination completely. Within the constraint of the purpose, the imagination has an ability to play freely and therefore allows for the possibility of free harmony. For example, there are numerous different forms that satisfy the purpose of the vase, yet not all of them are beautiful. The beauty of a vase is not determined by the satisfaction of the purpose, even though it depends on it. The satisfaction of the purpose of the vase is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of its beauty (Allison 2004, 138–143; Guyer 2002; Rueger 2008; Stecker 1987).

102 

M. KUPLEN

There are, however, some artifacts and works of art that Kant classify as free beauties (i.e., according to mere form), even though they have a practical function. These are decorative artifacts such as “decoration of rooms by means of wallpaper, moldings, and all kinds of beautiful furnishings, which merely serve to be viewed”  (2000, 201), as well as examples of nonrepresentational artworks, such as “all music without a text” (2000, 114).  As he writes, these examples “signify nothing by themselves: they do not represent anything, no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties” (ibid.). Presumably, works of art such as pure music and for that matter abstract art in general are free beauties, because even though they are made with a certain purpose, this purpose is free or purposeless beauty itself, that is, to give satisfaction in virtue of mere form alone. Hence, nonrepresentational artworks are like natural objects in that no determinate rules for the combination of sensible manifold can be given (there are not rules as to how to create rule-less beauty). We engage with them as pure formal configurations. The subject of aesthetic perception is freely imaginative manifold of intuition, that is, the mere form of the object. Yet, it is not every freely imaginative manifold of intuition that can occasion in us the feeling of aesthetic pleasure. The value of such imaginative manifold is measured in terms of the degree of harmonious relation it produces with the faculty of understanding. Even though imagination synthesizes the sensible manifold without being governed by the conceptual rules of the understanding (i.e., imagination is in free play), it must nevertheless stand in agreement with the lawfulness of the understanding. In other words, the combination of the sensible manifold must exhibit a rule-like order, even though this order is not brought up by any particular determinate rule. Kant expresses this form of free harmony between imagination and understanding by referring to his notion of lawfulness without a law: Thus only a lawfulness without law and a subjective correspondence of the imagination to the understanding without an objective one—where the representation is related to a determinate concept of an object—are consistent with the free lawfulness of the understanding (which is also called purposiveness without an end). (2001, 125) 

That is, an object is beautiful if the combination of its elements is in harmony with the understanding (it is lawful), but without this harmony being determined by any particular concepts of the understanding (it is without a law). The experience we have of lawfulness without a law, when we feel that a certain combination of formal elements in the object is just the right one, in which elements suit and complement each other, without however having any determinate rule that would serve as a basis for the justification of the appropriateness of the specific combination. We simply feel or enjoy the heightened agreement of the two faculties, without this agreement being brought up by the assistance of concepts.

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

103

4  Abstract Images and the Legacy of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism According to Kant, the imagination has the ability to apprehend the form of the object without being governed by any determinate concepts. It is the mere form of the object without the consideration of what the object represents that is responsible for its aesthetic quality. In this respect abstract images play an important role. Abstract image does not depict any particular object, yet it still is an image. Abstract images are created and viewed solely for their pure visibility— how elements are arranged with respect to one another whereby this arrangement is not determined by any purpose. We can see accordingly in what sense Kant’s aesthetic theory was considered as significant in the development and understanding of modern art. His conception of aesthetic appreciation was revolutionary in that it emancipated the form from the content of the object (its representational material) and thereby allowed the possibility to understanding and appreciating art irrespectively to what it represents. Works of art such as made by Mark Rothko, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró and others are without any recognizable images or representational content that would hold our attention and direct our appreciation—they are just fields of colors, lines and shapes. Nonetheless, they are still considered as one of the greatest works of art. Our appreciation of abstract images lies in discerning a certain kind of perceptible unity and harmony among the freely combined features of the object (consider for example Joan Miro’s abstract painting The Gold of the Azure, 1967, which gives the appearance of a free and spontaneous combination of irregular forms and colors, but also of a certain control and organization to which these elements seem to be subordinated and which makes the work aesthetically integrated and harmonious). The beauty of an abstract image is attributed to the form alone, that is, to the way sensible manifold is combined and organized together and which can bring our cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding into harmonious play producing thereby intense feeling of pleasure. Even though in our ordinary perception, imagination and understanding are also in agreement, nevertheless no feeling of pleasure occurs. This is because the synthesis in our ordinary perception is governed by the understanding and its concepts, and thus synthesis is assured and proceeds automatically. Understanding simply grasps the interconnectedness among perceptual features through its concepts without attending to particular sensed qualities of the object. Aesthetic perception, on the other hand, is free from our cognitive concerns and projection of meanings into the image. The subject of aesthetic perception is a singular representation of an object, that is, a singular form, rather than a relation between forms for the sake of identifying the object. Aesthetic appraisal “involves a suspension of our ordinary cognitive concern with classification and explanation” (Allison 2004, 187),

104 

M. KUPLEN

which allows for the free activity between imagination and understanding. The understanding is free because it is not concerned with the identification of the object and imagination is free because it is not determined by the particular empirical concept. Since aesthetic perception is not limited by conceptual determination for the sake of identifying the object and thus by seeing the object from existing well-­ defined viewpoints, it allows us to become more fully aware of the mere structure of the image itself. We cannot be fully aware of the texture, structure and pattern of the image as long as we perceive the object in light of the conceptual determination. The reduction of conceptual influence on perceptual image gives us the possibility to detect, discover and explore features and patterns of the image that have been left unnoticed so far. Kant explains such way of perceiving the object as a way of seeing the object in which we are indifferent to its existence: If the question is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation […] One only wants to know whether the mere representation of the object is accompanied with satisfaction in me, however indifferent I might be with regard to the existence of the object of this representation. (2001, 90–91) 

Aesthetic perception is not restricted by the question of the representation (i.e., what the object should be) and thus with the practical significance of the object in its everyday existence, but rather how it merely appears to us as we observe its formal qualities as they are directly presented to our senses—the finer distinctions of forms, lines, texture and colors. Kant’s aesthetic theory influenced many thinkers who have found the idea of aesthetic formalism as the guiding principle of art. It resonated in Clive Bell’s idea that the significant form, which comprises “relations and arrangements of lines and colours”, is the “essential quality in a work of art” (Bell 1982, 70), as well as in Roger Fry’s conception of art, whose essence lies in the presentation of “order and variety in the sensuous plane” (Fry 1981, 24). Particularly vocal in promoting Kant’s ideas has been the American critic Clement Greenberg, who emphasized pure abstract and formal elements in art, these being “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment” (Greenberg 1982, 6). In contemporary philosophy of art and in light of a contemporary artistic practice, aesthetic formalism as a universal theory of art is an untenable position (Parsons 2004; Dziemidok 1993). At most, it has been preserved in the form of a moderate aesthetic formalism pursued by Nick Zangwill (2005). He holds the view that some works of art are purely formal (e.g., instrumental music, pure abstract paintings and sculptures), while other are not (they include

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

105

non-formal properties such as history of production, representational, cognitive or moral properties); for a version of a moderate formalism view, see also Matthews (2001). What is also distinctive for moderate formalism is that it is developed not merely as an account of aesthetic appreciation of artworks but of natural objects as well. Furthermore, it includes among formal properties not merely compositional, but sensory properties as well (colors, sounds, tastes, smells) such as being shiny or vivid. It is important to point out, however, that Kant’s conception of aesthetic formalism is much more complex in nature than interpreted by the twentieth-­ century artists, art theorists and critics, as it incorporates not merely perceptual form, but ideas and thoughts as well (McMahon 2010; Costello 2013; Wicks 2015; Crowther 1991). For example, Kant writes that form of the object functions as the “vehicle of communication” of aesthetic ideas (2001, 191), whereby he formulates an aesthetic idea as “an inner intuition (of the imagination)” (2001, 218) that “occasions much thinking, though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (2001, 192). In short, an aesthetic idea refers to a certain kind of picturing of thoughts and associations that occur in our mind as we reflect on a particular object (of art or nature) and which give rise to (present) various concepts that go beyond sensory experience (e.g., concept of eternity, hell, immortality, death, envy, love, etc.). The free harmony between imagination and understanding, which occurs in aesthetic perception of the mere form of the object, also evokes the expression of an aesthetic idea: “in all the beautiful art what is essential consists in the form, which is purposive for observation and judging, where the pleasure is at the same time culture and disposes the spirit to ideas” (2001, 203). That is, mere image can be expressive of aesthetic ideas, even though it represents nothing. Expression emerges from a mere visible formal configuration. What exactly is the relationship between Kant’s perceptual formalism and the expression of an aesthetic idea (i.e., whether the expression of aesthetic ideas is merely incidental or criterial for aesthetic appreciation) is a matter of dispute. According to some writers (Rogerson 2008; Chignell 2007; Rueger 2008), an aesthetic idea is in fact an organizing or unifying principle of the sensible manifold. That is to say, free harmony is attained by the expression of an aesthetic idea. To conclude, Kant’s aesthetic theory suited well modernist attempts to liberate art from the standards of representation in order to make the mere form of the object visible and appreciated for its own sake. His conception of aesthetic formalism provided a philosophical dimension and legitimation to the development and understanding of modern art in that it offered an explanation of apprehending and appreciating the image independently of its objective information. The image has an independent existence. It can be valuable and worth looking at even though it depicts no particular object.

106 

M. KUPLEN

References1 Allison, Henry. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Berger, David. 2009. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: The Beautiful and Agreeable. New York: Continuum. Bell, Clive. 1982. “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”. In:  Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. New  York: Westview Press. Cheetham, Mark A. 2001. “Kant and Cubism revisited”. Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 17 (3): 293–298. Chignell, Andrew. 2007. “Kant on the normativity of taste: The role of aesthetic ideas”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85 (3): 415–433. Costello, Diarmuid. 2013. “Kant and the Problem of Strong Non-Perceptual Art”. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53 (3): 277–298. Crowther, Paul. 1991. “Beyond formalism: Kant’s theory of art”. Filozofski vestnik, 12 (1): 27–40. Dziemidok, Bohdan. 1993. “Artistic Formalism: Its Achievements and Weaknesses”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (2): 185–193. Ewing, A. C. 1967. A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fry, Roger. 1981. Vision and Design. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Greenberg, Clement. 1982. “Modernist Painting”. In: Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. New  York: Westview Press. Gibbons, Sarah. 1994. Kant’s Theory of Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginsborg, Hannah. 1997. “Lawfulness without a law: Kant on the free play of imagination and understanding”. Philosophical Topics, 25 (1): 37–81. Guyer, Paul. 1977. “Formalism and theory of expressions in Kant’s aesthetics”. Kant-­ Studien, 68 (1–4): 46–70. Guyer, Paul. 2002. “Free and adherent beauty: A modest proposal”. British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (4): 357–366. Guyer, Paul. 2006. “The harmony of the faculties revisited”. In: Aesthetics and cognition in Kant’s critical philosophy. Ed.  by Rebecca Kukla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanna, Robert. 2005. “Kant and nonconceptual Content”. European Journal of Philosophy, 13 (2): 247–290. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuplen, Mojca. 2019. “Cognitive Interpretation of Kant’s Theory of Aesthetic Ideas”. Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, 56 (12): 48–64. Longuenesse, Beatrice. 2001. Kant and the capacity to judge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1  References to Immanuel Kant are given in the text to the volume and page number of the standard German edition of his collected works: Kants gesammelte Schriften (KGS). References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions. References are also given, after a comma, to the English translation of Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  IMMANUEL KANT AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IMAGE 

107

Matherne, Samantha. 2015. “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception”. Ergo: An open Access Journal of Philosophy, 2 (29): 737–777. Matthews, Patricia. 2001. “Aesthetic Appreciation of Art and Mature”. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 41: 395–410. McMahon, Jenny. 2010. “The Classical Trinity and Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism”. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 11 (3): 419–441. Neville, Michael. 1974. “Kant’s Characterization of Aesthetic Experience”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33 (2): 193–202. Paton, H.J. 1965. Kant’s metaphysic of experience. New York: The Humanities Press. Pippin, Robert. 1992. “The schematism and empirical concepts”. Kant-Studien, 67 (1–4): 156–171. Parsons, Glenn. 2004. “Moderate Formalism as a Theory of the Aesthetic”. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 38 (3): 19–35. Rogerson, Kenneth. 1986. Kant’s aesthetics: The roles of form and expression. Lanham: University Press of America. Rogerson, Kenneth. 2008. The problem of free harmony in Kant’s aesthetics. New York: State University of New York Press. Rohs, Peter. 2001. “Bezieht sich nach Kant die anschauung unmittelbar auf Gegenstände?”. Proceedings of the 9th International Kant Congress, II: 214–228. Rueger, Alexander. 2008. “Beautiful surfaces: Kant on free and adherent beauty in nature and art”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 16 (3): 535–556. Schaper, Eva. 1992. “Kant’s schematism reconsidered”. In: Immanuel Kant: Critical assessments. Ed.  by Ruth Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux. London and New  York: Routledge. Stallknecht, Newton P. 1968. “From Kant to Picasso: A Note on the Appreciation of Modern Art”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2 (1): 26–34. Stecker, Robert. 1987. “Free beauty, dependent beauty, and art”. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 21 (1): 89–99. Uehling, Theodore Edward. 1971. The Notion of Form in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. The Hague: Mouton. Weldon, T. D. 1947. “Schematism”. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 48: 139–152. Wicks, Robert. 2015. “The Divine Inspiration for Kant’s Formalist Theory of Beauty”. Kant Studies Online: 1–31. Young, Michael J. 1988. “Kant’s View of Imagination”. Kant-Studien, 79 (2): 140–64. Zangwill, Nick. 2005. “Beauty”. In: The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Ed. by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Formalism and Kunstwissenschaft: The “How” of the Image Andrea Pinotti

1   Introduction Paraphrasing Aristotle’s dictum on being, “form” is said in many ways. The notion covers such an ample semantic spectrum that one might even doubt it could hardly be of any use for the methodology of art history and image theory. And yet, in spite of its puzzling polyvalence, in its millenary history this concept appears to represent an indispensable and inescapable tool for historians and theorists. The meaning of “form” is always co-determined by the antonym with which it constitutes a categorial polarity: in opposition to “matter”, form can signify the visible or touchable (more or less geometrical) shape of the image, its silhouette, contour or, more generally, design, or even its ideal invisible structure (for the distinction between “manifest formalism” (addressing the visible shape) and “latent formalism”  – (interested in the invisible structure) see Wollheim 2001). In opposition to the spiritual or conceptual “content” or “subject”, form can refer to the sensible components of the image (anything that is apprehendable by the senses, namely its shapes, its composition, and its materiality as well). The etymology of the word “form” (not unanimously accepted) embraces many of these semantic implications: the Latin term “forma” can be traced back to the Sanskrit root dhar (support), while the Greek morphè to the Indo-European root mer-bh (outward aspect). The Latin “forma” was employed to translate not only morphè, but also eidos, that

A. Pinotti (*) State University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_7

109

110 

A. PINOTTI

originally referred to the visible aspect of a thing, and only subsequently to an invisible structure (metaphysical, as in Plato’s gnoseology and ontology of the archetypes, or abstract and extracted from the multiplicity of beings, as in the empiricist tradition). The word idea, synonym for eidos, still testifies its sensible roots in the verb idein, to see (Cassirer 1924).

2   How Versus What? In the tradition of art historical methods, the opposition “form–content” has been the predominant one. Formalism has been opposed to iconography and iconology as the approach interested in the “how” of the image against the method focusing on its “what”. An exemplary characterization of this understanding was offered by Edgar Wind, when he contrasted Aby Warburg to Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin. While the former was presented as the heir of Jacob Burckhardt’s content-oriented cultural history, the latter were criticized for their embracing formal analysis and “pure vision” (Wind 1931, 22). In spite of scrupulous reassessments (Warnke 1991), this antagonistic picture has become canonical in many subsequent accounts. Actually, it would be easy to quote passages in Burckhardt’s corpus that go precisely in the opposite direction: “In art the element that matters the most is not the ‘what’, but the ‘how’” (Burckhardt 1884, 448) (unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author). This idea was not new and could be traced back at least to Goethe (see maxim nr. 756 in Goethe 1981, 471). Burckhardt would then be better described as the common trunk from which the two diverging branches of formalism and iconology could develop. It is certainly true that Riegl and Wölfflin emphasized the “how” of the image. Riegl unequivocally stated: “The creative art is not concerned with ‘what’ but with ‘how’” (Riegl 1901a, 227, fn. 117). The “how” is identified by the Kunstwollen (artistic will) of an epoch: the collective disposition of a specific culture in a specific epoch to configure its visual artifacts. Wölfflin argued that “a baroque façade in Rome has the same optical denominator as a landscape by Jan van Goyen” (Wölfflin 1915, 95). Asking the beholder to recognize the same visual schema in objects that are as different as an oil painting and an architectural façade is evidently a bold claim on the visual “how”. Yet, these authors were far from neglecting cultural factors. Riegl linked the late Roman Kunstwollen to the overall worldview of the epoch. Wölfflin acknowledged that the internal movements of seeing “have always been part of the more comprehensive general development of every period” (Wölfflin 1933, 324). In turn, the what-oriented iconologists did not disregard the formal factor. Also the major French formalist, Henri Focillon, recognized that “the influence exerted by natural and social environments on the life of forms” cannot be neglected (Focillon 1934a, 148). Warburg’s most famous concept—the Pathosformel—contains a clear reference to the domain of forms. Also the founder of modern iconology, Erwin Panofsky, reabsorbed the formal factor at “the level of intrinsic meaning”: the

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

111

decisions made by the artist in terms both of form and content, and even of techniques, assume a symbolic meaning and express a worldview. The legitimacy of the distinction between the how and the what had been radically challenged by Konrad Fiedler, the spiritual father of modern formalism: “We cannot distinguish form and content in a work of art. [...] In art no disparity between form and content exists” (Fiedler 1951, 149–50). This is not to say that formal analysis as a how-oriented approach cannot be distinguished from iconology as a what-oriented approach, but the differences between the two methods are much more nuanced than what is usually assumed in the common picture of art historical methodology.

3   Form and Formation Fiedler’s reception was strongly conditioned by the neo-idealist reading Benedetto Croce gave of his works. Croce is responsible for the coining of the misleading label “pura visibilità” (pure visibility), that he put forward in his essay on Fiedler, Hans von Marées, and Adolf von Hildebrand, translated into German by Julius von Schlosser (Croce 1911, 1929). As early as 1936, Lionello Venturi introduced the label to the Anglophone audience (Venturi 1936, chap. 10: “Art Criticism and Pure Visibility”). An influential anthology by Roberto Salvini (1949, 1988 for the French edition) contributed to extend “pure visibility” to a constellation of authors (including besides Fiedler and Hildebrand the names of Riegl, Wölfflin, Schmarsow, Brinckmann, Berenson, Bell, Fry, Stokes, Mesnil, Focillon, Longhi, and Venturi) that still nowadays constitutes the classical formalist canon. Actually, the formula “reine Sichtbarkeit” never occurs in Fiedler’s texts. His perspective undoubtedly concentrated on visibility and on the correlation between the seer and the seen; but it could hardly be characterized in terms of “purity”. This is particularly evident if one considers the role played by the hand: figuration is a gesture, a motor process that realizes for the eye a product that the eye itself would not have been able to create on its own. Figuration does not merely reproduce in a mimetic way a visible possession of a natural entity; nor does it give a sensible attire to spiritual contents already formed in the soul. On the contrary, in developing a visual representation, figuration makes visible something that did not exist before. It starts precisely where vision ceases, at the point where the eye passes the baton to the hand that picks up and develops the visual hints accomplishing the gesture of depicting (Fiedler 1887, 163–66) (on the manual implications see also Focillon 1934b). In this radical affirmation of poietic formation one can recognize the foundations of abstract, non-objectual art. The most concise formulation of this Fiedlerian heritage is due to Paul Klee, who stated: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” (Klee 1920, 25). Via Klee, this basic idea could expand in the subsequent philosophical reflection on art, famously in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1961, 183) and in Gilles Deleuze (1981, 56). Moreover, insisting on the dynamic and temporal process of formation rather

112 

A. PINOTTI

than on the completed form, Fiedler could make fruitful for modern art theory the basic intuition of Goethe’s morphology of natural beings on the fundamental difference between Gestalt as a static form and Bildung as the constant metamorphosis (Goethe 1807). Again, it was Klee who efficaciously diffused these ideas in the contemporary scenario by stating: “Formation is good. Form is bad” (Klee 1956, 169). It is surprising how Fiedler’s views, elaborated in close contact with figurative artists like Hans von Marées, Anselm Feuerbach, Hans Thoma, and Arnold Böcklin, could anticipate some of the most innovative solutions of the twentieth century. English translations of his texts (Fiedler [1876] 1949, 1951) might as well have inspired the Action Painting.

4  Distance and Nearness Hildebrand also emphasizes the role played by motor processes in the constitution of form. He transposes into aesthetic terms Helmholtz’s theory of the accommodation of the crystalline lens, identifying two different perceptual modalities: the visual representation of an object seen from a distance, and the motor representation triggered when the object is close to the observer (Hildebrand 1893, 229). Robert Vischer had proposed a similar comparison of eye and hand: “Touching is a ‘cruder scanning at close range’; seeing is a ‘more subtle touching at a distance’” (Vischer 1873, 94). The couple “near vs. distant” offered an esthesiological foundation for the Stilgeschichte (history of styles) developed by Wölfflin and Riegl (both readers of Hildebrand). Riegl describes the stylistic evolution from the ancient Egyptian through the Greek classical to the late Roman style in terms of an evolution from a tactile or “haptic” to an optical or “impressionistic” vision (Riegl 1901a, 25–26). Wölfflin similarly interprets the passage from Cinquecento to Seicento in terms of a movement from the tactile/linear to the optical/painterly (Wölfflin 1915, 96). If one turns to the Anglophone context, the principal mediator of these ideas was Bernard Berenson. A reader of both Hildebrand and Vischer, he argued that the painter must be able to stimulate the tactile sense, triggering in the beholder the illusion of touching the figure: “To realize form we must give tactile values to retinal sensations” (Berenson 1896, 11). Hildebrand’s book on form was translated into Russian in 1914. Strong traces of his arguments can be found in Pavel Florensky’s theoretical writings, where he reflects on the opposition between the contour-based graphics and the patch-based painting (Florensky 1924-25, 79–421). In Italian formalism, an echo of these ideas can be found in Roberto Longhi when he opposes a “linear style”, as a “mode of vision” grounded on line and contour, and of a “pure coloristic style”, which seems “primordial if compared to the linear” (Longhi 1914, 10–12). The pre-history of this fundamental polarization can be traced back to antiquity: in his Parmenides (165 c-d), Plato remarks that “it is like standing at a distance from scene paintings, where everything appears to be one [...]. But if you come close, they appear many and different” (Plato 1997, 63). In his Ars Poetica (361–2), Horace evokes this antithesis in the famous passage

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

113

concerning the ut pictura poësis: “A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away” (Horace 1942, 481). With respect to the post-history of this antithesis, Walter Benjamin (pupil of Wölfflin and passionate reader of Riegl) embraces it while inverting the movement: the far optical-auratic image gives way to the near-tactile shocking image of modernity (Benjamin 1935-36, 23). Speaking as early as the mid-Thirties of visual media in terms of tactility testifies of Benjamin’s prophetic intuitions, if one thinks of contemporary touch screens. Via Benjamin, Riegl’s notion of the haptic could spread in the domain of film studies, as well (Lant 1995; Marks 2000). These heterogeneous references suggest the fecundity of a categorial couple that understands form through its bodily pragmatics: inviting the beholders to get close, or pushing them away.

5  Surface and Depth Beside the couple “near-tactile vs. far-optical”, another dyad has significantly characterized formal analysis: that of “surface vs. depth”. Once again, Hildebrand proves an influential source. He speaks of “the disturbing problem of cubic form” (Hildebrand 1893, 96), that the sculptor must transform into a plane, in order to avoid the possibility of multiple perspectives and to control the artistic effect exerted on the beholder. Riegl historicizes this claim, arguing that ancient art as a whole aimed at negating depth, because it threatened the apprehension of clear individual entities. In particular, Egyptian art was engaged in negating what was perceived as a “most uncomfortable impression of space”. Only “modern” art (a notion that remains unspecified) will “emphasize shapeless infinite deep space” (Riegl 1901a, 28 and 229). Following Hildebrand and Riegl, Worringer developed his famous notion of agoraphobia: the primitive man is anguished by the menacing three-­dimensional space full of potentially dangerous living beings and finds in plane and inert geometric ornaments shelter from the hazardous outer world: “Confused and troubled by life, he seeks the lifeless, because it is free from the turbulence of becoming and offers permanent stability” (Worringer 1911, 30). Wölfflin is less negative toward three-dimensional effects. In his account they become a characteristic feature of Baroque art as opposed to the Renaissance, following “the development from planarity to recession. Classical art disposes the parts of a formal whole in planar stratification; baroque art emphasizes the overlap of parts arranged one behind the other” (Wölfflin 1915, 96). In stressing the importance of three-dimensional impressions, Berenson reverses Hildebrand’s judgment. A form is authentically artistic only to the extent it can produce volumetric effects. In a late essay devoted to the “tactile values”, we read that they “encourage us, always imaginatively, to come into close touch with, to grasp, to embrace, or to walk around them” (Berenson 1948, 60). (“Always imaginatively”: a parenthetical caveat that excludes actual

114 

A. PINOTTI

touching). Similarly, Roger Fry requires from visual artists a strong “plastic feeling”, that enables “the embodiment of an idea of form” (Fry 1911, 138). This emphasis on plasticity and volume, vindicated by the first generation of Anglophone formalists, has been radically challenged by the most influential American formalist critic, Clement Greenberg. The advocate of purist avant-­ garde against the pseudo-culture of kitsch and the theorist of abstract art has repeatedly affirmed that flatness is the formal property that enables painting to eventually become what it authentically is: an autonomous interplay of lines and colors on a frontal surface. Modernist painting, prepared by Impressionism and Cubism, has completed the liberation from any attempt to create an illusion of a deep space that the beholder could enter: “Pictorial art reduced itself entirely to what was visually verifiable, and Western painting had finally to give up its five hundred years’ effort to rival sculpture in the evocation of the tactile” (Greenberg 1949, 272). Greenberg is however aware that flatness can never be absolute: “The first mark made on a canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness” because it produces effects of advancing figure and receding ground. “Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension” (Greenberg 1960, 90). Inspired by the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Leo Steinberg critically re-formulated Greenberg’s notion of flatness into the concept of “flatbed picture plane”: a re-orientation of the picture from verticality to horizontality, in order to create a space that can hosts objects and actions (Steinberg 1972).

6  Eye and Body As above recalled, formalism is frequently associated to “pure visibility”. However, a closer reading of formalist authors reveals a broader attention to the body as a whole. Vischer observed that any optical stimulus triggers a total body response: “The whole body is involved; the entire physical being is moved” (Vischer 1873, 98–9). Leaning directly on him, the young Wölfflin argued that any external form resonates with our own physical body, which becomes a veritable material a priori (a form in the Kantian sense, although strongly empiricized) of formal understanding: “Our own bodily organization is the form through which we apprehend everything physical” (Wölfflin 1886, 157–8). Wölfflin later abandoned this generally bodily approach in favour of the antithesis between tactile seeing versus optical seeing. Similar to Vischer, also Hildebrand had remarked: “We animate and denote every new appearance we encounter with the physical feelings that have accompanied similar appearances in the past”. The responding body becomes the condition of possibility of formal experience: “If we extend this response to the whole body, it is only natural that it everywhere has a stimulating and decisive influence on form” (Hildebrand 1893, 261). A reader of Hildebrand, August Schmarsow made these remarks fruitful for his formalistic approach to architecture. Rejecting Wölfflin’s and Riegl’s emphasis on the eye, he argued that humans are not “exclusively optical

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

115

creatures” (Schmarsow 1905, 16). On the contrary, the whole living body acts as an intermediary between the subject and the environment. The structure of the human body, the specificity of its upright posture, the disposition of the organs, and the degree of their mobility and cooperation condition our orientation and also our modality of conceiving and producing. The three main bodily axes—height, width, and depth—inform our response to architecture as a space-builder (Schmarsow 1894, 281–97). The emphasis on movement introduces time into space, as appears evident in Schmarsow’s architectural focus: his main object is not the façade, that in its bi-dimensionality is offered to a static visual contemplation, but rather the interior that is experienced by the whole body. Here the spatial configuration is structured according to the space-time chiasm of rhythm: in his work devoted to the laws of composition in medieval art, Schmarsow (1915–22) develops a veritable architectural rhythmology connecting the respiratory, cardiac, and affective rhythmics to the interior spaces of early Christian churches, Romanesque basilicas, and Gothic cathedrals. This approach became the peculiar mark of Schmarsow’s pupils, like Wilhelm Pinder (1904). Analogous reflections on the crucial role played by bodily rhythm can be found in British formalism (see Rose 2019), for instance in Roger Fry, who remarks that the experience of forms is connected with the “essential conditions of our physical existence”: Rhythm appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity; mass to all the infinite adaptations to the force of gravity which we are forced to make; the spatial judgment is equally profound and universal in its application to life; our feeling about inclined planes is connected with our necessary judgments about the conformation of the earth itself. (Fry 1909, 37)

In these last decades, a renewed interest in formalist authors has marked some of the most stimulating works in architectural theory, like those of Anthony Vidler (1992, 2000) and Harry F. Mallgrave (2013), who are particularly attentive to the relationship between body and building.

7   Form and Feeling From its very beginning, modern formalism had to face the controversial issue of a crucial relation: that between form and feeling. Robert Zimmermann (1865) published a general aesthetics as science of forms in which he defended the existence of pure forms, deprived of any meaning and content, and structured according to the mathematical principles of regularity, symmetry, and proportion. Also an associationist like Gustav Theodor Fechner, Zimmermann acknowledged the existence of pure forms, once all associations are eliminated. Contrary to these assumptions, Robert Vischer disputed the possibility of “pure” forms, disconnected from any sort of content and of emotional implication. He argued that association only explains how two representations are

116 

A. PINOTTI

juxtaposed and not how a representation is fused together with the perceived form. Against Zimmermann, Vischer claimed that any objective form is correlated with a subjective perceiver. The conditions of the formal apprehension are determined by the perceiver’s bodily structure: “These laws of regularity, symmetry, and proportion are nothing other than subjective laws of the normal human body” (Vischer 1873, 98), with its organic structure and emotional rhythmics. When a perceiver is in front of an inanimate form, she unconsciously projects in it her own life and vital rhythm, so that the object appears as if it were a living subject. The technical term for this process of animation is Einfühlung (empathy). Two kinds of empathetic animation must be distinguished: a physiognomic or emotional empathy and a mimicking or acting empathy. In the first case, the subject empathizes static forms that appear to be endowed with an emotional mood, like in the example of a melancholic landscape; in the second case motion is attributed to objects, like when a tree “stretches” its branches as if they were arms. Wölfflin transposed these thoughts into the architectural field by asking: “How is it possible that architectural forms are able to express an emotion or a mood?”. The answer is to be found, again, in the human body as a plexus of motion and emotion: “Physical forms possess a character only because we ourselves possess a body” (Wölfflin 1886, 149 and 151). Vischer’s empathy theory was important for Aby Warburg’s investigations on “‘empathy’ as a determinant of style” (Warburg 1893, 144). Motor empathy was particularly apt to explore the intensification of movement in static images conveyed by mobile accessory forms such as garments and hair, as symptoms of a renewed sensibility of the Renaissance for the antique. The very idea of Pathosformel as a formal bodily scheme intuitively imbued with an emotional charge is in full accord with Vischer’s criticism of pure formalism. If Warburg made empathy fruitful for the understanding of figurative artworks, this notion proved to be extremely effective for the comprehension of abstract forms as well. Theodor Lipps (1906), psychologist in Munich at the turn of the century, claimed that before being recognized as representative of actual objects, lines, and colors per se possess their own character and personality and can institute with the perceiver a kind of quasi-intersubjective relation. Through the mediation of his critic Wilhelm Worringer (who in 1907 published one of the most impactful texts in twentieth century art theory: Abstraction and Empathy), Lipps’ ideas could spread in the artistic circles, especially that of The Blue Rider. Kandinsky’s “grammar of painting” proposes a correspondence among forms, colors, sounds, and affective moods (Kandinsky 1911), that not only echoes the empathy theorists but also re-actualizes Goethe’s intuition of an “effect of colour with reference to moral associations” (Goethe 1810, 304–16) (Fig. 1).

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

117

Fig. 1  Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow, Red, Blue, 1925, oil on canvas; 128 x 201.5  cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (in public domain)

8   Form and Life Motion and emotion are ciphers of life: the multifaceted interconnection of formalism and vitalism has been one of the major features of this methodological approach. Vischer argued that each sensation of form “leads to a strengthening or a weakening of the general vital sensation” (Vischer 1873, 98–9). Berenson identified the major task of form in its capacity to enhance the enjoyment of life in: “Art can be only life-communicating and life-enhancing” (Berenson 1896, 92). Yet, what kind of life is here at stake? British formalism disentangled aesthetic life from ordinary life. Roger Fry distinguished the actual life from the imaginative life of art, a fuller modality of living relieved of moral responsibility and practical consequences: art “is an expression and a stimulus of the imaginative life, which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action” (Fry 1909, 26). Despite the fact that art is open to influences from life, its changes are essentially determined by its internal forces, which often play against the external conditions (Fry 1917, 17–18). A similar argument was put forward by Clive Bell. What makes an artwork specifically artistic is its “significant form”: “Lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions” (Fig. 2). But, for its being significant no evocation of real life must be provoked: “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life” (Bell 1914, 8 and 25). The issue was addressed by the Kunstwissenschaft, as well. Riegl (1897-99) tried to classify different forms of Weltanschauung in

118 

A. PINOTTI

Fig. 2  Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas; 46 x 46 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich (in public domain)

their relation to art and religion, claiming that art and culture run on parallel tracks (Riegl 1901b). Wölfflin ambiguously oscillated between the affirmation of the autonomy of artistic vision and the need to acknowledge an effect of external factors. Forms do change, but “life would have to be experienced in one particular way in order for that to happen” (Wölfflin 1915, 309). The “racial” argument was frequently employed. Wölfflin (1931) opposed the Italian and the German feeling of form. Riegl (1901, 26, fn. 4) as well claimed that a national tendency distinguished the formal inclinations of the tactile Latin and the optical German people. Worringer (1911, 27–51) developed a veritable anthropological typology, identifying four main types, corresponding to a variation of the cosmic sense that impacts on the sense of form: the primitive, the classical, the oriental, and the northern man. José Ortega y Gasset (1911) wanted to add to this anthropological gallery the type of the Spanish man. French formalism, influenced by Bergson’s vitalism, widely addressed the issue form-life, as well. Focillon stated: “Life is form, and form is the modality of life”. Forms undergo a process of constant metamorphosis that styles fixate

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

119

in stable configurations. It is possible to identify four stages for each style obeying to an internal logic: “The experimental age, the classic age, the age of refinement, the baroque age”. The movement from the first to the last stage corresponds to an increase in liberty. Not only a teleological stylistic development is to be rejected, but also the idea of a harmonious correspondence of all cultural domains: “History is, in general, a conflict among what is precocious, actual or merely delayed” (Focillon 1934a, 33, 68, 156, 140). Focillon’s pupil George Kubler also focused on the relation between form and temporality. Vindicating art as “a system of formal relations”, he targets “the morphological problems of duration in series and sequence”, regardless of changes in meaning, and embracing all sorts of man-made things (Kubler 1962, IX–X). Against the biological model (which cannot account for historical purposes), and the notion of style because too vague, Kubler embraced the language of electrodynamics in order to investigate impulses, relay points and resistances, and increments and losses in the transit of forms across space and time. The historian is a kind of astronomer, who looks only at old light and tries to establish an initial point interpreting a luminous signal coming from the past.

9   Form, Structure, and Gestalt Empathy theories and vitalistic approaches frequently adopt what might be called a projectivist “hydraulic” model, the form is conceived of as a void container, infused with the subject’s life and feelings. A radical criticism of this model was raised by Gestalt psychologists such as Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, who argued that human expression is only one chapter of a broader expressivity, pertaining to any entity (both animate and inanimate) by virtue of its formal and material configuration. Perceptual facts, Köhler says, “are far from being neutral facts” that can be filled with no matter what content; any factuality is imbued with expressiveness and dynamic character: “Few people can hear the rumbling crescendo of distant thunder as a neutral sensory fact; it sounds to most of us ‘menacing’” (Köhler 1947, 244). Thus, each expressive element constitutes a field with the other elements, so as to build an expressive interaction which is independent from subjectivist projections and belongs to the objectual properties. Rudolf Arnheim picked up these ideas and made them fruitful for the domains of aesthetics and theory of art and architecture. The general theoretical premise underpinning the application of Gestalt theory to the interpretation of artworks is that expression has the priority over form in the perceptual apprehension of artistic objects (just as it happens for non-artistic situations). In case of neglect of expressive contents, the artist’s activity is downgraded to an “empty formalism”: Expression must predominate because it is a key to meaning. The use of an artistic medium is justified only as far as something is thereby expressed. Considered as merely formal patterns, sensory percepts carry no aesthetic meaning whatsoever. (Arnheim 1949, 108)

120 

A. PINOTTI

Arnheim (1954, 1977) developed his application of the Gestalt principles in the domains of painting and sculpture, as well as of architecture. Line, plane, and volume; figure and ground; parts and whole, periphery and centre (Arnheim 1982), the Gestalt tendency toward good form: all these issues contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of expressive forms in a field of forces that Arnheim exhibits translating it into a visible diagram. Gestalt theory exerted a strong influence also on the second generation of the Vienna school of art history devoted to so-called Strukturanalyse (structural analysis): Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt, and Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg (1933). Sedlmayr’s approach is characterized by a preliminary intuitive grasping of the overall meaning of the artistic object before analytically investigating its constitutive parts. It is from Koffka that Sedlmayr borrows the notion of “gestaltetes Sehen” (shaped or formed vision), aiming at a description of the artwork (in this case Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome) that is “‘good’, ‘objective’, because it is factually grounded in the object itself” (Sedlmayr 1926, 61; see also Sedlmayr 1925, 1930). As Otto Pächt puts it, a “good description” is obtained “not from an external point of view, not on a mere similarity, but on an inner grasp of the coherence of the hole” (Pächt 1930-31, 188–89). Sedlmayr’s 1931 claim on scientific rigorousness as the cipher of this approach provoked a severe criticism by Meyer Schapiro, who accused him and his companions of lacking historical sense and of leaning on “wishful intuitiveness and vague, intangible profundity” (Schapiro 1936, 456).

10   Form, Technique, and Medium In the art historical and methodological discourse, form (as recalled above in § 1) has been mostly considered in its opposition to content. Nevertheless, its relationship to matter has not been neglected at all. Inaugurating the investigation of the concept of style, architect, and theorist Gottfried Semper insisted on the crucial role played on the determination of forms by the materials and techniques available in a certain space and time. In his tracing back architecture to weaving, Semper identified two basic textile gestures: “In threaded and banded forms they are used for binding and fastening; as supple surfaces they have the purpose of covering, containing, dressing, enveloping” (Semper 1860–63, 218). It is not difficult to recognize in this opposition the antithesis between line and patch that had to be subsequently developed by the theorists mentioned in § 3. Semper is commonly opposed as a “materialist” and a “mechanist” to formalists such as Wölfflin and Riegl: yet, let alone the fact that he explicitly wrote on formal beauty (Semper 1856-59, 219–44), the formalists acknowledged his crucial importance for the theory of style, rather stigmatizing his epigones, who reduced his approach to an exclusive consideration of material and technical factors. If we turn to the French formalist scenario, it is in Focillon that we find the most passionate advocate of matter and techniques against any spiritualistic or internalist conception of form:

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

121

Even before separating itself from thought, and entering into extent, matter and technique, form is extent, matter and technique. Form is never nondescript. Just as each of the various kinds of matter has its formal vocation, so has each form its material vocation, already plotted out within the inner life. (Focillon 1934a, 122)

Form is not an abstract pattern or a naked representation: it is form in a given material worked by specific tools: “A form without support is not form, and the support itself is form” (Focillon 1934a, 62). In turn, technique is not a ready-made possession to be merely repeated: it must be learned, lived, and creatively metabolized and transformed. Focillon speaks of the “law of technical primacy”, by virtue of which in a certain time a technique overrides all the others constituting the fundamental formative modality: it is for instance the case of the Gothic flamboyant style, called by Focillon a “painter’s architecture”. But the interferences provoked by this primacy do not mean that transpositions in materiality and technique are possible without resulting in an original artwork: a charcoal drawing copied in wash “assumes totally unexpected properties; it becomes, indeed, a new work” (Focillon 1934a, 100). In the Anglophone context, Clement Greenberg has been the most ardent crusader for the so-called “medium-specificity”. Rejecting the possibility of technical hybridizations as those envisaged by Focillon, Greenberg makes an unequivocal plea for a 1:1 relationship between each art and its medium: “It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself” (Greenberg 1940, 32). Revamping the approach inaugurated in 1766 by Lessing’s Laocoon, in which painting as the art of space was opposed to poetry as the art of time, Greenberg calls for a “newer Laocoon” for his own age in order to avoid dangerous intersections. Just as Lessing dismissed narrative painting for its attempting to introduce a temporal succession in an art that is constitutively static, Greenberg discards in painting not only any “literary” reference to external contents, but also any plastic effort to evoke volumetric effect through chiaroscuro and shaded modelling: flatness, surfaces, shapes, and colors are all that constitute the powers and limits (in the Kantian critical sense) of this art. Far from concealing them, the artist has to overtly expose them as what makes this art properly artistic: “The motto of the Renaissance artist, Ars est artem celare, is exchanged for Ars est artem demonstrare” (Greenberg 1940, 34).

11  New Formalisms and Post-formalism Greenberg’s formalistic approach has profoundly marked the American art historical, theoretical, and critical discourse down to the present day. A further development of his idea of medium-specificity has been offered by Michael Fried in his attack against minimalist (or “literalist”, as he prefers) art as an art which confines itself to the mere display of its objecthood in a situation that always implies the encounter with the beholder: “The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art” (Fried 1967, 153). Fried (1980) has

122 

A. PINOTTI

subsequently traced back “theatricality” as opposed to “absorption” in the eighteenth century French painting, investigating artworks that are designed to treat the beholders as if they were not “there” (on Fried see Abbott 2018). Such a polarity recalls (although without explicit reference) Riegl’s distinction between the “internal” and the “external” coherence in the Dutch group portraiture: the former is obtained by the interplaying gazes of the characters depicted within the representational space; the latter is a unity that the painting institutes with the viewer by virtue of at least one gaze that from the painting points directly toward the beholder (Riegl 1902, 256). Greenberg remains a landmark for both formalist and anti-formalist authors who dialectically determine their theoretical stance in a critical confrontation with his perspective (Bois 1990, XV–XVII). In this respect the lively exchanges occurred between Timothy J.  Clark (1982) and Michael Fried (1982), and between Johanna Drucker (1996) and Yves-Alain Bois (1996) on the legacy of formalism in general and of Greenberg in particular are exemplary (see also Buchloh 2015). After a Greenbergian start, Rosalind Krauss has intensely worked to overcome the association of the notion of medium with purity, autonomy, and self-referentiality: in the corpus of artists like Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge, she has described ways of “reinventing the medium” in an age defined of “post-medium condition” (Krauss 1999, 2000). Also the re-actualization of Georges Bataille’s notion of informe (formless) proposed by Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois in order to address modernism from a totally different vantage point can be read as a critical response to Greenberg’s linear narrative stretching from Manet to abstract expressionism (Bois and Krauss 1997, 25). Informe is a term which refers to an operation displacing the dyad “form vs. content” (and, correspondingly, “formalism vs. iconology”) and its binary logic, and which circumscribes a constellation of features encompassing disgust, violence, aggression, triviality, obscenity, horizontality, uprootedness, rottenness, lowness, materialism, desublimation, declassification, and the like. In art historians like David Summers (2003) and Whitney Davis (2012), the label “post-formalism” has come to identify their effort not to throw out the baby with the bathwater: that is the effort to integrate the heuristic potentialities of formal analysis with historical, anthropological, culturological, and also iconographic considerations, avoiding formalism in its extreme form, which thinks that formal properties can be segregated from content, meaning, representational references, and even from style. In aesthetics, an analogous attempt to temper pure and extreme formalism with the acknowledgment of extra-formal aesthetic properties has been proposed by Nick Zangwill (2000): Extreme formalism is the view that all the aesthetic properties of a work of art are formal. Anti-formalism is the view that none of them are formal. [...] Moderate

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

123

formalism is the view that while some aesthetic properties of a work of art are formal, others are not. (Zangwill 1999, 612)

12  Pseudomorphism Formalism has always been intimately connected to a comparative attitude: the ability to recognize the similar in the different, without reducing the different to the same and at the same time without maintaining the different in an unrelated and dispersed state, has characterized the morphological approach at least since Goethe’s times (see Bader et al. 2010). Nevertheless, art historians have come to express significant preoccupations about the risk of inferring from external similarities between two objects a historical relation of derivation of one from the other. This kind of mistake has been labelled “pseudomorphism”, drawing the term from crystallography, where “pseudomorph” refers to a crystal consisting of one mineral but having the form of another. Even if Marx had already employed the term as early as 1878, Spengler was the main responsible for its introduction in the conceptual inventory of the humanities. In his view, a pseudomorphic phenomenon occurs when previous cultural patterns suffocate newer cultural expressions, casting them in old moulds (Spengler 1918–22, 189). The concept has been subsequently employed in different disciplinary fields: for example, by Theodor W. Adorno in his essays on musical aesthetics, or by Hans Jonas in his studies on Gnosticism. As regards the art historical discourse, it was Erwin Panofsky who (without crediting Spengler) had recourse to this notion in order to describe “the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view” (Panofsky 1964, 26-7). This was the case of the apparent striking similarity that is to be seen between Punic sarcophagi and High-­ Gothic tombs dating 15 centuries later. More recently, and with a direct connection to Panofsky, Yve-Alain Bois has re-launched the pseudomorphic issue, conceiving it as “a major booby trap for the art historian”. And yet, confessing cases in which he himself had fallen prey of such a trap, Bois concedes that “pseudomorphosis is not necessarily entirely pseudo”: If two objects look the same, it does not mean that they have much in common— much less that they have the same meaning. But if they have something in common, this might reside in their strategy, or at least in their conditions of possibility”. (Bois 2015, 129 and 131)

The booby trap is transformed into a crucial heuristic tool by Georges Didi-­ Huberman: impressed by a totally anachronic (and philologically absurd) resemblance between the decorative elements of Fra Angelico’s Madonna of the Shadows and Jackson Pollock’s dripping technique, he acknowledges that it is such an indefensible similarity which invites him to reflect upon a part of Fra

124 

A. PINOTTI

Fig. 3  Fra Angelico, Madonna of the Shadows, 1450, detail of the lower part of the picture (left) (in public domain); Jackson Pollock’s studio-floor in Springs, New York: visual result of being his primary painting surface from 1946 until 1953 (right). Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Angelico’s work that had been so far neglected (Didi-Huberman 1990, 30; see also Didi-Huberman 2000, 20): a new research domain is thus opened by virtue of an incongruous pseudomorphic similarity (Fig. 3). The reference to pseudomorphic phenomena and relations in recent art historical studies (Nagel and Wood 2010; Nagel 2012; Powell 2012) promises to promote a revaluation of the concept of pseudomorphosis and of the potentialities of the pseudomorphic strategies, rescuing the term from the pejorative connotation it has received since Panofsky’s assessment. Actually, Panofsky himself had admitted a more positive evaluation of pseudomorphism than the one expressed in his late work on tomb sculpture: as early as 1939 he had used the term “pseudomorphosis” to characterize the capacity of Renaissance images to give visual expression to contents and meanings that had been treated in classical literature but not in classical art, thanks to the mediation of surviving medieval iconographic elements: “Owing to its medieval antecedents, Renaissance art was often able to translate into images what classical art had deemed inexpressible” (Panofsky 1939, 71). This argument suggests a complex articulation of the pseudomorphic function in three times (Renaissance– Middle Ages–Antiquity), envisaging a poietic retroactive movement exerted by the present on the remote past via the filter of the recent past.

References Abbott, Mathew. 2018. (ed.). Michael Fried and Philosophy. Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality. New York: Routledge. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1949. “The Priority of Expression”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 8 (2): 106-09.

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

125

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1954 [2004]. Art and Visual Perception (2nd ed., 1974). Berkeley: University of California Press. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1977. The Dynamics of Architectural Form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1982 [1998]. The Power of the Center. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bader, Lena, Gaier, Martin, and Wolf, Falk (eds.). 2010. Vergleichendes Sehen. Munich: Fink. Bell, Clive. 1914. Art. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Benjamin, Walter. 1935-36 [2008]. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott et al. In: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media.  Ed. by Michael W.  Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y.  Levin. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap. Berenson, Bernard. 1896 [1909]. The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. Third ed. New York and London: Putnam’s Sons. Berenson, Bernard. 1948. Aesthetics and History. New York: Pantheon. Bois, Yve-Alain. 1990. “Antiformalism”. In: Painting as Model, XV–XVII. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Bois, Yve-Alain. 1996. “Whose Formalism?”. The Art Bulletin, 78: 9–12. Bois, Yve-Alain. 2015. “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes”. October, 154: 127-149. Bois, Yve-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind E. 1997. Formless. A User’s Guide. New  York: Zone Books. Buchloh, Benjamin H.  D. 2015. Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Burckhardt, Jacob. 1884 [2003]. “Über erzählende Malerei”. In: Vorträge 1870-1892. München and Basel: Beck and Schwabe. Cassirer, Ernst. 1924. “Eidos und eidolon. Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen”. Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1: 1–27. Clark, Timothy J. 1982. “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art”. Critical Inquiry, 9 (1): 139–56. Croce, Benedetto. 1911 [1991 (re-edition)]. “La teoria dell’arte come pura visibilità”. In: Nuovi saggi di estetica. Napoli: Bibliopolis. Croce, Benedetto. 1929. “Die Theorie der Kunst als reiner Sichtbarkeit”. German trans. by Julius von Schlosser. In: Kleine Schriften, vol. 2. Tübingen: Mohr. Davis, Whitney. 2012. “What is Post-Formalism? (or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte)”. nonsite 7. http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-­7-­formalism­post-­formalism. Deleuze, Gilles. 1981 [2004]. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. by Daniel W. Smith. London and New York: Continuum. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1990 [1995]. Fra Angelico. Dissemblance and Figuration. Trans. by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2000. Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Minuit. Drucker, Johanna. 1996. “Formalism’s Other History”. The Art Bulletin, 78: 750–1. Fiedler, Konrad. 1876 [1949]. On Judging Works of Visual Arts. Trans. by Henry Schaefer-Simmer and Fulmer Mood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fiedler, Konrad. 1887 [1991]. “Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit”, vol. 1. In: Schriften zur Kunst, 2 vols. München: Fink.

126 

A. PINOTTI

Fiedler, Konrad. 1951. Three Fragments from the Posthumous Papers. Trans. by Thornton Sinclair and Victor Hammer. Lexington: Stamperia del Santuccio. Florensky, Pavel A. 1924-25 [2000]. “Analiz prostranstvennosti i vremeni v chudožestvenno-izobrazitel’nych proizvedenij”. In:  Istorija i filosofija iskusstva. Moskow: Mysl’. Focillon, Henri. 1934a [1992]. The Life of Forms in Art. Trans. by Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler. New York: Zone Books. Focillon, Henri. 1934b. “In Praise of the Hand”. In: Focillon 1934a. Fried, Michael. 1967 [1998]. “Art and Objecthood”. In:  Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Fried, Michael. 1980. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fried, Michael. 1982. “How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark”. Critical Inquiry, 9 (1): 217–34. Fry, Roger. 1909 [1920]. “An Essay in Aesthetics”. In:  Vision and Design. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. Fry, Roger. 1911 [1996]. “Plastic Design”. In: A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. by Christopher Reed. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Fry, Roger. 1917 [1920]. “Art and Life”. In Vision and Design, 11–22. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. Goethe, Johann W. 1807 [1988]. “The Purpose Set Forth”. Trans. by Douglas Miller. In: Scientific Studies, 63–66. New York: Suhrkamp. Goethe, Johann W. 1810 [1840]. Theory of Colours. Trans. by Charles Lock Eastlake. London: Murray. Goethe, Johann W. 1981. Schriften zur Kunst. Schriften zur Literatur. Maximen und Reflexionen. München: Beck. Greenberg, Clement. 1940 [1995]. “Towards a Newer Laocoön”. In:  The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., vol. 1. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1949 [1995]. “The Role of Nature in Modern Painting”. In: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., vol. 2. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1960 [1995]. “Modernist Painting”. In: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., vol. 4. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hildebrand, Adolf von. 1893 [1994]. “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts”. In:  Empathy, Form and Space. Problem in German Aesthetics. 1873-1893. Ed.  by Harry F. Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Horace. 1942. “Ars Poetica”. Trans. by Henry Rushton Fairclough. In: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kandinsky, Wassily. 1911 [1970]. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. by Michael T. H. Sadler. New York: George Wittenborn. Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Guido. 1933 [2003]. “Remarks on the Structure of Egyptian Sculpture”. Trans. by Brian Fuchs and Amy C. Smith. In: The Vienna School Reader. Ed. by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Klee, Paul. 1920 [2013]. “Creative Confession”. Trans. by Matthew Gale. In: Creative Confession and Other Writings. London: Tate Publishing. Klee, Paul. 1956 [1973]. The Thinking Eye. Trans. by Ralph Manheim. London: Lund Humphries.

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

127

Köhler, Wolfgang. 1947 [1992 (reissued)]. Gestalt Psychology. Renewed 1975 by Lily Köhler. New York: Liveright. Krauss, Rosalind E. 1999. “Reinventing the Medium”. Critical Inquiry, 25 (2): 289–305. Krauss, Rosalind E. 2000. “A Voyage on the North Sea”. Art in the Age of the Post-­ Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. Kubler, George. 1962 [2008]. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lant, Antonia. 1995. “Haptical Cinema”. October, 74: 45–73. Lipps, Theodor. 1906. “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß”. Die Zukunft, 54: 100–14. Longhi, Roberto. 1914 [2001]. Breve ma veridica storia della pittura italiana. Milan: Rizzoli. Mallgrave, Harry F. 2013. Architecture and Embodiment. London: Routledge. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Marx, Karl. 1878. “Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association”. The Secular Chronicle, and Record of Freethought Progress, August 4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1878/08/04.htm. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1961 [1964]. “Eye and Mind”. Trans. by Carleton Dallery. In:  The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nagel, Alexander and Wood, Christopher S. 2010. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books. Nagel, Alexander. 2012. Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time. London: Thames & Hudson. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1911 [1966]. “Arte de este mundo y del otro”. In: Obras completas, vol. 1. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. Pächt, Otto. 1930-31 [2003]. “The End of the Image Theory”. Trans. by Tawney Becker. In:  The Vienna School Reader. Ed.  by Christopher S.  Wood. New  York: Zone Books. Panofsky, Erwin. 1939 [1972]. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Icon Edition. Panofsky, Erwin. 1964 [1992]. Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. London: Phaidon. Pinder, Wilhelm. 1904. Einleitende Voruntersuchung zu einer Rhythmik romanischer Innenräume in der Normandie. Strasbourg: Heitz. Plato. 1997. Parmenides. Trans. by Reginald E. Allen. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Powell Amy K. 2012. Depositions. Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum. New York: Zone Books. Riegl, Alois. 1897-99 [2004]. Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts. Trans. by Jacqueline E. Jung. New York: Zone Books. Riegl, Alois. 1901a [1985]. Late Roman Art Industry. Trans. by Rolf Winkes. Rome: Bretschneider. Riegl, Alois. 1901b [1995]. “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk”. In:  Gesammelte Aufsätze, 65–70. Berlin: Mann. Riegl, Alois. 1902 [1999]. The Group Portraiture of Holland. Trans. by Evelyn M. Cain and David Britt. Los Angeles: the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Rose, Sam. 2019. Art and Form: from Roger Fry to Global Modernism. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

128 

A. PINOTTI

Salvini, Roberto (ed.). 1949. La critica dell’arte moderna. La pura visibilità. Firenze: L’Arco. Salvini, Roberto. 1988. Pure visibilité et formalisme dans la critique d’art du début du XXe siècle. French trans. by Erika Dickenherr et al. Paris: Klincksieck. Schapiro, Meyer. 1936 [2003]. “The New Viennese School”. In:  The Vienna School Reader. Ed. by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Schmarsow, August. 1894 [1994]. “The Essence of Architectural Creation”. In: Empathy, Form and Space. Problem in German Aesthetics. 1873-1893. Ed. by Harry F.  Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Schmarsow, August. 1894; 1905 [1998 (re-edition)]. Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft. Berlin: Mann. Schmarsow, August. 1894. 1915–22. Kompositionsgesetze in der Kunst des Mittelalters. Leipzig: Teubner. Sedlmayr, Hans. 1925. “Gestaltetes Sehen”. Belvedere, 8 (10): 65–73. Sedlmayr, Hans. 1925; 1926. “Zum gestalteten Sehen”. Belvedere, 9 (10): 57–62. Sedlmayr, Hans. 1925; 1930. “The Architecture of Borromini”. Trans. by Karl Johns. Journal of Art Historiography, 14 (2016): 2–114. Sedlmayr, Hans. 1925; 1931 [2003]. “Towards a Rigorous Study of Art”. Trans. by Mia Fineman. In: The Vienna School Reader. Ed. by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Semper, Gottfried. 1856–59 [1984]. “The Attributes of Formal Beauty”. In: Gottfried Semper. In Search of Architecture. Ed. by Wolfgang Herrmann. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Semper, Gottfried. 1860–63 [2004]. Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts: or, Practical Aesthetics. Trans. by Harry F.  Mallgrave and Michael Robinson. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Spengler, Oswald. 1918–22 [1927]. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Trans. by Charles F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf. Steinberg, Leo. 1972 [2007]. “Other Criteria”. In: Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Summers, David. 2003. “Post-Formalist Art History”. In:  Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. New York: Phaidon. Venturi, Lionello. 1936. History of Art Criticism. Trans. by Charles Marriott. New York: Dutton. Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Vidler, Anthony. 2000. Warped Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Vischer, Robert. 1873 [1994]. “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics”. In: Empathy, Form and Space. Problem in German Aesthetics. 1873-1893. Ed.  by Harry F.  Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Warburg, Aby. 1893 [1999]. “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring”. Trans. by David Britt. In:  The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Warnke, Martin. 1991. “Warburg und Wölfflin”. In: Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions. Ed. by Horst Bredekamp et al. Wainheim: VCH.

  FORMALISM AND KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT: THE “HOW” OF THE IMAGE 

129

Wind, Edgar. 1931 [1983]. “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics”. In:  The Eloquence of Symbols. Ed.  by Jaynie Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon. Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1886 [1994]. “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture”. In:  Empathy, Form and Space. Problem in German Aesthetics. 1873-1893. Ed.  by Harry F. Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1886; 1915 [2015]. Principles of Art History. Trans. by Jonathan Blower. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1886; 1931 [1958]. The Sense of Form in Art. Trans. by Alice Muehsam and Norma A. Shatan. New York: Chelsea Publishing. Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1886; 1933 [2015]. “A Revision from 1933 as Afterword”. In:  Principles of Art History. Trans. by Jonathan Blower. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Wollheim, Richard. 2001. “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (2): 127–37. Worringer, Wilhelm. 1907 [1997]. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Trans. by Michael Bullock. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Worringer, Wilhelm. 1907; 1911 [1920]. Form Problems of the Gothic. Unattributed trans. New York: Stechert & Co. Zangwill, Nick. 1999. “Feasible Aesthetic Formalism”. Noûs, 33 (4): 610–29. Zangwill, Nick. 2000. “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism”. The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 (201): 476–93. Zimmermann, Robert. 1865. Allgemeine Ästhetik als Formwissenschaft. Wien: Braunmüller.

Aby Warburg and the Foundations of Image Studies Steffen Haug and Johannes von Müller

1   “Image Historian”: From the Arsenal to the Laboratory, 1917 and 1927 “I am an image historian, not an art historian”. Claiming to have spoken these words to his son, Aby Warburg (13 June 1866–26 October 1929) recorded them in his diary on 12 February 1917. Since the beginning of the First World War, Warburg kept cautiously surveying the latest political and military developments and their reception in Germany and Europe, paying specific attention to the role of images as means of information and, more importantly, agitation (cf. Diers 1997; Schwartz 2007). In order to understand the dynamics of the surrounding visual culture, he then turned to moments in history he deemed precedents for the contemporary situation and whose analysis therefore struck him as particularly revealing. This was the very moment he consciously declared his profession’s nature. Thus, it seems possible to date accurately the transition from a conventional study of the history of art to an innovative form of approaching its source materials that was finally to open out to the universal project of image studies (cf. Warnke 1999; Bredekamp 2003; Hensel 2011). This, however, would mean to simplify what is indeed a complex history—with regard to Warburg’s practice, whose particular ways of accessing a history of art in the context of the wider history of civilization unfolded over the span of the scholar’s entire oeuvre, as well as to the field of image studies in general whose beginnings cannot be limited to Warburg alone. However, Warburg is

S. Haug (*) • J. von Müller The Warburg Institute, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_8

131

132 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

Fig. 1  Aby Warburg at Coronado Beach, USA, 1896.  © The Warburg Institute, London (reproduced with permission by the copyright holder)

undoubtedly a key figure in this history  (Hofmann et.al. 1980) (Fig.  1). It seems therefore critical to clarify what he might have had in mind when he not only distanced himself from the discipline of art history of his time but explicitly differentiated his own metier as that of an “image historian”. The context in which the above-quoted phrase is conveyed provides information essential to Warburg’s study of a history of images. Noted down in his diary, it speaks of his habit of recording pedantically any progress he made. After the war, when his library eventually grew into the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K. B. W.), a private research institute, this took on an even more systematic form and his personal diary was transformed into an institutional journal (Warburg 2001). As such, it was more dedicated to professional matters than to private ones. The fact that Warburg marks the completion of his conversion to becoming an image historian in a conversation with his son is therefore as remarkable as it is exemplary—not least because it points to his family’s significance in all his endeavors. The family’s banking business, after all, supplied the background that enabled Warburg to remain a private scholar all his life, not being restricted by any university’s budgetary policies while

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

133

running an operation as costly as his. The distinct cultural scientific interests as they are articulated in the name of the K. B. W. drove its director’s exceptional practice of acquisitions: he assembled books in large numbers and from a variety of fields and disciplines (he famously disapproved of any “grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit”, limitations caused by the disciplines’ border patrol) to create a unique synthesis of knowledge that he deemed necessary for the study of a history of civilization according to his understanding (Forster 1976, Böhme 1997, Wind 2009). This library’s organization did not follow the division of disciplines, but its categories were informed by Warburg’s particular research questions. Thus, it served as a tool supporting his work due to the famous “Prinzip der guten Nachbarschaft”; the law of the good neighbor, according to which the book one needs, is the one next to the book one was looking for (Saxl 1970). In 1926, he even had a building erected designed for his unique library, furnished with the latest technologies, ranging from a system of pneumatic delivery pipes to a photo studio equipped with state-of-the-art reprographic devices to supply him with reproductions of the sources he studied and worked with. Depending so fundamentally on his family as he did, Warburg gave a synopsis of his work to his siblings in 1927, seeking to secure their future support: “I feel the need to reflect upon the origins and the nature of this institution for whose further development I ask such extensive moral and material support” (Warburg 2012b, 112). In this remarkable document, Warburg justified the institutional costs with a summary of his academic efforts: “This phenomenon of exchange between North and South, which had become so strikingly evident to me, could only be studied at an institute that really brought together the northern and southern threads. In other words, an institute was necessary that had the essential, very expansive publications about both areas, and that made them easily available […]” (117). Thus, Warburg himself defined the central theme of his work as the exchange between visual cultures in Southern and Northern Europe. The most famous product of this distinctive interest is probably the Mnemosyne Atlas. This ambitious project, which was to remain unfinished, set out to trace visual continuities throughout a cultural history. Warburg assembled motifs that kept reappearing in different eras, being constantly remodeled but preserving only the more their expressiveness. The title references the mother of muses and goddess of memory and in fact the project is based on the hypothesis of a cultural memory of images. Warburg was tracing this memory by revealing itineraries the respective visual forms had traveled on through time and space: from antiquity to the Renaissance, up to Warburg’s present and from Asia via Greece, Spain and Italy to Northern Europe. As the cause of the images’ constant movement, he identified a psychological dimension, recognizing visual representations as expressions of emotions or rather affects. The famous term he used to describe this quality was “Pathosformel” (Warnke 1980). In those Pathos Formulas, he saw the products of a phylogenetic imprint, converted in antiquity into a visual vocabulary that remained significant throughout the history of Western

134 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

civilization. This significance equaled a power, due to which images could be charged with almost magic capabilities, subduing the beholders, forcing them as an object of cult to idolize them; or, in contrast, they could equally well act emancipating: externalizing emotions, they reduced those emotions’ immediacy, translating the distance between beholders and images into a distance between human being and surrounding world, then creating what Warburg called “Denkraum der Besonnenheit”, a mental space for reflection. It is exactly this tension between superstition and reason, magic and science that Warburg understood as the “tragic” driving force of civilization. Since he held it equally responsible for “moving” images, the history of these movements matched a history of civilization. The latest episode of this “tragic” history, Warburg believed to be witnessing himself during the First World War, leading him to redefine his own profession as that of an “image historian”. However, the tension between opposites as a driving force of civilization is something he was already concerned with even as the young art historian as which he started out.

2   “Pathos Formula”: Warburg’s Early Works, 1886–1914 In 1891, Warburg finished his doctoral thesis on Botticelli and the resurfacing of specific ancient motifs in the Renaissance artist’s painting. From this first monograph to his famous lecture on the “iconology” of the Palazzo Schifanoia in 1912, he constantly expanded the field of his studies. Following the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), he regarded art within the social, cultural and philosophical context of its time. In doing so, he developed a synthetic view, in which he considered visual and literary sources alike, which led him to the founding of iconology as a method. This method served Warburg’s particular cultural historical and theoretical approach to art history. The respective steps of this development should be retraced briefly. As indicated above, Warburg was born as the eldest son of the renowned Hamburg banking family, whose banking house M.  M. Warburg & Co was founded by his great-grandfather. At the age of 13, however, he transferred his “first-born”-right as successor of the bank to his brother Max Warburg (1867–1946), who in exchange financed his library and research for the rest of his life. In 1885, he passed his examination at the Hamburg Johanneum, subsequently adding an exam in Greek as the basis for the entrance to university. Warburg commenced his university studies in Art History, History and Archeology at the University of Bonn in autumn 1886. He studied with Carl Justi (1832–1912), the historian Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) and the scholar of comparative religion Hermann Usener (1834–1905), laying the theoretical foundations of his later approach (Gombrich 1970). On a study trip to Florence with August Schmarsow (1853–1936) during the winter of 1888/1889, Warburg found the topic for his doctoral dissertation and indeed his life’s work: the “Nachleben”, that is, the afterlife or survival, of antique motifs in the early

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

135

Renaissance, used specifically for the depiction of the human body in motion (cf.  Michaud 2007; Didi-Huberman 2017). Warburg thus contradicted Winckelmann’s notion that antiquity was only a model for a statuary of “noble simplicity and silent magnitude”. In his doctoral thesis (1891; published 1893), supervised by Hubert Janitschek (1846–1893) and Adolf Michaelis (1853–1910) at the University of Strasbourg, Warburg traced the antique models for the depiction of movement in Sandro Botticelli’s Spring and Birth of Venus, in this case through animated accessories (“bewegtes Beiwerk”). He was able to show that they were not only found in the visual arts but also in antique literary descriptions, rediscovered in the Renaissance and first put to life in poems, theater and festive culture. For his iconographic method, Warburg compared art and literature and included contemporary  book illustrations which mediated between the two. He finally interpreted the depictions of movement not solely as an aesthetic style but as the “seelischer Ausdruck”, the psychic expression, of the time, as a commencing liberation from the rigid religious and aesthetic conventions of the late Middle Ages. In 1892 Warburg studied psychological medicine in Berlin for the summer semester, as he had an interest in the psychic foundations of aesthetics. This interest also informed the theoretical reflections of his Fragments on the study of expression (1888–1906) (Warburg 2015). Between January 1894 and April 1895, he spent several extended periods of time in Florence, where he worked on the relationship between art and early opera and its renewal by the revival of antiquity by studying costume- and stage-drawings. From October 1895 to May 1896, he traveled to the USA on the occasion of his brother’s wedding, where he visited the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico for field research (Warburg 2018). As he was interested in their festive culture as, according to him, people in the state of primitive pagan culture, he expanded his research spectrum by including ethnology (Bredekamp 2019). In November 1897, after his marriage to the sculptor Mary Hertz (1866–1934), Warburg moved to Florence. As part of the circle surrounding the newly founded German Art Historical Institute (today the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz—Max Planck Institut) and its director Heinrich Brockhaus (1858–1941), he carried out intensive archival research as a basis for his later studies. His main topic continued to be the art of the early Renaissance with the frescoes of Domenico Ghirlandaio as the subject of several studies, as these works show a dual influence: on the one side, the renewal of antiquity and its gestures in motion, notably with the figure of the Ninfa, contrasted on the other side by a detailed depiction of contemporary portraits and heavy decorated costumes inspired by the Northern school. The revival of antique forms was thus part of a twofold struggle, against the religious conventions as well as the taste of the Medici patrons for Northern costume realism. Warburg researched the trade routes of the Medici between Flanders, France and Florence, as well the variety of objects depicting this influence of Northern style in their collections. Warburg did not publish his findings in a single book, but in a series of publications between 1901 and 1905, such as Portraiture and

136 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

Florentine Bourgeoisie (1902) and Artistic Exchange between North and South (1905), in which he summed up his research on the reciprocal migration of artworks in Europe. After his return to Hamburg, Warburg began in 1905 to institutionalize his research library (Diers 1991). Simultaneously, he continued to establish a wide international academic network, leading to him being the co-organizer of the international congresses of art history between 1907 and 1912, including figures like Adolf Goldschmidt (1863–1944), Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929), Jacques Mesnil (1872–1940), Adolfo Venturi (1856–1941) and others. In his 1905 lecture Dürer and Italian Antiquity, he presented his research on the abovementioned “Pathos formulas”, the recurring gestures for the expression of intense emotions, coined in antiquity and revived in the Italian Renaissance (Hurttig 2012). Using the example of the “death of Orpheus”, he traced the trajectories of the motifs from Greek vases to an Italian etching and from there to Dürer’s drawing. Arranging plates with these images for his audience, the panels he thus produced are an early model of the later Bilderatlas, discussed below (Diers 2009). After researching the migration of motifs between North and South, the inclusion of the images of astrology widened the perspective even further from 1908 onward, now embracing as well the image-trajectories between East and West. Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) and Franz Boll (1867–1924) became his essential collaborators in the following years. In 1912, Warburg gave his  famous lecture on Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, in which he was able to attribute the previously unexplained figures of these frescoes to astrological sources. He could prove the chain of transmission of these figures from Greek astrology via Alexandria, Baghdad, India, North Africa and Spain to Italy, and show the continuous transformations of their iconography over the course of this path. The iconology of these frescoes is thus only understood if the trajectories of motifs are studied. The majority of these visual and textual documents were not regarded as art, but illustrations, closely connected to the astrological texts, from late antique cosmological systems via manuscript illuminations to printed treatises. The lecture is regarded as the birth of iconology and brought him great international recognition (Heckscher 1967). In his study he combined positivist source studies with fundamental methodological explanations in which he called for the extension of art history to cultural studies. In those studies, from 1891 to 1912, Warburg subsequently widened the range of images of his research, opening it from art history to a cultural history of visual expression. As stated at the beginning, this research was about to be intensified and explicated as a history of images in response to the events of the First World War. While he has always been concerned with politics—notably with the constant threat of German antisemitism (Schoell-Glass 2008)—now it became the center of his daily practice. Between 1914 and 1918, Warburg’s research was informed by the experience of the political impact of mass images between news and propaganda. This dichotomy was to become the essence of his understanding of the image’s twofold potential and civilization as a permanent struggle.

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

137

3   “Word and Image”: Warburg on the Age of Luther, 1917–1920 Warburg’s method of describing phenomena in dichotomic terms, deducing dynamics from juxtapositions and even narrating history itself as a pendular process rested entirely on his understanding of the image as an inherently ambiguous form. Thus, it was both focal point and key factor of Warburg’s notion of civilization. Its specific dialectic conception, the essence of Warburg’s image theory, is exemplified in an almost ideal form in an article that fittingly bears in its title what is probably the most famous of his pairs of terms: Pagan-­ Antique Prophecies in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920). This article is generally understood as one of the founding documents of the fields of Bildwissenschaft or visual studies as championed by prominent figures like Horst Bredekamp (Bredekamp 2003) and W. J. T. Mitchell (cf. Hensel 2011, 12f.). It is no coincidence that an interview with Mitchell, after all one of the pioneers of visual studies, quotes the very title of Warburg’s formative text: Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image (McNamara 1996). The pairing of “Wort und Bild” answers to the parallelization of written and visual sources that Warburg developed as iconological method in his preceding studies. Furthermore, by overcoming the exclusive category of art and turning toward the universal notion of the image, which he interpreted alongside the two poles of its expressive spectrum, idol and sign, he succeeded in indicating its agency as a history-shaping factor. As mentioned above, Warburg did so under the impression of the events of his own time. Not only did he witness the usage of images for propagandistic purposes, but, more importantly, he observed a continuous deterioration of the capability to critically judge those images and with them the contexts they derived from. This worrying development he recognized as a consequence of war, which he himself experienced as a crisis. However, Warburg was, after all, an art historian and cultural theorist whose interest lay in historical items and whose analytical capacity had been trained studying them. Soon after he had started surveying the reception of war in the media and the impact it had on social life, he therefore turned to a historical case that appeared particularly meaningful to him: the age of reformation, shaped by religious conflicts, first fought out by means of the early printing press and then carried forth in the Thirty Years’ War, another conflict that involved all European powers. Consequently, Warburg presented the “age of Luther” as a model that made his own time appear as the Wiedergänger of an archetypical conflict that resurfaced in both moments in history and was nothing less than a fundamental struggle that defined European civilization itself (Newman 2008). “The standard work on The Bondage of Superstitious Modern Man”, the text begins, “would have to be preceded by a study […] on the Renaissance of the Spirit World of Antiquity in the Age of German Reformation” (Warburg 1999, 589). To conduct this very study, Warburg chose as its object astrology with its long tradition in which classical culture served merely as one of many mediators, and

138 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

its ambiguous nature as both magical practice and a method based on mathematics. Warburg examined how horoscopes and prophecies were used for celebrating Martin Luther or arguing against him, depending on what side was issuing the respective pamphlet. He wanted to understand as much as he sought to demonstrate not only how political (or religious) conflicts reinforced an eternal conflict between superstition and reason but also how these two were in fact inherent in one and the same practice, or rather a “Gerät, mit dem der Astrologe messen und zugleich zaubern kann”, a tool for computing and working magic alike. These opposites Warburg was able to describe in terms of his image theory. For, the constellations of stars could equally be read as a “Sternbild”, literarily an image formed of stars, and as “Sternzeichen”, a sign recognized in the stars (599), hence being an image and as such a phenomenon whose impact on its beholders was immediate, almost magical, and a sign, an abstraction that removed the phenomenon from its beholders’ proximity. This “unheimlich entgegengesetzte Doppelmacht”, this dual power whose nature was so unsettling due to its contrariness, Warburg saw being reinforced by the concrete example of the stars and constellations carrying the names of the pagan gods, but he deduced it from a potential of the image in general. The image was capable of subduing its beholders, demanding as an idol cultic devotion, especially since its range was enhanced: “The art of printing enabled images  – their language an international one  – to fly far and wide. These stormy petrels darted from North to South and back again, and every party sought to enlist in its own cause the ‘pictorial slogans’” (622). The media critique is obvious. To give it historical depth, Warburg first had had to widen the range of his concerns, which he did when he declared that the images he examined “fall into the scope of the history of art in the widest sense (insofar as the term covers image making in all its forms)”, and then continued “they lack aesthetic appeal; and without the texts that relate to them […] they are unpromising material” (598). Led by the image as object of his study, and complementing it by the “word” as an image historian, Warburg established nothing less than a discourse analysis avant la lettre. By doing so, he had identified the image as a general category, though he maintained a particular notion of art in the more conventional sense. He left it to Albrecht Dürer to counter the image’s magical powers and to realize its potential as an epistemic instrument. In Dürer’s artistic description of allegedly monstrous phenomena, Warburg recognized a proto-scientific approach to nature and therefore an antidote to superstitious beliefs. The mental space for reflection, the “Denkraum” that could be destroyed by images, could also be increased by the means of visual expression. Since the struggle between superstition and reason was a universal one, a “tragic history of freedom of thought in modern Europe” (650), in that sense that the “age when magic and logic blossomed […] is inherently timeless” (599), Warburg himself took on a particular responsibility. Studying the agency of images, he, as their historian, had consequently an agency of his own. By analyzing the discourses of the age of Luther and through them deconstructing the discourses of his own time, he himself was battling to

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

139

increase the ever endangered “Denkraum”  (Korff 2007). This responsibility would guide him in his last (and productively most lasting) years.

4   “Mental Space for Reflection”: The Bilderatlas, 1924–1929 Warburg had first given his lecture on Pagan-Antique Prophecies in November 1917 in Hamburg and then in April 1918 in Berlin. While he was preparing the publication, the war was finally turning against Germany. Just before the imminent defeat, Warburg suffered a breakdown from which he recovered only in 1924, having been treated in a sanatorium in Kreuzlingen in Switzerland. During this time, beginning in 1921, Fritz Saxl became director of the library and developed it into a research institute with academic lectures and publications in close collaboration with the University of Hamburg. Here, the lecturer of art history, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), whom Warburg had first met 1915, and the professor for philosophy Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who visited Warburg 1923 in Kreuzlingen, collaborated closely with the K. B. W. During that time, Saxl published his first article on Warburg’s methodology (Saxl 1922), which remains fundamental until today. In April 1923, Warburg presented his lecture on the “Serpent-Ritual” in Kreuzlingen as proof of having regained his powers sufficiently for academic work, drawing on his trip to the Pueblo Indians in 1894/1895 while analyzing the Pueblo rituals as a moment of transition of human culture between magic practice and symbolic art form (Warburg 1995). After his return to Hamburg in August 1924, Warburg continued his pre-­ war research, but now contextualized within a wider anthropological perspective. His lecture for Franz Boll on The Influence of the ‘Sphaera barbarica’ on Western Attempts at Cosmic Orientation in May 1925 placed the astrological images from his Schifanoia-lecture in the context of the human relation to the cosmos between Babylonian astrology and modern science. In May 1926, he opened his new library building, the already mentioned K. B. W.—Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, at Heilwigstrasse 116, next door to his own house. For it, he conceived a new lecture room in the form of an ellipse. This “symbolic form” references a “watershed” in the relation of the human to the cosmos, as it refers to the scientific calculation of the planetary orbits as ellipses by Johannes Kepler and thus the transition from a speculative to a modern scientific model (Bredekamp and Wedepohl 2015). In his first lecture there, Rembrandt and Italian Antiquity, Warburg extended the research on the renewal of antiquity to the Northern Baroque, tracing the moment in which the “pathos formulas” had become a fashionable rhetorical form in painting, against which Rembrandt advanced more calm and reflective gestures. For this lecture, he arranged the images on rectangular panels, lined up along the sides of the lecture room (cf. Warburg 2000, XI). For these sequences, Warburg already used the term “Bilderatlas” in August 1926

140 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

(Warburg 2001, 6). From then on, he regularly accompanied his lectures with sequences of images on portable displays. In spring 1927, Warburg developed the concrete project of his Atlas; on 22  February, he writes to his brother Paul: “I am planning a large ‘Atlas of types’ [Typenatlas], to summarize my research as far as it concerns the influence of antiquity on European culture”. The “types” refer to the “pathos formulas” as the primary visual vocabulary of ancient art, and the Atlas intended to illustrate the variety of that vocabulary as well as its later resumption and processing as a medium of expression by artists since the Renaissance (Wedepohl 2014) (Fig. 2). The Atlas was to trace the “Wanderstrassen”, the trajectories of the images through the different epochs as well in their geographical exchange. For the concrete work of the Atlas, Warburg arranged photographic reproductions of the artworks on panels, each one measuring approximately 200 by 150 cm, consisting of wooden racks covered with black cloth. Warburg continually widened the project. A first series of photographs to document his panels from May 1928 contained 43 panels with 682 images, while the second series of photographs from August/September of that year already contains 71 panels with 1050 images. In order to deepen the themes and the material for them, he traveled to Italy from October 1928 to June 1929 with his assistant Gertrud Bing (1892–1964), who had joined the K. B. W. in 1922 (Bing 2019). In Rome, he presented his project to the public on 19 January 1929 in his lecture on Roman Antiquity in the Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Warburg 2012a, 303–366). After his return to Hamburg, Warburg worked on the Atlas until his death and left it unfinished. This “last version” comprises 63 panels with 971 images. As the panels number up to 79, the series was not yet complete, underlining the status of the project as a “work in progress”. Warburg had planned to publish his Atlas as one volume of plates, accompanied by two volumes of texts, the first with historical documentation and the second with his interpretation. Of the text, only his draft for the introduction had been formulated (Warburg 2009), as well as another fragment on Manet and Italian Antiquity (Warburg 2014). The introduction sums up Warburg’s implicit theory of the function of image production within culture since his early works, and so he writes, The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world can probably be designated as the founding act of human civilization. When this interval becomes the basis of artistic production, the conditions have been fulfilled for this consciousness of distance to achieve an enduring social function which, in its rhythmical change between absorption in its object or detached restraint, signifies the oscillation between a cosmology of images and one of signs. (Warburg 2009, 276f.)

The “distance” and “interval” which Warburg mentions describe the very Denkraum he had been concerned with throughout his scholarly work and

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

141

Fig. 2  Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas,  1929, panel 79.  © The Warburg Institute, London (reproduced with permission by the copyright holder)

142 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

with a particular intensity from 1914 onward. Subsequently, he applied this theory, notably, to the entirety of image production from the early cultures to modernity (Zumbusch 2006; Johnson 2012). In the panels, he follows this history from early Babylonian astrology in the fourteenth century B.C. to his own time. This universality is also present in the variety of objects that Warburg assembles for his argumentation: They range from reliefs, sculpture and painting, applied arts, prints, manuscripts, book illustrations to postage stamps, contemporary advertisements, press photography and newspaper clippings. The panels truly summarize the development of Warburg’s research over a span of four decades. Inevitably, this includes also the approaches he had started to develop and refine while witnessing the propaganda of war. Newspaper photographs therefore expand the “longue durée” of the “pathos formula” up to the present of the Weimar Republic. Warburg followed it from antiquity via the Renaissance to contemporary photographs, seeking to realize in this Herculean (and impossible to fulfill) task the very mission which he had imposed on himself in the moment he revealed to his diary in 1917: “I am an image historian, not an art historian”.

5   “Afterlife”: Warburg’s Legacy What is true for history is equally true for historiography. Thus, the line between Warburg being indeed a founder of prestigious projects such as “image studies” or even a “methodology of iconology” and Warburg rather being found by others and posthumously installed in this role is a blurry one. One does not have to reach a decision on this matter though, to point out the most critical aspects of Warburg’s efforts that predestine him as a milestone within the history of the history of art and image studies in particular. In December 1933, the K. B. W., now directed by Fritz Saxl, the successor of Warburg, had to leave Hamburg and emigrated to London to escape from prosecution in Nazi Germany. Together with Gertrud Bing and Edgar Wind (1900–1971), later Oxford’s first professor of the History of Art, Saxl achieved the relocation of nearly 60,000 books (McEwan 1999). Once in London, the staff of what was now The Warburg Institute made it their occupation to help colleagues to escape from central Europe and either to find work and a home in the UK or to continue their journey across the Atlantic. Among them was also Ernst Gombrich, later long-time director of the Warburg Institute and author of the Intellectual Biography of Warburg (Gombrich 1970). By rescuing his library and also his working papers, Warburg’s former associates laid the foundations for the “Nachleben” of their mentor’s achievements. However, this history is first and foremost one of survival, not only of an intellectual project, but of the people associated with it. With the departure of the K. B. W., Warburg fell into oblivion in Germany. Apart from individuals like Carl Georg Heise (1890–1971), a former student of Warburg’s and the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle from 1945 to 1955, who published in 1947 his Personal Memories of Warburg (Heise 2005), art

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

143

history as a whole abstained from dealing with this legacy that was no longer physically present. It was not until a critical engagement with the political contaminations of German art history began in the late 1960s that Warburg was rediscovered or rather revived: as an alternative to the scholarship whose tradition had remained intact throughout the years between 1933 and 1945. This was not least the achievement of Martin Warnke (1937–2019), then professor of Art History in Marburg and soon after in Hamburg, where, due to his initiative in 1995, the city of Hamburg obtained the building of the former K.  B. W. and the Warburg-Haus was founded as a permanent part of the University of Hamburg (cf. Bredekamp et al. 1991). Given the strong political impetus of Warburg’s work, especially in later years, it is not surprising that its reception opened out into the formation of the field of political iconography (Warnke 1992). This field played a decisive role in the reformation of art history as Bildwissenschaft. Warburg’s method was particularly applicable to the analysis of visual politics due to its particular nature. As mentioned above, his approach can be read as a form of discourse analysis. This might explain why it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that an interest in his work started to grow, not only in Germany but also in Italy as well as the USA  (Wuttke 1998; Biester and Wuttke 2007).  This led to new publications of his writings (Warburg 1998aff.; Warburg 1998b) in various editions (Warburg 2010), also internationally. Warburg was committed to the necessity of studying artworks in close relation to other forms of cultural expression. Not only did this allow him to gain new insights concerning the objects he studied as an art historian, but it also affected the status of the objects of those studies. It emphasized their significance beyond the confines of a purely art-historical interest and, in consequence, revealed their autonomy. This is what made Warburg’s legacy—his texts as well as the many unfinished projects and notes—once more relevant in the aftermath of more recent developments such as the so-called material turn. The agency that Warburg was willing to attribute to images is already inherent in his famous dictum from 1888, directed at the image as such, “Du lebst und thust mir nichts”: you live but do me no harm (Warburg 2015, 6). Once more, Warburg speaks to the twofold potential of the image: as object of cultic practice, it had the power to subdue its beholders while, as an epistemic instrument, providing the means to overcome this submission. This conviction informed his strong focus on the actual object and it is what keeps informing the potential his work has  (Wedepohl 2016), despite an undeniably strong eurocentrism and many other flaws, in the context of an increasingly global perspective of art history as a discipline. It is this, his sincere interest in the “image” and its “history” in the sense of a contemporary discourse, the analysis of which is directed at revealing the very dynamics that drive civilizations.

144 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

References Warburg’s Writings Warburg, Aby. 1998aff. Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag/De Gruyter. The following volumes have been published: Warburg, Aby. 1998b. I.1,2: Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance. Reprint of the edition by Gertrud Bing in collaboration with Fritz Rougemont 1932. Horst Bredekamp and Michael Diers, eds. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Warburg, Aby. 2000. II.1: Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSNYE, Martin Warnke in collaboration with Claudia Brink, eds. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Warburg, Aby. 2012a. II.2: Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen, Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt, eds. Berlin: De Gruyter. Warburg, Aby. 2018. III.2: Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord-Amerika, Uwe Fleckner, ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. Warburg, Aby. 2015. IV: Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde, Ulrich Pfisterer and Hans Christian Hönes, eds. Berlin: De Gruyter. Warburg, Aby. 2001. VII: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek, Karen Michels and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Warburg, Aby. 2010. Werke in einem Band, Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig, eds. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

In English Warburg, Aby. 1995. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians in North America. Translation and essay by Michael Steinberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Warburg, Aby. 1999. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Contribution to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translation by David Britt, introduction by Kurt W. Forster. Los Angeles: Getty. Warburg, Aby. 2009. The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past. Translation and introduction by Matthew Rampley. Art in Translation, 1 (2): 273–283. Warburg, Aby. 2012b. From the Arsenal to the Laboratory. Translated and edited by Christopher D. Johnson and Claudia Wedepohl. West 86th, 19: 1. Warburg, Aby. 2014. “Manet and Italian Antiquity”. Translated by Henriette Frankfort, introduced, edited and annotated by Claudia Wedepohl. Bruniana & Campanelliana. Ricerche filosofiche e materiali storico-testuali, 20 (2): 455–476.

General Bibliography Biester, Björn, and Dieter Wuttke. 2007. Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866–2005 mit Annotationen und Nachträgen zur Bibliographie 1866 bis 1995.  Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner. Bing, Gertrud. 2019. Fragments sur Warburg. Martin Treml and Philippe Despoix, eds. foreword by Carlo Ginzburg. Paris: INHA. Böhme, Hartmut. 1997. Aby M. Warburg (1866–1929). In: Axel Michaels, ed. Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, Munich:

  ABY WARBURG AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF IMAGE STUDIES 

145

C.H.  Beck: 133–157; online: https://www.hartmutboehme.de/data/media/ Warburg.pdf Bredekamp, Horst. 2003. “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft”. Critical Inquiry, 29 (3): 418–428. Bredekamp, Horst. 2019. Warburg, der Indianer. Erkundungen einer liberalen Ethnologie. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst, and Claudia Wedepohl. 2015. Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gespräch: Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst; Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds. 1991. Aby Warburg: Akten des Internationalen Symposiums (Hamburg 1990). Weinheim: Acta Humanitoria. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2017. The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, Translated by Harvey Mendelsohn. Michigan: Pennsylvania State University Press. Diers, Michael. 1991. Warburg aus Briefen. Kommentare zu den Kopierbüchern der Jahre 1905–1918. Weinheim: Acta Humanitoria. Diers, Michael. 1997. Schlagbilder. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart. Frankfurt: Fischer. Diers, Michael. 2009. “Atlas und Mnemosyne: Von der Praxis der Bildtheorie bei Aby Warburg”. In: Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn. Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp: 181–213. Forster, Kurt W. 1976. “Aby Warburg’s History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images”. Daedalus, 105 (1): 169–176. Heckscher, William S. 1967. The Genesis of Iconology. In: Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes. Akten des XXI.  Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964. Berlin: Gebr. Mann. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1970. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography: With a Memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl. London: Phaidon. Heise, Carl Georg. 2005. Persönliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg. Björn Biester and Hans-Michael Schäfer, eds. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Hensel, Thomas. 2011. Wie aus der Kunstgeschichte eine Bildwissenschaft wurde. Aby Warburgs Graphien. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Hofmann, Werner; Georg Syamken, and Martin Warnke, eds. 1980. Die Menschenrechte des Auges: Über Aby Warburg. Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Hurttig, Marcus Andrew. 2012. Die entfesselte Antike. Aby Warburg und die Geburt der Pathosformel, Thomas Ketelsen and Andreas Stolzenburg, eds. contributions by Ulrich Rehm and Claudia Wedepohl. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König. Johnson, Christopher D. 2012. Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Korff, Gottfried (ed.). 2007. Kasten 117: Aby Warburg und der Aberglaube im Ersten Weltkrieg. Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde. McEwan, Dorothea. 1999. “A Tale of One Institute and Two Cities. The Warburg Institute”. Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, 1: 25–42. McNamara, Andrew. 1996. “Words and Pictures in the Age of the Image”. Eyeline, 30: 16–21. Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2007. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. New  York: Zone Books.

146 

S. HAUG AND J. VON MÜLLER

Newman, Jane O. 2008. “Luther’s Birthday. Aby Warburg, Albrecht Dürer, and Early Modern Media in the Age of Modern War”. Daphnis, 37: 79–110. Saxl, Fritz. 1922. “Rinascimento dell’antichità: Studien zu den Schriften A. Warburgs”. Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, 43: 220–272. Saxl, Fritz. 1970. “The History of Warburg’s Library”. In: Gombrich 1970: 325–338. Schoell-Glass, Charlotte. 2008. Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism. Political Perspectives on Images and Culture.  Translated by Samuel Pakucs Willcocks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Schwartz, Peter J. 2007. “Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek. Vorbericht einer Rekonstruktion”. In: Korff 2007: 39–70. Warnke, Martin. 1980. “Vier Stichworte. Ikonologie—Pathosformel—Polarität und Ausgleich—Schlagbilder und Bilderfahrzeuge”. In: Hofmann, Syamken, Warnke, 1980: 55–83. Warnke, Martin. 1992. “Politische Ikonographie”. In: Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst. Zur Geistesgegenwart der Ikonologie, Andreas Beyer, ed. Berlin 1992: 23–29. Warnke, Martin. 1999. “Aby Warburg (1866–1929)”. In Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, Heinrich Dilly, ed. Berlin 1999: 117–130. Wedepohl, Claudia. 2014. “Mnemosyne, Apollo and the Muses: Mythology as Epistemology in Aby Warburg’s ‘Bilderatlas’”. In The Muses and Their Afterlife in Post-Classical Europe, Kathleen W.  Christian, Clare E.  L. Guest, and Claudia Wedepohl, eds. London: The Warburg Institute: 211–270. Wedepohl, Claudia. 2016. “Aby Warburg”, in: Oxford Bibliographies, online: https:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-­9 780199920105/ obo-­9780199920105-­0087.xml#firstMatch Wind, Edgar. 2009. “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaften and Its Meaning for Aesthetics”. In: The Art of Art History, Donald Preziosi, ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press: 195–214. Wuttke, Dieter. 1998. Aby M. Warburg-Bibliographie 1866–1995. Werk und Wirkung, mit Annotationen- Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner. Zumbusch, Cornelia. 2006. Wissenschaft in Bildern. Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk.  Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Early Interactions of Static and Moving Images Mirela Ramljak Purgar

1   Introduction One of the keys to the understanding of visual culture at the beginning of the twentieth century is the relationship between the static and the moving images. There is good reason, then, to investigate the interactions not only between the image that preceded the movie (the photograph) but also the image that came into being under the influence of film. In this entry we shall call this kind of image the static-moved image. This essay takes its point of departure from the conviction that Walter Benjamin was one of the first authors to have written about the link between the media of photography and film, the new technologies of the beginning of the twentieth century, and that it was he that created the foundation for a discussion of the crucial themes that appeared at the turn of the century. As well as in his best-known work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1939), in his much more extensive work, The Arcades Project, which will be invoked here, he also drew attention to the key role of the new visual media of the static and the moving images. The fact that in this text Benjamin refers equally to the photograph as a technological invention and a new means of artistic expression will enable us to define the context within which interaction between the different visual media occurs. The medium of photography, for instance, to be discussed at the beginning of this essay, will be considered in the following ways: (1) in the period of modernity, characterized by the ambivalence of the concept of modernity, as a not entirely new phenomenon, but in the new circumstances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a new environment for the analysis of phenomena such as

M. R. Purgar (*) Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek, Croatia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_9

147

148 

M. R. PURGAR

beauty or “presentness” (Calinescu) or the “divided pathos of Modernism” (Hoffmann); (2) within the new socially and technologically produced observer: precisely because of the appearance of new visualization techniques, Jonathan Crary thinks that the germs of Modernism were at the beginning of the nineteenth century; (3) within the new multimedial observer: in this sense, we have referred to John Fullerton, who shows that the new technologies meant a new experience in the person of the observer, the user of the new optical inventions that were a form of popular entertainment. In his essay on modern techniques of visualization in popular culture, Fullerton mentions the documentary film as the most recent in the series, while in Walter Benjamin, in the essay entitled “Photography” in The Arcades Project, film is mentioned first. Accordingly, we think that it is film that is the medium that affected the visual expression of some paradigmatic modern artists. We have taken as an example Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and also referred to theorists who have studied his printmaking oeuvre (Schiefler and Dube-­ Heynig) and the editors of his letters (Delfs and Kornfeld), in order to correlate on the one hand the new medium of moving images and on the other those that are static—Kirchner’s woodcuts—and show how the concept of the moved image is dealt with in equal measure by the artist himself and the experts who were then trying, in the early twentieth century, to understand and interpret the new manner of expression. We shall discover in what way the so-called multimedial observer is concealed behind the observer of Kirchner’s woodcuts: using the example of the prints Akt mit schwarzem Hut (1911/13) and Frauen am Potsdamerplatz (1914), we shall show that the artist was aware of his position as mediator between static and moving images, as was the observer who has to know both in order to understand the principle of the static-moved image, as we have here called images like the two woodcuts mentioned.

2   Walter Benjamin, Photography and The Arcades Project When he was writing his notes for The Arcades Project (1926–1940), collecting quotes and adding to them his own comments in the “Photography” unit, Walter Benjamin was concerned, among other things, with the difference between the photograph and the painting. This was very clearly one of the points of contention in the reception of the medium that differed substantially in its grounding in technology and was still to earn its place on the scale of artistic value. Later we shall refer to Calinescu and a source in Baudelaire, noticing the relation between history and the present. As Susan Buck-Morss writes, in his “practice of history writing” (Buck-Morss 1991, x), Benjamin attempted to deny the present as mythical presence, not interpreting this present as culmination of a “cultural continuum”, rather through the revelation of the relation of historical sources “which has the power to explode history’s ‘continuum’” (ibid). From this it derives that the specific historical knowledge

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

149

that is needed for the liberation of the present from myth “is not easily uncovered. Discarded and forgotten, it lies buried within surviving culture, remaining invisible precisely because it was so little use to those in power” (ibid.). According to Benjamin, the difference between painting and photography is characterized by the attitude to technology. However, how does he set up the little shifts in the perception of this difference? A kind of paradox occurs, for example: that the old photographic technique—daguerreotypy—provides greater expressiveness than the more recent photography (Benjamin 1999, 687; Y 8, 1—German edition cf. Benjamin 2018), for this older technique arrives at a “livelier and more universal expression” by submitting the plate to a longer exposure. It was a kind of expressiveness, taking the example of photographic portraiture, in the concrete concepts of colors and forms, that for Benjamin’s contemporaries meant a struggle for prestige in the domain of art (Walter Krain in Benjamin 1999, 675; Y 2 a, 5). Benjamin himself was to claim that the first photographs mean “the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man” (678; Y 4 a, 3) but also that photography “reduces the informational merits of painting”, meaning that a “new reality unfolds”, one that painting makes up for by its emphasis on color (678; Y 5, 3). Benjamin also quotes Gisela Freund, when she in turn quotes from a monograph on the photography of Disderi of 1862 (Freund 1936). In connection with photographic portraiture, a much featured photographic genre in the public of the time, Disderi emphasized the following: in the making of a photograph, it is not the accuracy of reproduction that is concerned but above all of the transmission through the media of natural characteristics “toward this individual”, at the same time confirming and further embellishing them (677: Y 4, 4). Finally, the actual criterion for setting a value on the painting was to change the perception of photography. Auguste Galimard said in 1850 that the daguerreotype determined the values of Meissonier’s painting at the 1849 Paris Salon (685; Y 7, 5). In the same chapter, that devoted to photography, Benjamin writes of the parallel technological inventions that tell of the research into movement: he writes of the phenakistiscope (689; Y 9 a, 1), the stereoscope (682; Y 6, 5) and the panorama (690; Y 10, 1), introducing as he did so the problem of the production of movement and the problem of the representation of movement. What for example Degas brought into his paintings, as a representation of rapid movement, is what was provided by “instantaneous photography” (688; Y 8 a, 2). Delacroix, however, beat photography “because of the stormy agitation of [his paintings’] subject matter” (678; Y 4 a, 2). There is no chronological introduction of these media, for film, among other things, is mentioned right at the beginning of his eclectic essay with its plethora of quotations. Not only does Benjamin analyze the new technological media, he sees them as a part of the time that leaves behind it traces in the time in which he lived himself. On the second page of the essay devoted to photography, we can read that ideas of past time (“the refuse- and decay-phenomena”) (672; Y 1, 4) exist as a kind of annunciation “of the great syntheses” (ibid.) that are still to come, and these “worlds of static realities” (ibid.) for Benjamin are omnipresent. At their center

150 

M. R. PURGAR

is Film (ibid.). This historical process includes, above all, the relation “between art and technology”, every other attempt to deduce a systematic relationship between art and photography necessarily failing (675; Y 2 a, 6). Although he introduces film at the very beginning of the essay, he also writes according to the insights of Roland Villiers (1930), who in his brief history of film mentions Thomas Edison, who invented the kinetograph and the kinetoscope, as well as Étienne-Jules Marey, who managed, before Edison, to produce a machine capable of reproducing 12 images a second (686: Y 7 a, I). We shall attempt to describe the process, beginning in the static image, the photograph, its transformation into film, and then, the influence of film back again on the static image, which we shall call the static-moved image. In order to sustain a balance between the meta-properties of the image—that it is static or moved, that it is a moving or a static-moved image—we have to go back to the age of modernity or Modernism and consider the duality that Benjamin himself brought in a particular way into his thinking, about static worlds and mobility, the production of movement and the result of this research—the medium of film, that is, the place of film in the moved worlds of static images.

3  The Ambivalence of Modernity and Modernism Referring to Benjamin’s quotations and comments, we have brought out at least two features of the new static image—the photograph. It is a technological invention, then, and in this differs from the picture as traditional medium, from the painted, graphic or drawn, but it is a means of expression, which because of this characteristic is able to compete with the painting. We might call it a technological and expressive, or inventive and pictural manner of distinction. This duality is inherent in some views about modernity or the idea of modernity, as seen by Matei Calinescu in his book Faces of Modernity: Avant-­ garde, Decadence, Kitsch (1977). The idea of modernity is not new, but that version that coincides with the fin-de-siècle and has its origins in Romanticism is interpreted as follows by Baudelaire: [Modernity is] the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable […] As for this transitory, fleeting element whose metamorphoses are so frequent, you have no right either to scorn it or to ignore it. By suppressing it, you are bound to fall into the emptiness of an abstract and indefinable beauty […] By plunging too deeply into the past, he loses sight of the present […] for almost all our originality comes from the stamp that time imprints upon our feelings. (Baudelaire, after Calinescu 1977, 48)

Calinescu explains that modernity hereby loses its “descriptive function” (Calinescu 1977, 49), for the present is incomparable with the past, which makes any systematic comparison of the modern and the old impossible (49). According to Baudelaire, modernity shows a specific sensitivity for the present,

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

151

sensuousness, transience, bringing with it a new concept, that “of novelty” (47); it is this notion that Calinescu claims to be one of the key concepts in the understanding of the idea of modernity. When he writes about Romanticism, Baudelaire also writes about the properties of art, equally, then, of the Romantic and the contemporary version, and these are “intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration toward the infinite …” (Baudelaire, after Calinescu, 47). Is it not then precisely the new idea of modernity, which was given shape at the end of the nineteenth century, that according to which we can distinguish two oppositions in the relationship of ambivalence. They are, as we have already determined in the case of Benjamin, the staticness of the worlds of the past and mobility or the investigation of movement in the new manner of life, in the expression of the new ways of expression, including the artistic. On the one hand, there is what is technologically new, as well as a new sensitivity, a different emotionality, feeling and experience. The existence of the category of time as that which mediates in the experience of reality and art now crosses over from a measure to a new identity of existence. Is it for film precisely transience that is crucial, just as mutability is crucial for modernity? Calinescu says, if modernity has lost its descriptive function, then the existence of the present can now be defined as the paradoxical possibility of going beyond the flow of history through the consciousness of historicity in its most concrete immediacy, in its presentness. Aesthetically speaking, the “eternal half of beauty” (consisting of the most general laws of art) can be brought to fleeting life (or afterlife) only through the experience of modern beauty. (Calinescu 1977, 50)

In other words, instead of tradition and imitation, art is now adventure and the use of the imagination (ibid.). Benjamin separated the present as the accumulation of the past and the beginning of the future along the same lines. Would it be possible to attempt to identify this inconstant, impermanent pole—modernity—with the new manner of life, and then, as against the static image—as against the static worlds of the past—equally as against those that Benjamin notes in the Parisian, Neapolitan, Muscovite and Berlin glazed shopping arcades, and then as against the photograph as bourgeois medium (for portraiture above all), those worlds that represent mobility, movement, a series of frames instead of just one (image) might exist. Another author, Werner Hoffmann, was, in fact, in his research into Modernism (Moderne), to erect the combining of heterogeneous layers of meaning as blend of paradoxes as the new unit of measurement of the new time that, according to him, began at the moment when the idea started with St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century—the idea according to which the definition of beauty in its material product is proportionality and clarity (Hoffmann 2004, 170). Hoffmann saw in Modernism, which thus began in the second half of the eighteenth century, as “the negative pathos of a new

152 

M. R. PURGAR

contra-art”, which in its ugliness was to represent the opposite pole of the ideally beautiful (173). Fragments and bits and pieces represent “the disruptive syntax of a new pathos”, from which derive “more or less dissonant assemblages” (172). The definition of this new pathos is possible: it is no longer a god-given necessity but a “spiritually rich arbitrariness (Willkür) that lays the foundation for confusion (Verwirrungen)” (172). As reference is made to the beginning of the new pathos or the pathos of the “divided Modernism” (as the name of the book runs: Die gespaltene Moderne) in the eighteenth century, so the definition of the new negative pathos is invoked in the definition of Reynolds: in 1772, he defined the acme of excellence as that “assemblage of contrary qualities, but mixed in such proportions, that no one part is found to counteract the other” (172). Hoffmann sees ambivalence or “Zwiespalt” (173) as an important feature of this new, divided pathos, referring to Schiller: between the beautiful and the sublime there is “a mixed feeling”: composed of “yearning”, manifested as shock (Schauer) and joy (Entzücken) (ibid.); this contradictory feeling binds in us “opposed natures” (entegegengesetzte Naturen) (174). Ghirlandaio’s painting The Birth of St John the Baptist (1486–1490) in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence means for Hoffmann not only the adoption of some motif (like Warburg’s Pathosformel) but “contained something additional, namely a ‘passionate and understanding experience felt in the spirit of the pagan past’” (161). In the case of this painting, it is the formula of the pathos of “an elementary vital desire” (ibid.), in Hoffmann’s quotation of Gombrich (1981). We shall see that this “vital desire” is to be crucial for the static-moved images of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, when movement, sensed under the influence of movement in film, then a new but already accepted medium, was to change the model of representation in which the static and the moved would be mingled. This is because the figure comes unexpectedly into the “frame” of the image, related simultaneously to frame and to depiction.

4  The Production of Movement: The Moving Image In the first chapter we stated that Benjamin mentions the production of movement. The theorist Jonathan Crary was to set himself this problem or theme in the 1990s. Before we move to Techniques of the Observer, as the book is called, the main propositions of which we shall restate, we might want to recall Werner Hoffmann and his invocation of the Renaissance, when he speaks of the dual, divided, pathos of Modernism. He refers, as we have already mentioned, to Ghirlandaio’s Birth of St John the Baptist, the woman carrying fruit, whom Warburg calls “a polymorphous ‘nymph’”, representing “the elementary will for life”, who dethrones the previously existing “canon” (Hoffmann 2004, 45) for with her rapid step she moves into the otherwise static depiction with its clearly divided layers of perspective, in the middle of which lies the mother of St John. The stance of the female character, which unlike the rest of the depiction in the Ghirlandaio painting represents motion, occurs at the right-hand

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

153

edge of the depiction, entering it practically from outside, from the space outside the painting. Such a Pathosformel “vital desire” was also considered by Philippe-Alain Michaud, going back to Warburg’s parallel research into the Renaissance and the contemporary medium of film. Michaud depicted this parallelism in the following way: Although the question of motion runs through all of his research, Warburg’s interest in its mechanical reproduction seems quite marginal. The new Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, built during the 1920s in Hamburg, next to his family home, was, despite its sophistication, structurally equipped only for the projection of fixed images, not for films. It is nonetheless true that Warburg’s method—the application of which ranged progressively from analysis of static figures in 1893 to the generalized montage in Mnemosyne, to which he devoted himself from 1923—was entirely based on an aesthetic of movement that was expressed at the end of the nineteenth century by the nascent cinema. Warburg opened art history to the observation of bodies in motion at the very moment the first images capable of representing them became diffused. (Michaud 2007, 39; my italics)

When he was interested in the antique, the past—in the Renaissance—in Michaud’s interpretation, Warburg invoked the “phenomena of transmission, assimilation, and transposition that make up the historicity of artistic forms” that “are the objectified expression of personal research, possessing, in the final analysis, an introspective meaning. Limiting his analysis to a series of details isolated from the mythological figures, he focused on a series of secondary motifs in which the representation of movement is concentrated” (Michaud 2007, 67–68). In other words, making use of “models of Antiquity”, in the Birth of Venus (Florence, Uffizi) (70), Botticelli had tried to produce “the illusion of motion” (71), because the female figure at the right, just as in Ghirlandaio’s painting, had “tripped into” the picture. But any approximation to or convergence with the models from Antiquity did not mean, however, repetition of the antique vocabulary, some derived semantics of the figures, but for the purpose of discovering “the expressive formulas according to which life was represented therein” (Michaud 2007, 71; cf. Ramljak Purgar 2020).

5  Modernization of Vision The production of movement, the way Benjamin himself adduces it in The Arcades Project, started, then, much earlier than the time of the invention of film. However, research into this phenomenon was paradigmatic of the theory of art of the early twentieth century, for example, in Warburg, as we have already remarked. The production of movement, however, in a technological sense, as a certain “modernisation of vision”, writes Jonathan Crary, starts in the first third of the nineteenth century: It is not enough to attempt to describe a dialectical relation between the innovations of avant-garde artists and writers in the late nineteenth century and the

154 

M. R. PURGAR

concurrent “realism” and positivism of scientific and popular culture. Rather, it is crucial to see both of these phenomena as overlapping components of a single social surface on which the modernization of vision had begun decades earlier. I am suggesting here that a broader and far more important transformation in the makeup of vision occurred in the early nineteenth century. Modernist painting in the 1870s and 1880s and the development of photography after 1839 can be seen as later symptoms or consequences of this crucial systemic shift, which was well under way by 1820. (Crary 1992, 5)

In his Theory of Colours, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe researched into the phenomenon of the “retinal afterimage”; this phenomenon, thinks Crary, is perhaps “the most important optical phenomenon discussed by Goethe in his chapter on physiological colours” (97). As Crary himself found in his historical explorations, the inventions of “optical truth” started to “constitute an irreducible component of human vision” (97); this means that afterimages were a subject of scientific inquiry during the 1820s in the whole of Europe. This led to a mass of inventions, at the beginning aimed at scientific research, but soon after that used for the purpose of popular entertainment. In order these were as follows: (1) the thaumatrope (Dr John Paris, 1825): a circular disc with a drawing on either side, a string attached; it could be twirled by hand: when joined together in such a spin, the drawing of a man without hair and hair itself would produce the appearance of a hirsute man; (2) phenakistiscope (Fig. 1): in the late 1820s the Belgian Joseph Plateau also dabbled with afterimages, discovering one of the most influential theories—the persistence of vision; the rapidity of the presentation of different objects to the eye in rapid intervals had as a result “impressions” on the retina as a combination, “as a single object”, “gradually changing form and position” (Plateau 1829, 25  in Crary 1992, 108–109), But, concludes Crary, there were two kinds of research to which the idea of the “persistence of vision” led. The first went toward “self-observation” (Goethe, Purkinje, Plateau and Fechner), when the observer’s retina was the subject of investigation. The second source was the consideration of “new forms of movement, in particular, mechanised wheels moving at high speeds” (Crary 1992, 111). The new media that took up this new revolution were, in order: (1) the diorama (Louis Daguerre, early 1820s): unlike painted panoramas from the end of the eighteenth century, the diorama incorporated an immobile observer into a mechanical device and it seemed that the observer was undergoing a temporal optical experience (112–113); (2) the kaleidoscope (1815, Sir David Brewster), the ability of which to create an infinite number of symmetrical forms generated “the appearance of decomposition and proliferation” (116); (3) the stereoscope (Fig. 2), where two separate images were joined into a single three-dimensional picture, their positions “simulat[ing] the anatomical structure of the observer’s body” (128) (Fig. 3). It is important to point out here that Crary splits off this process of the invention and production, as he writes himself “of the ‘realism’ of the 19th century and mass culture” from the usual

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

155

Fig. 1  Joseph Plateau, phenakistiscope which incorporated his own research and that of Faraday and others, 1830 (in public domain)

sequence in the chronology of invention: “What is important, then, is that these central components of 19th century realism of mass visual culture precede the invention of photography and in no way required photographic procedures or even the development of mass production techniques” (17). The inventions, thus, and their later popularization in the entertainment industry did not mean an implied cause-and-effect sequence with respect to photography. These inventions were rather inextricably dependent on a new arrangement of knowledge about the body and the constitutive relation of that knowledge to social power. These apparatuses are the outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus exchangeable. The standardization of visual imagery in the nineteenth century must be seen then not simply as part of new forms of mechanized reproduction but in relation to a broader process of normalization and subjection of the observer. (Crary 1992, 17)

156 

M. R. PURGAR

Fig. 2  Ernemann Universal Stereoscope, around 1900. Ernemann A.G., Dresden. Built for formats up to 9 x 18 cm (in public domain)

Fig. 3  Lemiare, from a series of daguerreotype stereo images of James Pradier’s statue—Baigneuse aux Papilleten, 1852–1855 (in public domain)

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

157

6  The Creation of the Multimedial Observer The fact that it is the observer that changes the awareness of the seeing of the world helps John Fullerton, analyzing the early Swedish film, to try to see the phenomenon of “‘cinematic vision’, a distinct way of representing and giving coherence to the world” as a “multimedial mode [my italics], which not only drew upon existing modes of representation but exploited heterogeneous forms of visual pleasure [my italics] to promote fascination in the medium” (Fullerton 1999, 164). The very fact of movement by lift in the film Visite à Stockholm, which Pathé Frères shot in Stockholm and screened in 1908, tells us something about the prosthetic means of the camera that follows movement in the lift; then, the observer moves around the city, rides in the tram; the woman who observes the city from the lift experiences a thrill when she looks through the stereoscope and excitement when she looks at the city from the position of the raised lift (163). In four different early Swedish non-fictional films, Fullerton notices various manifestations of medium and observer: 1. in the medium of panorama, which now, at the end of the nineteenth century, is no longer similar to a sharply focused perspective illusionism, constructs three dimensionality with stereoscope photographs, putting the observer at a distance from the object of observation. For example, in the film Stockholmbilder, 1909-10, the attention of the observer is drawn to the “extreme foreground of the shot, if not the picture plane itself”, creating an “almost hypnotic fascination” in the movement by lift (Fullerton 1999, 170). The result is not only the attraction of the attention of the observer to the actual apparatus with which the panorama has been shot, but also includes the optical illusion of “foreshortening as an attraction in its own right” (171); 2. in the procedure of phantom ride shooting, an example of which is the film Med Jordens Nordligste Järnväg of 1911, which creates the visual shock of driving in a train with the help of a “sudden contrast in form”, because in this case the attention of the observer suddenly shifts from the distant long shot to an exceptionally close-up detail (172–173). The different depths of observation alternate in line with the media of panorama and stereoscope in the late nineteenth century, in line with the European film of the early 1910s (173). “Visual registers”, which the observer alternates, while looking at this documentary, are confronted with the multimedia aspect of the medium; this author writes that “the development of film form responds, in part, to an elaboration of earlier technologies of the moving image” (ibid.); 3. in the film Sveriges Huvudstad of 1917, when there was a tendency for “formal experimentation”, which Fullerton finds analogous with the photographic work of László Moholy-Nagy in the Bauhaus school in the 1920s

158 

M. R. PURGAR

Fig. 4  Sweden’s Capital City, short movie, 1917, screen capture (in public domain)

Fig. 5  Handicraft Fair in Falkenberg,  short movie,  1907, screen capture (in public domain)

(174). Then “the prosthetic nature of photographic representation” was related to “envisioning the world optically” (175). This occurred in the shooting of an intricate city crossroads, from an unusual angle, from above (Fig. 4). The manner on which the camera does this, by emphasizing “the abstract organisation of the picture plane” and by the fact that “the angle of view flattens perspective so marking a further formal correspondence between the first three shots” (ibid.) is the result of “optical distortion”, which corresponds with the need for “the formal organisation of the picture space” (ibid.); 4. in the film Handicraft fair in Falkenberg of 1907, in a scene with a coach in a little village during fair time when “movement in and of pro-filmic space” was shot (177), Fullerton emphasizes the fact that the moveable camera is so mobile that it is “dynamically set against movement within the frame”, the consequence of which is “a pronounced sense of bodily movement in the viewer […] many of the shots articulate a more haptic representation of space” (179) (Fig. 5). The author concludes that by producing instability in the observer, the film testified to the fact of the camera as “prosthesis for the

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

159

viewer’s body in motion” (ibid.). Seeing the world with different eyes is the strategy that Fullerton identified in making it clear that the observer necessarily had to be involved in the process of seeing, as well as in the property of the film medium to reconstitute representation in interaction with other optical media that came into being earlier (182).

7  The Static-Moved Image “A multimedial response in the historical spectator” meant, according to Fullerton, the recognition of the interaction of at least two historical media—the stereoscope and the camera. As we shall see, the moveable camera is visible in the manner of representation: first of all in the female nude in the woodcut Nude with a Black Hat (1911/13) and then in the black and white woodcut Women at Potsdamerplatz (1914) by the German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. While in the first example the movement of the camera and its shooting from different angles is paradigmatic, in the second it is the mobility of the imagined camera to interact with different framing, zooming in and out, characteristic of the stereoscope. Analysts of Kirchner’s prints have sensed that in his investigation of the print medium there was a focusing on the experience of visual experimentation of the observer, capable of utterance with formal means of expression, as well as with characteristics like vitality and movement. In other words, when he did the woodcut Akt mit schwarzem Hut (Fig. 6), Kirchner was aware of the relation between subject in motion and the moved object. The concept of “motion” Fig. 6  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Nude with a Black Hat, 1911–1913, woodcut, 66 x 21.5 cm (in public domain)

160 

M. R. PURGAR

was used in his review of Kirchner’s prints up to 1916 by Gustav Schiefler (Schiefler 1926/1990, 419, 424-425), focusing on the phrase “inner motion” (innere Bewegtheit), linking formal expressiveness and psychological vitalism. A little later, Dube-Heynig defines this motion as the “direct capture of the momentary” (Dube-Heynig 1961, 30): connected with this idea is that of the rhythm “that links all Kirchner’s works” (ibid.). A cognate phrase is that “characteristic motion” (eigentümliche Bewegtheit) that this author, using the example of Akt mit schwarzem Hut, sees as the outcome of the relation of motif and background. Dedicating herself to the problem of the relation of motif and background, although she does not specifically say so, in her analysis she imparts importance to the relation between the planes and begins to deal with depth as a spatial category. Worthy adding to this category are the characteristics of vitality (lebendig) and flat, referring also to Kirchner’s concept of the hieroglyph, according to Dube-Heynig’s definition—“the abbreviation of natural form to flat form that suggests to the spectator the experience of the artist” (32). Dube-Heynig thinks that the Nude was started in Dresden and finished in Berlin. Apart from noting the similarity with the nudes of Lucas Cranach, she analyzes the proportions established in the depiction of the body and claims: “The upper part of the body, thanks to the raised arms, is shortened and contracted, the lower part, on the contrary, apart from the powerful rounding of the legs, is long and narrow” (50; cf. Ramljak Purgar 2019). The longitudinal form of the paper, we observe, additionally elongates the female figure, which suggests at least two views: the view from above onto the legs and feet and the frontal view for the upper part of the body. The figure is, in other words, at once part of the space of the picture and is separated from it, not only because through the stylization of the shoes it merges with the background at the bottom, and with the darkened face and black hat with the dark outlines of the background—and thus creates a suggestion of the curvature of the body in the central part—but also because in it two views are combined, as if two frames of the same object were put together: the shot from above and the frontal shooting are joined in the same figure. With the body itself time is measured, for it is necessary for a summary view of the body first of all to look in one way and then in another. The hatching and shading, that is, the serrated contours in the graphic depiction, join together two dimensions: flatness, shaped by mere addition of lines and three dimensionality, duplicating the serrated contours. Pushing down toward the ground, in a flat and a deep sense at the same time, is done by turning the left leg of the figure into a component part of the hatching, while to the right of the figure the surface is dark, without any identifying feature, like an abyss, a precipice. The hatching, in short, joins the inverse (in the lower part, when there is no shortening, but a suggesting of widening) and the vertical perspective (for the motifs climb above each other, suggesting that in fact one is behind another), shortening and elongating, flatness and depth,

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

161

Fig. 7  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Women at Potsdamer  Square, 1914, woodcut, 50 x 37 cm (in public domain)

creating an ambivalence of space. Framing, then, some kind of montage, different angles and deformations are already present in Kirchner at that time. In the graphic work Women at Potsdamer Square, the play of looks and the movement of the camera is still more complex (Fig. 7). In 1990 Janet Bergstrom analyzed the early German films of Asta Nielsen, writing at the same time of the harmonization of the acting with the directorial mise-en-scène of appropriate films. This happens by the unannounced entry of a figure from the space outside the take into the shot itself, by the alternation of takes in interiors and exteriors, done precisely in this way so as to be experienced as natural, harmonized with the natural manner of acting of the leading lady, Asta Nielsen (Bergstrom 1990, 164). This manner of acting “the inner conflict” is the result, writes Bergstrom, of the capacity for the expression of

162 

M. R. PURGAR

“the ambivalence of the torture of her feelings, without any words” (164). The natural manner is described from the example of the film In dem grossen Augenblick of 1911, when a mother because of poverty gives up her child, and, a few years later, tries to get it back, dying in a fire trying to save the child. Bergstrom states that the naturalness cannot in fact be described, it is only visible to the eye, but on the basis of the following few properties of the character: there is, that is, a passionate battle for the child, visible in the eyes and movement of the body, the actress thereby bringing out the “very physical expressiveness, atypical for female characters, embodied in what is called the ‘inner conflict’” (172). Nielsen herself, as Bergstrom quotes her, describes her “reconceptualisation of acting and shooting for the camera as the opposite of the theatre” (164) in such a way that she stands out from the surroundings, plunging into previously imagined parts of the filmic realistic and explored with respect to a possible “genuine expression” in the encounter with the film lens (ibid). Bergstrom also emphasizes the connection of Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad, future writer and director of her films, in the decision about the joint enterprise in the sense of bringing out the potential of the film as “art form” (ibid.). This naturalness is also, paradoxically, present in the writings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, when in the treatise “Die Arbeit E.  L. Kirchners” of 1925/1926 he refers to his approach to the depiction of some figure: the being of things and beings is better able to be defined when the figures do not know they are being observed, under the assumption that they are moving (Kirchner in Kornfeld 1979, 341). The so-called inner image that “his experience” gives him, comes after the reworking of previous images, and he makes the last one visible, by creating in the plane surface (342). In those years, when he wrote about the influence of film on his art, which he had not done until that moment, it was discernible in two pieces of his writing. In June 1925 he compared film with “magazines illustrated with photography”, contributing to the nascent “modern style” (Delfs and Kornfeld 2010, letter no. 1494); in December of the same year, he wrote of the “modern seeing” (modernes Sehen) which now was making an impact on painting: film research (Kinostudium) “led to the possibility of the expression of intimate feelings, in which there was no longer anything coarse, and yet they were uncommonly powerful and monumental” (Delfs and Kornfeld 2010, letter no. 1612). Kirchner wrote of the cinema, not of the film, and of the institution that opened up the possibility for a new visual sensation, and compared it with photography, popularized at that time in print media. Both media in a new manner affected the observer’s ability to cope in the world of visual attractions, affected the “modern formal language” characteristic of the “modern style” just then being created. Translating the term Kinostudium as film research, we privilege the emphasis on form, on the contemporary sensitivity to changes precisely under the influence of film, which can be connected with feelings (Empfindungen) and with their expression (Ausdruck).

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

163

If we now go back to the print Women at Potsdamer Square, we will recognize the importance that Bergstrom attaches to directionality to the space outside the composition by the entry into and exit of the character in the films of Urban Gad. The emphatic, almost brutal stride of the male figure on the left in the direction of the couple of female figures in the foreground, transferred to the interpretation of film, means “occupying a separate plane of the picture for at least a few moments, contributing to the progress of the drama” (Bergstrom 1990, 168). And it was this very transience of the momentary image that was what Kirchner was already expecting from his viewers by that time, 1914. Let us explain this transience, this duration of the moment, on the black and white graphic print of Frauen am Potsdamerplatz. In the analysis of the print (and not only of the photograph, cf. Gnägi 2011) duration in observation is needed, as if the scene itself came into being as a reconstruction of a process that went on in time—a process of observing as process of shooting. The woodcut Frauen am Potsdamerplatz means, equally, a position taken up with respect to earlier works (inspired by seeing through a wide-angle lens) and an instruction in reading the scene from the aspect of the vertical line of the shooting of the scene. But this is not a matter of any reminiscence of a wide-angle lens, as it was in some of the images from the Berlin period of Kirchner’s oeuvre. Irrespective of this, a great depth of field exists in the depiction, as part we might say of a composition characteristic of the stereoscopic, the ambivalent, the disparate establishment of the distribution of objects in the compositional and spatial deployment. In the historical depiction of the stereoscope, the figures are never entirely three-dimensional, rather just some parts of the picture are fully captured, which means that in the perception of such a field a complex of different intensities is produced, without any of the unity or homogeneity characteristic of the photograph or the painting. The figures in this woodcut take up the whole height of the paper (the left-hand figure, the right being lower) and indicate that the depiction on the page should be read in the vertical direction, the main longitudinal axis of the composition. At the same time, the distant figures are disproportionally smaller, just as the female figures in the foreground are disproportionally tall. Then, the female figure on the left, in the woodcut, in the main longitudinal axis of the scene, is conjoined in the upper part of the body to the building of the station; in order to pick out the profile, Kirchner has had to add a white contour, stylizing and geometrizing the face. The hatching in the corners of the picture, up and down, and the asphalt island on which the female figures are standing tend to support the ascription of an extra meaning to the scene, of focusing. Not for some place to be sharp and some indistinct, but above all because the edges and the island suggest the lens of the eye, of the camera, through which the scene is taken. Shooting means gradually rising from down to up: in this traverse the figures are compacted and are stylized practically to the point of pattern. Only the step forward of the rather large male figure in the middle ground means a connection between the planes, means that dynamization of the flatness of the medium, a metaphor of the conflict of the plane

164 

M. R. PURGAR

with the third or fourth dimension. This character is looking toward the observer, although it might be said that he is looking to the right, outside the image, with cigar in his mouth, bent forward, with arms adumbrated merely in outline. If we compare this woodcut with Kirchner’s photograph of 1919, when he shot Portrait of a Young Girl (Porträt eines Mädchens) (Fig.  8) in a double exposure procedure (Gnägi 2011, 96), completely blurred, almost in motion, from one side and the other, so the two female figures in the woodcut potentially mean just the movement from right to left: two forms for a single gesture, a gesture of abstraction, for their heads do not correspond with the position of the legs, that is, the anchoring of the shoes in the hatching grid. This abstraction is another way of saying deformation, imperceptible, for we hardly notice the hidden relations that indicate a depiction of the process of shooting, because the artist conceals this with the actual theme. The clock in the scene, although it shows the right time, should be seen in the context of a different implication of the representation in this woodcut: the flatness of the joining of head and building and the spatialization of the stride and the triangular Fig. 8  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Portrait of a Young Girl (Double exposure), 1919–1923, photography, silver gelatine (modern print), 15 x 10 cm (in public domain)

  EARLY INTERACTIONS OF STATIC AND MOVING IMAGES 

165

diagonal extension of the fragment of the ground all together build up a fourth dimension. Perhaps the central female figure is looking in the direction from which the artist is “recording”, this is also the apex of the triangle that Kirchner is building on the ground, together with the stride of the male figure: he is outside the picture, just as is the artist. Slightly turned to him is the building of the station with its clock. Finally, the metaphor of the moving male figure, the circularity of the asphalt island and the direction in which the female figures are looking, as well as the building being thrust in to the very top of the picture, all suggest a circular movement, vigorous, powerful, forceful circulation, in which nobody is a real participant, apart from the actual artist who is taking the picture, outside the image. The game of looks is so produced, from the observer into the picture, from the artist toward the scene of which he is at once witness and observer. To be able to follow him, we have to turn into what is called the multimedial observer, we have to track, like the movie camera, the scene—not in the way in which it seems to be unfolding at first glance, but that scene that suggests the reading of the temporal sequence, which is at once moment and duration.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Y. (Photography)”. In The Arcades Project. Published after the German edition: Rolf Tiedemann (Hrsg.) Das Passagewerk, 1982, Suhrkamp Verlag. Translated from German by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc Laughlin. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 671-692. Benjamin, Walter. 2018. “Y. (Die Photographie)”. In Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. Band V. 2; Ur. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 824-846. Bergstrom, Janet. 1990. “Asta Nielsen’s early German films”. In Usai, Paolo Cherchi and Codelli, Lorenzio (eds.) Before Caligari, German cinema, 1895-1920. Catalog of the 11th edition of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, October 13-21. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Calinescu, Matei. 1977. Faces of Modernity: Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer. On vision and modernity in the nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press. Delfs, Hans and Kornfeld, Eberhard W. (eds.). 2010. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Der gesamte Briefwechsel. B. 2: letters from 1924 to 1929. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess. Dube-Heynig, Annemarie. 1961. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Graphik. München: Prestel-Verlag. Freund, Gisela. 1936. Freund La photographie au point de vue sociologique (manuscript, p. 152. Quoted in: Benjamin, 1999, Y4a, 5).

166 

M. R. PURGAR

Fullerton, John. 1999. “Seeing the World with Different Eyes, or Seeing Differently: Cinematographic Vision and Turn-of -the-Century Popular Entertainment”. In John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (eds.) Nordic Explorations: Film Before 1930. Sydney: John Libbey & Company. Gnägi, Mandy. 2011. Der Maler als Fotograf. Ernst Ludwig Kirchners Porträtsfotografien. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1981. Aby Warburg. Eine intelektuelle Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Hoffmann, Werner. 2004. Die gespaltene Moderne. Aufsätze zur Kunst. München: Verlag C. H. Beck. Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig. 1979. “Die Arbeit E. L. Kirchners”. In Eberhard W. Kornfeld, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Nachzeichnung seines Lebens. Katalog der Sammlung von Werken von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner im Kirchner-Haus Davos. Published in the occasion of the exhibition by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Kunstmuseum von Basel, November 18th to January 27th 1979, pp. 331-345. Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2007. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Translated by Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone Books. Ramljak Purgar, Mirela. 2019. “Strategien der Ornamentierung. Einfühlungsdrang und Abstraktionsdrang in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari und in der Grafik von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner”. New Theories, 1: 2019, pp. 84-119. Ramljak Purgar, Mirela. 2020. “Bewegter Holzschnitt und Film. Bewegungsdar­ stellungen in der frühen Druckgraphik Ernst Ludwig Kirchners”. IMAGE – Journal for Interdisciplinary Image Science, 31: 1. Editors: Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Jörg Schirra, Stephan Schwan and Hans Jürgen Wulff. http://www.gib.uni-­ tuebingen.de/image. Schiefler, Gustav. 1926 [1990]. “Einführung”. In Gustav Schiefler, Die Graphik Ernst Ludwig Kirchners bis 1924, B. I: bis 1916. Berlin-Charlottenburg: Euphorion Verlag. In Wolfgang Henze (ed.) 1990. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Schiefler, Briefwechsel 1910-1935/1938. Stuttgart and Zürich: Belser Verlag.

Iconoclasm and Creation of the Avant-Garde Nadja Gnamuš

1   Iconoclastic Avant-Garde: Introductory Remarks The notion of modern(ist) art was closely related to progress, change, and novelty and was as such antithetical to everything that was normative, generally valued, and institutionally affirmed. In historical accounts modernist art represented a radical rupture within art historical canon and its value system against which it proposed a new ontology of art. In order to retain the condition of modernity and adapt to changing ideas art has had constantly to reinvigorate itself and renounce any kind of stability and the rule. It is not surprising though that iconoclastic attitude was intrinsic to modernist movement and the avant-­ garde, in fact, as Dario Gamboni has noted in his comprehensive study on modern iconoclasm, at the turn of the century, modernity was inevitably linked to iconoclasm (Gamboni 1997, 257). According to Paul Wood (1999a) avant-garde has been the most pervasive term in writing about modern art, which was identified with artistic modernism. However, avant-gardism has been a contested concept with different, even controversial applications and interpretations, describing various directions, tendencies, and different motives which do not share a common universalized aim. While avant-garde has been theorized as synonymous with modernism or as an extension of it, on the other hand, some authors (Peter Bürger) regarded it as its political other, which has been oriented at merging art and life, promoted political engagement and a social function of art. Generally speaking, modernism related to aesthetic autonomy, formal innovation, and epistemological deconstruction of a medium (namely painting) while avant-garde was

N. Gnamuš (*) University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_10

167

168 

N. GNAMUŠ

associated with provocation, opposition to the values of bourgeois society, criticism of the traditional notions of art by introducing cross-media approach, and most of all with the idea of art as an instrument for social change. This interpretation echoes loud today, when avant-garde has become a common grounding for all relevant contemporary art, particularly identified with its politically motivated, socially engaged, and critical aspects. In the context of this essay the term avant-garde will apply to those artistic positions which represent aberration and difference from the norm and most radically depart from valid set of rules, criteria, and values either by way of formal innovation or by introducing new functions of art. On the one hand, the avant-garde movement was closely tied to development of sociohistorical events and increasing tensions, contradictions, and instability in art and society ever since the end of ancien régime, which eventually demonstrated that the basic condition of the world was change and not stability. In its utopian dimension it can be regarded as an inevitable stage in an evolutionary model of historical progress toward a fulfilment of the absolute and perfect society and was as such a continuity of idealist projections of art. On the other hand, raison d’être of the avant-garde was based on a system of discontinuities and the idea of disruption, which contradicted the past and rejected all historical categories, eventually even the notion of art itself. Iconoclastic behavior relates to major aspects of avant-gardist thought as long as we understand the term in its expanded meaning. Traditionally, iconoclasm referred to the destructive breaking of religious objects and would have later been used in cases of destruction or any kind of mutilation of culturally valuable objects. Within contemporary discourse it either refers to violent attacks on monuments or to the methodical dismantling of architectures, images, and other kinds of objects (Boldrick and Clay 2007, 1–2). According to Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders (2007, 16) art historical treatments of iconoclasm have moved from acts of destruction into various critiques of art that will become one of central issues of modernist art. Iconoclastic impulse and destruction of old were both spontaneous reaction and subversive methodical tool, making the foundation and condition for the creation of new forms and attitudes to art. In this case destruction was not a negative damaging force but rather the inevitable condition of new possibilities of cultural production.

2  Shapes of Negation Discussing the avant-garde in iconoclastic terms demands a particular frame of viewing set against a backdrop of a particular legacy of images, their production, art-historical account, and theoretical framework against which iconoclastic activity was oriented. In his account on modern art Ortega y Gasset argued that modern works of art feature the following characteristics: they avoid the living forms and are dehumanized, regard the work of art as nothing but a work of art, understand art as play, are essentially ironic, and dismiss art as a thing of transcendental quality (Ortega y Gasset 1968, 14). All of these

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

169

features share iconoclastic attributes as they are essentially in conflict with traditional Western art, particularly with its concept of representation, social role of images, and the definition of art itself. Iconoclasm and avant-garde share a revolt against images or works of art as effective “symbols of power.” This power commonly refers to images as substitutes of the divine in the context of traditional iconoclasm while, from the perspective of the avant-garde, it pertains to the cultural hegemony of tradition. Gamboni understands aesthetic iconoclasm as a radicalization of the idea of artistic progress, according to which tradition was not only insufficient to bring it forth but really stood in its way (Gamboni 1997, 255). In the framework of this examination three notable “iconoclastic” streams overlapping with each other were at work, which brought in major transformative tendencies and instigated a change in a definition of what constitutes art. The first was directed against the representative image based upon the classical concepts of imitation and mimesis; the second critically confronted institution of art, its conventions, taste, norms, and style by means of technical and idealistic transgression manifested in new subject matter and formal innovation; the third negated the notion of art itself and disclaimed its superiority with implication of anti-art. Relationship between image and language was extensively transformed with the split from ut pictura poesis tradition and narrative art, reaching its peak in abstraction, above all in the monochrome. Technical methods of avant-garde brought about the break with traditional technical apparatus and notions of skill and craftsmanship, largely changing the notion of artwork. In this respect the use of chance, improvisation, and readymade had particularly antiartistic character. Last but not least, transcendental conception of art was replaced by auto-teleology of art, guided by a search for materialist foundations of art on one hand and philosophical investigations in art essence on the other. Indeed, iconoclastic rhetoric abounds in early modernist artists’ writing and manifestoes. The renouncement of traditional principles of painting and sculpture, a demand for the reorganization of art schools and the reorganization of museums, the urge for “the great rebellion of artistic movements,” for a new art as well as a negation of art, the attack on aesthetics, ethics, and culture, and the ideas of reconstruction of perceptions, values, and beliefs and destruction of the old—they all define the mindset of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements. When we consider iconoclastic acts of the avant-garde and the concept of iconoclasm as such, it is necessary to make a distinction between metaphoric and literal iconoclasm. Iconoclasm does not only refer to attacks on materiality of objects but, what is most important, it engages with value and symbolic power within them; it is not so much about removing and demolishing things but rather about destroying functions and symbolic order they install. In the twentieth century art several instances of literal iconoclastic acts can be found. Destruction, desecration, and creation were bound together in various ways and were mostly connected with exploring new ways of artistic expression, which contributed a range of meanings.

170 

N. GNAMUŠ

These acts were not only new methods of making art but foremost a response to culture and society which was itself shaped by destruction. They were used as a tool of public engagement, confronted mass production and consumption, questioned the criteria of art and its institution, and produced other meanings and references. These cases include, among others, de-collagists’ dismantling of advertising images and posters and reconstructing them in new formal and meaningful entities, Tinguely’s self-destructive machines (Fig. 1), Arman’s creative use of destruction performances, Fontana’s slashed canvases creating a new space concept affiliating void and infinity to the more recent, such as Ai Weiwei’s provocative smashing a Han dynasty ceremonial urn as a critique of old habits and cultural value system and the latest edition of Banksy’s self-­ shredded painting targeting artificially established economic value of art. Apart from these and other meaningful destructive acts, avant-gardist iconoclasm had essentially “metaphorical character”. Dario Gamboni distinguishes between the use of iconoclast and vandal. While the latter demolishes, the first signals the metaphorical character of the destruction (Gamboni 1997, 256). Rather than implying a physical violence in the traditional meaning of the word, it exerted symbolic violation of tradition. Avant-garde was not only interested in removing the symbols of the old regime, manifested for example by removal of historical monuments of the Tsarist Russia after the socialist revolution, and replacing them with the new idols of the revolution, but in the first place aimed at introducing new aesthetic principles and practices representative for the

Fig. 1  Jean Tinguely, Gears, 1967; scrap old metal components (part of Le Paradis Fantastique). Photo by www.cgpgrey.com. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

171

ideas of a modern society. Revolutionary art was either implicitly or explicitly (as in the context of politically oriented avant-gardes) linked with social change and political agency and was considered a companion to the material and intellectual reconstruction of society (Marcuse 1969, 37). Rather than acts themselves it was the use of violent rhetoric which ignited “destructive” revolutionary spirit. Anatoly Lunacharsky, himself an active participant in the October Revolution, for example censored Mayakovsky’s aggressive poetic lines (“It is time to let the bullets clatter against the walls of the museums”) despite the fact it was only a metaphor for the assault by the cultural revolution on the institutionalized functioning of art. After all, it was metaphoric force and not literal aspect of iconoclasm that brought in long-term changes of art paradigm. For this reason we should turn now to violation which targeted the value system of art institution by way of methodical and theoretical dismantling of the established signifying order and its semantic fields. It was the concept(ion) of artwork, its notion, criteria, and functions, which were under attack.

3  Distorted Realities: On the Path Toward a New Image Historically, representation was based on conflation of image and prototype, making possible a seeming naturalness of a depicted object. Due to a smooth continuity between signifiers and signified the represented object either embodied a presence of the depicted, that is, the thing depicted literally lived in the image and became the model, as was often the case with sacred images, or representation substituted for actual presence by re-creating a prototype. In his defense of images St. Augustine concluded that the Son is the perfect image of the Father because the Son is not only “from” the Father or “like” the Father but is equal to him. Either way—the imaginary identity between image and its model or one standing for the other—was a source of historical iconoclasm, as well as of iconolatry, which targeted the very core of image-prototype relationship. David Freedberg described this tendency to conflate image and prototype as follows: “We worship, venerate, give thanks to, make promises to not the image itself but the Virgin or Saint in the image. At the same time, we know that it is but an image, man-made, of a substance that is not flesh” (Freedberg 1985, 26). Icons could have been objects of devotion precisely because, from a semiotic point of view, they work by analogy, rather than on the basis of identity and sameness. According to Peirce, icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents (as is the case with index), but it simply happens that “its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness”. In the last decades of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries traditional concepts of likeness and mimesis, inherited from Platonic and Aristotelian understanding, underwent a decisive change. The

172 

N. GNAMUŠ

idea of recreation of the world through aesthetic achievement and spiritual improvement was bluntly criticized and so was conception of art as adherence to the “truth” to nature. Discarding the image of reality based upon the ruling principle that any form of artistic creation is a mirror image of nature would become a primary concern of artistic image. Since impressionism the idea of imitation of reality was no longer embedded in “eternal” likeness which is implicated in the nature but was transformed into pictorial interpretation of the sensory experience of life, the world perceived through the senses, and a changing perspective of the observing subject. Human active role became central in conceiving the world and so did interpretation and imagination, which were more important than merely reproducing surface appearances of objects. Aesthetic transformation of traditional notions of representation was based on rearticulation of artistic skill by means of a significant form, which was able to provoke aesthetic emotion instead of only conveying information. Mirror image reflecting coherent external world was broken in fragmented and multi-­ perspective views of cubist pictures, which allowed, as Kahnweiler (1949, 12) noted, that differing and diverse representations in the mind were reconciled in a single act of cognition. Gombrich considered Cubist extension of representation as a revolt against illusion and an attempt to destroy a coherent image of reality by introducing contradictory clues, shifts in figure and ground and other devices, which baffle our perception (Gombrich 1960) (Fig.  2). The union between image and model based on a natural relation was dissolved also in other avant-gardist methods, particularly in collage and montage by way of cutting-up objects into dispersed fragments which connected by means of other laws than that of mimetic transcription, leading to a different integration between perception and representation. Processes of de-formation and de-­ figuration went hand in hand, with a common goal to dismantle a naturalized depiction in which looking at a depicted object and recognizing it were directly correlated. In this operation of defamiliarization Viktor Shklovsky recognized an opportunity to experience a familiar, common experience afresh and to reinvent reality through a strategy of estrangement. On the other hand, such distortions of habitual perception evoked in uniformed or uncreative spectator unease and resentment. Misunderstanding and ill-consumption of modernist distortion were a result of disregard for its metaphorical dimension and incapability to grasp its psychological content. Such views were radicalized in manifestative condemnation of destruction of natural code, such as was Paul Schulze-Naumburg’s publication Kunst und Rasse (Munich, 1928), in which physical and mental abnormalities were aligned with paintings by leading modernists. Break with formal convention was in this case received as a production of alienated, abnormal, and non-consumable form, which acted as a distortion and mutilation of nature itself. The art of the early avant-garde was, as Paul Wood rightly observed, seen as an anarchic threat to cultural values particularly due to “its character as art rather than because of the overt political allegiances of the artists” (Wood 1999b, 186). However, modern art rejected direct references to reality

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

173

Fig. 2  Pablo Picasso, Les Demoisselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 244 × 234 cm. Museum of Modern Art—MoMA, New York (in public domain)

inasmuch as the concept of reality itself changed. New pictorial reality was discovered and informed by the latest scientific discoveries and new ideas about our comprehension of time and space (particularly theory of relativity, non-­ Euclidean geometries, concept of n-dimensional space), spiritual concerns (Ouspensky’s spiritualism, theosophy), psychology and technological inventions which would impact social and cultural life and, eventually, enormously changed artistic production. Modern visual representation did not only deconstruct illusion of reality but urged to reinvent it anew, to create its imaginary equal and replace this world with signs and emblems—as Khanweiler claimed about Cubism—which acted through sensual immediacy of material properties and were significant due to their capacity to evoke feelings, emotions, sensations, and transfer ideas and

174 

N. GNAMUŠ

thoughts. As soon as extrinsic qualities of art judgment were replaced by intrinsic qualities of art, truth to reality was no longer measured by likeness to physical forms as supreme criterion but established self-imposed scope and determined its principles and limits based on “reality of the medium,” which required a new value system and a critique. Epistemological concern and emphasis on materiality of a signifier replaced allegorical representation. Malevich called this “new realism” in painting (Malevich 1915), for Kandinsky it was spiritual revelation, for de Stijl artists new plastic style, embodied through the means of elementary principle of color and line. It is noteworthy to observe that materiality of the sign(ifier) was important trajectory of desanctification of art. Historically, iconoclasm was connected with the reception of images as material entities, in which physical and metaphysical content, sacred and profane, were diametrically juxtaposed. Destruction of relics was in the first place an act of annihilating their magical status and revealing them as nothing but matter, wood, gold, linen—as commodities among other objects of the world and not as embodiments of something divine. According to David Freedberg, assault on images represents mastery and superiority over the powers of both image and prototype by making plain the ordinary materiality of the sign. Through “a disruption of the apparent unity of sign and signified” this intermingling of matter and appearance is fully resolved (Freedberg 1985, 28). Similar, yet metaphoric disruption can relate to modernist break with traditional notion of representation, especially with its representational unity, narrative function, idealism, and moral concerns. A great deal of modernist criticism privileged form over representation and called attention to material qualities of medium and support as the locus of production of meaning and essential basis of art. For Clement Greenberg (1960) modernism’s attention to medium was a way to make art in order to call attention to art and not to anything external to it. Michael Fried (1965) developed this ideology to the point, at which painting was clearly identified with a painted object and was in no essential respect different from other objects in the world. Iconoclastic revelation of matter in modernist art was not in the first place intended to demystify the image or to destroy its symbolic charge but to point to its materialness and expose its fabrication not only as a means by which a meaning is conveyed but as a content and value per se. Autonomy of pictorial means was a way to expand possibilities of image but also a way to destroy its past conventions and “meaningful” content. In this context Bataille’s notion of informe becomes a significant manifestation of transgression of harmonious arrangement and symbolic nobility of form, which used to be the basis of good design in art. Bataille considered formless as the ultimate negation of a demand that each thing has its form and compared it with something that is deprived of all rights and can as such get squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. If Kant understood formlessness and the absence of form as a possible index to the unpresentable (what could also be linked with Jewish and Islamic prohibition of representations of God), Bataille refused to turn matter into “a positive surrogate for spirit or

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

175

Fig. 3  Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit, 1961. Photo by Jens Cederskjold. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

mind” (Jay 1993, 66) or recognize it as possible constructive entity. For him formless is base, declassifying operation which resists sublimatory impulse of assimilating it to any meaningful concept and is rather subjected to constant deformation (for this cf. Yves Alain Bois’s essay “The Use Value of formless,” in: Bois and Krauss 1997, 18). In the early 1960s, at the dawn of the neo-­avant-­ garde, Piero Manzoni provided his own contribution to Bataille’s scatological attack on idealism of form. In his ninety cans of Artist’s Shit (Merda d’artista, 1961) (Fig. 3), inspired by both Informel and Duchamp’s legacy, he converted culturally debased gesture into cultural capital, a conserved “cultural good,” by which he ironically commented on art market, artist’s labor, and its fetishization.

4  Against Representation: A Challenge of Abstract Art Abstract art has been one of the most radical negations of past notions of representation and as such one of the most hermetic episodes in the history of picture making. This is due to the fact that abstraction means an entire vacation of representational subject matter and objects and is basically a renouncement of the idea of painting as tableau. A depicted motive is replaced by a content, which seems to be reduced to material properties alone; a painted canvas, linen, stretcher, texture, color, form, ground, or the process in which it was made. Regardless of the absence of anything objective a viewer can relate to, abstract

176 

N. GNAMUŠ

art was never only about pure aesthetic activity based on its own eternal laws but it often depicted physical phenomena, such as light, sound, energetic forces, and abstract things and ideas in a most dense and synthesized manner. From structuralist perspective, it was about inventing different signifying practice for the things which already exist but are (re)constructed by new visual possibilities. In the field of “aniconic” abstract tradition two streams of thought coexisted: one (as was the case of Malevich, Rothko, Newman, and others) (Fig. 4) was oriented against mimetic representation with the aim to expand the image in new symbolic or emotional sense; the other dismissed priority of human experience and destroyed representation in order to erase the code of “meaning” and replace it with self-referential and self-reflexive theoretical basis for art (as in the case of the Minimalist movement, Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd, and others) (Fig. 5). In both cases the position of abstraction was radically realized

Fig. 4  Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 88.7 × 71 cm. In a private collection (in public domain)

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

177

Fig. 5  Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–1986. Photo by Douglas Tuck. Wikimedia Commons, CC By-SA 4.0

in the case of monochrome painting, in which all the remnants of representation disappear as if the visible itself were erased. Abstract art decisively shattered old models and standards of viewing and interpreting art. It proposed a new discursive ground which far exceeded formal analysis and pure medium condition as it opened to a vast field of philosophical possibilities. It was precisely from its representational void that abstract image drew its power to make us imagine. As there was nothing to see or directly identify with, abstract pictures established their meaning by torrent of words and proliferating interpretations which justified the absence of narrative information. Leah Dickerman observed that abstraction made it more incumbent on the artist to write, and also to develop new systems for the delivery of text. For that reason abstract pictures were accompanied by titles, manifestos, statements of principles, performative declamations, discursive catalogues, explanatory lectures, and critical writing by advocates of abstraction (Dickerman 2013, 3–51). The meaning of abstract form does not so much depend on the material quality of the signs as it does on interpretation and symbolic function that we assign to those signs (cf. Hall 1997, 12), hence the meaning always results from interference of form and interpretation. Reception of abstraction thus relied as much on sensorial perception as it did on intellectual apprehension even though the priorities between the two might not be evenly nor clearly distributed. It is hardly surprising that this context produced one of the most “iconic” images of modern art, Malevich’s Black Square (Fig. 6). In this image all the controversy concerning the meaning in abstract art is condensed,

178 

N. GNAMUŠ

Fig. 6  Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 79.5 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (in public domain)

confronting metaphysical hermeticism, philosophical depth, and intellectual elitism on one side and a conception of new painterly realism grounded on pictorial autonomy on the other. A Black Square was not a modernist icon only because of its pictorial radicalism reduced to utmost simplicity but also because it represented a modern “religious icon” which transfigured conception of the divine and sacred by secular means through which the invisible world could be transmitted to sensory vision. Black square hovering in the void, as if appearing in the infinite vastness of no-gravity space, was a form carrying a particular metaphysical charge. Malevich conceived it as a fundamental Suprematist element, a kind of “zero of form”, which made visual equivalent for the absolute and extraterrestrial state of mind free from perspectival gaze of material world. “It was no empty square which I had exhibited but rather the experience of objectlessness”, he declared. Even though black square was referred to as an image of “pure feeling” separated from a physical body, it seemed equally separated from the human soul. The space that was prefigured in this painting was, due to its detached rationality, precision, and clarity, like an echo of a higher spirit from which human was eliminated. In fact, impersonality of black square resembles the anonymity of the icon master. Regardless of the absence of any

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

179

overt iconographic symbolism it is the image-concept for spiritual dimension which strives to present the unrepresentable and makes visible that which cannot be seen (Lyotard 1988). As such it is close to a sight of God, who can only be experienced through spatial experience. On the other hand, Russian artist Erik Bulatov, emerging in the 1960s, proposed antithetical reading to Malevich’s spiritual ideas, when he interpreted a black square as a blocked window, a barrier, or a bandage over sight, which literally and symbolically deprives vision, rather than an aperture to imaginary and imagistic interpretations activating cognitive faculties of the mind. Black square was, after all, a complete erasure of pictorial mise-en-scène as well as of the idea of picture as a reflective surface of external world and was as such a sign of representational iconoclasm. Representational is here applied according to the usage as is explained in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: “represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind or in the senses […]”. The void of abstraction has always elicited a paradoxical response with the ability of being both at once, erasure of sight and a destruction of representation and open potentiality, triggering absorption and imagination. If abolition of representation proposed a new metaphysics of modern man within non-representational tradition of Malevich, Barnet Newman, or Yves Klein, it was within another avant-garde milieu abolished on, diametrically opposed, materialist grounds backed up with equally vigorous rhetoric and utopic aims. Constructivists declared war on art, on its bourgeois values and its association with religion and philosophy. The first non-figural monochromes, Alexander Rodchenko’s Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour and Pure Blue Colour, were opposed to any search for universal essence of art. Instead they announced the end of painting by clearly identifying image and support and separated it from historical legacy by declaratively rejecting speculative role of art. Rodchenko’s monochromes were reduced to physical properties and plain painting conventions, to a mere object status discarding any metaphoric content. When Rodchenko painted his famous triptych at the end of 1921, he stated: “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane, and there is to be no more representation” (Andrews and Kalinovska 1990, 47). Constructivists called into question major constituents of art—the necessity of art as specific aesthetic activity and its contemplative reflection. Instead they were more concerned with the social role of art, in which artistic forms would be united with utilitarian goals while artistic skills were not to be used as disinterested aesthetic experiments but should be applicable to real life and practical purpose. The end of art idea—pertaining particularly to painting itself—has been a repeated issue throughout modernist art. The ends equally exchanged with declarations of new beginnings and starting out of a scratch, strangely joining together art’s closing ceremonies and restored beliefs within ever suspending historical loop. A myth of absolute and ultimate painting was notoriously

180 

N. GNAMUŠ

articulated by Ad Reinhardt’s almost compulsive rituals of fabricating a final painting. His art was based on negation, which targeted not only abolition of representation in order to emancipate the artist from the bondage of appearance and nature but all pictorial conventions as such, color, light, brushwork, form, space. Reinhardt attacked the very essence of painting founded on its capacity to render things visible. His black paintings were in fact impenetrable to sight as there was nothing to see in a traditional sense, except from hardly noticeable changes in hue and brightness which forced a spectator on the edge of perceptual ability. Reinhardt’s art did not only address painting as a retinal phenomenon by provoking maximal sensory awareness of a viewer but presented it as intellectual practice by introducing a new philosophical and theoretical framework for it. In Reinhard’s view art should only function as art and as nothing else. Unsurprisingly, this reflective self-consistent principle of making art was highly influential for Joseph Kosuth’s idea-based, linguistic approach to art, according to which a work of art is realized as analytical proposition devoid of any morphological properties (Fig. 7). Kosuth’s conceptualist iconoclasm was, unlike Reinhardt’s cleansing of allusions, rooted in pure renunciation of material works of art and aesthetics. His conceptual investigations literally produced art as text and radically redefined notion of art by virtue of theoretical presumptions about art’s nature and by promoting thinking, and not visual experience, as the most important aspect of the work.

Fig. 7  Joseph Kosuth, Self Described and Self Defined, 1965, light installation at MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019. Photo by Thiago Cardoso and Unsplash.com (in public domain)

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

181

Fig. 8  Daniel Buren, striped columns in Domaine National du Palais-Royal, October 2019. Photo by iStock

At the crossroads of abstraction and conceptualist approach another iconoclast artist contributed his critique of conventional premises of art, particularly of its institutional establishment. Daniel Buren in fact, at least through argumentation, brought art to its theoretical dead end. His conceptual painting was based on a found fabric with a regular measurement of 8.7 cm wide vertical stripes, which he regularly hung outside a gallery in large-scale public space installations. Buren’s striped cloth functioned more as a pictorial statement than as a painting. It was literally a barcode of erasure since it wiped out individuality and skill, abolished expressivity and authenticity—all used-to-be qualifiers of art—and pointed to the fact that it was the context and specific site that would create a new frame for defining the work. According to Buren, the idea of his work was to abolish the code that has until now made art what it is, in its production and its institutions (Buren 1977) and the question was no longer about art, but about something else. So far the art prefix of his works was merely coincidental, a result of their “exhibit value”, defined by appearance and appreciation in the institutional context of art (Fig. 8).

5  Art Against Art: Enlarging Limits Principles according to which Buren’s work and other conceptual tendencies were conceived and interpreted as art stem from the early avant-gardes and relate to Dada’s nihilism, anti-rationalism, social and political criticism, all

182 

N. GNAMUŠ

realized by means of previously non-art forms, such as provocative public speeches, street actions, and performances that took place outside the official art institution. Along with de-forming dynamics of formless, finality of “last paintings” and destruction of representation in a monochrome the most prominent iconoclastic object was undoubtedly Duchamp’s unassisted readymade. Marcel Duchamp never believed in an immanent or absolute truth in art. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Jean Crotti, from 1952 he wrote: “A picture is made not by the painter but by those who look at it and grant it their favours…” (Naumann 1982, 16–17). In this respect art was very close to religion as in both the truth existed and was valuable only as an instrument of interpretation. For him art did not have any essential nature but it was a thing of cultural ritual; its “truth” was circumstantial, contingent upon historical condition and related to economic, political, social, and other contexts, even to pure luck. From this perspective, it was almost compelling for Duchamp to reject any kind of dogmatism in favor of intellectual argument and societal and cultural conditions of art. Duchamp’s invention of readymade was closely connected with his abandonment of painting and artistic expressivity, which he subsequently replaced with inquiries into the idea of art-as-such. For him readymade was an experiment, a kind of thought-provoking game by which he could test the limits of art. By means of readymade artwork was physically equated with a common thing, however, with a distinction that their difference was no longer qualitative, aesthetic, or “retinal” but conceptual and defined by context. Joseph Kosuth would later observe that with Duchamp art changed its focus from the form of pictorial language to what was being said, from appearance to conception. Retrospectively, Duchamp posed a very vital question regarding art’s awareness of its own condition of being and credibility. Particularly when there is no internal meaning, by design, skill, and material distinction, artwork is conditioned by nomination and symbolic system alone while art becomes a practice of discourse and not of craft. Readymade brought about a total desacralization and profanation of art in respect to its culturally elevated status and hierarchical position. It did not only contest art’s historical roots in aesthetics and challenged traditional definition of art but also abandoned its anthropological basis in cult and religion as it made explicit move from art’s affective qualities and auratic presence to art as institutional consensus. Dario Gamboni described readymade as an assault on artist as unique creator, on a notion of creativity and an “assault against rarity” (Gamboni 1997, 125) since it, as an object of mass production, deprived artwork of its aura, uniqueness, and authoritative presence. In this way readymade was a sign of technology overpowering craft and of reproducibility which allowed for greater accessibility and a wider distribution of objects and images, eventually making art a more ubiquitous thing. If initially Duchamp’s early readymades went basically unnoticed, the Duchamp effect has become most viable in the 1960s, with the arrival of the neo-avantgarde, conceptual art, and postmodernist anti-aesthetic posture. Based on this new reception of

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

183

readymade, Arthur C.  Danto (1981, 13)  would profoundly analyze the “magic” of elevation of a mere thing to an artwork and demonstrate that art is not defined by any intrinsic, material properties but rather by theoretical propositions, which could, in theory, extend art possibilities to infinity. Readymade is a paradoxical object. On the one hand it was an embodiment of anti-art tendency as it broke with the idea of art as a specific and sublimated cultural product. Even before Tatlin’s tower, which was pronounced by Vladimir Mayakovsky “the first monument without a beard”, a shiny white urinal, named Fountain and mounted on a pedestal, was a mockery of a statue as a symbol of the art of bourgeois society (Fig. 9). On the other hand, readymade confirmed symbolic realm of art as it acquired credit by virtue of artist’s self-made declaration “this is art”. According to George Dickie (1975) readymades perfectly embody anti-art position since they deny all traditional criteria but nevertheless acquire the status of art. It was only the autonomy of art which made possible systematic questioning of the borders of art and consequently bringing forth readymade as one of the most iconoclastic ideas in art.

Fig. 9  Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (in public domain)

184 

N. GNAMUŠ

Given this background, anti-art has become a legitimate part of art-historical narrative, in fact an extension of art with its own parallel tradition. Anti-art has been an intentional antithesis of what has been so far defined as art, yet it has been, in whatever disguise, always measured against the backdrop of art and existed only in relation to it. Duchamp’s paradigm has precisely by the act of subverting all the existing assumptions about art, even more firmly emancipated art since it granted art institution a full mandatory force of self-evidence. De-bordering of art and contesting its limits have become an established avant-­ garde strategy setting and modifying its own criteria, once and again accommodated and incorporated within art institution and, in the end, domesticated by musealization. Relationship between art and iconoclasm has implied power relations. Following these facts Pierre Bourdieu showed that the logic and symbolic power of artistic world is revealed most clearly by the very attempts to subvert it (Bourdieu 1980, 80). After all, he pointed out, all powerful social institutions, including art, in effect, behave like religions. Even though art has stopped being a substitute for religion, it became religion itself with musealized items, which are regarded as relics of a kind. Notwithstanding the fact that a definition of art has changed and that another conception of it has arrived, based more on the knowledge that this is art than on the senses and sight, a belief in art is still a deeply rooted belief which produces concrete economic, cultural, and social effects. Iconoclastic behavior, which turned out to be an important driving force in artistic production, its self-inquiry, and its social functions, has been closely connected with belief. It is not surprising though that both iconoclastic objects of the twentieth century, Malevich’s painting Suprematism 1920–1927 and Duchamp’s Fountain, were themselves submitted to iconoclastic acts. The authors of these actions did not consider them as vandalistic acts but presented them under a banner of art, as works of art referencing another works of art and thus commenting on their references and symbolic power. Alexander Brener, who in 1997 sprayed a large green dollar sign across Malevich’s painting, explained his graffiti action as a protest against corruption and commercialism in the art world. His intervention aimed at transforming a utopian image into an emptied cultural asset—a musealized artefact ironically turned into a metaphysical impossibility, a fake icon of modern era. In 2000 Chinese artists Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi urinated on Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) at the Tate Modern. Yuan Cai regarded their performance as a creative dialogue with the canonical piece: “As Duchamp said himself, it’s the artist’s choice. He chooses what is art. We just added to it” (Fineman 2004). From historical perspective, revolution in art could only be achieved by discarding traditional notions and functions of art and, as a result of this, to quote Picasso, an act of creation was first of all an act of destruction. Rejecting the old notions did not mean the end of art but was rather a sign of exhaustion of a certain paradigm and of the arrival of a new conception of invention. Emancipation from representational nature in abstraction was not only a

  ICONOCLASM AND CREATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE 

185

destruction of a certain concept of an image but an extension of it and so did readymade not only negate art but was enlargement of its limits. We can speculate that such a conduct would eventually lead to self-elimination of art, whereby the notion of art would be entirely abolished and replaced by creative and critical communal practice. On the one hand, we can imagine this as the ultimate iconoclastic act destroying a symbolic realm of art, on the other, it would be a full realization of avant-gardist utopian vision in which art and life would completely merge. One way or the other, art has always found the way of reinventing itself, including the appropriation of iconoclastic act, metaphorically and literally, as a way of creation.

References Andrews, Richard and Kalinovska, Milena. 1990. Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–1922. Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington. Bois, Yves Alain. 1997. “The Use Value of “formless”. In: Bois, Yve-Alain, Krauss, Rosalind. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books. Boldrick, Stacey, Clay, Richard (eds.). 2007. Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms. Hampshire: Ashgate. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods”. The Field of Cultural Production. 1993. New  York: Columbia University Press. Buren, Daniel. 1977. Reboundings. Brussels: Daled & Gevaert. Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Dickerman, Leah. 2013. “Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements”. October, 143: 3–51. Dickie, George. 1975. “What is Anti-Art?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33 (4): 419–421. https://www.jstor.org/stable/429654 Fineman, Mia. 2004. “Art Attracts”. The New  York Times. December 12. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/design/art-­attacks.html. Freedberg, David. 1985. Iconoclasts and Their Motives. Maarssen: G. Schwartz. Fried, Michael. 1965 [1998]. “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella”. In: M.  Fried,  Art and Objecthood. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Gamboni, Dario. 1997. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books. Gombrich, Hans Ernst. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York: Pantheon Books. Greenberg, Clement. 1960 [1993]. “Modernist Painting”. In: John O’Brian (ed.)  Clement Greenberg. The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hall, Stuart. 1997. “The Work of Representation”. In: Hall, Stuart (ed.). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications. Jay, Martin. 1993 [2013]. “Modernism and the Retreat from Form”. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique. London and New  York: Routledge.

186 

N. GNAMUŠ

Kahnweiler, Henri-Daniel. 1949. The Rise of Cubism. New  York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988 [1991]. “Newman: The Instant”. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Malevich, Kazimir. 1915 [1969]. “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting”. In: Andersen, Troels (ed.) K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art: 1915–1933. London: Rapp & Whiting. Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. New York: Beacon Press. Naumann, Francis M. 1982. “Affecteusement, Marcel. Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Susanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti”. Archives of American Art Journal, XXII/4. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1968. The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rambelli, Fabio and Reinders, Eric. 2007. “What Does Iconoclasm Create? What Does Preservation Destroy? Reflections on Iconoclasm in East Asia”. In: S. Boldrick and R.  Clay (eds.). Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms. Aldershot/ Hampshire: Ashgate. Wood, Paul. 1999a. “Introduction: The Avant-Garde and Modernism”. In: P. Wood (ed.). The Challenge of the Avant-Garde. New Haven and London: The Yale University Press. Wood, Paul. 1999b. “The Avant-Garde in the Early Twentieth Century”. In: Paul Wood (ed.). The Challenge of the Avant-Garde. New Haven and London: The Yale University Press.

Planarity, Pictorial Space, and Abstraction Jeffrey Strayer

This article looks at how abstraction has progressed in art history in relation to the image and the planar surface, and in relation to consciousness, concepts, and language. I begin with challenges to more traditional kinds of representation that were mounted by people such as Turner and Cézanne, and that were continued through Analytic Cubism to Mondrian and Malevich on to Abstract Expressionism and Color-Field Painting. This brief outline enables one to see how the dilution and disintegration of the realistic image end in the reality of the surface in pure visual abstraction. I also consider the route from papier collé and collage to Duchamp, and to different kinds of surface in different kinds of object, and how that route leads to Minimalism and linguistic Conceptual art, which itself represents, in at least one important sense, a return to the use of planarity in the background surface on which visible language is situated. In the particular perspective on art history cited, it is seen how information in the form of an image comes off the surface, to go onto a common object, only to come back onto the surface as symbolic language by routes that are both artistic and philosophical. At this point I examine how the surface returns as a site for creative investigation and manipulation, and identify problems that arise with the use of written language on a two-dimensional surface. How the image functions in the course of this progression; how it relates to surface, language, and concepts; how realistic images and abstract forms stand in different relations to perception, thought, and time; how the notions of boundary or limit, and identity and difference, pertain to images, surfaces, and concepts;

J. Strayer (*) Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_11

187

188 

J. STRAYER

and how perception, thought, and action are presupposed by all of these things are matters that are introduced at points relevant to the issues to which they pertain. The relation of art to mind, choice, and understanding means that the ontology of art that I call conceptual idealism must be briefly considered in the context of the preceding matters. The article ends with the suggestion that consideration of the relation of surface, language, and ideas to one another, and to their comprehension, may be of interest to novel investigations of even more reductive kinds of abstraction than have hitherto appeared.

1   Image, Surface, and Abstraction in Art History An artist of sufficient ability can use artistic media, such as oil, pastel, or watercolor, to create a picture of something that is realistic in the sense that it can be recognized as an image of something from the world beyond the surface on which the picture is seen, and by which both the construction of the picture and viewing knowledge are informed. Examples include Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose (1633) by Francisco Zurbarán, Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Brueghel, and Sir Thomas More (1527) by Hans Holbein. The latter painting is a means of connecting us with the past in enabling us to see what the person that it pictures looked like. In that sense a realistic portrait is a window through which we can view elements of the past, and in that way documents an aspect of history that continues to inform the present. History can also appear in, or in relation to, a painting that is based on an actual event that an artist supplements or changes in ways that are creatively determined at the time at which the work is produced. One gathers that this is the case with a work such as Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (c. 1438–1440) by Paolo Uccello. The figures and artifacts of battle seem likely to have been modified according to compositional interests, and one does not suppose that the field of battle beneath and behind the horses was pink, as it is in the painting. Greater liberties can be taken in the interest of a belief system, such as Christianity, in The Annunciation (1437–1446) by Fra Angelico, or in some other interest, such as using realistic space and suggestive images in the service of perceptual or cognitive bewilderment, as with The Furniture of Time (1939) by Yves Tanguy. The sort of realism in two-dimensional art that is supposed to be like looking through a window, or holding a mirror up to nature, is challenged by images whose realism is shaped and contested according to the interests, knowledge, and constitution of the artist from whom they result. Here I am using the term realism in a loose sense that is not photographic, but one in which an image can be said to be realistic if it is recognizable as picturing or denoting a thing of a certain kind of thing, such as a tree, even if things of that kind do not look exactly like that in themselves. Although all figurative or illusionistic painting, including the most realistic painting, is abstract in lacking the third dimension, painting became more abstract as liberties were taken with images in the principal interest of allowing painting to conduct formal

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

189

investigations of its own intrinsic possibilities. The primary goal of such an investigation was, and is, to determine what visual art might achieve when freed from the obligation to picture nature or artifactual reality as they appear outside of art in daily living. Organic abstraction. Where one begins in the history of art to locate the genesis of the kinds of abstract art found in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is somewhat arbitrary. However, it is impossible to overlook the contribution to one kind of abstraction of the late works of J. M. W. Turner. Whether or not such works as Landscape with River and Distant Mountains (c. 1845) (Fig. 1), Sun Setting over a Lake (c. 1840–1845), or Sunset from the Top of the Rigi (c. 1844) are finished, they are extraordinary, and artists have seen and been influenced by them. And such completed works as Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844) by Turner advance abstraction in being characterized by a loosening of the image, a softening of the edges of substantial objects, and such a blending of positive and negative space that the hard edges of precise pictures of things are lost in relation to their ground. This art can be understood to foreshadow the diffuse Color-Field painting of Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. Late paintings by Claude Monet at Giverny, such as The Path with Rose Trellises, Giverny (c. 1922) that themselves border on pure abstraction, anticipate the sort of nature-based abstraction of Abstract Expressionism of which Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Pat Steir are, in their different ways, representative. Although such works as de Kooning’s Excavation

Fig. 1  J. M. W. Turner, Landscape with River and Distant Mountains, ca. 1840–1845, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (in public domain)

190 

J. STRAYER

(1950) may contain broad flat areas of an unchanging or slightly varying color, they tend to be more linear, like the Monet cited, and their line is organic, not geometric. The line of development stemming from Turner contains images or areas of paint that are more diffuse and inexact, and that reflect such parts of nature as clouds, fog, dust, mists, and the softening light of overcast skies or twilight. The nature-indebted abstraction to advance from Monet calls to mind such things as sticks, the thin clawing limbs of leafless trees, stems of plants, grasses, and the more exact edges of things that are better articulated in standard light. Different aspects of the two kinds of natural influence may mix, combine, or interact, and perhaps the flatter more painterly aspects of largely or loosely  linear works are the created counterparts of such things as fields, mud, swamps, moss, rivers, and lava flows. For instance, although the Monet cited presages linear abstraction, he also did works—such as The House from the Garden (c. 1992)—that incorporate areas that might be thought to be painterly responses to the kind of natural phenomena just listed. In any case, Turner and Monet are just two artists that were influential to an abstraction that, as organic, suggests a connection with nature, even as it ends in work that means to be self-sufficient in the sense that its nature and value are determined in relation to its abstract composition and created visual properties, and not in relation to an exterior reality lying beyond the surface of the work by which it may nevertheless have been informed. Geometric abstraction. Such late works as Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves (1902–1904) by Cézanne—of which there are many versions—are characterized by the careful dissection of objects that, in being less isolated than integrated with their ambient space, form a kind of fusion of figure and ground that consists of what is determined by their interactive relationships (Fig. 2). This interaction often seems to be both settled and dynamic, and in featuring harder-edge lines that echo boundary lines of a rectangle, initiates an abstraction that is less organic than geometric. Although such painting can be based on nature, as in the work cited, it can be understood to use nature to get beyond nature. This leads to the Analytic Cubism of Braque and Picasso, then to the geometric abstraction of Mondrian and Malevich, and subsequently to the hard-edged Color-Field painting of Barnett Newman. The monochrome and Greenbergian Modernism. One can imagine a nebulous form by Turner becoming so dispersed throughout an area as to mark it as an undifferentiated expanse, and a monochromatic space with a rectangular border situated in a larger area can be imagined to expand to fill that area with nothing more than its single color. In either case the work as a visible object now coincides with the bounded surface of the work. And whatever the genealogy, the work is now characterized by nothing foreign, and just consists of its particular assertive being. Here the recognizable image is replaced by something that simply declares its perceptible physicality as the item of focus. Lest a single monochrome be thought to end painting, or a number of monochromes to vitiate creativity, flatness can be delimited in any number of ways, with or without diverse colors, lines, and shapes, including in ways investigated by such

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

191

Fig. 2  Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1902–1904, oil on canvas, 60 × 72 cm; Kunstmuseum, Basel (in public domain)

artists as Cy Twombly (Fig.  3), Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Ryman. The latter two are particularly relevant to working within restrictive limits, as Reinhardt did by focusing on creating minimal differences between different squares of the nine black squares that composed a larger square, and as Ryman did by exploring the use of different kinds and shades of white paint in relation to different kinds of surface of different sizes. Looking for interesting ways to delimit flatness was said to be the program of Modernist painting, as it was the job of work of that sort to explore the essence of painting (cf. Greenberg 1960, 85–93; 1962, 121–133). This is only one kind of abstract art though, and there is an additional route to abstraction that must be recognized. From collage to Duchamp and the readymades. In papier collé and collage, Braque and Picasso introduced elements of common reality, such as bits of newspaper, onto the surface of the artwork. In his readymades, Duchamp removed the surface of the painting and just exhibited the quotidian object itself as the work of art. One way to think of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is to see it as the two-dimensional surface of a white painting that has come off the wall to enclose the object that it perceptually envelops to coincide perfectly with the shape of that object. As a result, what the object is is immediately seen, as what is seen registers in the mind as a token of a type of common object. And

192 

J. STRAYER

Fig. 3  Cy Twombly, Untitled, from Hommage a Picasso (Bastian 41), 1973, grano-­ lithograph and collotype in colors, on woven paper, 76.2 × 55.9 cm. Photo by Wikimedia Commons (fair use)

this means that the image of something as representing the concept of that thing is replaced with the thing itself that an image could be used to represent. An effect of the standard planar area coming off the wall to collapse onto the surface of a chosen object is that the mind reads the object as being an object of that type, as much as the mind could have read a pictured image of the object as signaling or symbolizing an object of that type. Both painted image and selected artifact then represent a means of getting to a thought of an object, or to the concept representing that kind of object, by taking different artistic routes. Artworks and literal objects. In a typical Minimal artwork, the planar surface is no longer a site of symbolization but is a visual expanse that engages thought

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

193

and perception as a literal area or object. In Joseph Kosuth’s Any Five-Foot Sheet of Glass to Lean Against Any Wall, Alberti’s window has been replaced by the kind of glass that a window normally contains. But one is not meant to see something through Kosuth’s glass. Rather, seeing the glass itself and understanding it in relation to the following points are what matter. First, it shows that there is a physical place to go beyond the monochromatic painting, namely transparency. Second, its physical relation to the wall as a means of partial support can be seen to comment on the relation of the work to the sort of institution in which it is typically expected to be exhibited. Third, because a transparent object’s material is not internally differentiated, any perceived difference in areas of its surface is determined extrinsically in relation to its larger environment. This emphasizes the relation of the work both to the observer and the environment since nothing perceived in the material/surface of the object is intrinsic to the object. And nothing would be perceived, as sense data or reflected images, apart from the presence of the observer doing the perceiving. Fourth, the work of art is not a particular but a type that can have any number of instances, as can be understood from its title. Given this and the preceding point, the relation of this work to both body and mind is emphasized. Fifth, what this kind of work shares with others in the history preceding it is an (abstract) identity, and a difference from what it is not, that is shown visually in a clear linear boundary that separates it perceptually and conceptually from everything that it is not. This is important to the recognition that the more abstract artworks possible will concentrate on the notions of identity and difference, as philosophically basic notions that are also fundamental to art. From the visible surface of art to the page as semantic surface. Conceptual art is said to be an art of ideas, and ideas as imperceptible might be thought to mark the limit of abstraction in art, and so to end the potential of abstract art to go further, or in a different direction (on conceptual art in general see Lippard 1997; on conceptual art, philosophy and “the idea idea” see Goldie and Schellekens 2009). However, abstract art has more than one end or direction, more than one limit, and more than one way of arriving at those limits. Works of linguistic conceptual art that feature words on a page, or other flat surface, such as Victor Burgin’s All Criteria (1969) represent, in at least one important sense, a return to the use of planarity in the background surface on which language is situated (Schlatter 1990, 185). One can recognize in such works a progression from the flat surface of Minimalism and Greenbergian Modernism to the surface of the page, or to the surrounding space of language as the negative ground of the text as figure. Consideration of the use of language in relation to space means that the different perceptual and conceptual relations of both space and language to meaning, thought, and time will have to be examined. The figure-ground relation, to be considered further below, results in four problems, and their solution, as linked to perception, thought, and language, in turn results in a number of philosophical and aesthetic possibilities for abstract art.

194 

J. STRAYER

2   Image, Surface, Mind, and Meaning Images and ideas. The word image comes from the Latin imitari to imitate. An image is the imitation or reproduction of the form or means of recognizing or identifying something else. An image can be understood to be a kind of idea that involves the notions of imitation, duplication, and representation in that an image re-presents, or presents again, in a different space, in an imitative medium, that of which it is the mental or understood duplication. Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait (1500) is an example. That which is represented, or presented again, is presented to mind, so that a relation is established between image and object. In recognizing what the image represents, a cognitive relation is created between image and object so that an image has a conceptual dimension, and so is a form of information. Images in art may consist, at the elementary level, of visual sense data, but their functioning as representative material takes them beyond that foundation to the meaningful level of thought and understanding. As an image as information is directed toward a perceiving and comprehending subject, the subject-­ object relation cannot be ignored in talking about images in art, and in fact the relation is tripartite in being image-subject-object. The subject is the means of connecting image and object in the sense that no image can represent an object without the perception and understanding of a conscious subject. The subject is then a necessary condition of an image standing for an object. Surface as site. The planar surface has been the main site of artistic investigations for most of art history. The reason would seem to be facts about reality, including practical matters, that underwrite and sustain at least certain kinds of creative investigation. The history of art includes ample illustration of how techniques of assembling lines, shapes, and colors on flat surfaces can be used to construct planar images that register phenomenally with viewers as being depicted slices of actual or possible reality. Thus, suitably manufactured visible data with the right internal relations can be connected through consciousness to a separate real or imagined world. And connecting conceptually disparate phenomenal entities—pictures and the things that they picture—seems best suited to a surface that, as flat and smooth, is most receptive to the techniques used to link images to their external counterparts so that the concept that applies to the depicted object registers in thought as a result of seeing the depicting image. It is difficult to paint something with the visual crispness, clarity, and existential accuracy of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) (Fig. 4) on the rough and undulating walls of a cave, or on something with the surface of a globe or a saddle, and of course these and other non-flat surfaces would result in a different aesthetic. Use of the representational methods of realistic art on planar surfaces is fitted to the notion of seeing art as if looking through a window, and of course most windows are flat and rectangular, as are most artworks in history. (Windows are also transparent, and so share that feature with the space through which we see, and with the acts of seeing and thinking on which art and culture depend, as indicated below.) Flatness is

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

195

Fig. 4  Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793, oil on canvas, 165 × 128 cm; Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels (in public domain)

also implicit in the notion of realistic art holding up a mirror to nature, since mirrors that are accurate in their reflections are flat, not curved. Ways of communicating information or conveying knowledge most often make use of rectangular planar surfaces. Think of blackboards or whiteboards, projection screens, tablets, smart phones, computer and television screens, and pages of books. Art as a means of conveying information and ideas is not limited to using images. What is remarkable is the amount of varied and important work produced by artists on planar surfaces in the history of art, and how that work engages and expands the notions of image, information, and idea as it leads to novel art forms, such as Installation, Earth, and Performance art, that are linked to earlier forms and extensions of planar art. On the relation of data, information, and subjects in abstract art. All apprehensible data is informative at the conceptual and cultural level at which art exists and functions as art. Given the lack of images in more abstract or

196 

J. STRAYER

non-objective works of art, and the absence in such visually restrictive works as monochromatic paintings of such means of conveying ideas as language, the question naturally arises if certain abstract works have moved beyond the association of art with information in the form of images to an art of pure data— the data of seeing. While that may be thought to be an appropriate insight into the nature of such works, the deeper thing to realize is that, at the level of intellectual and cultural maturity at which art operates, no datum can be apprehended that does not fall under a certain concept or set of concepts. A large number of concepts applies to an all-white painting, including those of thing, painting, white, opaque, art, and being an object of attention. In that sense its surface is as much a semantic one, albeit one of a different kind and complexity, as one that is marked by images or populated by words. All of the data of even the most reductive art is information in being classifiable data. However, the information of an abstract painting is not limited to the sort of basic concepts listed above, but includes information that connects it to relevant histories and criteria of evaluation. Relevant histories are all of those that are germane to the production, understanding, and evaluation of a work. They include, but are not necessarily limited to, art, critical, intellectual, cultural, and technological history. Relevant relations among such histories are also significant. Thus, instead of an image pointing beyond itself to something in the external world—as in traditional illusionistic art—the informative data of abstract painting points beyond itself to a historical tradition of which it is a modern development. And that information, with the information provided by its formal visual elements, is pertinent to, and may challenge, ways in which the work might be critically and aesthetically assessed. Because of the relation of abstract art to history and evaluation, and so to its engagement of the conceptual mind to which it is directed, any planar space of any kind of art, including perceptually reductive art, is semantic. Seeing is then a necessary but not a sufficient condition of appreciating and understanding a work. It must be supplemented with an active mind working with a vocabulary of appropriate ideas. Images and concepts. Because of the intellectual relation of images to thoughts and concepts, images can be understood to be the artistic precursors of concepts in Conceptual art, concepts that will typically be imageless in the sense that understanding or using them need not rely on something pictorial or otherwise related to sensation. Notice that the use of concepts, as communicated through words, in art does not have the same relation to artist and audience as that of images. Although a word may be used artistically because of its polysemantic character, or its capacity for ambiguity, it is chosen for this reason by the artist using it. And this choice makes sense only in relation to a set of public understandings that allow for ambiguity or multiple meanings. A word then, in having a public meaning(s), is not shaped individually in the way that an artistic image is in being a partial product of the native and developed constitution of the depicting artist. Consciousness, art, and conceptual idealism. All art depends on consciousness to be made, to be interpreted and understood, and to be evaluated. Visual

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

197

artworks and their surfaces and features, including images, are normally thought to be physical objects. This is incorrect for two basic reasons. The first is what physics tells us about matter. The second is that all art is intentionally directed toward mind that is meant to understand and respond to it as art. The planar artistic surface, qua planar and artistic, is dependent on mind in that, as physics assures us, it is only seen as planar, and is not planar in fact as a physical collection of moving atoms in mostly empty space. It also depends on mind since perceptions and understandings are mental, and art presupposes perception and understanding to be art. Without the participation of the mind to which it is directed there is no artistic surface, either as seen or understood. The same remarks apply to a work’s images, and to any other apprehensible entity that forms part of the work, or on which it depends to be art. As seeing and understanding are mental, they are philosophically ideal in the sense of depending on mind. While it is not necessary for an artwork itself to be perceptible, it must be possible to understand what any artwork, however conceptual, abstract, radical, or anomalous, is meant to be. This understanding depends on the perception of at least one perceptual object that the work itself is to be understood to be, or it depends on an apprehensible object containing information directed to the kind(s) of mental event(s)—such as reading and comprehending language—relevant to the understanding of intended artistic identity. In such a case, the perceptual object will contain comprehensible information that directs consciousness beyond sensation to something else that all or part of the work is to be understood to be. An example can be seen in the language by Robert Barry as illustrated below. In any case, any understanding of the identity of any artwork of any kind of art, including any that is purely visual, works with the concepts of art and artwork. For that reason, and because the perceptual objects and minds on which art depends can each be metaphysically material, I call the ontology of art and abstraction “conceptual idealism”. The concepts relevant to producing and apprehending works of art apply regardless, and so artworks are conceptually ideal in depending on what we think of as mind even if they are not metaphysically ideal in not being immaterial. Conceptual idealism is consistent then with pure physicality and the universal absence of immateriality. The discontinuous nature of art. Because consciousness is discontinuous, and any artwork of any kind of art depends on consciousness, an artwork is a discontinuous entity that only has its particular identity, as art, when standing in the right relation to consciousness, given the nature of what it is that the work is meant to be.

3   Image, Surface, Thought, and Perception Surface, time, and information. An unchanging planar surface is in time but is not of time in the sense that it does not use actual change or motion in the determination of artistic identity. Rather, time is arrested in the persistent image, or in any data of determined visual content and established relationships

198 

J. STRAYER

thought to lack variation, as set in an ostensibly permanent space that defeats the time of quotidian reality. The time of the stable visual artwork is confined to the present, and is so limited even when an image of the work refers to a past and future in which it is seen to be historically embedded. The constancy of thought in relation to the realistic image. Thought is constant in relation to a realistic image in that the same concept, or concepts, can be understood to apply to the image each time that it is an object of perception. Image identity is not simply preserved over time, but remains the same, within limits, in spite of spatial changes of angle to, and distance from, the image of the observer. (Such limits are tested by late Monet paintings, for instance, which become abstract paintings when viewed from a short distance from the surface of what appears to contain an image from a distance.) Thought will also defeat conceptual challenges to images posed by intervening media, or change in ambient lighting, as long as these do not rise to the level of so interfering with perception that the data on which images depend can no longer be properly seen. This relation between concept and image echoes the assumed constancy of identity of the artwork to which the image belongs since the work is conceived of as something that will present the same data to awareness each time that it is seen. Although it is known to physics that the physical substrate of a perceptual object is constantly changing, the perceptual object has a cultural stability over time that is linked to its continuity in consciousness and perception. The relations noted of thought to image and thought to work that remain in spite of the sort of changes stated reinforce the significance of the cognitive dimension of perceptual art and artistically relevant perceptual objects, and can themselves be used in artistic exploration. This cognitive importance also pertains to the relation of thought to the linguistic symbol of meaning in artworks that include or use words in the determination of their identity, and underlines the need to speak of conceptual idealism in the ontology of art. Abstraction, thought, and perception. Although the relation to thought of the identity of an abstract work, such as Newman’s Cathedra (1951), is the same as to that of a realistic work, such as Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c. 1662–1668)—in the sense that we expect to see the same thing when we see it again—there is a difference between them that is worth noting. Because abstract paintings are about their visual data as visual—and are not meant to be, or consist of, an image—different perceptions of them that are due to changes in observer’s angle and distance can have a greater effect on what we take the work to be, and so how it relates to thought in addition to sensation. Although the visual data of any painting will change in relation to change in observer angle and distance, because of the constancy relation maintained between thought and image, these data are typically seen as things to be overcome or ignored in realistic paintings, whereas they might be thought to be of great importance to, or even to be partially constitutive of, an abstract work. Thus, the whole of an abstract painting might not only be thought to consist of

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

199

abstract visual data rather than images, but to consist of these things as seen from different observer positions at different times, and so to introduce a subject-­dependent temporality into a work that is otherwise seen to be stable in the constancy of its identity. However, this is temporality without a temporal order in that a sequence of observations of the work can occur in any sequence over any given period. Given that, and the difference of the relation of observer and perceptual events to surface, the nature of an abstract painting can be understood to echo the temporal dimension of the ontological discontinuity of the artwork as dependent on thought and perception. How we think and talk about abstract works then changes in relation to the perception of the surface data of abstract visual works, and that fact raises the possibility that there may be other ways to investigate the relation of visual information to thought and perception that may be of artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical interest and importance.

4   Language, Surface, Thought, and Perception Images, surface data, and language. Although language used in a visual artwork, or in a work that depends on a visual object, may itself have an important visual dimension, language that is conventionally related to a standard planar surface is more about what the language conveys—as a thought—and is less about the language being seen in a formalist or expressive way that has to do with the shapes and textures of its words and letters and their treatment in two (or three) dimensions. In that sense a word in art is more like an image in a realistic painting that uses the surface to get beyond the surface to things that, in being understood, are recognized to be external to the surface on which the image that represents them depends. An image in a realistic painting and a word used in a Conceptual work have in common being symbolic means of representing or triggering ideas. They differ in that the image, but not the word, can appear as the reflection of something in the external world, and this is the case even when an image accompanies the understanding of a word since it is the conceptual content of the understanding that is necessary to that comprehension, and not the appearance of an image in the mind, which is contingent. Thought, perception, and transparency. Seeing is transparent in the sense that, in seeing, the focus is on the thing seen, and not on the act of seeing on which a perceived object, as perceived, depends. Thinking is similarly transparent in that, in thinking about something, one does not see, focus on, or think about the thinking but about the object that the thinking concerns (except of course when thinking reflexively takes itself as its own object). However, seeing terminates in something seen, and thought terminates in an object of the intellect to which thought is directed. An object of perception is typically opaque, and even if an object of thought is not characterized by a similar opacity it is still something in which thought concludes, and so has in common with

200 

J. STRAYER

perception, as an Intentional act, an Intentional object that is the terminus of the act. Because the word intentional is relevant to philosophy of art both in relation to an act done with purpose and to the act-object structure of perceptual and conceptual consciousness, I follow Searle here, and in other works, in capitalizing the word when it pertains to the latter usage (Searle 1983). Image, language, and opacity. Although either a painted image or a written word is opaque, it depends on transparent light to be seen, and it must engage the transparent conscious processes of seeing and thinking to refer beyond itself and to function in a work of art. Abstract and visual boundaries. Every visual artwork, and every visual object on which an artwork depends, has a visible boundary—typically a frame or the unframed perimeter of the rectangle containing the visual information of the visual work. Every word has a conceptual boundary that pertains to its meaning. This conceptual boundary consists of the logical relation of identity that the meaning of the word has to itself and the logical difference of that meaning from everything other than that particular meaning. The conforming use of the public meaning(s) of a common word can be understood to mirror, in conceptual form, the conforming use of a rectangular planar surface in most visual works of art. And the logical boundary of meaning can be understood to echo in transparent conceptual form the perceptual boundary of the perimeter of a rectangular surface that features a word or image. ALL THE THINGS I KNOW BUT OF WHICH I AM NOT AT THE MOMENT THINKING— 1:36 PM; JUNE 15, 1969. (Robert Barry 1969)

Problems of language and surface. There are both problems and possibilities that come with using written language in art on a two-dimensional surface. The character of no Conceptual or other linguistic work with which I am familiar even reflects recognition of these problems and possibilities, let alone exhibits a formulated way of addressing them. In most, language is written once on a wall or positioned a single time in the blank white space of a page or other rectangle, as in the work by Robert Barry in the illustration above. The problems are those of number—how many times to use the same language and why; distribution—how to position repeated instances of the language in relation to one another; figure and ground—how to relate the distributed instances of language as figure to their surrounding space as ground; and asymmetry—how to deal with the unyielding visual and linguistic orientation determined by the unitary direction of reading of a language like English. There are in fact ways to approach these problems that are not only of aesthetic interest and value, but different solutions of the difficulties cited enable one to investigate not only how ideas can be designed to function in relation to the subject comprehending them, but how ideas can be made to function in

  PLANARITY, PICTORIAL SPACE, AND ABSTRACTION 

201

relation to the subject functioning in relation to the object. That is, it is possible to investigate how ideas can function as a consequence of, and in relation to, how the subject stands in conscious relation to the apprehensible information of the manipulated perceptual object—the information that is responsible for causing the ideas that can stand in relation to the things to be investigated. Further, the ideas can not only be designed to be so related to the things in which they stand in the kinds of relation noted, but they can be designed to reflect in themselves their standing in those relations. (For further on this, including the notions and relations of deep form and layered content, see Strayer, Jeffrey Essentialism and Its Objects: Identity and Abstraction in Language, Thought, and Action (forthcoming))  This indicates then that the artistic interest in the planar surface can be continued in work that develops out of the sort of history of image and surface in art whose nature and relation this article is intended to provide. 

5  Conclusion: From Images to Imageless The notion “from images to imageless” describes the progression in the history of art from images as perceptible information to words as conceptual information. This is the transition from the working and data of perception to the acts and objects of pure imageless thought, as that route is affected and shaped by the things stated in this article. And although an imageless end is reached, the objects of imageless thought are themselves produced in relation to, and may be affected by, the comprehension of language situated in a planar surface that is so marked by the manner of its distribution as to become a complex space of apprehension. The things mentioned in the previous section—including the relations of mind to an apprehensible surface and to visual and verbal information that characterize that surface; relations of thought and perception as transparent to opaque and transparent things to which they are directed, and on which they depend; and relations of abstract and visual boundaries—are mentioned as things that might be included among relevant foci of creative aesthetic investigation, as much as realistic and manipulated images, visual data, and surfaces have been for various kinds of visual work in art history. The question naturally arises whether these things can be combined, as matters of creative interest, with other things of importance cited above, in considering the contrast, relations, and interactions of thought and perception—as temporal and impermanent—and objects and images seen and concepts and objects of thought—as, at least ostensibly, permanent—as a complex and fruitful area for artistic investigation. That the answer is yes, that there are ways of proceeding, and that there are aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical reasons that underlie these ways, are things that in other works and places I have attempted to illustrate (cf. Strayer 2007, 2017; cf. also www.JeffreyStrayer.com and Fig. 5).

202 

J. STRAYER

Fig. 5  Jeffrey Strayer, Haecceity 12.0.0, 2002; photo courtesy of the author. Each instance of the repeated circular text reads: that of which one cannot form a conception in conceiving of that of which one cannot form a conception…

References Goldie, Peter and Schellekens, Elizabeth. 2009. Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? New York and London: Routledge. Greenberg, Clement. 1960 [1993]. “Modernist Painting”. In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1951–1969. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 85–93. Greenberg, Clement. 1962 [1993]. “After Abstract Expressionism”. In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1951–1969. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 121–133. Lippard, Lucy. 1997. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schlatter, Christian. 1990. Conceptual Art Conceptual Forms. Exhibition Catalogue. Paris: Gallerie 1900/2000 Marcel Fleiss. Searle, John. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strayer, Jeffrey. 2007. Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction. Leiden: Brill. Strayer, Jeffrey. 2017. Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction. Leiden: Brill.

The Postmodern Image Luca Malavasi

“It becomes more and more difficult […] to specify exactly what it is that ‘postmodernism’ is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions across different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries, as different factions seek to make it their own, using it to designate a plethora of incommensurable objects, tendencies, emergencies” (Hebdige 1988, 181). Dick Hebdige’s remarks about the slipperiness of the term postmodernism (which continues with an endless list of things that can be associated to it) are neither the first—even if we are “just” in 1988—nor, obviously, the last problematization of this sort. More concisely, in 2009, in an article for the New Yorker centered on the work of Donald Barthelme, Louis Menand has described postmodernism as “the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts”, and at that moment the definition sounds particularly true, if we think that post-9/11 a wide international debate on the end of the postmodernism has been going on, fatally adding definitions over definitions, while trying to understand what would have replaced it, if something has (Brooks Toth 2007; Toth 2010; Faye 2012; Rudrum and Stavris 2015). Anyway, complaining about the impossibility of grasping the essence of postmodernism and of packing it up in a single viable definition has become a theoretical common place and frankly a quite useless one. Nowadays, we should probably, in the first place, think about postmodernism as something that surely “has happened”, using this past condition and our “new” condition as

L. Malavasi (*) University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_12

203

204 

L. MALAVASI

phenomenological starting points. There is no doubt that something like a “postmodern condition” (Lyotard 1984 [1979]) and an artistic and cultural postmodernism, as well as a theory, a philosophy, and a critical methodology for analyzing texts and society, have not only existed but have also indelibly marked a phase of Western history, more or less the last 30 years of the last century—even if, just like the objects to which the term postmodernism can refer to, its chronology is extremely fluctuating. It depends, in the first place, on the disciplinary area (e.g., literary postmodernism is an earlier phenomenon compared to postmodern cinema) and, secondly, on the interpretation we give to its crisis. And there is no doubt (or there should not be), to come to the topic of images, that a postmodern visuality has existed as a vital part of the postmodern condition, even if like the major definition of postmodernism, it seems difficult to define and sum up its characteristics. Actually, it sounds even curious to think about postmodernism in terms of visual culture, therefore employing an approach inspired by visual culture studies: on the one hand, because the analysis of visual and audiovisual fields like cinema, television, and art has been often considered separately and in relation to specific aesthetic traditions (see, for example, the “separatist” but quite common approach followed by Tim Woods 2009); even the less strict analysis, like the one in Brian McHale’s The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015), often fails in connecting all the streams that cooperate to define a visual regime. On the other hand, because historically visual culture studies actually came out, as discipline and method, against or at least putting aside postmodern image theory, its approach and its “feeling” about images. In this chapter, I will try to point out some crucial aspects of postmodern visuality. With this term I mean at least three different things, even if deeply intertwined: first, a cultural, technological, and mediatic context; second, a theory of images; and third, visual aesthetic, that I will exemplify primarily through movies.

1   Technology, Media, and Images “This is my belief, however, that the term ‘postmodern’ has a meaning, and that this meaning is linked to the fact that the society in which we live is a society of generalized communication. It is the society of the mass media” (Vattimo 1992 [1989], I). During the 1980s, no other philosopher has recognized and investigated the centrality of the link between postmodern society and the transformations that, since the 1970s, have affected the mass media system, from a technological, productive, and distributive points of view better than Gianni Vattimo. The commonplace that the postmodern condition would have been marked by a “hemorrhage of images” (Adair 1992, 17) can only be truly understood on the condition that this growing quantity is also read and analyzed as the product of a series of qualitative transformations that concern both the media system, the production and distribution technologies, and finally the very nature of images. Once these aspects are taken into account, we could

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

205

look at postmodern season not as a simple preparation phase of the present times but as the first and decisive step of a technological, cultural, and visual revolution that represents the full development of the current digital and networked society—and saying that does not mean embracing “continuist” theories (such as the one elaborated by Lipovetsky and Serroy (2007), quite unsatisfying) nor putting the discontinuous theories completely out of game, even if they often sound otherwise unsatisfactory in supporting a generalized, radical paradigm shift. The postmodern mediascape—its structural innovations, its functioning, the transformations it introduces in the way the subject relates and reacts to the visual—is what mostly marks and identifies the postmodern condition, to the extent that “media culture has become virtually synonymous with ‘the postmodern condition’” (Woods 2009, 225). At the same time, it constitutes an axis whose development runs quite independently both from the theoretical interpretation of postmodernity—it doesn’t matter if it is carried out with the tools offered by art theory and post-structuralistic literature, by deconstructionist philosophy, or by cultural studies—and from the idea of postmodernism, intended as one of the main stylistic strategies of cultural and artistic production of the last quarter of the twentieth century. For this reason, it is particularly important, today, to reread that wide territory of postmodern theoretical reflection which has endeavored to define and understand the transformations that Western society has undergone at various levels, putting the problem of a “media-saturated” society at the center of the debate (Strinati 2004), marked, in particular, by an unprecedented dominance of technology, technical image (Flusser 2002 [1997], 2011 [1985]) and media culture. That is to say, a society characterized not simply by a conspicuous, quantitative increase of images coming from cinema, television, advertising, and so on but also by the hegemonic role that the image plays per se, as “object” and main filter of mediation of social meanings and values, and as an extension and reification of a visuality increasingly managed by technical knowledge. What we can call mediatic postmodernity coincides with a broad and general process of technicalization and mediatization, a medial turn led by the new role taken by information, communication, and, more generally, visuality. This process initiates a “revolution” that is not merely technological but also social and anthropological, founded on the renewal of the relationship between technique, symbolic productions (first of all images), and the human being—a revolution that only in the 1990s would have been “branded” as a pictorial turn (Mitchell 1992) and an iconic turn (Boehm 1994). This process started in the second half of the 1970s (to explode in the following decade) and is defined, in the first place, by a new power and a new penetration force attributed to visual and audiovisual media (in their unprecedented integration): however abused, the labels “age of the image” or “society of the spectacle” effectively photograph a new social and cultural centrality assumed by visuality. With Jameson, we can speak of a new age of the “eye” (Jameson 1998): in summary, according to him, the history of contemporary

206 

L. MALAVASI

vision is divided into three main phases, from its birth as “gaze”, a situation stretched between the principle of identification/relationship and the submission of the other, to its bureaucratization (the gaze becomes an “eye”, an instrument for measuring power), until its reification in technology, in a full and total visibility, that runs the society of the images. The causes and, at the same time, the effects of this progressive transformation are also (if not above all) a series of big and little changes in cultural and technological production, which interests both the industry and the tools for the creation and circulation of content, affecting all media and, precisely, the very idea of a media system. Just to give a quick example, think of cinema: the notion of postmodern mediality coincides, in this case, with a series of changes that affect cinema first and foremost as an industry, ranging from the dissolution of the logic of the majors to the development of home video and neo-television markets, up to the explosion of the blockbuster phenomenon as an emblem of a completely new interrelation between entertainment sectors. More generally, and concretely, starting from the end of the 1970s, in Western societies there has been a global reorganization of the media and communication system: global because “on one hand, it simultaneously touches all forms of communication, from the other because it coincides with the rise of the ‘information industry’ as a whole in a crucial, and to some extent driving, sector of the entire economy” (Ortoleva 2002, 107). There are essentially two main agents of these transformations: the first is the massive development of national and international telecommunications networks, from which derives, among other things, the birth of new technologies such as fax and mobile telephony. This kind of development imposes, for the first time, cultural and productive logic destined to grow and spread in the future, such as the diversification of uses (think, for example, of the telephone network, which begins to bring not only the voice signal but also images, data, and written texts) and the convergence of networks (the mobile phone, for example, arises from the convergence of the cable and the ether) (ibid., 195). The media industry immediately takes advantage of it: the worldwide multiplication of commercial and pay television, via cable and satellite, is the best example. And it is worth noting that the logic of diversification of uses is directly related to the start of a process of miniaturization, simplification, and “mobility” of media and technologies: in addition to mobile telephone, we can recall the advent of the Walkman and Camcoder (introduced by Sony in 1982). The second factor that contributes to enhancing the role and function of visual mass media is the development of information technology. From the end of the 1970s, the computer stops being a heavy and expensive technology, transforming itself rather quickly into a “light” and economic technology, intended for the most diverse uses (in 1985, for example, the two protagonists of Weird Science use precisely a computer to give birth to their ideal woman). This process is favored, after 1975, by the introduction of microprocessors, which lead to the development of the first personal computers: Apple, founded in 1976, marketed its first PC, the Apple II, the following year; in 1982 the

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

207

Commodore 64; and, at the same time, the Atari 400 and 800 appeared. The turning point, however, was 1984, when Apple launched the Macintosh, destined to revolutionize the personal computer market (and to “free Humanity”, as the famous launch spot directed by Ridley Scott recounts). The computer was definitely “homey” and personal, and was also, by now, domesticated, smaller, mobile. In this case too, the media industry immediately takes advantage of the presence of a new platform, intending it both as an alternative delivery system and as a territory for the development of new industries, first of all, that of video games. By the mid-1970s, then, as the coinage of the term telematics (1976) reveals, the encounter between telecommunications and information technology became a priority. The effects of the combination of new information technologies with other developing communication technologies—satellites, telephone networks, and fiber optic cables—were already evident in the 1980s, thanks to the role played by the new entertainment industries in affirmation of a society which, as we mentioned earlier with Vattimo, appears “saturated by the media” and in which media operates in an increasingly global and convergent perspective. The 1980s, it is worth mentioning, are also the decade in which the rise of media conglomerates as an industrial structure shows the first repercussions on the ways of existence of single texts, whether they are films, television programs, video games, comics, or books. The key words of the future debate on the media society—convergence, connection, intermediality, and so on—take shape at this very moment, thanks to a revolution that is primarily technological and which, from a methodological point of view, must be thought not only within a history of the media and cultural production but also within the framework of a nascent philosophy of technology (Winner 1977, 1986)— which, not surprisingly, will be transformed in the following decades into a privileged area of media society analysis.

2  A (New) Theory of Images Not sufficiently remembered in the context of postmodern studies, Les Immateriaux, the great project curated by Jean-François Lyotard in 1985 for the Centre Pompidou (March 28–July 15; cf. Lyotard 1985a) probably represents one of the most significant theoretical gestures regarding the theory of images and media. Half exhibition, half writing experiment in the age of computers, the latter testifying in one of the two catalogues which accompany the exhibition, Épreuves d’écriture (Lyotard 1985b; Gallo 2008). Les Immateriaux was born from the desire to document the “breakdown of contemporary society in relation to modern ideals” (Théofilakis 1985, 9) and to provide legitimacy to the postmodern era. This task is therefore tackled through an analysis of the “body” of the new world (assuming that the shape, the materiality, and the “appearing” of the world count as emblematic) split into five key words: maternité, matière, matrice, matériau, and matériel. The basic idea is to confront the new existential and communicational horizon of a technoscientific

208 

L. MALAVASI

society and the instability of identity (due to the crisis of the modern ideals), with the five words used to interrogate, respectively, the origin of messages, their referentiality, the code trough which they can be decoded, the medium on which they live, and the process of their social dissemination. Therefore, the exhibition pays great attention to new materials and to the logical inversion of the messages’ inscriptions (now, the “project” invents its own material) but also to the transformational power of computer science, to the invisible and to the microscopic—relaunching Duchamp’s idea of “infra-mince”—to the new, technological process of representation and visualization (electronic microscope, roughness tester, scanner, holograms, and so on), which initiates an inevitable process of dematerialization while empowering the human eye through a new technoscientific prosthesis: Multiplication of the objects visible from the human eye thanks to capture, recording, and restitution materials of invisible waves. The human eye has access to information which is behind and beyond the natural limits of its perceptual space. (Lyotard 1985a)

More generally, the exhibition insists on the destiny of the materiality of reality, stretched between scientific translation/reduction and visual digitalization, of whose process Lyotard particularly outlines the divorce of the image from its “natural” referent and, at the same time, realistic output (that brings back and links the image to an “absent” reality). As Les Immateriaux clearly shows, the attempt to legitimate—or, in any case, to comprehend and analyze—the postmodern times suggests not only to take into account the “problem of images” and, consequently, a series of issues traditionally related to it—that is, their materiality, their ways of appearing, their social and cultural role, their relationship with reality, and so on. This attempt also imposes to enlarge the perspective and the methodology, particularly mixing the philosophy of Western society, the theory of image and media studies with the philosophy of technology and the scientific knowledge (a general trait of postmodern theory that would have been mocked by Alan Sokal; cf. Sokal 1996; 2008). At the same time, Les Immateriaux reveals that postmodern theory could be seen, in the first place, as an attempt to grasp the nature, the structure, and the functioning of a media-saturated society (even when this task is not so explicit): as we have summed up in the previous paragraph, a society marked by the advent of new communication technologies, by a new media system, and by the explosion of information technology, in which the increasing presence of the visual is characterized by a different existential appearance (new materiality and new matrix, to quote Lyotard) and performance of images—the “flux” of television, holograms, videogames, computer language, the first examples of digital effects, scientific visual imagery, and so on. Taken as a whole, from this inevitable side of postmodern reflection about Western society, a sort of “theory of images” derives that spins around two major traits (which would have become commonplace in the future analysis of

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

209

the visual): on the one hand, the definitive disposal of a “naïve” (positivistic, rational, photographic) interpretation of the visual (analog) representations and of the media that convey and spread them. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts out in 1984, language and imagery are no longer what they promised to be for critics and philosophers of the Enlightenment—perfect, transparent media through which reality may be represented to the understanding. For modern criticism, language and imagery have become enigmas, problems to be explained, prison houses which lock the understanding away from the world. (Mitchell 1984, 503)

On the other hand, actually anticipating the theorization of the already mentioned “turns”, we can broadly recognize, within postmodern theory, the attempt to map the way in which the visual starts imposing itself as the language of social and cultural exchange: if Paul Ricoeur opens his book about Freud and the “masters of suspicion” asking “How can language be put to such diverse uses as mathematics and myth, physics and art” (Ricoeur 1970, 3), in the 1970s a similar question starts running in many different humanistic fields, but with “images” instead of “language”—it is, actually, the question at the base of a project like Les Immateriaux. The range of questions raised and confronted by postmodernists—even in a world in which digitalization is just at the beginning of its course—represents a very strong introduction to a series of contemporary issues related to the visual. An ideal list of these questions runs from the problem of the animism of the artificial to the threatening analogy between machine and human beings, from the hyperrealistic version of the copy to the disappearance of the real (as referent or, more generally, as something that still counts), from the illusionist power of the media to the uncanny (because it is more and more autonomous and “alien”; cf. Winner 1977) working logic of the machine (the nowadays very common idea of the “black box” has one of its first theorizations in Baudrillard’s L’Échange symbolique et la mort, 1998 [1976]). After all, the postmodern work about images and visual represents the first attempt to deal not just with the realm of a new visuality, as it was just a step further into a previous and stable history or tradition, but to relate to a double, and interwoven, metaphysical crisis: that of the rational centrality and “governance” of human being upon the world, primarily based on faith in the technical progress enabled by scientific research and that of the images as a “tool” to grasp, know, and possess the world. More than other postmodern thinkers, Jean Baudrillard has stressed this double crisis since The system of objects (1996 [1968]), explicitly reversing the perspective of the influential essay The Age of the World Picture (1977 [1952]), in which Martin Heidegger looks at the modern age as a period characterized by the domain of science and its metaphysics, which undergird the objectification (in form of representations) of the world led by a new human subject (new in its own subjectiveness). The Heideggerian thesis of the possession of the world through and thanks to representations—the conquest

210 

L. MALAVASI

of a distanced “view of the world”, a Weltanschauung—is replaced by Baudrillard with the idea of the desertification of reality performed by visual hyperreality, in which objects and representations take “life” in the form of autonomous simulacra, freeing themselves from human ratio and referentiality in order to stand in the world as pure entities, to “put forward” (“to represent” means exactly that) just themselves. Among the numerous key words and theoretical concepts introduced, scrutinized, or enlightened in a different way by postmodern thinkers—or by thinkers who we can link to the postmodern context—that of simulacrum, along with those of technical image and technical system, can be taken today as leading references in order to summarize and better understand the still valuable contribute of the whole debate. From the 1970s onward, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Vilém Flusser, and Jacques Ellul—chosen here, among many others, exactly for the persistence and topicality of their thought— contributed in outlining the complexity of the new social and cultural scenario and to grasp the reasons of this newness, putting forward the visual as a major issue. What associates these three very different, non-systematic, and idiosyncratic scholars in the first place is the increasing consciousness of the crisis of the mastery of the human being and of the traditional forms of representations. According to Baudrillard, the idea of simulation does not have much to do with a falsification principle (which always implies the possibility of recognizing the deception), but rather refers to a real replacement or, to say it better, to an epochal reversal in the logic of recognition: now reality proceeds from the image and no longer the latter from the former. Simulation represents the form of the third order of the simulacra (Baudrillard 1994 [1981]; 1998), and its governance coincides with two essential shifts in the functioning of society: first, a kind of dramatic divergence of the relationship between signs and referents; second, a radical solution of the continuity between the processes that generate the structures and run reality (now hidden between black boxes and codes), and the processes of interpretation and decoding. In this sense, the simulacrum does not conceal reality, but imposes itself as (hyper)reality, referentially autonomous, so that what it is witnessed coincides, basically, always and only with the mystery of its own linguistic functioning, the mystery of its being there and, paradoxically, of its nonetheless referential performance. The reality—the “thing” which can testify through and underneath an analogous reproduction—thus ends up forcefully, in this kind of reproduction, as something that does not really matter anymore. The opposite path, moreover, from reproduction to reality, now appears completely unlikely, in the sense in which there is no longer any isomorphism (“to be like to”) between the two terms. On this crucial matter, the position of Vilém Flusser—whose thought revolves around the idea of technical images as a new regime for human consciousness, and not just a mere visual transformation—sounds quite similar, even if in his discourse, the major opposition is based on different terms, those of “concrete” and “abstract”. For Flusser, the ongoing cultural revolution, led by technical images, would bring both a new generation of individuals—for

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

211

whom “the search for deep coherence, explanation, enumeration, narration, and calculation, in short, and historical, scientific, and textually linear thinking is being surpassed by a new, visionary, superficial mode of thinking”—and a new epistemology. This new “species” of individuals no longer see any sense in trying to distinguish between something illusionary and something nonillusionary, between fiction and reality. The abstract particle universe from which we are emerging has shown us that anything that is not illusory is not anything. This is why we must abandon such categories as true–false, real–artificial, or real–apparent in favor of such categories as concrete–abstract. The power to envision is the power of drawing the concrete out of the abstract. (Flusser 2011 [1985], 38)

In fact, for Flusser—who does not explicitly rely on the idea of simulacrum—technical images differentiate themselves from those of the past primarily by how (and why) they block the path from representation toward the object: beyond the image there is not (any longer) the reality, but the concept, the abstraction, the technical exercise of the dissolution of matter. But Flusser, unlike Baudrillard, looks at the “black box” that now presides over the production of images more as a symbol of a crisis of interest in technical-scientific discourse than as an insurmountable, cognitive limit. In fact, one of the issues posed by technical images is not so much that of their release from the reference to the objective world, as that of their fullness and evidence. However, the result parallels in some ways the Baudrillardian idea of hyperreality: many of the observations made by Flusser on the cultural repercussions of the “envisioned surface” of technical images lead to the conclusion that the power of new images coincides with the production of a kind of a crisis of interest in reality. In this sense, images cease to function as mediation tool between the subject and the world, blocking the path to and from the image. About that, it is worth remembering that Flusser was one of the first to have intuited that in the face of this “blockage”, it is necessary to flush out the technique behind the image, instead of looking for reality “inside” them (ibid., 34). The reference to Jacques Ellul’s theses is, in this regard, almost inevitable. In the analysis that the French scholar has devoted to “technocratic world” since the early 1970s, technique is described in the first place as something which conceals, bans the distance, presenting itself more and more as immediate and, in fact, invisible, rather than enunciating itself for what it is, that is, a vehicle, an instrument, and a means (Ellul 1980). Between the “closer watching” of the technique suggested by Flusser and the strategy of moving away into the “totally different” that Ellul points out as an essential strategy to react to the governance of technology (which works to put out what cannot be absorbed and controlled, that is, the surplus, the gap, the margin, etc.), there is a profound affinity. And not so far from the Baudrillardian idea of the code society as a referendum in which the human being responds to the system through a behavior that is no longer reflective, but ruled by a binary operations

212 

L. MALAVASI

(yes/no, in/out, on/off, etc.), Ellul insisted on the internalization of the conformism of the technique, a technique that builds up an artificial universe which poses the man as a fatally incompetent subject: the society of technique, in fact, appears to him as a “nervous system” in which human being is marginalized, a sort of impotent creator who stands in front of a world of objects and functions that have far exceeded the possibility of being really understood, even as regard to their purposes. But the conformism indicated by Ellul also passes, inevitably, through the triumph of the main “product” of this society, the images (at the expense of words): Ellul’s idea that image “suffices to itself”, proceeding to build up a reality in which what remains are ghostly bodies, traces enlivened by technology, replicas, and prostheses that erase the problem of the presence of things also echoes Baudrillard; along with Flusser, on the other hand, Ellul pointed out the idea that this sort of cancelation looks like a kind of arrest on the road that should lead to questioning the “black box” (the technique, the constructive processes, and the “nervous system” that governs contemporary society). But if Ellul’s slightly apocalyptic analysis appears today as one of the most important contributions in order to enlighten the postmodern reaction to the “society of image” and to the birth of a series of topics and issues strictly linked to the understanding and analysis of contemporary visuality, is also because it traces the bold differences between a “pre” and a “post”, implicitly summarizing an entire, vast debate that runs from Debord and McLuhan to Virilio and Lyotard: “No comparison is possible between what people have traditionally known of images and what we are now exposed to… It is a society made by, for, as a function of, and by means of visualization” (Ellul 1985 [1981], 80–81). And the main difference is recognized exactly in the collapse of the reality into images and in the latter’s self-sufficiency, which “become unquestionable, just as reality is. This happens because images become more real than reality itself” (Ellul 1985 [1981], 81). Along with this, Ellul’s other statements are destined to become the core of further investigations (in media and image theory, as well as in sociological studies), like the idea that this triumph of the visual is going to reduce people to “mere spectators”, diminishing the interest in and the capacity of action (“now the superficial spectacle imposes itself on us all day long, turning us into passive recorders of images”) (Ellul 1985 [1981], 89), or like the idea that the spectacularized flux of image will keep human being in a sort of “hypnosis” (that echoes the Baudrillardian “ecstasy”) in which everything, from the most banal event to the most tragic, will be perceived and lived as the same thing. From a broad point of view, and thinking about the further development of such issues, we should think to postmodern reaction to a new visual realm as the first affirmation of the awareness of an ongoing turn which, driven by a new kind of media protagonist, is not limited to the increased quantity of images, but it introduces some essential changes in their nature and action. More

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

213

basically, this reaction puts the “problem of images” at the core of contemporary debate: no longer a specific field of investigation but, on the contrary, a common, inescapable ground in order to understand the human being and his world.

3   Postmodern Aesthetic The third aspect that defines what we have called the postmodern visuality is probably the most recognizable but, at the same time, the most slippery, as the analysis of cultural and artistic postmodern production has clearly showed since the beginning. Particularly, scholars and critics have often chose to embrace a “quantity” or a “quality” paradigm (sometimes both at the same time), that is to say: on the one hand, a paradigm that implies a sort of global, generalized postmodernization of stylistic features (in all arts and segments of cultural production); on the other hand, a paradigm that draws a too straight, direct, and co-dependent relationship between social and economic condition and the “face” of cultural production. At the same time, it has become more and more difficult to grasp and define what these stylistic, sometimes “symptomatic” features are, to the extent that postmodern aesthetic seems to be found in cultural production ultimately more as a generic “atmosphere”, something that we can “feel” but not exactly define, rather than a series of precise options and intentions. After all, the list of postmodern stylistic features has grown immensely, and this is especially evident when we deal with images and visuality. Instead of offering an umpteenth list of “ingredients”, nowadays, more aware of the “post” of the “post”, it would be probably wiser to indicate few more resistant and influential characteristics that the postmodern visual aesthetic has revealed about contemporary images, and especially audiovisual images. And I think that these qualities could be summarized in three main aspects: (1) the openness, instability, and malleability of the iconographic and visual surface of images; (2) the problematization of the role, materiality, and technicality of the support and of the presence and functioning of linguistic conventions; (3) the emerging of a technocratic ideology. From a certain point of view, all three of these aspects have to do with the double, technical revolution that occurred starting with 1970s and which deeply affected the “life” of images (means of production, editing, and circulation): first, the advent of the electronic technology and devices, and then the spreading of the digital ones. The first aspect elaborates, from a certain point of view, the topic of the “divorce”—or of the cultural crisis of the link—between reference and signs. In fact, postmodern images seem to work—or value—less than (re)presentations of something that refers or belongs to reality, rather than open spaces of inscription of visual contents and writing operations. In doing so, images problematize some crucial postmodern topics such as the one of relationship between original and copies (Crimp and Krauss) or the one of the autonomy and self-­ sufficiency of visual representations. Therefore, the more the significance of the image loosens its ideological and ontological realistic binding (not its realistic

214 

L. MALAVASI

appearance), the more it puts forward its own visual essence, both plastic and figurative. And if the video art territory (whose birth is strictly related to the electronic revolution) represents an all-too paradigmatic illustration of this way of working on images (think, for example, of Nam June Paik), cinema—which, in the impossibility of a general mapping of cultural production, we will use in this paragraph as case study—could testify this tendency both in mainstream and in independent/author production. We can think, for examples, to Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, whose work is lead, since the mid-1980s, by the idea of the deconstruction of the “stability” of image. This tendency, especially in Greenaway (Fig.  1), will explode in the next decade, when the ideas of frame and grid will be supplanted by a pictorial composition of visual signs and objects, laid down like layers and inlays, beyond perspective rules—work explicitly addressed against the “square” and the screen format, with elements inside each other, like in a Russian nesting doll or in a mirror game. But we can also think to the work of Brian De Palma, Kathryn Bigelow, and David Lynch (Fig. 2) (or to the work of a mainstream director like Adrian Lyne), which (especially in the 1980s) testifies to another side of the postmodern attitude to “perform” with and on images, that of hyper-realistic deformation, which not only exposes the surface—addressing the compositional rules, the “frameness” of the space, the perspective organization, the flatness of the plane, and so on—but also filling the picture with “visual objects” (through the exasperation of the relationship between foreground and background elements, or through the expressionist colorization or ralenti, etc.). In all cases, the picture emerges as a visual composition (in the

Fig. 1  Peter Greenway, Drowning by Numbers, 1988, screen capture. Pictured are Bernard Hill (as Madget) and Joan Plowright (as Cissie Colpitts 1) (fair use)

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

215

Fig. 2  David Lynch, Blue Velvet, 1986, screen capture. Pictured are Denis Hopper (as Frank) and Isabella Rossellini (as Dorothy) (fair use)

sense of the Latin origin of the word, “place together”), distancing itself from reality as pure image, insisting not simply on the autonomy of the latter but also on its peculiar structure and appearance, and especially on the encounter between plastic and figurative dimensions. This attitude, which is outlined on the formal aspects of images (and which takes advantage of the possibility offered by a new generation of cameras and electronic visual effects) parallels, from a certain point of view, research about digitalization, which, since the late 1970s, has its most important laboratory in the foundation of Pixar. In its ontological essence, as we know (Manovich 2001; Casetti 2015), digitalization is a crucial turning point with regard to our discourse. However, instead of remarking on its well-known aspects such as the referential autonomy and the realistic aesthetic of digital images (with their consequent load of theoretical issues), we can list other two aspects here, more related—again—to the stability of the figurative dimension: on the one hand, the combination of live action and animation or, more generally, the combination of existential regimes of very different images, such as in the first test by John Lasseter, Where the Wild Things Are, 1983 (which mixes traditional and digital animation) or in a movie like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), whose director, Robert Zemeckis, would work again, in the future, on this kind of pictorial “mélange”; on the other hand, the morphing (Sobchack 2000) quickly recognized not just as a “shape-shifting formlessness” process that “greedily ‘devours all forms’” but also as metaphor of our “larger metamorphic technosphere” (ibid., XIII). But probably the key aspect to support our point better is the spread of the blue and green screen (for an historical reconstruction, cf.

216 

L. MALAVASI

Foster 2010). From television to cinema, the “travelling matte” starts piercing and filling potentially everything within the space of the frame, establishing a subtle but essential shift from both the old (and often opposite) metaphors of the shot as frame or window: here, again, indeed, we witness the triumph of the com-position, of the unexpected encounters between different visual regimes and matters, of the vanishing of the rules of perspective and of the spectator’s position, of the free, pictorial manipulation of space and time, and so on. In this sense, the blue screen is probably the most appropriate tool to testify the beginning of cinema’s shift from its status as an indexical media technology to a condition in which it works more as a sort of subgenre of painting (Manovich 2001). The second aspect we have listed before—the problematization of the role, materiality, and technicality of the support and of the presence and functioning of linguistic convention—is probably the most evident and discussed (at least regarding the second aspects), and as the previous one is not just, or completely, an effect of some kind of “lost (visual) innocence” (cf. Eco 1983), neither an ironic prolongation of some Modern issue, but having to do— again—with the postmodern tendency toward the objectification of images and the “spectacularization” of the relationship between human being and images per se. From a certain point of view, we should probably posit here, in this formal and technical attention to the “being” of images, the first step of a tendency that is now a crucial aspect of our relation to images: that of post-­ production, intended essentially both as a cultural position—the image as an open field and as a creative action—the virtually never-ending reworking of the qualities of images, exposed as variants rather than defining, fixed characteristics (also from an historical point of view), and consequently parceled out one from another, and revealed in their essence and singularity (both formal and technical). Brian De Palma could stand as a perfect illustration of this attitude and cinematic “gesture” (think, for example, to the ways in which he engages with and reworks Hitchcock’s archetypes and imagery) also because he perfectly reveals the ontological essence of the “game”—that is not just playing with images, with a more or less explicit irony (Fig. 3). More generally, this growing attitude is well revealed by the intermedial “mosaic” (Montani 2010) or by that side of the postmodern deconstructive game that clearly engages with the support, from split-screen (used more and more in an eccentric way) to technical deformation such as the one displayed in Crooklyn (Spike Lee 1994), in which the parameters of the inscription and of the technical existence of the image are openly affected through a manipulation process that reaches the extreme limit of sabotaging the projection (an entire sequence, lasting more than 10 minutes, is distorted by the choice to use an anamorphic lens in the shooting phase, normally used to straighten the panoramic format in the projection phase). However, instead of multiple examples, what’s important to note here is that today we should renew our interpretation of and perspective on classical postmodern features such as metalinguistic attitude, pastiche, quotation, and

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

217

Fig. 3  Brian De Palma, Blow Out, 1981, screen capture. Pictured is John Travolta (as Jack) (fair use)

virtuosity: that means, think about them less as pure formal strategies, brought by some kind of crisis on the path of modern interrogation of artistic work, and more as effects of a change in the cultural and ideological human “agency” toward images (especially technical images); the image seems to be taken and regarded more and more as “performance space” rather than field of inscription of linguistic and semiotic operations, and that is probably the aspect that, more than others, distances some apparently related postmodernist and modernist artistic operations. We can stay in the sphere of cinema to briefly illustrate the third aspect, which opens up the analysis to the role of technique in relation to technical images. We should not forget (see previous paragraph) that the postmodern visual aesthetic starts defining itself in the context of a more general technical revolution: that is to say, from a material and historical point of view, the advent of the digital image (with everything that follows in terms of new production and manipulation possibilities) does not represent a linear advancement within a particular story, but the effect of a more general and pervasive new techno-­ scientific culture that announces itself in a very transversal way. To put it in a different way, we start dealing in all visual and audiovisual fields with technical innovations that affect—to remain in cinema—not just the history of cinema technology but also the history of cinema as technique. Therefore, what prevails here is not the idea of image as an object, neither the idea of image as a field of operation, but the idea of image as artifact (from the Latin “arte factus”: “artfully made”, but also “artificially made”). Regarding this aspect, the most interesting case study is probably the blockbuster movie which, since the late 1970s, becomes the core of (new) Hollywood production, to the present, when it plays a pivotal role in the entertainment industry.

218 

L. MALAVASI

Besides the narrative and ideological aspects—scholars have constantly remarked on, and sometimes complained about, the fact that blockbuster movie seems to bury the idea of the great adventure of cinema as narrative and moral reworking of reality under thick layers of visual excitement (see King 2002)—the blockbuster explores the possibilities of a new “technical imagination”, also in its effects on the senses and experience: an elaboration, measured through and on the body of cinema, of a different destiny for the image as technique. In particular, the blockbuster movie seems to celebrate a cinema of technical power, in which technique imposes itself and acts as the only referent of images, opening up to other worlds and, at the same time, exasperating a crucial dimension of the cinematographic image, that of its intimately “artificially made” nature. Therefore, the new “culture” of visual special effects should be regarded in the first place as the integral acceptance of the intrinsic effective dimension of the image (Prince 2012) and as the constant relaunch of the idea of image as a special effect. The spectacular cinema of the 1980s explored this aesthetic of excess with stubbornness, tracing the direction lines of a technical imagination destined to explode in the following decade (to continue, detonation after detonation, to the present). Particularly, that cinema started working on some kind of excess of vision, of what can be seen, materialized, and presented, freeing movies and images from an anthropomorphic rationality. Along with the previous aspects, which insist more on the materiality of inscription and writing of visual content, this latter aspect deals especially with the visual materialization of what can be imagined, revealing to what extent postmodern images testify not just to the beginning of a new ontological era for images, but also a new cultural development for narrative and visual imagination, fueled and freed by technology.

References Adair, Gilbert. 1992. The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice: Reflections on Culture in the 90s. London: Fourth Estate. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994 [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996 [1968]. The System of Objects. London and New York: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998 [1976]. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage. Boehm, Gottfried (ed.). 1994. Was ist ein Bild? München: Fink. Brooks, Neil and Toth, Josh (eds.). 2007. The Mourning After. Attending the Wake of Postmodernism. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Casetti, Francesco. 2015. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1983. Postille a Il nome della rosa. Alfabeta, 49: June. Ellul, Jacques. 1980 [1977]. The Technological System. New  York:  The Continuum Publishing Corporation. Ellul, Jacques. 1985 [1981]. The Humiliation of the Word. Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans.

  THE POSTMODERN IMAGE 

219

Faye, Jan. 2012. After Postmodernism. A Naturalistic Reconstruction of the Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, Jeff. 2010. The Green-Screen Handbook. Real-World Production Techniques. Indianapolis: Wiley. Flusser, Vilém. 2011 [1985]. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, Vilém.  2002 [1997]. Vilém Flusser: Writings. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, Gallo, Francesca. 2008. Les Immatériaux. Un percorso di Jean-François Lyotard nell’arte contemporanea. Roma: Aracne. Hebdige, Dick. 1988. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London and New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977 [1952]. The Age of the World Picture. In id., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York and London: Garland Publishing, pp. 115–154. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. Cultural Turn. Selected. Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998. London and New York: Verso Books. King, Geof. 2002. New Hollywood Cinema. An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (dir.). 1985a. Les Immateriaux. Vol. 1: Album. Inventaire. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. ̇ Lyotard, Jean-François  (dir.). 1985b. Les Immateriaux. Vol. 2: Album Epreuves d’écriture. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. Lipovetsky, Gilles and Serroy, Jean. 2007. L’écran global. Culture-médias et cinema à l’âge hypermoderne. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. McHale, Brian. 2015. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1984. “What Is an Image?”. New Literary History, 15 (3): 503–537. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1992. “The Pictorial Turn”. Artforum, 30: 89–94. Montani, Pietro. 2010. L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Ortoleva, Peppino. 2002. Mediastoria. Mezzi di comunicazione e cambiamento sociale nel mondo contemporaneo. Milano: il Saggiatore. Prince, Stephen. 2012. Digital Visual Effects in Cinema. The Seduction of Reality. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970 (1965). Freud and the Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rudrum, David and Stavris, Nicholas (eds.). 2015. Supplanting the Postmodern. An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Sobchack, Vivian (ed.). 2000. Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sokal, Alan. 1996. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. Social Text, 46–47: 217–252. Sokal, Alan. 2008. Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

220 

L. MALAVASI

Strinati, Dominic. 2004. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Théofilakis, Élie (dir.). 1985. Modern, et après? Les immatériaux. Paris: Autrement. Toth, Josh. 2010. The Passing of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 1992 (1989). The Transparent Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology. Technics-Out-Of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Winner, Langdon. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in an Age of Hugh Technology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Woods, Tim. 2009. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Digital Images and Virtual Worlds Rebecca Haar

The emergence of digital technologies has significantly changed the perception of visual content and how immersion—and in particular pictorial immersion— is defined and perceived. The same applies to terms such as simulation, simulacra, virtuality and of course virtual realities. Images often represent a certain aspect of reality that can be virtually transformed into something that can no longer be traced back to any reference system of reality. But there is much more than that: this concept allows for immersion which means to dive into the image. Immersion describes an effect of being exposed to illusory stimuli which fade into the background to such an extent that the so-created virtual environment is perceived as real and therefore it is important to specify the attributes of virtual image systems compared to images of traditional works of art or moving images such as cinema or videogames. Art historian and media theoretician Oliver Grau states that [n]ever before has the world of images around us changed so fast as over recent years, never before have we been exposed to so many different image worlds, and never before has the way in which images are produced changed so fundamentally. (Grau 2003, 3)

Due to constant shifts in content, the concept of immersion must always be viewed in the context of current perspectives and its history. Virtual reality and, in this regard, digital images have been used by artists as an experimental field since early on: “[V]irtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images” (Grau 2003, 5). Grau describes virtual reality also as “a

R. Haar (*) Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_13

221

222 

R. HAAR

panoramic view [that] is joined by sensorimotor exploration of an image space that gives the impression of a ‘living’ environment” (7). Thus, even in media theories, there is no key theory that describes everything; instead, there are different currents with different positions on the object of investigation or rather the objects of investigation. In order to approach this topic, an attempt will first be made to provide a short historically oriented definition of the basic concepts of simulacrum and virtuality, as their conceptual history goes back a long way. This also includes a closer look at (pictorial) immersion and how this is associated with simulacra and virtuality: “The ontology behind pictorial experience within diverse cultures and civilizations has to go beyond art history’s aesthetic imperatives and encompass cultural history […] as well as within technology in general” (Purgar 2019, 18) and “[c]ultural history demonstrates that images never possessed a unique ontological basis” (20). The general problem of pictorial or visual studies is that it is not really obvious what a picture or image should be. Whoever wants to work scientifically on images has to deal primarily with the question of what an image is and for what reasons it exists (Wiesing 2018, 14). It depends on the respective philosophical position whether a stellar constellation, a reflection, a silhouette, a calligraphy, a diagram, abstract photography, cyberspace (and thus also virtual worlds and digital images), a map or a footprint is counted among the group of images (ibid.). Historically, the perception of images as well as art has changed continuously and has been transformed from applied arts, media of information to aesthetic works and art for the purpose of pure art, l’art pour l’art, which can be observed in the visual arts. Oliver Grau describes the wish “to be in the picture, in both the metaphorical and nonmetaphorical sense, did not disappear with the [representation of] panorama[s] but lived on in the twentieth century” (Grau 2003, 141), which means that admittedly “[f]or the medium of the panorama functioned in the same way as film, slides, or computer programs, that is, only in conjunction with its presentation apparatus” (ibid., 127). A panorama is an illusional space that represents “the highest developed form of illusionism and suggestive power of the problematical variety that used traditional methods of painting” (ibid., 6). From this the pictorial representation developed further into 360° images that “continued and entered developing new media and art trends” (ibid., 141) which allows to produce art that is connected with (pictorial) immersion and “attempts to realize new media for illusions” (ibid.). The concept of the trompe l’œil works in a similar way as an aspect of illusion painting. Here, no panorama is created that virtually surrounds the viewer, but rather, through illusionistic painting and perspective representation, the impression is created as if it were a three-dimensional representation. With forced perspective optical illusions are created, which evoke a sculptural impression of the presented contents. Not only are illusions produced, there is also an aesthetic discussion on the theoretical level that deals with these ideas. Since images are always connected with perception, as already mentioned before, a closer look of the concepts of simulacrum and virtuality is useful: In ancient philosophy Plato already

  DIGITAL IMAGES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS 

223

distinguished between the theory of art and that of mimesis: the image (eikon) which represents an exact correspondence of the original image, and the mirage (phantasma) which only shows similarities (Stiegler 2005, 222). Since Plato, the history of the reception of the simulacrum has started with mimesis and, especially in the field of aesthetic theory, has had a great influence up to the twentieth century (ibid., 225). This theory is a proof that even with the earliest visual media—drawing, painting, and sculpture—people accepted the recognition of forms and physiognomies from the real world, merely because people themselves intuitively produced “a correctional mechanism” for representation, the latter being actually a doubt of the simulacrum-­like nature of the image, that is, a doubt that the image is not in itself what we see in it. (Purgar 2019, 20)

The term simulacrum is dazzling and multicolored and just as difficult to grasp. A simulacrum is defined as a real or fictitious entity that is related to something or someone or has a resemblance to it. The meaning of the simulacrum is shaped by a dichotomy immanent in meaning, which includes the idea of deceptive pretense as well as that of productive fantasy as a component that belongs to creative thinking (Huber 2008, 65). This dichotomy is important in so far as it already reveals the significance of the simulacrum and thus of simulation on many sides. Already here it becomes clear that the concept of the simulacrum or simulation in its entirety can be assigned neither to a clear system nor to a method, but must be defined accordingly for each arrangement where it is used. The simulation as well as the simulacrum has been applied in many, sometimes contradictory schools of thought and currents, which makes the conceptual history very complex but also difficult to apprehend and connects this with immersion and immersive image perception. In addition to this, Jean Baudrillard, a media theorist and philosopher, has led since the beginning of the 1980s with his shifting of the concept of simulacra in a fundamental and theoretical way to a new compilation of various basic theoretical assumptions in various fields. He makes a distinction between simulation and not simulating, while simulation means “to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (Baudrillard 2009, 3), which he defines as something that implies absence. An image is according to Baudrillard’s perspective “the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (ibid., 6). Baudrillard also divides simulacra into three orders, which he locates historically (Baudrillard 1993, 71f). A first-order simulacrum still clearly shows a difference between original and copy. The second order recreates reality, which simultaneously erodes the difference between the imaginary and the real. With a third-order simulacrum, there is no longer any reference of reality, and virtual life becomes completely independent, which means this kind of simulacrum is so to speak a copy without an original. Baudrillard calls this the era of simulation (Baudrillard 1994, 2). Later he

224 

R. HAAR

supplements a fourth order, which no longer refers to any reference (Baudrillard 2009, 5). He describes it as “the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, […] and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue or pure contiguity” (ibid., 5f). This means that “there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general” and it is located behind the code (ibid., 6). Even though Baudrillard’s description of the various orders of the simulacra does not fall within the realm of image studies in the stricter sense, it is nevertheless worth mentioning, since it takes up the subject from a media-theoretical perspective. Also, the concept of the simulacrum was coined well into the nineteenth century as a counter-model to mimesis. With the history of photography, the history of the simulacrum can easily be shown: Already in early photographic theory, technical images were referred to as simulacra which are contrasted with imitation by art (Stiegler 2005, 223). Photography, however, only captures the surface of an object, not its depth or life. The daguerreotype was also said to be no longer an imitation, but the absolute and perfect truth, in which photography replaces the object and is not merely its image (Stiegler  2001, 37). The viewer of a photograph expects the picture to depict reality. The philosopher  Roland Barthes deals with this theory, among others, in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), in which he examines in detail the character of representation and its theoretical implications. Photographs have a strong reference character to the documentary, but photography was manipulated early on, for example, with painted backgrounds. With the help of illusion techniques, virtual spaces that seemed real were already created here. Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between simulacrum and mimesis, and the antinomy between mimesis and simulacrum runs through the various texts of nineteenth-century photographic theory. At the same time, it determines the distinction between an artistic use committed to mimesis, for which photography is out of the question or at best only in the sense of preliminary studies, and a scientific and technical application, in which photography can play out its special qualities and open up ever new areas of human perception (Stiegler 2005, 223). This dichotomy is topical for photographic theory until the twentieth century. In the avant-garde, photographs finally show the so-called optical truth (ibid., 224). The photographer László Moholy-Nagy is of the opinion that precisely this is the objective visual form of our time (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 26). With the beginning of digital photography, its meaning shifted once again, actually approaching the terminology of Baudrillard, according to which copy and original are obsolete as categories: Photography no longer refers to an original image or a reality that it would have to depict, but produces its own (virtual) reality as a simulacrum (Stiegler 2005, 224). The simulacrum only refers to the medium it has produced, for photographs are simulacra in the emphatic sense of the word and are thus not committed to either reality or mimesis (ibid.). In fact, they are a truth that has its correlate in computer programs, but nevertheless produces images that cannot be distinguished from traditional images

  DIGITAL IMAGES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS 

225

committed to the mimesis paradigma (ibid.). What is interesting here is that the simulacrum is no longer seen only as imitation or reproduction, but produces its own reality and couples this with a series of political, technical, social and theoretical implications (ibid.). As a consequence, it can be deduced from this that reality or parts of the perception of reality are cultural constructions. The history of virtuality is no less complex than that of the simulacrum. Virtuality derives from the Medieval Latin virtualis or virtualitas and was equated in scholasticism with the ability or the possibility to exist (Münker 2005, 244). Often the virtual is associated with terms such as appearance or simulation and then explicitly contrasted with the real (ibid.), which is why virtuality is theoretically to be linked with simulacra. However, virtuality does not mean the opposite of reality, as is often assumed; rather, virtuality is to be seen as the counterpart of topicality: virtual worlds are worlds that are possible, but not actual. At the same time, the adjective virtual is used synonymously with implicity (Knebel 2001, 1062ff). Symbols open up paths into imaginary worlds that tend to become virtual by using properties and features that also exist in the real world: “[V]irtuality […] has followed human culture from its very beginning. Symbols open up imaginary worlds that tend to be virtual worlds by including traits that intimate real social worlds” (Fornäs et al. 2002, 30). If you like, these are already the first virtual realities that started with prehistoric cave paintings (Rheingold 1991, 379f). Dreams, rituals, ideas and even language itself can also be regarded as virtual (Poster 1998, 184–211). The idea of memory place as a mnemonic unit is also relevant in this context. It is linked to different cultures that do not know cultural techniques like writing, and can therefore also be regarded as one of the first virtual worlds that is individually constituted in the imagination of a person (Boellstorff 2008, 33). Today, the virtual “is often used as a proper noun […] a place, a space, a whole world of graphical objects and animated personae which populate fictional, ritual and digital domains as representatives of actual persons and things” (Shields 2003, xv). In general, the terms virtuality and virtual appeared in different and ambiguous uses in the media theoretical discussion of the last twenty years to describe specific effects of the increasing distribution of digital media (Münker 2005, 244). The virtual is often combined with illusion or simulation or in a broader sense also with simulacra and thus opposes what is called real. Depending on the context, however, these terms are defined in different ways, which leads to a multiple assignment of meaning, making an exact and above all unambiguous definition difficult. While virtualization, according to Stefan Münker, deals with the implications and consequences of digitalization on the most diverse forms of individual and collective modes of perception, the discussion of the so-called virtual reality concentrates on the theoretical implications of the technical possibilities for the digital generation of multimedia worlds (ibid., 244). The term virtual reality was introduced in 1989 by the artist Jaron Lanier, who also presented a new system called Reality built for two, in which two participants could interact with each other simultaneously in a computer-generated

226 

R. HAAR

and thus artificial environment (Blanchard et  al. 1990). Such virtual spaces were developed as early as the 1960s by computer artist Myron Krueger, among others, who was the first to design computer environments that allowed users to interact with graphic elements on a screen (Münker 2005, 245). In this context, virtuality is to be regarded as a fundamental signature of an era which, as the consequence of digitization, is marked by the migration of essential elements of the most diverse social activities to digital data spaces (ibid., 247). The consequences of this are in the meantime the focus of many research projects on topics such as virtual work and other things, whereby the term “virtual” is sometimes used extensively to describe things that were originally called differently. This leads to the term itself becoming arbitrary in its interpretation (Haar 2019, 80). After the philosopher Michael Heim postulated in The Design of Virtual Reality (1995) that virtual reality consequently implies a fundamental ontological paradigm shift, other media theorists also tried to describe this ontological state more precisely (see also Münker 2005, 246f). Looking at pictures and images creates an awareness that is mediating between imagination and perception, and the object of the picture stands between the object of perception and the object of imagination. The novelty of the new media consists precisely in the fact that the computer makes it possible to produce images that move out of the described intermediate position in a way never seen before and, in the way they present an image object to the viewer, radically resemble the counterevidence of imaginary objects (Wiesing 2018, 112). The sociologist Elena Esposito, for example, points out that in the common equation of virtuality and simulation, which Baudrillard and others represent, the specificity of virtuality threatens to disappear (see also Esposito 2007, 269–296). Immersion, regardless of its nature, is barely comprehensible without these terms, but now that they have been defined more closely, it is now time to take a closer look at immersion in the context of virtual worlds and digital images themselves. With the development of virtual worlds, the description of immersion has also changed, as it can now be perceived on other levels. This allows an extended theoretical framework, which is also discussed by media scholar Gundolf F. Freyermuth, who introduced the topic of the hyperimmersive turn and describes it as a possible future development of virtual presence. But in order to be able to address this concept, it is important to consider the actual development of virtual worlds and digital images to date, that is linked closely to computer gaming: The early computer games were often digital adaptations of analogue games, and many of their principles could be transferred to the computer. The computer is currently developing more and more into a new type of tool with which mind experiments can be conducted that would literally be unimaginable without this enhancer of the imagination (Wiesing 2018, 123). This leads to the concept of hyperimmersive turn, which Freyermuth locates historically in the context of various immersive forms of perception. This theory is preceded by three turning points. As described by Freyermuth, the first turn, this procedural turn is already evident in the 1950s, among other things, because the new universal machine, the computer, was made playfully

  DIGITAL IMAGES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS 

227

usable, which means creating original forms of games that would not be possible in any of the older analogous media (Freyermuth 2015, 62). Joseph Licklider also introduced the term man-computer symbiosis as early as 1960, which is supposed to describe an interactive use of the computer (Licklider 1960, 4–11). This procedural turning point was followed in the 1970s by the hyperepic turn, which placed its emphasis on text-based computer games, enabling a new literary mode (Freyermuth 2015, 74). In the 1990s, he located the hyperrealistic turn, which broke away from narratological and ludic concepts and focused on technological developments, which in turn had their focus on virtual representations. With the hyperealistic turn, digital worlds expanded their technical and aesthetic potential, graphics became increasingly photorealistic and the visual worlds could already be generated arbitrarily and in real time (ibid., 96). Virtual worlds and thus also games as a genuine audiovisual medium can be increasingly influenced aesthetically by other audiovisual media. Computer-­ generated images become hyper-real, the imagery almost photographic. Their contents no longer refer to reality, but become virtual worlds whose virtuality is more real than reality, and find their media-technical realization in the software on which a game is based (ibid., 88). Hyperrealistic images do not document even where they show real things (ibid., 89). This is followed by the hyperimmersive turn as an outlook for a possible further development which drafts a theoretically structured history of digital games and at the same time a historically oriented theory that seeks to determine their relationship to analogue games on the one hand and to the linear audio vision of film and television on the other hand (ibid., 96). Most interesting for pictorial appearance are the hyperrealistic and the hyperimmersive turn. On the basis of these turning points, Freyermuth develops his own understanding of immersion, which explicitly contains also augmented and mixed reality as gradations of the perception of reality and which he differentiates more precisely on the basis of the four medialities, the different forms of immersion. He attempts to differentiate this on the system level ontologically and media-specifically by dissecting the various medialities of audiovisual media more precisely and linking this to the mentioned turning points. Freyermuth does not assign passivity to immersion, presupposing that the term is known. In his view, the main distinguishing feature is mediality, which he divides in four different degrees. Primary audio-visuality enables an immersion in reality, where the recipient can get lost in real time in current events that are simply seen or staged (ibid., 112). Secondary audio-visuality leads to immersion in the realistic, where the recipient loses himself in his own time in artifacts such as dramas or paintings (ibid.). Tertiary audio-visuality finally expands this concept of immersion into the photorealistic. With the quarternary  audio-visual, Freyermuth no longer speaks of the viewer, but of the user. It allows him to immerse himself in the hyperrealistic (ibid.). Oliver Grau provides in Virtual Art a similar description: “The media strategy aims at producing a high-grade feeling of immersion, of presence (an impression suggestive of ‘being there’),

228 

R. HAAR

which can be enhanced further through interaction with apparently ‘living’ environments in ‘real time’” (Grau 2003, 7). An immersive image is exactly the category of images that makes the recipient believe that the thing shown in the image is really present: Accordingly, the work on virtual reality pursues the goal, and here philosopher Lambert Wiesing refers also to Oliver Grau, of creating a profound feeling of presence, which in extreme cases is so strong that the recipient of the picture considers the artificially present thing visible there to be a real thing and even to confuse it with it (Wiesing 2018, 107). The observer is, so to speak, immersed in the world of the picture being depicted and believes himself to be at the place of the depiction (ibid.). It hardly seems to make sense anymore, remarks Wiesing, to address the idea of the immersive image with the concept or virtual reality. With this it is necessary to distinguish between two different types, where he differentiates between immersive virtual reality and non-immersive virtual reality. The former he counts as cyberspace, the latter is known from computer games. So immersive virtual reality is indeed created by an alignment of perception of the image object with the perception of a real thing. A non-immersive reality is created by the alignment of the image object with the imagination and this alignment with the imagination is also what is new about the images created with new media (ibid., 109). In art, it has existed for a long time. Immersion is a feature that also can occur in all types of pictorial visibility. The trompe l’œil painting and the panorama painting would be examples of immersive panel paintings or at least of the attempt to create such. Also 3D film represents an example for the effort to combine immersion and film, while cyberspace provides immersive variants of animation and simulation (ibid., 122). After all, the idea of immersion is an old concept that not only has made its appearance through new media but is at most better realized through them. In the virtual reality of a digital simulation, the recipient is not able to dispose the image objects at will, but he can interact with them. Virtual reality is able to combine the concepts of panoramas and trompe l’œil and creates a new kind of experience. Virtual worlds are also a multisensory space that is interactive experience on a limited scale, because in the beginning, these technologies were not mobile and could only be used in demarcated areas or by looking at it from certain perspectives or by viewing it from certain perspectives, which allow a certain three-dimensionality and thus also immersion. No theorist foresaw the mobilization of the Internet. However, it is precisely this mobilization that now allows for media-aesthetic models that now extend reality through virtual reality, mixed realities, and augmented realities and also holograms, which is why pictorial immersion in this context can no longer be viewed in detachment from media theories, but can be considered in an interdisciplinary manner, taking into account the perspectives from the field of game studies. Especially the mobilization of the Internet and the associated technical developments in the design of portable multimedia devices have changed perception. Instead, wireless broadband networking has made them accessible to the public space. As a result, technologies of mixed, augmented and virtual realities

  DIGITAL IMAGES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS 

229

are also finding their way into everyday life. Although this is taking place after the medial turn in the 1990s, its impact should not be underestimated: This conversion is compared with the change from silent film to sound film (Freyermuth 2015, 102f). In 1965, Ivan Sutherland, who is one of the pioneers of computer graphics and with Sketchpad, developed one of the first interactive graphic application, and Raymond Goertz experimented with a prototype of head-mounted displays and a data glove (Gutiérrez et  al. 2008, 149). With a head-mounted display, “the user is […] immersed but does not benefit from the extent of the peripheral vision” (Raja et al. 2004, 1). So head-mounted displays allow the feeling of immersion, but only with a limited perception due to the helmet that users have to wear during usage, and no movement of the head allows the viewer to take their perspective out of the picture beyond a frame. If someone is dealing with a perfect perceptual simulation, that does not allow to perceive everything else that is outside of this simulation—it is a perfect 360°-simulation. The recipient of a cyberspace can still know, but no longer perceive, that he is in a virtual reality (Wiesing 2018, 108). Immersion becomes perfect with this kind of technology, and so the perception of pictorial representation has indistinguishably adapted to the perception of the real world (ibid.). Wiesing concludes that if virtual reality is compared to the phenomenon of immersive images, this leads to the fact that one is orientated toward an undoubtedly very extreme image type and therefore cannot explain why the common reference to virtual realities also applies to clearly recognizable images. He also states that images are usually referred to as virtual realities, which are not at all in the tradition of the panorama or stereoscope. As an example, Wiesing mentions simulations on a computer screen or even an average computer game: It is natural to speak of a virtual reality here, although these images on screens are not necessarily immersive (ibid.). Not only simulations of this kind but also spatial immersion, which is not based on a head-mounted display but uses other technical means, play a role here. Another concept enabling extended immersion was developed some time afterward: In the late 1980s, a new system with the name CAVE (for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) was developed. CAVE describes a space for projection of an illusionary world in a three-dimensional virtual reality. The system itself has been used since the 1990s mainly in research and industry, and in contrast to head-mounted displays, a CAVE offers multiple users the opportunity to simultaneously experience a virtual world (cf. Pape 2001). This can be realized in different ways: an option is a cube with up to six projection surfaces, which enables a high level of immersion, where “[t]he suggestive impression is one of immersing oneself in the image space, moving and interaction in ‘real time’, and intervening creatively” (Grau 2003, 3). At the moment there is a variety of head-mounted displays which are available for nearly everybody, and they allow highly immersive experiences for the users, which also enables presence as “an impression suggestive of ‘being there’” (ibid., 7). With the spread of these devices, games and virtual reality environments have also gained in

230 

R. HAAR

quality and immersive capabilities like holograms. They are a different kind of virtual image representations that are a kind of modern trompe l’œil, but it is, according to Jean Baudrillard, not as intelligent as a real trompe l’œil, “which is one of seduction, of always proceeding, according to the rules of appearances, through allusion to and ellipsis to presence” (Baudrillard 1994, 106). For him, a hologram is a “perfect image and the end of imaginary” (ibid.). He also compares holograms with hallucinations: They are “total and truly fascinating once the hologram is projected in front of plague, so that nothing separates you from it (or else the effect remains photo- and cinematographic) [… and] instead of a field as a vanishing point for the eye, you are in a reversed depth, which transforms you into a vanishing point” (ibid., 105). All these elements suggest that virtual realities and thus also virtual worlds are a “part of the core of the relationship of humans and images” and that “[y]et the idea goes back at least as fast as the classical world, and it now reappears in the immersion strategies of present-day virtual art” (Grau 2003, 5). Grau also states in this context that “art history and the history of media have always stood in an interdependent relationship and art has commented on, taken up, or even promoted each new media development, the view of art history as media history, as the history of this interdependent relationship that includes the role of artistic visions in the rise of new media of illusion, is still underdeveloped” (ibid., 4). Wiesing extends this with the statement that the invention of new visual media seems like an implicit search for even better realizations of the phenomenological understanding of images (Wiesing 2018, 117). The image object might become an externalized fantasy object and from this moment on, not only does the image reveal what someone has thought and imagined, but the process of imagining itself is transformed into the visible (ibid., 119). In summary, it can be said that digital technologies enable images that allow the viewer to perceive the depicted object immersively while viewing the image, and through the further development of these technologies immersion as a concept allows ever new opportunities to perceive the environment and virtual worlds, which are further supported by hyperrealistic and hyperimmersive representation.

References Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2009. The Transparency of Evil. Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London: Verso. Blanchard, Chuck; Burgess, Scott; Harvill, Young; Lanier, Jaron; Lasko, Ann; Oberman, Mark, and Teitel, Mike. 1990. “Reality Built for Two: A Virtual Reality Tool”. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics,  24: 2 (February) (https://doi. org/10.1145/91394.91409).

  DIGITAL IMAGES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS 

231

Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Esposito, Elena. 2007. Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Fornäs, Johan; Klein, Kasja; Ladendorf, Martina; Sundén, Jenny, and Sveningsson, Malin (eds.). 2002. Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet. Bern: Peter Lang. Freyermuth, Gundolf. 2015. Games. Game Design. Game Studies. Eine Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gutiérrez, Mario A.; Vexo, Frédéric, and Thalmann, Daniel. 2008. Stepping into Virtual Reality. Berlin: Springer. Haar, Rebecca. 2019. Simulation und virtuelle Welten. Theorie, Technik und mediale Darstellung von Virtualität in der Postmoderne. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Heim, Michael. 1995. “The Design of Virtual Reality”. In Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (eds.), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Embodiment. London: Sage Publications, 65–78. Huber, Hans Dieter. 2008. “Phantasie als Schnittstelle zwischen Bild und Sprache”. In Michael Ganß, Peter Sinapius, and Peer de Smith (eds.), Ich seh dich so gern sprechen. Sprache im Bezugsfeld von Praxis und Dokumentation künstlerischer Therapien. Berlin: Peter Lang, 61–70. Knebel, Sven. 2001. “Virtualität”. In Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Band 11. Basel: Schwabe. Licklider, Joseph. 1960. “Man-Computer Symbiosis”. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. HFE-1, 1: August, 4–11. Moholy-Nagy, László. 1927. Malerei, Fotografie, Film. Antwerp-Munich: Albert Langen. Münker, Stefan. 2005. “Virtualität”. In Alexander Roesler and Bernd Stiegler (eds.), Grundbegriffe der Medientheorie. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 244–250. Pape, Dave. 2001. “The CAVE Virtual Reality System”. Dave’s CAVE Pages. Electric Visualization Laboratory, accessed 28 July 2001, www.evl.uic.edu/pape/CAVE/. Poster, Mark. 1998. “Virtual Ethnicity: Tribal Identity in an Age of Global Communications”. In Steven G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-­ Mediated Communication and Community. London: Sage Publications, 184–211. Purgar, Krešimir. 2019. Pictorial Appearing. Image Theory after Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Raja, Dheva; Bowman, Doug; Lucas, John and North, Chris. 2004. Exploring the Benefits of Immersion in Abstract Information Visualization. 8th Int’l Immersive Projection Technology Workshop (IPT ‘04). Rheingold, Howard. 1991. Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-­ Generated Artificial Worlds—and How It Promises to Transform Society. New York: Simon and Schuster. Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. New York and London: Routledge. Stiegler, Bernd. 2005. “Simulakrum”. In Alexander Roesler and Bernd Stiegler (eds.), Grundbegriffe der Medientheorie. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 222–228. Stiegler, Bernd. 2001. Philologie des Auges. Die photographische Entdeckung der Welt im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Wiesing, Lambert. 2018. Artifizielle Präsenz. Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

The Martian Image (On Earth) Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie

1   Introduction: From the Kino-Eye to the Electric Man “Machine vision” is not an invention of the digital age, it dates back to the invention of the photographic and filmic machine of vision where images are recorded automatically, and it is logical to think that, at some point, these machines will no longer need us to function or to look at their images or data. Already in the 1920s, experimental filmmaker Dziga Vertov imagined mechanical kino-eyes not only replacing human eyes but becoming autonomous. In this well-known passage from his “Kino-eye” (Kinok) manifestos Vertov lends his voice to such a camera-robot: I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto

Note: An earlier version of this text, entitled “The Future Evolution of the Image” was published in The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, edited by Marco Bohr and Basia Sliwinska (London: Routledge (March 2018), 131–143. The notion of the image as a sensus communis and the final passage on the Martian image on Earth is a glimpse on the authors’ upcoming book, COMMON IMAGE. Towards a Larger Than Human Communism (forthcoming November 2021). I. Hoelzl (*) Hamburg, Germany R. Marie Digne-les-Bains, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_14

233

234 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations. Freed from the rule of sixteen seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of space and time, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you. (Vertov 1984 [1923], 17f, emphasis ours)

Vertov’s manifesto—in line with other manifestos of the historical avant-garde, from Futurism to Bauhaus—implies not only the idea of machinic vision as autonomous, but also as fundamentally superior to human vision: “We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera” (1984 [1923], 15). At what point will these “new instruments of vision”, as Bauhaus experimental photographer László Moholy-Nagy called them (2002 [1932]), no longer be “enhancements” of human vision (from optical glasses to the google glass) but replacements (robotic eyes)? But before examining the latest developments of machine vision, its consequences and the decisive choices we are facing, we want to show that the very principle of the machine of vision dates back to the beginning of Modernity, the fifteenth century.

2  Machine of Vision and the Program of the Image In our book Softimage (Hoelzl and Marie 2017), the word “programme” appears within a family of terms: algorithm, software, computation, processing, and programming. If these terms, all gravitating around digitalization, seem almost interchangeable, we are in fact using the term “programme” in a larger yet very specific sense, that of the program of the image, or the image as a program, which is not a condition that emerged with digitalization, but one that dates back to the Renaissance. (In Chap. 5 of Softimage we show that if the digital image is a programmable database view, the image as the program is not something new in the sense that the photographic paradigm of the image is the very program of aligning perception and representation.) This first part will explore the way the program of the image develops in the fifteenth century in an intricate relation with the political program of the time and the birth of the humanist episteme. The original Greek meaning of programma is “public proclamation or notice” and “injunction” (Liddell and Scott 1940), stemming from prographein or “setting forth as a public notice”. The current meanings of “plan or scheme”, “set of measures or activities” appear much later; program in the sense of “software instructions” appeared in the 1940s. Program thus comes to mean both the announcement itself and its content: a political program, for instance, means both the series of actions that a given party proposes if elected

  THE MARTIAN IMAGE (ON EARTH) 

235

and the very announcement of this series of actions. Pro-gram (“to set forth”) is closely linked to pro-ject (“to throw forth”), whose meaning evolved from the Latin projectum, “something prominent” to the modern “plan”, “preliminary drawing”, and “tabulated statement” (ibid.). Likewise, program (in its original sense of pro-gramma) can designate written or drawn inscriptions/ injunctions—no distinction here between the literal and the visual. Projection in the sense of “estimate, forecast” has a similar significance of futurity as program and project. But it also has a more technical meaning of both the method to represent a 3D space on a plane surface and its result (a perspectival drawing or painting; a map). When we are speaking of the program of the image, we are speaking about an epistemic revolution of which the perspectival image, in the fifteenth century, was one of the principal instruments, the geometric and mathematical representability of the world allowing its objectivation, its possession, and mastery (Hoelzl and Marie 2017, 132). In the Renaissance, the imaging of the world coincides with the project of modernity, or, as Martin Heidegger put it in 1938 at the eve of World War II, “the fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture” (1977 [1938], 132–134). As a striking synthesis of the etymology of program and project as “setting” or “throwing forth”, Heidegger defines “picture” not in mimetic terms, but in the sense of “to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself”, the event of the world becoming picture coinciding with the event of “man’s becoming subjectum in the midst of what is” (emphasis in text). As a result, world picture and world view—“the position of man in the midst of all that is”—are closely linked. Human action conquers the world as picture, and this “world picture” in turn acts upon man. The image, then, is both representation and action; it is both set out before oneself, appearing at a distance, and set forth in relation to oneself: image and man relate to each other as part of “what is”—image praxis and praxis (enactment and embodiment) are intertwined. But there is another dimension of the program of the image in the humanist era that we want to explore before extrapolating the results of this analysis to the current posthumanist era. It is the dimension of the program that is implicit in the image (apparent but nevertheless unseen) which we have earlier referred to as the photographic paradigm of the image (Hoelzl and Marie 2017, 94–95). Based on the tacit assumption of the commensurability of vision and representation, the perspective protocol not only governs how we image the world but also how we see it.

3   From Geometry to Algorithm The modern program of the image, the principle of geometric projection, of the world scaled to human dimensions, has been running for about five centuries. It sustained the program of modernity that consisted in the “calculation, planning, and moulding of all things” (Heidegger 1977, 135). During this time, the convergence of vision and representation has been continuously

236 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

perfected, so that at the end of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we make no difference between the way we see the world and the photographic image (Berger 1972, Mirzoeff 2016)—Augmented Reality works precisely because of this common reference system of vision and representation. The modern machine of vision and the modern machine of power have been functioning (and reinforcing each other) at full speed. But the digital revolution brought a new dimension to the program of the image. Digitalization is not merely about the transformation of images into zeros and ones, into bitstreams and pixels, it is about its algorithmization: compression and decompression protocols such as JPEG or MPEG that reduce storage space/bandwidth and Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocols regulating/routing its transfer across digital networks, and so on. With digitalization, the mathematics underlying the image is no longer merely geometric but increasingly algorithmic: protocols that regulate when/ how an image (or image element) is displayed on screen, when/where/how it is being sent to/how it changes if a user clicks on it (an ad for instance) or what is considered a suspicious visual pattern and how it is detected, and so on. With navigable image databases, or rather databases that are navigable as images, such as Google Street View, what the on-screen image actually displays is subject to database updates, connection speed, screen resolution, and navigational options provided by the software and the real-time correlation with a given user query or user location. This dynamic relation between data and data is the foundation of the algorithmic paradigm of the image. No longer only a means or a medium of human communication, the image today is a tool for human-­ machine and machine-machine communication, and its new syntax is that of algorithms or finite sets of instructions in which fixed values are replaced by variables (Manovich 2001, 234). Algorithms are encoded into programs, using computer languages, and are executed when running the program. An algorithmic image, then, is de facto a (computer) program. But as we argued above, this paradigm shift (from geometry to algorithm) is actually a paradigm superimposition, with the old paradigm (projection) being embedded into the new paradigm (processing). This superimposition is made possible by the fact that geometric perspective itself is a kind of algorithm: a finite series of instructions for the construction (creating) and deconstruction (viewing) of images, an algorithm that is based on, and generates, the (visual) commensurability of image and world. The real revolution is then cybernetic: if the old algorithm of projection has fixed values the new, computational algorithms run in a real-time feedback loop with each action of the viewer functioning as a new input. If the progressive convergence of vision and representation has made possible the instrumentalization of the gaze since the fifteenth century, its algorithmization has made of the image the center of multiple operations: an “operative image” (see Hoelzl 2014).

  THE MARTIAN IMAGE (ON EARTH) 

237

4   From Hardimage-to Softimage Are the two notions consecutive elements in a temporal/technological/ideological series? The old hardimage, the solid image of a solid world, and the new softimage, the flexible image of a flexible world? Let us examine this idea by going back to Renaissance painting, where “hard” (and we particularly think of mural painting and painting on wood here) was the general mode of appearance of the image. Is The Ideal City (Veduta di città idéale, 1480–1484), the veduta (or view) of an ideal city commonly attributed to Fra Carnevale (Fig. 1), for instance, a hardimage? The painting was most likely executed for the palace built by the Duke of Urbino between 1470 and 1475. It is unclear whether the painting seeks to expose architectural, urbanistic and humanist principles or rather the principles of perspectival representation. But most probably these principles are intertwined … The Ideal City is first of all an ideal image, constructed following a strict protocol—that of central (one-point) perspective. The power of this image that still captures us after five centuries resides in its performativity where the accuracy of its protocol of representation and the accuracy of what it represents mutually legitimate each other: the image is the geometric projection of an ideal city constructed following an architectural program of good governance and in its ideal (geometric) construction mirrors that very political program. Art historians Hansen and Spicer argue that architecture stands as a metaphor for good government (2005, 62–67). In fact, it is the representation of the Duke of Urbino’s political program where architecture is the arkhé, the beginning and foundation of social order: there is a clear repartition of space in this painting: political power in the foreground (the palaces of the dominant families), religion, and entertainment in the middle ground (the Baptistery and the amphitheater), and labor in the background (a warehouse and possibly houses for the popular classes). The ideal city (then and now) is one where the place of work and rest of the popular classes are in the background (periphery)

Fig. 1  Fra Carnevale (attributed), Veduta di città ideale, ca. 1480–1484, oil and tempera on panel, 77.4 cm × 220 cm; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (in public domain)

238 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

while the center is reserved for housing the leading families, religious ceremonies, amusement, and theater. Is The Ideal City a hardimage? It is as hard as a painted panel can be, and its perfect geometry displays solidity, even if it does not show an existing city, but an ideal city; even if it is not an image of the world, but an idea of the world, not a view of a city, but a political project. But a hardimage does not need to be a perfect copy of world, in fact it does not need to be a copy at all… Brunelleschi’s experiment carried out in 1420 is usually interpreted as the proof of central perspective in the sense that it allows us to perfectly align a 2D projection of reality with 3D reality. But the perspective protocol operates in fact in reverse: it is not so much a projection of reality on a plane, but the projection of our will on the world. The reason why The Ideal City is indeed a hardimage is that its projection is a strong and sustainable one, a solid foundation for the humanist project of the construction of a new subject, well located, well temporalized (and tempered), and, most importantly, in view (in plain sight). What we have called a hardimage is precisely the place for the construction of this subjectivity (through painting, and later, photography), and it is the solidity of the subject that determines the solidity of its representation, not the contrary. But the perfect visibility of the modern subject allows her in turn to see, and to face (as a solid group) her opponent: the enemy army, the state, the industry, and so on. It allows for the dynamics of war or revolution taking place in the line of (human) sight, in what Lev Manovich has called the “geometry of the visible” (Manovich 2001, 223), a dynamics that the control society tries hard to undermine taking over from their enemies the strategies of guerrilla and asymmetric warfare: invisibility and latent threat of web and GPS tracking, RFID, drones, and so on. The visible measures of surveillance (airport scans, CCTV cameras) are but a camouflage of a system of total control, whose imperfection (invoked after each terrorist attack) is only apparent because what the control society relies on is in fact permanent insecurity (at work, in the streets, and at home). In today’s Empire or global system of power, to speak with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, where the multitude “both sustains the Empire and calls for its destruction” (2000, 61), the hardimage (discipline) is replaced by a softimage (control), whose multiple and invisible “mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic’, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens” (23).

5  Dystopic Image In short, if the project of modernity was based on the visible (panopticon) and the politics of representation (The Ideal City), postmodernity is built upon representation as politics and we seem to enter a new epoch where the invisible (an-opticon) partakes in the post-politics (Žižek 2009) of dissimulation. An interesting example of the dialectics of the visible/invisible can be found in the series Limit Telephotography (2006–2010) by the American artist Trevor Paglen

  THE MARTIAN IMAGE (ON EARTH) 

239

Fig. 2  Trevor Paglen, Canyon Hangars and Unidentified Vehicle; Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance approx. 18 miles; 12:45 pm. 2006, C-print, 30 × 36 in. Photo by Trevor Paglen; Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco

(Fig.  2). For this series, Paglen employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret military sites; sites which do not exist on the map and whose existence and cost are not publicly disclosed. This image claims to show the invisible: a military base that exists neither on the map nor in the official military budget of the USA.  Actually, the image doesn’t show much; what it shows—three brown buildings with some unidentifiable white shapes in the background—is the limits of vision, the border of the visible/invisible. Yet its caption—Canyon Hangars and Unidentified Vehicle; Tonopah Test Range, NV; Distance approx. 18 miles; 12:45 pm—tells the invisible: the name and kind of the building, its location, and the distance from which it has been photographed, and, on his website Paglen gives a detailed account of its history as a base for stealth fighter planes (planes designed to be invisible to radar, visible light, radio frequency, and audio), but cannot reveal any details about current activities there, which seem to be both military and scientific. Compared to The Ideal City, this image exemplifies the new mechanics of the image and of power that we mentioned in the beginning of this text: the former is a perfect image of a perfectly ordered world, where everything is exposed in plain sight (even if the popular buildings in the background are partly occluded). The latter is a blurry image of a secret base where all parts of the image are equally underexposed. Hence, we have moved from a regime of the visible and enlightenment to a regime of the invisible and of obfuscation. Of course the story of the two images is different and Paglen’s photo is not a commissioned work for a prince of our times (nowadays artists rarely work on

240 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

commission anyway). But how tempting is it to imagine a large size print of The Tonopah Test Range photograph hanging on the wall of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s personal office at the Googleplex in Mountain View—as a symbol of both secrecy and transparency: secrecy of its algorithms and of its data centers (heavily guarded like military bases); transparency of user data … or should we better imagine it hanging in Google X, a secret research lab run in an undisclosed Bay Area location?

6  The Postimage Scenario Another scenario is drafted in feminist posthumanism (Braidotti 2013) and ecophenomenlogy, “post” implying a worldview where the human species no longer assumes a superior position which justifies the domination/exploitation of its weaker members, other species and natural resources, but where humans are engaged in a “reworlding” (Haraway 2016) that involves the entire ecosystem; and where they are part of what David Abram calls “animate Earth” (1996). Let us consider the new field of possibilities this line of research opens for the image. It is logical to think that, just as the perspectival image has been a central element in the formation and consolidation of the humanist episteme which elevated “Man” as the center and sovereign operator of the world, the future image will probably play an important role in a posthumanist episteme where humans/technologies/nature are no longer seen as separate (or even antagonistic) but as co-evolving (Stiegler 2014) and co-laborating (Haraway 2008). Leaving behind the dichotomy of objective (machinic) versus subjective (human-bound), we can consider images (or imaging) as a collaborative practice across species, that is, between machines/robots and humans/animals and any intermediary forms (cyborgs, biomachines, etc.). In an earlier text, we have called this future scenario the “postimage”, defined as “the collaboration of visioning humans/animals, data/algorithms and, increasingly, autonomous machines” (Hoelzl and Marie 2017, 73). But given the advances in robotics, this idea of a sensus communis that transcends/envelops the individual sentient being and its actions risks to partake, in practice, to an oppressive system of collective forced labor where exploitation of natural resources will reach a new level (gene engineering; species grafting; etc.) and where robotics, bio-­ engineering, and cybernetics will merge into one. Consider for instance the so-called “mixed swarms” (Fig. 3) constituted of human, animal, and machinic elements each with their “cognitive and motoric capacities” as the SWARMIX project website at IDSIA (Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence) Robotics Lab puts it. These elements certainly “collaborate”, but even if such mixed swarms may run autonomously, there is an instance of control built into them. This control may be human (an emperor; an oligarchy), it may be algorithmic (with singularity being achieved and computers having taken over), or it may be both (with humans still in control). A good deal of funding is poured into this latter option of ensuring that the advent of “superintelligence” (Bostrum 2014) will “benefit humanity” as one

  THE MARTIAN IMAGE (ON EARTH) 

241

Fig. 3  SWARMIX: Drones, dogs, and humans cooperating in a search and rescue operation, http://www.swarmix.ch. Image created by the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL, Lausanne. SWARMIX stands for Synergistic Interactions in Swarms of Heterogeneous Agents. Permission granted by project leader Prof. Bernhard Plattner, ETH Zurich

can read on the home page of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. The problem here is the implicit definition and measurement of human intelligence in computational terms, a fight lost in advance. The problem is also the unquestioned telos of machine vision: the creation of a machine that can do without humans … and images. In short, the postimage will be what we will make of it, for better or worse, or, probably, for better and worse simultaneously; with and without humans. In order to enlarge this debate beyond the confines of human ethics and affect, we propose a radical shift of perspective, not from human to non-human, but from Earth to Mars. We take inspiration from the last chapter of Mike Davis’ text “Beyond Space Runner” in his book Ecology of Fear (1998). The chapter is titled “The Mars Fleet”.

242 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

7  Martian Image (on Earth) Davis starts from the idea that, since the American culture is built on the principle of conquest, the next one can only be the conquest of space, real or fantasized. Davis’ text opposes the Californian dream of the 1960s with the harsh reality of the 2000s with a percentage of imprisonment much higher than that of Martian colonies imagined by science-fiction writers: Once upon a time—in the rocket summers of my childhood—it was widely believed that Los Angeles’s ultimate suburb would be the planet Mars, not a maximum-security prison in the desert. The outer edge of the “commuter belt” in Burgess’s diagram would become extraterrestrial. If this now seems preposterous, it is only because our imagined futures have worn poorly over the ensuing years. The 1990s in particular have been a funeral decade, interring many of the hopes and fantasies of the earlier twentieth century. If today Eisenhower-era images of the suburbanization of the solar system seem more than wacky, it would have seemed equally absurd 40 years ago to have predicted that nearly two million Americans would greet the next century from the insides of jails and prisons. (Davis 1998, 418)

It is unclear whether the idea of the conquest of Mars was already in the air when Ray Bradbury wrote his Martian Chronicles (1950). What is known for sure is that since the 1952 Mars Project by Wernher von Braun, the inventor of the Nazi V2 rocket, a plethora of scientific scenarios such as Mars One and Mars Direct have been devised, complemented year after year by science-fiction scenarios, whose screen adaptations populated the collective imagination with ever new instances of Martian images, mostly dystopian, from Rocketship X-M (1950), Flight to Mars (1951), and The Angry Red Planet (1959) to Escape from Mars (1999), Red Planet (2000), and First Man on Mars (2016). Sixty-five years after the project by von Braun, the conquest of Mars is still on the agenda, this time commercial, with the project Mars One (bis) by the Dutch engineer Bas Landsdorp for instance, who envisages to install a human colony on Mars starting 2024 (issuing one way tickets!), or that by Elon Musk that consist of installing a permanent colony of 80,000 people on the red planet starting 2026. The political and economical implications are enormous, but so are the cultural implications. And it is here that the question of the image intervenes. Just as the humanist revolution transformed the world view of pre-­ modern civilizations, in Europe first, and then across the globe, by means of a powerful machine of vision, central perspective, the success of the Mars colonization will depend on the success, philosophical as well as technological, of a new machine of vision … one that we could call the Martian image. But what Martian image? The photorealistic image which, since the very first projects of von Braun and the illustrations by “space artist” Chesley Bonestell, is at the forefront of the visualization of this conquest? Bonestell’s images of an imaginary Mars conquest have allowed an entire generation to project itself on Mars. “In addition to his famous illustrations for

  THE MARTIAN IMAGE (ON EARTH) 

243

the Collier’s series on space exploration, he worked on the art design for the 1953 film version of War of the Worlds (Mars attacks downtown Los Angeles), and his images help inspire the famous Mission to Mars ride at Disneyland”, writes Davis (1998, 420). But they did not suffice and will not suffice to give the necessary élan for the emergence of a Martian episteme, that is, an ensemble of knowledge (or beliefs) that would constitute the technological, social, and cultural conditions of a migration to Mars. Or maybe we need to think from a Martian perspective and await the first migrations and settlements to allow this new ensemble of knowledge to emerge, in which case posing the question of the Martian image seems premature at this stage. But still… What we have is a convergence of clues that all point toward space, the first of which being the pervasive phenomenon of “offshoring” (Urry 2014) rendered (in)famous by the recent affair of the “Panama Papers” documenting, among other things, illicit capital outflows out of Africa equaling the amount of foreign aid money. (For a detailed account of the scope and implications of the scandal see the website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists). The flight beyond the reach of political control by financial and commercial enterprises (including Google’s recent plans to establish offshore server farms) points toward the most radical offshore in a physical sense: outer space. And the invisibility of these enterprises is another index of the future image and its invisibility in an age of post-politics. The term “Martian image” refers, in a first move, to the images of Mars and of the life on Mars proposed by the different colonization projects as well as the images collected by the spacecrafts and ground robots (Fig.  4). In a second move, it refers to the images that may one day be created on Mars by a human, transhuman, or robotic population. In a third move, and this is the most exciting one, the Martian image refers to the concept of the image viewed from Mars, that is, at a time of our history where the conquest of Mars seems at hand. In other terms, the Martian image is the possibility of reinventing the image in view of a possible (and ideal) settlement on Mars and the development

Fig. 4  Color Variations on Mount Sharp, Mars (White Balanced), 10 November 2016. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21256, accessed 12 February 2017 (in public domain)

244 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

of a Martian episteme. What image for this new episteme? A purely sentient image, that is the combination and synthesis of any kind of recordable data, visualized or not? Or a significant image, capable to carry (or create) sense concerning the life on this planet? Are both forms compatible? Could this compatibility be the key to the future evolution of the image? Or should we think of the Martian image differently altogether, no longer in terms of offshoring or conquest and colonization, which both suppose the existence of an onshore or an earthly base as point of reference, but in terms of a radical change of point of view and reference? If the aerial and satellite perspective still focused on Earth (think of Google Earth), and if the images of Mars gathered by NASA explorations still focus on human spectators (think of the Mars Exploration Image Gallery) we need to accept the hypothesis that the future image may be one that has neither the earth as an object nor the human as a point of reference. The future machine of vision may be a machine of xeno-­ vision, a vision that is not only radically different from human vision, however technologically augmented, but that is also radically indifferent to the earth and earthlings… The text by Mike Davis allows us to catch a glimpse of this xeno-vision, in which human activity is nothing but a geophysical phenomenon: in the same chapter “The Mars Fleet” that we mentioned earlier, Davis shows an infrared satellite image with the caption “The L.A. riot from space”. The image features an untypically hot zone. He writes: The large anomaly, researchers explain, “corresponds to south central Los Angeles, where an average of three new fires were started each minute during the three hours preceding the image”. […] In this fashion, the Rodney King riot, although composed of tens of thousands of individual acts of anger and desperation, was perceived from orbit as a unitary geophysical phenomenon, comparable to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 or the huge fires (also a form of arson) that consumed Indonesian forests in 1997. (Davis 1998, 421, 422)

There exist numerous scenarios for the future image, dystopian and utopian, but what unites them is that they are all tied to the future of humankind, which again is tied to the future of the human-habitable world, be it ecosystem Earth or Mars or exoplanets within what is called the “habitable zone” of another star system. With the term “Martian image” we want to evoke yet another possibility, the possibility of an image that is—contrary to the robotic eye—indifferent to the human: an alien image. How could we think of such an image? Can the image exist beyond (human) thought? Trying to answer this question we are trapped in a similar feedback loop as is the astrobiological research on extraterrestrial life (a term created by the NASA in 1996). According to environmental philosopher Sebastien Dutreuil, astrobiology’s lack of conceptual unity (despite its umbrella definition of studying the living universe) is due to the ambivalence that the discipline (and its predecessor, exobiology) entertains with the definition of life. Some consider

  THE MARTIAN IMAGE (ON EARTH) 

245

the “abstract” or “universal” definition of life as the ultimate aim of astrobiology, which englobes research of extraterrestrial life, the origins of life, extreme life, and the environmental conditions of life. Others consider the response to the question “what is life” not an end but a means, a necessary prerequisite for doing astrobiology. The question “is there life on Mars” would then require a reevaluation of the meaning that we give to “life”, as geneticist Joshua Lederberg put it (Dutreuil 2008, 7 quoting Lederberg and Carl 1970, 394). Such a philosophical reevaluation is mostly replaced by a purely operational definition of life. But despite the claims of molecular biology arguing that with the discovery of the double helix we know what life is, a number of limit cases (viruses, ecosystems, etc.) shows that the concept of life is vague. And the common definition of “biosignature” as a phenomenon produced by a biotic system comparable to those that we know on Earth (Dutreuil 2008, 18, quoting Lovelock et al. 1993, 715–721) shows that its conceptual framework remains Earth. We (humans) are thus caught in a conceptual feedback loop: only if we discover life elsewhere or artificially create life can we obtain a truly universal definition of life, but discovering life means having a concept of it already. Put differently: if we stick to our earthly definition of life, we run the risk of finding no (such) life outside Earth. If we don’t, we run the same risk: without a definition of what life is we cannot recognize anything as a kind of life. Except that the radical alien life will be beyond our conceptual capacities. The same holds true for the image: status quo humans, having evolved in ecosystem Earth and with a human-centered neurological structure, no matter how technologically augmented, will only be able to find status quo images … recognizing any alien image would first require becoming an alien. But there is another way to think of the alien image, namely in terms of a Martian image on Earth: an image absolutely foreign to our Cartesian and anthropocentrist thought, to our philosophies, to our humanist beliefs, and to the previous human-centered paradigms of the image (be it soft or hard) an image which can gather, contain, and expose the whole of the relations between organic and anorganic bodies that constitute ecosystem Earth.

References Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-­ Human World. New York: Vintage. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin Books. Bostrum, Nick. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: University of Oxford Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Mike. 1998. “Beyond Space Runner”, in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, pp. 418–422. Dutreuil, Sébastien. 2008. “La vie en biologie: enjeux et problèmes d’une définition; usages du terme”.  Philosophie 1: 67, https://www.cairn.info/revue-­philosophie­2018-­1-­p-­67.htm.

246 

I. HOELZL AND R. MARIE

Hansen, Moren Steen and Spicer, Joaneath Ann. 2005. Masterpieces of Italian Painting. Baltimore/London: The Trustees of the Walters Art Gallery/D. Giles Ltd. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977 [1938]. “The Age of the World Picture”, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row. Hoelzl, Ingrid. 2014. “The Operative Image—An Approximation”, in THE OPERATIVE IMAGE, Online Cluster Curated by Ingrid Hoelzl, The New Everyday, 3 February 2014, mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/operative­image-­approximation. Hoelzl, Ingrid and Marie, Rémi. 2017. Softimage: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image. London and Chicago: Intellect and The University Press of Chicago. Hoelzl, Ingrid and Marie, Rémi. 2017. “From Softimage to Postimage”. Leonardo/ Statements 51 (1): 72–73, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ LEON_a_01349#.WKWl9WURqHo. Lederberg, Joshua and Carl, Sagan. 1970. “Definitions of Life”, Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th Edition. Liddell, Henry George and Scott, Robert. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Trustees of Tufts University, http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-­bin/philologic/ getobject.pl?c.60:5:78.LSJ. Lovelock, James; Sagan, Carl; Thompson, W. Reid; Carlson, Robert; Gurnett, Donald, and Hord, Charles. 1993. “A Search for Life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft”. Nature, 365 (6448): 715–721. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2016. How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-­ Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. New York: Basic Books. Moholy-Nagy, László. 2002 [1932]. “A New Instrument of Vision”, in The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells. London: Routledge, pp. 92–96. Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. “The Anthropocene and Neganthropology”, translated by Daniel Ross. Unpublished Draft of a Lecture Held in Canterbury, November 2014, https://yachaytech.academia.edu/DanRoss. Urry, John. 2014. Offshoring. Oxford: Polity Press. Vertov, Dziga. 1922. “WE: Variant of a Manifesto (1922)” and 1984 (1923). “The Council of Three”. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson. Berkeley and London: The University of California Press, pp.  5–9 and 14–21. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso.

PART II

Fundamental Concepts

Intentionality, Phantasy, and Image Consciousness in Edmund Husserl Claudio Rozzoni

1   Introduction Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and is known as the founder of phenomenology. Husserl was famously led into philosophy by Franz Brentano (1838–1917), who reintroduced the medieval notion of “intentionality” into his contemporary philosophical reflections; Husserl later autonomously developed the concept in his Logical Investigations, the work that marks the inception of phenomenology. Intentionality, the essential law of consciousness, represents the core of the phenomenological enterprise (Husserl 1965 [1910], 90–91). Our experience of the world cannot be merely subjective or objective; rather, it essentially involves subjective and objective sides whose intimate relation precedes the abstract consideration of each of them. As Brentano puts it, “in presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on” (Brentano 2009 [1874], 68). Phenomenological description has to be able to offer a satisfactory account of the different modes in which our acts (and, correlatively, their objects) and our objects (and, correlatively, their acts) are given to consciousness. To say that our acts are intentional then means that there is a necessary correlation according to which “consciousness” always implies a “consciousness of”. Consciousness is related to objects in different ways––for example, perception of a tree, phantasy of a tree, and so on––and such relationships are “expressed by the little word ‘of’” (Husserl 1997 [1973], 12; Husserl 1960 [1931], 33).

C. Rozzoni (*) University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_15

249

250 

C. ROZZONI

More generally, as Husserl himself stated, the overarching task of phenomenology is a “critique of reason” (see  Husserl 1956, 297); this requires not only the analysis of superior acts, but also, and above all, analysis of the underlying “problems of a phenomenology of perception, phantasy, time and the thing” (ibid., 298, my transl.). However, whereas Husserl’s phenomenological analyses concerning theory of judgment, logic, perception, and time are well-­ known, his contributions to a phenomenology of phantasy and image might be described as relatively unknown, or at least less known until recently. One reason for this is that, despite the fact that Husserl famously declared that “feigning [Fiktion]”, exercised by our free phantasy, “makes up the vital element of phenomenology as of every other eidetic science” (Husserl 1983 [1913], 160), his published works only devoted cursory analysis to the topic (see for instance Husserl 1960 [1931]; Husserl 1973 [1939], especially §§ 39–42). Another significant reason is that Volume XXIII of Husserliana, collecting the bulk of Husserl’s unpublished work on Phantasy and Image Consciousness (Husserl 2005 [1980]), was published only in 1980 (edited by Eduard Marbach), and the English translation was not released until 2005 (translation by John B. Brough). Although Husserl never published these manuscripts, that does not mean that they are not of great significance. On the contrary, they not only offer precious testimony regarding the extent and manner of Husserl’s elaboration of themes he considered crucial to the destiny of the entire phenomenological project, but can also serve to shed light on the passages of the published texts devoted to phantasy and image consciousness, revealing their concrete and laborious genesis and offering beneficial context for better grasping their meaning and their significance (despite having been afforded less space than other subjects). Moreover, the fact that these manuscripts were published only in 1980 clearly means they remained equally unknown to great thinkers of the twentieth century who drew heavily upon Husserl’s published works, and on those manuscripts accessible to them at the time, when developing their own concepts of images (phenomenologists and non-phenomenologists alike: in France, for example, we might point out Merleau-Ponty as well as—in a contrast that may offer fruitful angles for further analysis—Deleuze). As such, an original revival of these texts and a resurgence of the Husserlian voice in this regard could prompt retrospective reaction to the relationship between Husserl and these philosophers, thereby opening up new  possibilities for interpretations, developments, and critiques that can and must serve as a chance for productive insights on our contemporary understanding of images. The first of the texts collected in Husserliana XXIII—a lecture manuscript of the third part of a course Husserl taught in the winter semester 1904/1905 in Göttingen, entitled Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge—is probably the best known as well as the most systematic of the lot. The title of the course follows the one of the second part of the 1900/1901 Logical Investigations. Indeed, as Husserl explains at the beginning of this

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

251

seminal course, these lectures were supposed to be devoted exclusively to “the superior intellectual acts, […] the sphere of the so-called ‘theory of judgement’” (Husserl 2004, 3, my transl.); then, however, he felt the need to opt instead to conduct an analysis at a “lower level”, that is, of “those phenomena that, under the somewhat vague titles of perception, sensation, phantasy representation, representational image, memory, are well known to everyone, yet have still undergone far too little scientific investigation” (ibid., my transl.). The first two parts of the course were devoted to the phenomenology of perception and attention (see ibid.). In the third part, Husserl sets up the development of a phenomenological description of phantasy; he considered this step the necessary complement to its account of perception (see Husserl 2005 [1980], 1), and it would ultimately reveal itself as crucial to defining the peculiar kind of intentionality pertaining to phantasy and image consciousness under scrutiny here. The fourth part of the course was the one that famously introduced Husserl’s phenomenology of time; it was later elaborated and published as the well-known “lectures on time consciousness” in 1928, in Volume IX of the “Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung” (edited by Martin Heidegger). When, in the third section of the 1904/1905 course, Husserl finally starts coming to terms with the specific kind of intentionality involved in our phantasy experiences, he explicitly indicates that the work of Franz Brentano serves as the general background to his analysis. Specifically, Husserl draws upon Brentano’s lectures on “selected questions from psychology and aesthetics” (see Husserl 2004, 4), which the latter held in Vienna in the mid-1880s (see Brentano 1959, 3–87). Phenomenology’s father-to-be numbered among the course’s auditors, and Husserl refers to Brentano as his “brilliant teacher” (see Husserl 2004, 4; see also Husserl 1987 [1919], 304 ff.); at the same time, however, revisiting these topics also provides Husserl with an opportunity to distance himself from Brentanian views (see for instance Husserl 2005 [1980], §§ 4, 45).

2   Husserl’s Early Approach: The Point of View of Imaginatio Objects are given to us not only in the mode of perception, but in several other modes as well—for example when we see objects through images or, as they say, “in our mind”. As indicated, phenomenology must be able to provide an account of the essential differences between these modes of consciousness and of the peculiar nature of intentionality––the essential correlation between subjective and objective pole––inherent in each mode. In perception, objects are given to us in a dimension of presence [Gegenwärtigung passim]. The intentional act pertaining to perception gives the object not only as “there in the flesh”, but, more accurately, “as actually present, as self-given there in the current now” (Husserl 1997 [1973], 12).

252 

C. ROZZONI

Husserl explicitly construes the dimension of perception as implying a “character of belief” (ibid., 13): perception [Wahr-nehmung] as “taking-for-true [Für-­ wahr-­Nehmen]” (ibid.). In this regard, he distinguishes perception from perceptio [Perzeption]. Roughly put, perceptio can be thought of as a perception not implying the moment of belief. Therefore, it must be emphasized that the expression “in person [leibhaft]” does not eo ipso mean “perceptual” (in the sense of Wahrnehmung), and accordingly, as we shall see, it is possible to talk about something that is given in person without being believed existent. As for the objects given in phantasy, they are not certainly given as actually standing before us. Rather, Husserl writes that they “hover before [vorschweben]” us (see Husserl 2005 [1980], passim). They are given to us visually, intuitively, and yet we are not able to touch them. They are given through a peculiar form of intentionality in which an object “appears [erscheint]” to us, yet not as “present [gegenwärtig]” but rather as merely “presentified [vergegenwärtigt]” (ibid., 16, transl. modified). He defines these acts offering us these objects as “intuitive presentifications” [anschauliche Vergegenwärtigungen] (ibid., 6, transl. modified). It is exactly in this context that Husserl comes to a decisive confrontation with the issue concerning the peculiar kind of intentionality called “image consciousness”. In 1905, in fact, when seeking to define the nature of intentionality pertaining to phantasy acts, he begins by defining this intentionality in terms of “pictorialization [Verbildlichung]” (see for example ibid., §8). Husserl had already adopted this approach in an 1898 text devoted to “phantasy and representation in image” (see the appendix 1 to Husserliana XXIII, ibid., 108–137)—a text that did, indeed, serve as a starting point for his later Göttingen analysis. To understand phantasy consciousness as a pictoralizing consciousness means that the form of intentionality pertaining to it is construed as essentially analogous to the form of intentionality pertaining to the experience of what Husserl calls “physical images” (ibid., passim), for example the ones we commonly experience when viewing a painting, a photograph, a cinematographic image, a sculpture (these examples are all Husserl’s), and so on. According to this perspective, the phantasy object––which, as we have seen, does not actually manifest itself “in the flesh” but is merely presentified––“appears to us in image. The Latins say imaginatio” (ibid., 18). However, it is crucial to note that, although Husserl picks up his ensuing analyses from this point, it is not as a continuous line of philosophical thought but more as a way of reckoning with his early approach. In fact, his aim is “to try to pursue as far as possible the point of view of imaginatio [Imagination]”; by clarifying its essence, Husserl hopes to determine whether the concept holds up in the face of several “objections” of which he is already aware (ibid., note 2, transl. modified). As Husserl eventually confirms, these worries “subsequently turn out to be justified” (ibid., additional remark probably from 1917). According to “the point of view of imaginatio”, our experiences of objects given both in phantasy and in physical images are grounded upon the

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

253

intentional structure of image consciousness, construed as pictorialization [Verbildlichung], as “conversion into image”. Neither phantasy nor physical images offer us the actual thing in the flesh, the real object: they are intuitive presentifications in image of the thing. Thus, unlike what happens in perception––where objects and events perceived are given directly, without any iconic mediation––objects and events are not given directly in image consciousness. In this kind of intentionality, we can distinguish between the “thing” and the “image”. This intentionality involves a mediating iconic moment: what is intended is not the image itself manifesting before a subject’s eyes, but rather the absent thing for which the image functions as a “representant [Repräsentant]” (ibid., 19). This would also hold true for phantasy acts: “if the palace in Berlin hovers before us in the phantasy image, then the palace in Berlin is precisely the thing meant, the thing presented. From the palace in Berlin, however, we distinguish the image hovering before us, which naturally is not a real thing and is not in Berlin” (ibid., 20). From this viewpoint, phantasy representation implies “a certain mediacy” (ibid., 25). If image consciousness intentionality involves two objectivities, then, phenomenological description must account for two different objectifying “apprehensions, one built on the other”. Husserl specifies that, in order for an image consciousness to arise, the apprehension constituting the image as such is not sufficient. Image consciousness requires a second apprehension through which alone the relationship to the pictorially presentified image subject [Sujet] can be established. Our act is directed not at “the image hover[ing] before [us]”, but rather at the represented subject, thanks to a “second apprehension […] founded in the image apprehension” (see ibid.). Even so, phenomenological description of image consciousness seems to become “more complicated” when considering the “parallel case of the physical image” (ibid., 20). For one, the “concept” image is revealed to be “ancipital” in the case of physical images. Indeed, it can refer to both (i) “the image as physical thing, as this painted and framed canvas, as this imprinted paper, and so on” and (ii) “the image as the image object [Bildobjekt] appearing in such and such a way through its determinate coloration and form”, which Husserl, within the point of view of imaginatio, construes as the “precise analogue of the phantasy image” (ibid.). Accordingly, describing the intentionality involved in physical image consciousness leads us to consider “three objects” (ibid., 21) that are “distinct, yet inseparable” (de Warren 2010, 315): (a) The “physical image thing [das physische Bildding]”, that is, a “real object” that “is taken as such in perception”; (b) The “image object [Bildobjekt]”, or “representing image”, that is, “something appearing that has never existed and never will exist and, of course, is not taken by us for even a moment as something real”, which holds a “depictive function”; and

254 

C. ROZZONI

(c) The “image subject  [Bildsujet]”, that is, the “represented or depicted object”. (Husserl 2005 [1980], 21) From this perspective, the image object is revealed to be a veritable “medial-­ threshold”, simultaneously differentiating itself from the other two “objects” on account of what Husserl calls the phenomenon of “conflict [Widerstreit]”. For one, (i) physical image consciousness requires a consciousness of conflict between the image object properly manifesting and the perceived physical material found in the physical image. In the same sense, the image object also conflicts with its surrounding perceptual reality; with a painting, for example, the frame often delimits the boundaries between the two (see ibid., 50). The conflict between apprehension of the image object and the apprehension of the physical colors is a disjunctive conflict. The “spatiality” of the image object and that of the physical image are “incompatible” (see ibid., 153). Indeed, the apprehension of the image object can impose itself only by stealing, by “us[ing] up” (ibid., 28, note 4) all the sensuous content, leaving none available for the apprehension of the image thing––these two apprehensions cannot be simultaneous. For another, (ii) physical image consciousness requires a consciousness of conflict between image object properly manifesting and the represented image subject. Indeed, the former must present not only “moments of resemblance” (ibid., 33) to the latter, thereby allowing its relationship to the latter to arise, but also “moments of difference” (ibid., 44). These divergent moments must allow the image object manifesting as such and prevent us from illusionary perceiving it as the thing itself (see ibid., 22). Accordingly, the difference between image object and image subject should not be understood as a lack, a lacuna that a perfect image should be able to compensate. Rather, this type of conflict is a necessary condition for the two apprehensions, image object and image subject, to be built one on another. In this case the conflict is conjuctive: the two apprehensions are simultaneous––the object meant is the image subject, but only qua presentified by the constituted image object. What appears particularly tricky is to grasp the nature of the image object, the “interceding” element in this kind of intentionality. It is not the image thing, which can be perceived. It is not the image subject, which, despite being the ultimate object of my intentional act, is absent. Husserl qualifies the image object as “a nothing [ein Nichts]” (ibid., 50). And yet, it is an odd “nothing”, insofar as it is a visible one: a “figment [Fiktum]” (ibid., 59), an irreal mediality that functions as a representative for us who, by looking into it, are given to see the presentified subject. In this regard, a possible misunderstanding must be dispelled. It is important to emphasize that, from the outset, Husserl rejects the possibility of construing the image object––in physical as well as in phantasy image consciousness––as a “mental image” hidden in our head. Even hypothesizing, for the sake of argument, that this were the case would not constitute sufficient conditions for an image consciousness to arise, since it would remain to be described how that little image “suspended in our head” can refer to the

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

255

absent object: “If I put a picture in a drawer”—Husserl asks ironically––“does the drawer represent something?” (ibid., 23). This would entail a relapse to the “erroneous image-theory [Bildertheorie]” that Husserl already firmly rejected in the Logical Investigations (see Husserl 2001 [1901], 125; see also Alloa 2011,  179–183). At the time, his critical focus was mostly on ruling out “image-theory” from perceptual process’ account––no comprehensive analysis with regard to phantasy and image consciousness had yet been developed. In this respect, to follow Husserl’s provocation, it should also be noted that it would not suffice to respond by saying that the image in the drawer might refer to the object outside the drawer through resemblance—which, unlike depiction, is a reciprocal relationship (see Sokolowski 1992, 5; Zahavi 2003, 18), as Husserl already pointed out in Logical Investigations. For instance, two trees might closely resemble one another, but this does not eo ipso make one a representation of the other. In the same vein, being identical is not a change ruler either (Husserl 2001 [1901], 125), and identical twins do not represent one another. In other words, the capacity of representing is not merely to be grounded in the object: in order to account for such a possibility, we must turn toward the consciousness, namely, the peculiar act of presentifying an object through another. However, although similarity is not a sufficient condition in itself, it remains a necessary condition under this “delegation model”, as Husserl characterizes image consciousness intentionality as an intuitive form of presentification in which the image object acts visually as a representant of the image subject: “we see the subject in the image itself; we see the former in the latter” (Husserl 2005 [1980], 54). This is why image consciousness intentionality can be characterized as a seeing-in (see ibid., 33, 37, 57). The image subject, the represented object, is to be seen in the image itself. In this regard, it should also be emphasized that this peculiar intentionality is not to be considered a one-way street—it might occur in a double sense, in the sense that the subject we intend when viewing the image may simultaneously “look us” (ibid., 31, transl. modified), as often is the case with portraits. Beside specifying that in image consciousness we see the image subject in the image object, Husserl also differentiates image consciousness from symbolic or signitive consciousness (see ibid., 37). The image object does not function as a symbol for, or a signifier of, the image subject. Being a sign does not pertain to image consciousness essence (see ibid., 56–57, 185–186). On this point see also Marbach 2000, 295). Neither image consciousness nor symbolic/signitive consciousness are “simple” (Husserl 2005 [1980], 37) forms of intentionality (as the one involved in perception is), since they “both point beyond themselves”. However, whereas image consciousness does not point to something outside itself (as we have seen, one must see in the image object to see the image subject), “the symbolic apprehension and, in addition, the signitive apprehension point beyond to an object foreign to what appears intrinsically” (ibid., transl. modified).

256 

C. ROZZONI

Of course, an image can function as a sign but need not necessarily do so. Even in this case, before being assigned a signitive function, an image must be constituted as such; in this sense, image consciousness precedes signitive consciousness (ibid., 56). Accordingly, Husserl sharply distinguishes between internal (immanent) imaginatio––that is, the “genuine”––and “external (transeunt)” imaginatio, construed as symbolic/signitive consciousness based on an image consciousness (see ibid., 38). To put it roughly: seeing the palace of Berlin in a photograph of it (genuine) is not the same as seeing a small image of it on a street sign to indicate that the palace is nearby (external).

3  Phantasy as Quasi-experience The parallelism under scrutiny in the Göttingen course enters into crisis when Husserl attempts to apply physical image-focused description to the realm of phantasy. According to this paradigm, as we saw, phantasizing an object would require the constitution of a mediating image object allowing us to see the image subject in it. In physical images, the image object arises on a perceptual ground (although conflicting with it); as such, under the paradigm, a phantasized image object ought to be based on corresponding sensuous content, i.e., on the “phantasms” (ibid., 11). Under the specific variant of the “content-­ apprehension schema” informing Husserl’s work at this stage of his phenomenological journey (see Jansen 2005, which also points out the “empiricist vestiges” of this “early” account of phantasy), these phantasms would serve as the basis for the constitution of image objects in an analogous manner to their perceptual equivalents; correspondingly, they should somehow be “present” in the first place. In fact, when it comes to phenomenologically describing the double objectivity prerequisite (which supposedly also applies to phantasy) for seeing the image subject in the image object, the parallelism under examination (“point of view of imaginatio”) is severely challenged and ultimately abandoned. Indeed, Husserl comes to realize that construing a phantasm as a present, sensuous content underlying image object appearance in phantasy is a highly problematic step doomed to give rise to unsolvable problems (see Husserl 2005 [1980], § 37; see also Richir 2000, 80–84). In this regard, it is the very necessity of the constitution of an image object that is put into question. In fact, Husserl eventually comes to doubt this premise, and denies that phantasy consciousness intentionality implies the manifestation of an image object, that is, a depictive “figment” (constituting itself on “phantasms”) appointed to be the subject’s representative (see Husserl 2005 [1980], 59–60). This way, the parallelism between phantasy and physical images must be abandoned. If an objectifying apprehension constituting the image object is no longer a necessity in phantasy consciousness, then phantasy intentionality is no longer to be understood as involving a double objectivity: in phantasy acts––just as in perception––we have a direct form of intentionality that does not entail a mediation of an image object serving as a basis for a second objectivation, namely

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

257

that of the image subject. The intentionality characterizing phantasy experiencing is finally recognized as an immediate, unmediated, consciousness of presentification, “a modified consciousness of seeing what is meant in what is experienced” (ibid., 85). This gives rise to a new form of parallelism: phantasy intentionality is no longer to be construed as the pendant of the image consciousness intentionality, but rather as the veritable counterpoint of the perceptual intentionality, since both “relate” to their object “straightforwardly [einfältig]”, in “one fold” (see ibid., 92). This is a decisive point, and in this third part of the Göttingen lecture course Husserl knows that, if he is to make further progress in this direction, it is urgent that he conduct further investigation into the phenomenology of time, a subject that, as he recalled at the beginning of the first part, he skipped over in the Logical Investigations because he still felt not ready to come to terms with it (see Husserl 2004, 4). By taking time analysis into account, Husserl will be able to shed new light on his previous results and their possible development. Crucially, Husserl comes to recognize that what “hovers” before us in phantasy is “immediately [unmittelbar]” (Husserl 2005 [1980], 85) given as non-present (without requiring a conflict between an allegedly present phantasm and an image object obtained on its basis). The research manuscripts of the following years make clear that the revision of phantasy consciousness will be carried out through the passage from the paradigm of the delegation (Repräsentation) implying a double objectivity to the “immediate” one of reproduction (Reproduktion) (see ibid., texts No. 2 (1904–1909), No. 8 (1909) as well as the analyses conducted in the texts No. 15, 16, and 17, all from 1912, i.e., one year before the publication of Ideas I, which would benefit from these efforts). Under these altered terms, perception is a straightforward “impressional (originary) consciousness of the present, consciousness of what is there itself, and the like”, and phantasy is its “reproductively modified” counterpart: namely, a quasi-experience (quasi in the sense of quam si, i.e., “as if”), a straightforward “consciousness of what is there itself as it were, of what is present as it were, of the phantasy present” (ibid., 323). From this point of view, then, it is the presentification itself that is no longer characterized as a representative act, but rather as a reproductive one. What is reproduced in phantasy each time is not the object or the event, but the act of consciousness presentifying the object or event in the mode of “as it were”. Husserl is well aware that the term reproduction might give rise to misunderstandings. Accordingly, he finds the need to remark that “reproduction” is not to be understood as a copy, “an echo, reflection, afterimage” of an “originary experience”, a sheer repetition, but rather as a “new kind of act” with its own structure and its own “as it were” temporality (ibid., 372. On this point see also Bernet 2004, 94; 111–112). And yet, this is not the last word as regards phantasy intentionality. In fact, Husserl comes to discover a further essential element in its structure which is strictly connected to its reproductive nature. As early as 1911/1912 (see Marbach 2006, XXVIII), his phenomenological lens reveals another

258 

C. ROZZONI

mediation, another “fold” concerning phantasy intentionality construed as reproductive presentification. To avoid any misunderstanding: no iconic mediation is reinstated in its essential structure, which is still understood to be the reproductive parallel of the perceptual intentionality. On the noematic (objective) side, both perception and phantasy give their object in unmediated way. Rather, this other aspect can be unearthed when the phenomenological analysis turns to the noetic (egological) side of the act, bringing to light a “peculiar mediacy” (Husserl 2019 [1956–1958], 319) implicitly at work within it. Unlike perception intentionality, in which acts pertain to an unique egological flow, phantasy intentionality essentially entails a veritable subjective divide, a doubling of consciousness between “actual” and “phantasy-I” (see ibid., 320–321; see also Bernet 2004, 6; de Warren 2009, 149). In other words, phantasy acts are carried out by a phantasy-I differentiating itself from the real one (although a consciousness of reality, albeit minimal, always marks these quasi-experiences, thereby distinguishing them from hallucinations): “the actus ‘I phantasize a scene of centaurs’ is only possible in the form that I enact, in the mode of the ‘as if’, the actus ‘I perceive the scene of centaurs’” (Husserl 2019 [1956–1958], 320).

4   Image Consciousness, Once Again In the spirit of phenomenological inquiry––in which every “step forward” offers new perspectives from which what was “originally” construed as “simple and undivided” often proves “complex and full of distinctions” (Husserl 2005 [1980], 19), and also vice versa, as we have seen above––the outcomes obtained on the side of phantasy presentification called for a reconsideration of the phenomenological account of the presentification in physical image which, at least in Göttingen’s lectures, seemed to have found in its three-sided articulation a fairly stable form. Indeed, the research outcomes on phantasy consciousness, which resulted in its characterization as a reproductive presentification (as an “as-if” counterpart of perception, that is, quasi-perception), ultimately bear upon Husserl’s understanding of image consciousness. Significantly, a manuscript from 1912 returns to question image consciousness “once again”, demanding “what that can mean” (ibid., 560). In this respect, in another manuscript from 1912, Husserl comes to “universalize the concept of phantasy” as presentification and to distinguish between “two fundamental forms”: (1) “reproductive” phantasy and (2) phantasy “complying with perceptio [perzeptive], that is, presentification in image, in pictorial exhibiting” (ibid., 565, transl. modified)—the latter then including image consciousness itself (on this point see also ibid., 605).

Thus, Husserl seems to change direction with regard to his earlier approach to the relationship between image and phantasy consciousness. To force the

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

259

terms at play somewhat: under the early account (imaginatio as “conversion into image”), one might have suggested that the genus image consciousness was divided into two species, that is, physical and phantasy image consciousness (understood as picture consciousness); subsequently, with the universalization of the concept of phantasy, one might indicate that it is the notion of phantasy consciousness that can be construed as a genus, subdivided into the species of phantasy with and without the involvement of physical dimensions, that is, reproductive phantasy and phantasy involving perceptio, respectively. It should be emphasized that in order to characterize image consciousness as a case of phantasy consciousness (“presentification in image”), Husserl is led to introduce the notion of perzeptive Phantasie, of “phantasy complying with perceptio”. In keeping with what we noted above, it is not by chance that Husserl does not make reference to “perceptual phantasy”, that is, to wahrnehmungsmäßige Phantasie, an expression that would amount to a veritable oxymoron. In fact, in pictorial exhibiting qua phantasy (consciousness of presentification), the consciousness of irreality is already at work, preventing its object from being taken-for-true (perception as Wahrnehmung), that is, perceived as existent. Hence, Husserl seems to suggest that pictures, like in the case of reproductive phantasy, exhibit their objects as appearance without any consciousness of presence arising, any consciousness of perception proper. Accordingly, such appearances are no “perceptual illusion[s]” (ibid., 563). Husserl is categorical on this point: “the image is not an illusion” (ibid., 581), it is not “a perceptual appearance [Wahrnehmungserscheinung]” (ibid., 584). On the one hand, it is true that the image object can be characterized as a figment, on the other hand, it is not “an illusory figment” (ibid., 585). Indeed, illusions proper take their object as true; they “posit” them as existent. Conversely, an image shows itself as an image (conflicting with perception) and, in principle, does not claim to be actually there, as a deceiving semblance does. As Merleau-Ponty will later remark, “it is of the nature of illusion not to present itself as such” (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945], 344). Let us note that this seems to suggest the possibility of also experiencing image consciousness as a “one-fold” intentionality (on the noematic, objective side), insofar as what is experienced on a physical basis is directly apprehended in the phantasy modification (see for instance Husserl 2005 [1980], 562). In this vein, Husserl ultimately comes to recognize that his early understanding of image consciousness [Bildlichkeitsbewusstsein] was still too involved with the depiction model, and that image consciousness intentionality is a more originary structure than depiction [Abbildung] intentionality strictly conceived, that is, “representation by means of more or less imperfect copies [Abbilder]” (ibid., 183). In this sense, depiction is not the last word about image consciousness, but one possible articulation of it. This aspect strongly emerges in the aesthetic and artistic considerations of images (although Husserl in many instances tends to use the adjectives “aesthetic” and “artistic” interchangeably, artistic and aesthetic consciousness are not one and the same).

260 

C. ROZZONI

Aesthetic consciousness is a form of intentionality that focuses on how an object appears (see ibid., 461). In one sense, it does not seem to be essentially related to image consciousness insofar as (i) an iconic status does not pertain exclusively to it: in principle, we can experience anything aesthetically (not exclusively images), for instance a “landscape” or even an “ashtray […] in the drawing-room” (ibid., 168). In another sense, it seems to imply a relationship with image consciousness insofar as (ii) Husserl suggests that, when aesthetically considered, portions of the actual world, a “landscape”, for instance, can “act as an ‘image’”. In these cases, in fact, we can take them “not as present: but precisely as images” (ibid., 167), operating in a phantasy consciousness that, just as a perzeptive Phantasie (see ibid., 615), does not carry out the “position taking” as regards existence that pertains to perception. As specifically regards images proper, in aesthetic attitude we look into the image without primarily considering it as a proxy for something to be depicted. We are “interested” in its particular way of manifestation without even questioning its relationship to any external subject that the image may be presumed to represent. To put it roughly: the “unusual” skin color of a face in a black and white portrait might be considered a “conflicting” moment (compared to real skin color) under a purely depictive consciousness, whereas an aesthetic attitude can instead experience the black and white nuances as an essential expressive element of that photograph and that face. Analogously, when viewing a close-up of a face in cinema we are not so much experiencing it as conflicting with a real size head but rather the expressive power of that iconic manifestation (on the expressive dimension of aesthetic consciousness, see ibid., 168–169). All these aspects become evident in the noteworthy manuscript, probably dating back to 1918, in which Husserl defines art as “the realm of phantasy that has been given form” and feels the need to significantly elucidate his previous characterization of artistic images, which he recognizes as too reliant on the dimension of depiction. The case of theater proves strategically important in that regard: when we are spectators to a stage performance, Husserl writes, we live in a “world” of perzeptive Phantasie, within which “depictiveness is not the primary concern”. Indeed, the images actors “produce”––for instance the “image of a character in the play”––art not “image of [Bild von]” in the sense of “depiction of [Abbild von]”. Husserl talks in this regard of “immediate imaginatio”, that is, of a “one fold” perzeptive Phantasie whose correlate, in keeping with what developed above, is the phantasy-I living in the “as-if” world (see ibid., 616–617). As spectators experiencing an ego-doubling, we live from the very beginning in a phantasy consciousness, or, as Husserl also puts it, in the world of “play [Spiel]”. It is true that actors are there “in person”. but we do not carry out the perception of them; we do not take them as real. Instead, we experience them as a form of phantasy in the flesh—we see characters directly. Reality “changes into reality as-if” (ibid., 615)––it is not posited, it is quasi-posited.

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

261

Let us remark that, as spectators to a performance, we do not freely produce the phantasies offered by the “play” we are invited to participate in as phantasy egos; rather, they “are […] forced upon us” similarly to what occurs in reality—“only”, here, in the realm of as-if. In this sense, the “image-worlds” shaped by phantasy can obtain “intersubjective ‘existence’”, thereby offering us the possibility of a shared quasi-experience upon which we can utter judgments, make assessments, and so on, which possess a “kind of objective truth” (ibid., 621. On the constitution of “quasi-worlds” see also Husserl 1973 [1939], §§ 39–40). This is an important aspect that can indeed foster theoretical insights—not only, for instance, as regards a phenomenological account of film experiences, but also as regards new types of screens, new image supports crowding our environment, whose analysis might highly profit from the phenomenological tools provided by Husserl’s descriptions. More generally speaking, it is valuable to stress that inherent potential within these manuscripts is hardly confined to specifically phenomenological problems or approaches—they can lend philosophical context to the contemporary discussion of images on an interdisciplinary level. In this regard, the importance has been stressed (see Jansen 2010) of responding to Husserl’s investigation of phantasy using a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach, allowing cross-­ fertilization among fields including analytical philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and psychopathology. In particular, this aim can be pursued in the following directions: • An inquiry concerning the issue whether or not phantasizing relies on the existence of “mental images” (see Jansen 2010, 147–149). • Toward a confrontation with analytic philosophy, including a comparison between Husserl’s characterization of image consciousness as “seeing-in” and Richard Wollheim’s seeing-in theory (see Brough 2012, 550–553), and, in such context, the role played by imagination in depiction. • For a phenomenological account of our contemporary environment, which is increasingly taking on the traits of an iconosphere. Within it, the several senses in which our experiences can be said to be mediated might strongly benefit from Husserl’s insights on the notion of perzeptive Phantasie and quasi-experience, especially as regards description of new iconic milieus such as virtual environment, simulated realities, interactive fictions, virtual realities (see for instance de Warren 2014). • Toward a clarification of the question whether and how phantasy acts might intervene in empathic processes, thereby contributing to the development of a phenomenological proposal (PP) that can offer an alternative and complementary account to those pertaining to Simulation-Theory (ST) and Theory-Theory (TT) (see for example Zahavi 2011; Breyer 2019).

262 

C. ROZZONI

References Alloa, Emmanuel. 2011. Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie. Zurich: Diaphanes. Bernet, Rudolf. 2004. Conscience et existence. Perspectives phénoménologiques. Paris: PUF. Brentano, Franz. 2009 [1874]. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Edited by Oskar Kraus.  Translated by Antos C.  Rancurello, Dailey B.  Terrel and Linda L. MacAlister. London & New York: Routledge. Brentano, Franz. 1959. Grundzüge der Ästhetik. Hrsg. von Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand. Bern: A. Franke; Hamburg: Meiner 1988 (zweite, unveränderte Auflage). Breyer, Thiemo. 2019. “Self-Affection and Perspective-Taking: The Role of Phantasmatic and Imaginatory Consciousness for Empathy”. Topoi. Brough, John B. 2012. “Something That is Nothing but can be Anything: The Image and Our Consciousness of It”. In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi, 545–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Warren, Nicolas. 2009. Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Warren, Nicolas. 2010. “Tamino’s Eyes, Pamina’s Gaze: Husserl’s Phenomenology of Image-Consciousness Refashioned”. In Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences. Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, edited by Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens, 303–332. Dordrecht: Springer. de Warren, Nicolas. 2014. “Towards a Phenomenological Analysis of Virtual Fictions”. Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2(2): 91–112. Husserl, Edmund. 2001 [1901]. Logical Investigations, Vol. 2. Translated by John Niemeyer Findlay. London & New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 1965 [1910]. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”. In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Translated by Quentin Lauer, 71–147. New York: Harper. Husserl, Edmund. 1983 [1913]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translated by Fred Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1987 [1919]. “Erinnerungen an Franz Brentano”. In Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Husserliana, Bd. XXV. Hrsg. von Thomas Nenon und Hans Rainer Sepp. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1960 [1931]. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1973 [1939]. Experience and Judgment. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Revised and edited by Ludwig Landgrebe. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1956. “Persönliche Aufzeichnungen”. Edited by Walter Biemel. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 16(3): 293–302. Husserl, Edmund. 2019 [1956–1958]. First Philosophy. Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920–1925). Translated by Sebastian Luft and Thane M. Naberhaus. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 1997 [1973]. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 2005 [1980]. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Translated by John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer.

  INTENTIONALITY, PHANTASY, AND IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS… 

263

Husserl, Edmund. 2004. Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), Husserliana, Bd. XXXVIII. Hrsg. von Thomas Vongehr und Regula Giuliani. Dordrecht: Springer. Jansen, Julia. 2005. “On the Development of Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology of Imagination and Its Use for Interdisciplinary Research”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4: 121–132. Jansen, Julia. 2010. “Phenomenology, Imagination and Interdisciplinary Research”. In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Edited by Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking, 141–158. Dordrecht: Springer. Marbach, Eduard. 2000. “On Depicting”. Facta Philosophica, 2(2): 291–308. Marbach, Eduard. 2006. “Einleitung [des Herausgebers]”. In E.  Husserl,  Phantasie und Bildbewusstsein, Text nach Husserliana, Band XXIII. Hrsg. von Eduard Marbach, XV–XLVI. Hamburg: Meiner. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Richir, Marc. 2000. Phénoménologie en esquisses. Nouvelles fondations. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Sokolowski, Robert. 1992. Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2011. “Empathy and Direct Social Perception: A Phenomenological Proposal”. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2(3): 541–558.

Aura, Technology, and the Work of Art in Walter Benjamin Žarko Paić

In the famous essay from 1935/1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), Walter Benjamin introduces a highly ambiguous concept of “aura” in the philosophical and historical discourse of aesthetics (cf. Benjamin 2008). Aura blends motifs of Greek mythology, Jewish Kabbalistic and eschatology, echoes of esotericism and occultism, the modern experience of transcending the boundaries of the material world of phenomena, the bohemian experience of poets and artists from Baudelaire to the Surrealists, and the practice of opium and hashish users. Isn’t it truly “shocking” and “provocative” that the key concept of modern and contemporary art—aura, which has managed to survive in the contemporary age of the technosphere—encompasses all speculative-metaphysical, hybrid, and manifold meanings precisely because it speaks of the power of image over language? So, despite his mimetic theory of language, Walter Benjamin opened the door to philosophy and art, starting from the “pictorial nature” of language. Martin Heidegger referred to this at one point in Plato’s thought: the use of the word logos in the Old Greece has been related to the image of a gathering place and the gathering of what was distracted (cf. Heidegger 1997). Moreover, all of Heidegger’s “terms” and “categories” are actually nothing else but transformed metaphysical concepts with clear traces of the Greco-German thought from primordial to modern times. Thus, for example, one of the most

Ž. Paić (*) University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_16

265

266 

Ž. PAIĆ

significant notions of modern philosophy, such as Heidegger’s event (Ereignis) (cf. Heidegger 1989), marks the connection of Being and time in the horizon of what is a condition of possibility of appearance. And above all, it is about the language of rooting in the land and the tradition from which all the essential ideas of the West originate. In one of the most philosophically significant discussions of art in the twentieth century, along with the Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (originally published in German in 1950), Benjamin’s reflection about aura as a mystery and mysticism became the very essence of art in its historical advancement to this day. Already in 1930 in Marseilles, where he wrote an essay entitled On Hashish (Über Haschisch), Benjamin delves into an expanded understanding of the aura from the perspective of theosophy, esotericism and occultism (cf. Benjamin 2000). This should be emphasized inasmuch it has become common place to speak of the experience of the sacred by having access to the divine in modern art. Thus, for example, Kazimir Malevich’s suprematism and his paintings are explained by a “secret connection” with the rationalist mysticism of the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky and his Tertium Organum. Marcel Duchamp, on the other hand, flirted with the esoteric of the Holy Grail; Joseph Beuys repeatedly invoked God as an art source in an anthroposophical sense. The need for alternative religious experience testifies to the fact that contemporary art, from its very beginnings in the historical avant-garde, lacks a different kind of autonomy, not merely an aesthetic one. In that sense, “greedy pursuit of God”, as Arthur Rimbaud puts it in Season in Hell, denotes an act of creative construction of a different transcendence from the legitimate dogmas of monotheistic religions, especially Christianity. There is no better witness to such a line of thinking than Walter Benjamin.

1   Aura and Its Loss: Technological Reproducibility The starting point of Benjamin’s thinking stems from the belief that a traditional work of art is based on its non-autonomy. The work of art originates from ritual and cult festivity. This means that it was used for the purposes of attending at sacred and the divine from the Old Greeks to the Middle Ages proving that myth and religion give the arts an aura of uniqueness. The authority of revelation thus has the function of legitimizing the place of art as a work celebrating the relationship of the divine and the human in the community. In contrast, the advent of the modern way of production requires taking into consideration a machine that rests on the logic of multiplying the original into infinity. The driving force behind this logic denotes the notion of technological reproducibility. Since Benjamin thinks of the metaphysical structure of the German language in the same way as Heidegger, it is obvious that he uses the term Technik in its adjective form: that which is technical should be both mechanical and reproductive. The problem, however, is that the use of the German word for the term technique in both Heidegger and Benjamin does not refer to the instrumental

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

267

nature of the technique as a means or tool of work for other purposes. Technique as reproducibility for Benjamin denotes the technology. And that means it is a system of managing and delivering information. Only from the system does the possibility of creating a new (product) emerge. Its features are: (a) that it is substitutable and reproducible; (b) that a difference between the original and the copy no longer exists; (c) that it is able to make visible the spiritual using the secular objects of modern capitalism. In this system, the media of photography and film prevail, while the age of technological reproduction appears in the sign of loss or destruction of the aura (Verlust der Aura). Instead of the uniqueness of the original, we encounter the doubling and multiplying of the singularity of Being. This means that art as a production (poiesis) of a creative work can no longer be understood without reference to material or technological “nature” that significantly affects the form and content of the work itself: The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it. Since the historical testimony is founded on the physical duration, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical duration plays no part. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object, the weight it derives from tradition. One might focus these aspects of the artwork in the concept of the aura, and go on to say: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura. (Benjamin 2008, 22)

What is it, then, technological reproducibility? The technique, as we have seen, is for Benjamin the same as modern technology. Its essence cannot be found in the understanding of the machine as a tool for production in terms of mechanical operations performed in order to produce artificial objects in a way used by nature to produce and reproduce itself. The analogy between nature and machine, however, still denotes the basis for understanding industrial production, as it was for Marx in the analysis of abstract work in Capital (originally published in 1867; cf. Marx 1990). The difference, however, arises when the technique, like reproduction, no longer imitates the work of nature. Instead, it is the construction of a “second nature” that acts quite differently from the original. This is evident in what Benjamin sees as the essence of twentieth-­ century technologies. In its two modes of appearance, technological reproducibility means: (1) independence of the original as handwork that boils down to the logic of natural teleology (means-purpose). This is evident in photography and cinematography, where it can no longer be possible to establish an analogy with nature as a one-off and inimitable reality of the “necessity” and “factuality” of Being; (2) when it comes to cinema, technological reproducibility allows for the distance of the object and the viewer because it brings a copy of the original to a situation completely different from the original, thus eliminating the authenticity of the work or its aura—distancing being the essence of reproduction.

268 

Ž. PAIĆ

From that viewpoint, it will be obvious that aura can be understood as a single occurrence (einmalig Vorkommen) of what is invisible in the appearance itself. It is, therefore, the relationship between the qualitative and the quantitative determination of the figure that points to the thing itself. The relationship always assumes two. Likewise, Benjamin, in explaining why the term aura cannot have anything to do with the occult, shows that it is something that will be referred to in the essay from 1931 entitled A Short History of Photography (Kleine Geschichte der Photographie) as “optical unconscious” (cf. Benjamin 2015). For the aura to appear in the phenomenon, there must be a distance between the thing itself and the observer. That which, in geometric perspective theory, is referred to as the horizon within which the possibility of an image occurs, has now its place where the aura possesses its “backing”. We cannot think about this in terms of the relationship between “subject” and “object” in the cognitive sense of contemporary Kantian aesthetics. Instead, Benjamin has already adopted from Schlegel and Novalis a new language that Paul Klee will develop in the modern art of painting when at one point in his Diary he expressed the key thought of a twentieth-century painting revolution: “Now objects are perceiving me” (cf. Klee 1961). That is the essence of the relationship between a thing and its occurrence concerning the observer. Without the aura that appears and at the same time disappears in a one-off game of approaching/distancing, it would be impossible to comprehend why art was at the service of the events of the ritual cult feast. What gives an event the dimension of sublime beauty does not come from objects as images. Everything comes from the aura of things alone. In the mystical environment only that which bestows holiness on the subject may create the spiritualization of reality. We can say that it is a spiritual horizon beyond which art goes “here” and “now”. Only in this way it becomes possible to reach the divine. Without aura, classical art does not have its essence. But, how to keep track of the appearance of the aura in the uniqueness and singularity of the original in the time of eternal-now? The answer lies in the notion of technological reproducibility. There is no doubt that the epistemological structure of the aura represents a secularized form of the exaltation of God’s presence in the image. In the sign of “profane illumination” and “optical unconscious”, a new technological notion of the essence of art brings all these concepts to the fore, and so does the relation of Being and time in the metaphysical sense of the word. The condition of the possibility of technological reproducibility, because of which the aura disappears from the horizon of appearance, is shown in essence by the production of the “new”. Walter Benjamin, in the Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk) with the first drafts of the 1935 writings, seeks to resolve the antinomies of time—progress and eternal return—through the experience of what was the main cognitive problem of medieval theology: tertium datur. If repetition causes boredom, and progress signifies an acceleration into infinity as a kind of “shock” with which the experience of uniqueness and singularity arises, then the only solution that seems acceptable to the spirit of modernity

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

269

should be the abolition of the boredom of “homogeneous and empty” time in the constant staging of “new”. Reproducibility must, from a state of homogeneous machinic reproducibility, assume the moment of the creative energy of the “new”. Instead of natural renewal cycles, the artificial need for “new” is at work. At the level of analyzing the sociological experiences of the modern city—such as fashion and design in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Benjamin made a counterpoint to industry, architecture, and avant-garde art, which uses assembly lines and patchwork to arrive at a new way of aesthetic experience (Erlebnis). However, it is quite obvious that reproducibility cannot be what emerges from the essence of technology (Benjamin 1991, 60–78).

2   Modes of Appearing and Disappearing of the Aura We have seen that the concept of distance is extremely important for Benjamin. There is no mere relation of contemplation between the sublime work of art and its observer. The observer is not a dead acceptor of stimuli coming from some distant realm of spirituality as an antenna receiving signals from the surrounding world. Kantian model of aesthetic experience Benjamin critically took over and upgraded in the early writings, starting from the essence of romanticism in Schlegel and Novalis and in Nietzsche (cf. Benjamin 2019). For the work of art to emanate a sense that evokes pleasure and cathartic experience of overcoming physicality, the metaphysical structure of art must be brought closer to the observer. Beyond mere contemplation resides the meeting place of the work and the audience. What was the notion of reflection in early Benjamin is now evolving to the notion of an aesthetic experience of participating in an event (cf. Bubner 1991). The problem, however, is that in the age of technological reproducibility, the media themselves, such as photography and film, are generalizing the subject of observational ecstasy in experiencing a work of art. This is a crucial change. Instead of reflection as an act of critical evaluation of the work, the collective subject of modern society, the mass, is brought to the center of contemporary art due to new media originating in their technologically changed essence. According to Benjamin, It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced. These two processes lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past—a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity. Both processes are intimately related to the mass movements of our day. Their most powerful agent is film. The social significance of film, even—and especially—in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage. (Benjamin 2008, 22)

270 

Ž. PAIĆ

Benjamin was right to say that the entry-level aesthetics of the reception ceased to apply to the masses. His idea of the peaceful contemplation of a sublime object of art flares up. The aura of the work of art is disappearing. But this destruction, as the basic notion of the historical avant-garde, is the beginning of its occult and secret power of action after it has disappeared irreversibly. Disappearance presupposes two things: (1) the replacement of the original with a copy and (2) the new foundation of art from the spirit of reproduction. Reproduction technology marks the site of the gap between cult and ritual and the everyday banality of “homogeneous and empty” time. There is still, however, something extremely problematic about the ontological status of the aura. If it is out of the question that Benjamin calculated with a metaphysical history of transcendence, let us look at what “auraticizing” the world means at all. Before that, we should start from the initial assumption. In the strict sense of the word, the term aura ranges from “profane illumination” to “optical unconscious” as a result of the immanent transcendence of the metaphysical assembly of Being, God, the world, and Human. If we might capture the “essence” of the aura, the problem of replacing language with an image in twentieth-century philosophy and art must be raised. Benjamin’s concept of aura contains what for Hegel was an absolute synthesis of self-­ consciousness and spirit in art, religion, and philosophy; then the notion of “the will to power” by Nietzsche as the eternal recurrence of the same; the equivalence of necessity and freedom in the inverted state in the capital in Marx; and the concept of the event (Ereignis) in Heidegger which gave rise to the possibility of a “second beginning” of history. Therefore, an aura must be defined as approaching-distance, as a sublime meeting place of the historical circuit and the constellation of history, as an experience of the origin-­ disappearance of the world in general, and ultimately as that which enables things to shine in the state of dematerialization as a spiritual figure of an individual. Not only does individual’s physical appearance die with him, but also the entire spiritual world of human life under the stars. There are, therefore, three modes of appearing in which the essence of the aura crystallizes: 1. appearing in all things, such as the monad, and only occasionally in the extraordinary stories that people attribute to things; 2. the change of aura comes from the movement of the thing itself, which means that the vision of the coming is revealed as a trace and as a mark of what is not visible in things but the outlines of their figures; 3. true aura cannot be equated with spiritualism, but only with the ornamental circle in which a thing or Being resides in the world around it (Mersch 2002, 47–52; Groys 2003, 34–35). Walter Benjamin went on to critically analyze the ambivalence between the absolute rationalization of nature and culture on the one hand, and new forms of the enchantment of what had already been dis-enchanted on the other. The emergence of photography and film, as well as their massive popularity and

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

271

acceptance as a new aesthetic and artistic experience, reversed the usual notion of the downfall of art as the truth of the human being. What remains unresolved in this ambivalence to this day is how exactly the aura of a work of art disappears. Is it the reason why the artistic feature of the work in terms of uniqueness and singularity is lost, as Marx wrote about the craftsmanship from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Baroque? Craftsmanship toward industry is referred to as sublimity to banality. Authenticity signifies the uniqueness of a creative act, and vulgarity denotes that which is massively reproduced. In short, Benjamin appreciates Weber’s analyzes of the process of rationalizing modern capitalist society (cf. Weber 2002) but he does not consider the self-­ establishment of the mind from the Kantian perspective of a rule. Instead, in the wake of Nietzsche and romanticism, he introduced a new concept of aesthetic experience (Erlebnis). And this means that the mind itself is dis-enchanted by being enchanted in the play of the creation of the fetishism of goods. The reproduction technologies underlying the mass receptivity of photography and film in the twentieth century completely overthrew the basic idea and at the same time the dogma of modern art about the autonomy of artworks. Instead of the subject of contemplation, which is always ultimately the object of a more powerful “subject” (society, culture, and technology), film and photography encounter the overcoming (Aufhebung) of the distinction between art and life. Freedom of one’s legitimacy is transformed into a service to one of two substitute religions: politics and aesthetics as ideology. What was the intention of the historical movements of the avant-garde, in particular Berlin’s Dadaism with the invention of the body as a performative event, was accomplished at the end of the twentieth century with the introduction of the technosphere into the production of “artificial life” (AI). Therefore, rationalization and mysticism are no longer in irreconcilable contradiction. It was obvious to Benjamin that what constitutes the unsolvable aporias and paradoxes of modern times stems from the structure of mythical thinking. In that sense, the loss of the aura we can describe as the liquidation or abolition of the autonomy of modern art, which in this act of pseudo-synthesis in the historical avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century goes in two pernicious directions. The first is related to fascism/Nazism and the second to Stalinist communism; the first is named the aestheticization of politics and the second the politicization of art. Fiat ars-pereat mundus, “It says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of art /Jour l’art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practised by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art. (Benjamin 2008, 42)

272 

Ž. PAIĆ

Aestheticization and politicization are just two different paths to the same— nihilism without works. In both cases, it is a construction of life from the spirit of technological reproduction. Fascism and Nazism start from the distraction or diffusion of the machine that manages human emotions, granting them the right to anger against the Other. That is why the aestheticization of politics comes always as ideological propaganda demanding the power of Nature over the spirit (the biology of a race); the politicization of art, in turn, relies on the power of History over nature (the necessity of establishing communism as the “iron law” of progress and development). In both cases, the human body lies in the center. So, this becomes the model for the technological construction of myth and science. The autonomy of the artwork is thus destroyed. Eventually, the aura was replaced by mass idolatry to the Leader, the Party and the people. What Benjamin assumes is that technological reproducibility of film coincides perfectly with the propaganda of fascism/Nazism and Stalinist communism. Mass in this context designates the end of the representational art of depicting the world as nature and history. Instead, what film expresses—what it shows as a new form of aesthetic distraction—denotes the artificial creation of a personality cult as a star. Film replaces the aura of the one-time appearance of the sacred and the divine marking the end of mortality and immobility of the object. Now the object itself, as an aesthetic sublimation of things, changes the observer by changing his status as the indifferent subject. Change drives the notion of aesthetic cognition. The most significant consequence of this reversal we can see in that what the message of technological reproduction becomes—a “culture”. In 1967 Guy Debord named it with a concept of a society of the spectacle (cf. Debord 1995). The paradigmatic case for this cannot be any longer the art of high modernism. Once again, we are confronted with the aporia and paradox of the founding of the “new”. When the aura of the work of art is resolved of topology “here” and “now”, the technological refinement of the multiplied “original” comes at its place. Certainly, this might be one of the reasons for Boris Groys’ extremely provocative and controversial position concerning the art theory today: he claims that the aura does not disappear with the loss of the original. On the contrary, it is just emerging in full scale of its appearance (Groys 2003, 35). “Profane illumination” and “optical unconscious” are today to be found anywhere other than in technological reproduction. This seems to be a mystery. What was unattainable to the senses during the history of the metaphysics of the West, and therefore had the status of sublimity that cannot be reduced to the materiality of the object, is now turning to the aesthetic construction of events. Thanks to the cinematic projection apparatus, images that emanate new meanings have the character of a laterna magica. The event of film production, distribution, and screening in its “holy trinity” elevates the banality, triviality, and ordinariness of life to the altar of the sublime portrayal of the unpredictable. In A Short History of Photography (Kleine Geschichte der Photographie), Benjamin summarized his understanding of the aura as an atmosphere. It is one that cannot be otherwise determined except by surrounding things with the

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

273

wondrous weaving of beauty in its ineffability. In the relationship between the two technologically created media such as photography and film, the problem becomes more complex. Not just because photography is “excess of the imaginary”, but because it stops the movement like dreams crystallized in hovering over things. The movement, in turn, produces the effect of double (de)materialization: 1. the emergence of an image from the succession of the moment, which means that it is precisely the time of awareness or the present-time (Jetztzeit) that is a condition of being able to remember and recollect; 2. the transformation of the image into a medium of the “optically unconscious”, meaning that movement does not take place outside the perception of the movement of the observer’s body itself.

3  Technological and Artistic Predispositions of the Aura Aura cannot be reduced to the vision, the view, the image, and its frame of appearance. It is the link between a Being and time. Through a specific way of mediation, we can arrive at its muted splendour. With the help of the aura, the mediality of the media is revealed (Mersch 2002, 47–50). What is referred to as the mediated immediacy in Hegel at the level of the absolute which encompasses a subjective and objective spirit, this appears in Benjamin’s thought in a fragmented totality of experience. Beyond traditional cognitive theory and its dogma of subject-object relationship, the experience combines Erlebnis and affect in a new context. The aura must, therefore, be understood as an ontological-­temporal horizon for the appearance of things. Like a shadow without which light cannot trace the object in the image, its appearance is framed by the presence of the sacred. The location of the horizon lies between a Being and time. As an event of “profane illumination”, the aura illuminates things in the world. Their mark is imprinted with the seal of the holy and the divine. Without it, art cannot have a permanent place in the metaphysical horizon of things: What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch. In the light of this description, we can readily grasp the social basis of the aura’s present decay. It rests on two circumstances, both linked to the increasing emergence of the masses and the growing intensity of their movements. Namely: the desire of the present-day masses to “get closer” to things, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness [Oberwindung des Einmaligen jeder Gegebenheit] by assimilating it as a reproduction. Every day the urge grows

274 

Ž. PAIĆ

stronger to get hold of an object at close range in an image [Bild], or, better, in a facsimile [Abbild], a reproduction. (Benjamin 2008, 23)

The reason why Benjamin sought to bring to the consideration of technology a yet esoteric-occult term secularized to the extent acceptable to the modern experience of transforming a work of art from a mystery of singularity into a mystic of reproduction might be that he saw how photography and film were perfect media for the performance of “immanent transcendence” of the world as an assembly (art-politics-technology) and a constellation of relations between society and culture. With the technical image created by the new reproductive media, life itself becomes more than life, and art becomes less than art. The avant-garde dream of merging life and art has taken the form of what is happening when we terminate it, as in one of Benjamin’s “dialectical images” (Benjamin 1999, 464): thanks to the “tiger leap into the past” (Benjamin 2002, 305–306), a path to what has always been a gift of indelible beauty is made possible. It is beauty that possesses an excess of melancholy. The surplus of this mental experience arises because every step forward into a dizzyingly accelerated future seems like the boredom of “homogeneous and empty” time. The problem with the disappearance and emergence of an aura of a work of art during the rule of the technological media, therefore, comes down to the question of time. If time denotes a condition of possibility of propagation, then the movement cannot be a matter of mechanics as the physics of objects in space, but of the threefold relation of Being, time, and aura. The aura gives the event a light of redemption. How should this be understood? The messianic trace of sublime beauty might be visible in the atmosphere of things. There is no possibility of its occurrence anywhere else. Benjamin’s thinking concerning the topology of aura in the essence refers to a world created by technology, therefore, evolves in the face of a break-off of history. Yet we cannot escape the impression that Benjamin’s insight into technology, unlike Heidegger’s, is imbued with aporias and paradoxes. As a paradigmatic representative of the “dissident” direction of Frankfurt’s critical theory of society, he cannot transcend the epochal shadows of this philosophical orientation and its failure. Modern technology is a term that arises from the social production of life, more precisely from a framework in which photography and film do not appear merely through the technological progress of media (e.g. as opposed to traditional painting technology). Much more significant than this fatal linearity of the technology might be that the social envelope in which the “productive forces” of history operate, to use the Marx term, is determined by the constellation of relations. In other words, despite all the fences and additions of historical materialism, Benjamin eventually understood art beyond that. He envisioned the disappearance of the aura by replacing it with new reproduction technologies. According to the proposed definition of “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” (Benjamin 2008, 23), the distance between the apparition event and the apparition as such must be determined spatio-temporally. Disposability is twofold: it belongs to space (“here”) and

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

275

time (“now”). The disappearance of the aura of the work of art that gives away “value” also disappears here-and-now. And that can only be holy as a condition of the possibility of the divine. This is a definition that Benjamin must have derived from Kant’s aesthetics and Hegel’s speculative-dialectical critique of art. The latter eventually slips into the “private space” of the observer’s remarks when the “spiritual need” for art disappears. If by analogy this is derived from the religion of Protestantism, which in the profane period of the “end of history” becomes the private sphere of experiencing the sacred, then the aura of the work of art should be placed in the environment of the play of aesthetic transcendence of Being. What Kant does in his third critique of 1790 (cf. Kant 2002) as a dispute between the sensible objection and the intellectual dawn in the notion of sublimity, for Hegel opens up the spiritual horizon of the emergence and disappearance of art, as discussed in his Aesthetics of 1835 (cf. Hegel 1988). When absolute science eliminates the need for art, a new need for its replacement has to be born. In this discussion, Benjamin opened up the problem of the end of the metaphysical notion of art. The development of modernity takes place in the aporia of its foundation in “nature” and/ or “spirit”. Although an example of a natural aura is one that, as in Kant, becomes an aesthetic paradigm, it is obvious that the shadow of Hegel hovers above this debate. This is obvious from the fact that in his lectures on the history of aesthetics from the Old Greeks through the Christian Middle Ages to the modern age, the process of overcoming (Aufhebung) of art and religion took the form of philosophy as absolute knowledge. The process is completed in such a way that the autonomy of art marks the path of self-reflection. With it, art purifies itself from religion. This process happens in such a way that the essence of art is no longer reducible to cult and ritual (the event of the sacred). It is now about the social conditionality of its emergence. The transition from the pre-modern community to the complex fabric of the modern art society signifies loss and gain. What is lost is about participating in the mystery of the sacred. And what is gained is massive idolatry to the technical image of life itself. Beauty is replaced by shock while sublimity is replaced by the provocation of pure physicality. Pleasure can no longer be separated from trauma (Perniola 2004, 3–25). Benjamin will, therefore, understand Hegel’s view of the “end of art” in the same way as Heidegger, and in the same way as Adorno. Also, it is not a work of “negative dialectics” with a peak in belief in the authenticity and autonomy of a work of art. Instead, everything now turns to the new mystique of “society”. Admittedly, this is not a sublime facility like in Marcuse’s theory, but it opens a space for the emergence of freedom and experiment in play beyond the ideology of capitalism and its “homogeneous and empty” reproduction times. In other words, in the idea of ​​the emancipation of art from religion, cult, and ritual are inscribed in an “enlightened way” into “other authenticity”. This happens in the face of the mass society of the new reception of the work of art. Exactly because photography and film lose singularity features, they become a “second event”. Such an event now bears the trace of aura of distraction. Instead of the space that gives

276 

Ž. PAIĆ

it meaning in the spatio-temporal sequence of moments “here” and “now”, there is a duplication of the original; abolishment of the presentation site by moving it anywhere, anytime; dematerialization of the media in pure technology, and picture as information: […] No investigation of the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility can overlook these connections. They lead to an insight: for the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics. (Benjamin 2008, 24–25)

“Parasitic subservience to ritual”—that is the perfect critique of mortification of artworks. When we recall Benjamin’s early writings on art criticism as well as the messianic idea of history, we are tempted to move in a different direction from the paved paths of interpretation of the 1935/1936 debate. First of all, what is “saved by the mortification of work” in his “second life” cannot be a mere reconstruction of the original covered by the ruins of history. Salvation denotes an act of ethical-political redemption. But in the case of an aura of the work of art, it is even more enigmatic than the seemingly radical representation of modernist praise for the autonomy of art. It is about Benjamin having to redefine the emancipation of art from religion. To emancipate as a person, it is necessary for the individual to reach the threshold of universality from the shackles of civil existence. Leaving the reductive position of a nation, class, and gender/sex, man reaches a higher level of humanity. But this does not mean that emancipation denotes an act of abstract generality. The emancipation of art from religion cannot be, therefore, an autonomous act of artistic practice. It is an act of political emancipation from religion as politics. In this sense, in criticizing “parasitic subservience to ritual”, Benjamin cannot release the influence of cult and ritual as a topology of the sacred and the divine without abolishing art in life itself. Without sanctifying life, there is no overcoming of art. Undoubtedly, this was the first and last aporia of historical avant-garde movements in the twentieth century. The artist assumes the powers of hero, saint, and martyr. But so does the public intellectual. When Benjamin questions the very framework of society in late capitalism on which the whole drive of contemporary art is based, his task is completed in the rapture of the revolutionary mysticism of events. He denied the possibility of life to be holy in itself if, at the same time, such and such life was not guided by universal righteousness. In 1921 written essay entitled Toward a  Critique of Violence (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) (cf. Benjamin 2021), this thought was uttered against any kind of religion of humanitarianism. That means against the idea

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

277

that life can be established in the biological or animal sense with a new origin of philosophy and art. Emancipation denotes an act of negation and suspension. When the political power of religion is denied, it is suspended in such a way that art should be formally deprived of “parasitic subservience to ritual”. It is just an act of dressing up in the Emperor’s new attire. In doing so, Benjamin made clear the fundamental problem of contemporary art. The essay ended with a diagnosis of a state of art left at the mercy of the new cult and its ritual. It is no longer a religious ritual, but a political one. This is obviously why we need to redefine the function and essence of aura in the age of technological reproducibility. Namely, the aura cannot be present any longer in the “single occurrence of distance as close as it is”. What happens irrevocably through technological reproducibility is that the metaphysical foundation of art must be abandoned from the essence of the work itself. When a work loses its uniqueness and singularity, it only takes place within the material form of its presence.

4   Aura, Photography, and Film The true, melancholic medium of modernity is represented in photography while a snapshot of life-in-duration and transformation only exists as a film without a subject. Both photography and film are in a linear sequence from the standpoint of the technological history of the invention. Former denotes the condition of possibility of the latter. The difference stems from the relationship between the standstill and the movement of Being-as-such. While photography captures reality at the moment of its crystallization, the film does the same but creating movement using a series of images, themselves in motion. Two notions of time correspond to two media of technological construction in modern times. Photographic time emerges as a melancholic sense of life in mourning for what has irreversibly gone. Therefore, it is possible to preserve its traces in memory only through a snapshot of the moment of existence. On the contrary, cinematic time is shown by repetition time. In every new rhythm and frame of life, the joy of living flows. But, there is no reality beyond the construction of the apparatus. After all, it is no coincidence that Benjamin, in his analyzes of photography and film, addressed the problem of the technological constitution of the relationship between illusion and its object. Photography designates the perfect medium for the transition of painting to a crystallized state of non-motion. The image is discreetly releasing cult functions in religious rituals. In this way, it becomes a record in the “eternal present”. Aristotelian nunc stans cannot be in the same line as Hegel’s bad infinity. It is not even a mere presence in the linear course of time. Quite the contrary, we have the experience of the moment of the presence (Jetztzeit) that has stopped in the past. Melancholy, hence, can be nothing but the truth of aura. There is a clear relationship between the concepts of early Benjamin’s writings on art criticism and tragedy (Trauerspiel) with thoughts on photography, the loss of the aura, and the essays on Baudelaire from 1931 to 1939. With melancholy, there is a decay of the aura. The way this happens assumes the power to

278 

Ž. PAIĆ

stop in time. It’s all like an “instant shot” of an event that takes place in memory by the act of repetition. However, a one-off and non-recurring impression do not completely disappear due to reproduction. What disappears relates to the authenticity of the moment in the act. With the invention of film, a significant move toward a hyper-reality of life had been made. But film did not bring an immersion in “here” and “now”. Its space-time determination occurs in motion-and-rest. Life as reality becomes a media event. It does not appear and does not present itself from the present, which is always slipping into the past. Because of this, a film cannot be a medium of melancholy like photography. At an instance when the time has stopped, there is a flow of awareness of irreversible disappearance. The apparent similarity of photography and film refers only to the mystery of impressions (mimesis) and presentations (representation) of the real. Instead of revealing the past, film reproduces what is sublime and aural in a manner of Proust’s “unintentional memory” (mémoire involontaire) (Cadava 1997, 44–57). This is the reason why film deserves the name of art-without-work. It is a pure event. From it flows the river of the unconscious and dreams. It follows, therefore, that the cinema-time is always that which recedes before the present. Looking for the future, there are traces of living wounds behind it. The early expressionist and surrealist mute films of the 1920s are obsessively tied to visions of apocalypse, madness, utopia, and dreams. The magical image that emerges from the ritual of “parasitic subservience to ritual” meets the demand of totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. And that is the other side of the same coin. The reason is that film denotes a medium of mass reproduction of dreams and the social power of the reception of art. Everything that was inhabited in the oases of privacy and intimacy is now being deployed in public spaces with audience and interactions. Politics, as a new ritual to which art is invoked in the same way, uses the technological power of film to fully mobilize the masses. Dreams, madness, visions, and utopias prove the premise that the aura of an artistic event is a new way of transmitting the sublime into the medium of reproduction. But what counteracts this is also the necessity of the “second life” of the aura after its loss and disappearance. It is a place of the aestheticization of politics (fascism/Nazism) and politicization of art (Stalinist communism). One is opposed to the other. However, what is common to both ways of bringing art to politics is their logic of power. The result of the politicization of society in the early avant-garde was the death of the aesthetic and the beginning of the abolition of society altogether. Instead of the aesthetic experience of shock characteristic for the early avant-garde, totalitarian movements are based on the political experience of subjugating power as a surrogate force of divine presence in the form of nation/ state/race/class. The aura is destroyed by closing the gap between society, state, and the individual while art object is no longer within the purview of the subject of contemplation. The destruction of society in guise of the masses comes triumphantly in its place.

  AURA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WORK OF ART IN WALTER BENJAMIN 

279

5  Conclusion The time of Benjamin’s immersion in the “eternal present” (Jetztzeit) has passed and also the time of Heidegger’s “enframing” (Gestell). What is happening today with the technosphere, as opposed to the mechanical way of technology, goes beyond the conditions of being able to comprehend the image ontology. The technosphere can no longer be considered metaphysically like the thinking of technique and technology. It does not come down to tools or apparatus that serve something. It is known from the cybernetic paradigm of understanding the world that the concepts of information, code, life, system, and environment are linked without a vertical or horizontal scheme of a predetermined order. When Benjamin uses the term image in order to make relations between society and culture on the one side and the notion of time in the horizon of appearance and disappearance on the other, he does so establishing a non-linear relationship between these terms. Information is constantly generated from nothing in the visual code of the network. Infinity takes on the role of perpetuating what no longer has its permanent essence, so it must be reconstructed to allow communication between the system and the environment. Therefore, the technosphere does not depend on external events. Its logic lies beyond the law of causality and the guiding principle of metaphysics, which, in the concept of the expediency of nature, finds its reason for existence. The aura is lost with the advent of technical media and at the same time is being replaced by dematerialization of the Being. Instead of reproduction as the main term with which Benjamin described the essence of technology, it is now about eliminating any distinction between “original” and “copied”. The ruling principle does not arise from the mimetic or representational “nature” of the image to which the language refers. The language itself, in its technological calculability, takes on the character of blank marking as an image. In this process of replacement, there cannot be any longer a matter of “re-­ producing” something that has the features of Being. Information and communication are only members of a single order or visual code system. And with them new reality beyond the “imitation” (mimesis) and “representation” is generated. Its essence can no longer be derived from the difference between nature and culture. In the meantime, reproduction has become a “new nature” in the social conditions of modern capitalism. This was the initial premise of Benjamin’s unfinished work on the Arcades Project / Das PassagenWerk project. Insofar as it is about the loss of aura, the whole philosophical and historical structure of thought in this lengthy text is a montage-­as-­ construction of what can no longer be subsumed to the environment of metaphysics. What is, then, the essence of aura in the technological age without originals and copies? Reproduction has become the very construction of the technical

280 

Ž. PAIĆ

perpetuation of a world-without-aura. Since the technosphere is no longer derived from the metaphysical grid of thought, everything should be open. The world of “here” and “now” is neither a model nor a framework for technogenesis that “produces” new worlds by itself. With Benjamin, the aesthetics of genius and mass was completed.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften. VI.  Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA and Boston: Harvard University Press and Belknap Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2000. Über Haschisch. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp/Insel. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. Vol. 3, Selected Writings. 1935–1938 (ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings). Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. In: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2015. On Photography. London: Reaktion Books. Benjamin, Walter. 2019. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2021. Toward the Critique of Violence. A Critical Edition. Ed. by Peter Fences and Julia Ng. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bubner, Rüdiger. 1991. Ästhetische Erfahrung. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Cadava, Eduardo. 1997. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Groys, Boris. 2003. Topologie der Kunst. Munich and Vienna: C. Hanser. Hegel, G.  W. F. 1988.  Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T.  M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “Die Zeit des Weltbildes”, in Holzwege. GA.  Vol. 5. Frankfurt/M: V. Klostermann. pp. 69–115. Heidegger, Martin. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt/M: V. Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Platon Lehre von der Wahrheit. Frankfurt/M: V. Klostermann. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klee, Paul. 1961. The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee. New York and London: Georg Wittenborn and Lund Humphries. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books. Mersch, Dieter (2002) Ereignis and Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Perniola, Mario. 2004. Art and Its Shadow. London and New York: Continuum. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books.

Image and the Illusion of Immanence in Jean-­Paul Sartre John Lechte

The starting point for understanding Sartre on the image and the imaginary is the fact that for the existential philosopher, the image is a relation of consciousness. Indeed, to follow the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, as Sartre did in the mid-1930s when he was working out his ideas regarding the imaginary and imagination—although L’Imaginaire (1986), which deals directly with the image, was not published until 1940, most of the material for the work was done at the same time as Sartre was writing L’Imagination, first published in 1936—an image is always an image of something; just as, for Husserl, consciousness is always consciousness of something (cf. Husserl 1982). As there is no consciousness in itself, so there is never an image in itself. What perhaps surprises here is that although the image is a relation of consciousness it is not simply produced by consciousness but has an autonomy that is entirely its own. As Sartre says: “An imaging consciousness is, indeed, consciousness of an object as imaged and not consciousness of an image” (Sartre 2004, 86). But, as we shall see, to speak of the autonomy of the image is not to imply that the image is an object; far from it. Conceiving the image as an object is an indication that one has fallen for the “illusion of immanence”, the illusion that posits the image as always already existing in the psyche and the imagination. Instead, the image is what enables access to what is imaged: it is the presence of the imaged (or object) in its absence, as Sartre puts it. Such an approach puts Sartre’s

J. Lechte (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_17

281

282 

J. LECHTE

notion of the image at odds with much of contemporary media theory, which proposes that the image is indeed an object—an object that is media specific, so that rather than a face being made present in a photograph it is said the medium ultimately becomes manifest, not the reality of the face. Thus, photography—that is, the medium—appears and not the immediate thing (the imaged) (cf. Wolf 2007). To read Sartre on the imaginary and thus the image is taken on a journey that sometimes falls into the trap of psychologism because Sartre is so concerned to delineate the “mental image” in relation to the work of experimental psychology. This is so even though his intention is quite the reverse (cf. Sartre 1989 [1936], 17). Rather than become embroiled in a critique, however, we shall endeavor to follow key paths of the Sartrean trajectory in order to illuminate a notion of the image that opens the way to the “magical” aspect of the imaginary. To illustrate briefly something of what is at stake today in Sartre’s notion of the image, it is worth noting Julia Kristeva’s interpretation of the image and of Sartre in her Intimate Revolt (2002). There, Kristeva, as psychoanalyst, emphasizes the negativity of representation, the fact that the object/thing represented is absent. It is the absence of the thing which would give freedom to consciousness in Sartre’s sense. In this regard, Kristeva asks in relation the experience of the imaginary today: What happens when the imaginary is reified in the “society of the spectacle”? Not only when we pass from the mental image that Sartre investigates to the real image (painting, photography, film) but when the universe of the real image becomes the only reality, decreeing its laws and logics, evacuating the singular fantasies of the independent mental act, imposing a stereotype of representation that kills individual phantasmatic creation in favor of a standardised imaginary? (Kristeva 2002, 127; translation slightly modified)

The issues raised here are crucial because a perspective is opened up that is partly at odds with the one to be presented on Sartre’s philosophy of the image below. Sartre, we will see, does not just deal with the mental image, as Kristeva suggests, but also with the so-called real image. But to deal with the real image is to deal with the real to which the image gives access. As the image for Sartre is not an object in its own right, it would be reality as such that would give rise to a “standardised reality”. Whatever the case may be, reference to Kristeva’s commentary shows the pertinence for contemporary society of the Sartrian engagement with the image. To appreciate this, it is necessary to remain a little longer with Kristeva. It is not a question, the analyst assures us, of demonizing the world of images, but of ascertaining the possible consequences, one of which would be people coming to believe in images as reality. In effect, there is no longer an imaginary because the image and reality are now one and the same (simulacrum). This is the “society of the spectacle” thesis, where what was real has

  IMAGE AND THE ILLUSION OF IMMANENCE IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 

283

supposedly become an image. The image has become an object in its own right. Psychologically, if everything is an image—that is, if reality is now a “real” image (to used Kristeva’s expression)—the imaginary is dead because the individual subject no longer has any freedom to make images, something which results in “new maladies of the soul” in which subjects no longer have an interiority (2002, 128). We shall see, however, that in fact Kristeva remains focused on the mental image, or on what for Sartre is the imagination, and not, as will be explained, on the image in the fullest sense.

1   Husserl and the Image There is no doubt that an important preliminary to appreciating the approach adopted by Sartre on the imaginary derives from an analysis of the image as classically conceived in relation to that of Husserl. Husserl’s phenomenological conception of the image is introduced in Sartre’s early book, L’Imagination of 1936 (1989). As Sartre presents it, if Hume’s conception portrays the image as a weaker form of perception based on impressions, for Husserl, the image only appears as such in light of the question: “what is an image?” (1989, 142). Such questioning becomes the basis of an eidetic approach to the image. For Sartre, however, the eidetic leads to the essence of the image as a psychological structure, whereas, against Sartre, it could be argued that it allows for the appearance of the image to occur independently of all psychology. That said, Sartre claims that Ideas furnishes “an entirely new theory of images”—even if Husserl’s conception of the image is only presented in a fragmentary way in passing, and even if he disagrees with Husserl at certain points (cf. 143). As I mentioned earlier, phenomenologically, there is no image in itself: there is only an image of something (146). Consciousness as intentionality thus becomes the means of combating “the errors of a certain immanentism”, which, in the case of Berkeley, enables one to say that there is only consciousness. With every intentionality, therefore, there is always a kind of dual structure: consciousness and its object; but this is a dual structure whereby consciousness is a mode of appearing of the object. There is no conscious object on one side and real object on the other. Intentionality, therefore, is not a simple voluntarism. It is not because an object is chosen that it is significant, but because there is no consciousness without an object of consciousness. Choice and psychology are quite another matter. From this it also follows that there is no separate mental or other entity—no simulacrum—that exists in parallel with the object of perception, the truly existing object. The simulacrum in this context becomes, for Sartre, the “métaphysique immanentist de l’image” (“immanentist metaphysics of the image” (148)). The notion of intentionality, then, enables the abandonment of this metaphysical view. Intentionality, or the avoidance of immanentism, also enables a distinction to be made, as we shall see, between perception and the image. This is the theme to which we now turn in the context of Sartre’s later work on the imaginary.

284 

J. LECHTE

2  The Image and the Imaginary The image, Sartre declares at an early stage in The Imaginary, is not another reality; it is not a simulacrum. To assume that the image is a simulacrum is to commit the error of the “illusion of immanence” (illusion d’immanence) (2004, 5). There may be an image of reality (of the thing, object, individual, etc.), but there is no reality of the image. The image is not a different version of the object: there is no unreal image on one side and a real object on the other. Nor should an image be confused with perception. In a perception of the Parthenon one will be able to distinguish the number of columns and will probably be interested in making this distinction. In an image of the Parthenon, on the other hand, the number of columns is quite irrelevant; for in this case the “column-ness” of columns is the important and interesting thing as far as the image qua image is concerned. Thus pronounced are the rudiments of Sartre’s theory of the image, and thence of the imaginary. And even though Sartre eventually seems to erode the solidity of the principle of the imaging consciousness (conscience imageante) at the end of The Imaginary, we shall follow the philosopher as he attempts to delineate the image as such without reducing it to a simulacrum. The imaging consciousness, then, is not a perception. The latter is analogical being formed by sense data deriving from objects in external reality. It is thus the basis of a thetic consciousness, or a consciousness founded on the subject-object relation. An image, by contrast, is a “non-thetic” consciousness, a consciousness without an object. When dealing with various forms of representation, careful distinctions need to be made as far as the image is concerned. The photographic image thus has two aspects. One aspect is the photograph as physical object; the other is the photograph as image. With a painting, a similar situation pertains regarding the distinction between the physical object given in a perception and an image—as it does with any physical form of representation whatsoever. The perception of the physical object that has been assigned the task of representation is quite different from the imaging consciousness. And this implies, in effect, that the image qua image—or imaging consciousness—is indifferent to the physical form of representation. The image, in effect, largely transcends its incarnation. This also means that an image has a specific relation to presence, such that when—as Sartre puts it— an image of a friend is produced in the mind, it is the friend who is the object of consciousness, not the image. This shows that an image is not some kind of container within which a content (presence of a friend) is housed. On the contrary, the image is the presence of the friend in consciousness. Or rather, the image is the consciousness as such of the friend, or of what is imaged. Whether this image appears immediately in the mind as a memory, or in a representation makes no difference to the imagining consciousness. For the imaged is always the object of an imaging consciousness, not the representation; to repeat, the imaged is a consciousness of what is imaged. By way of illustration, Sartre refers to the portrait of Charles VIII:

  IMAGE AND THE ILLUSION OF IMMANENCE IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 

285

It is he that we see, not the picture, and yet we posit him as not being there: we have only reached him “as imaged”, “by the intermediary” of the picture. One sees that the relation that consciousness posits in the imaging attitude is magical. (2004, 23)

Charles VIII is “there” through the image, even though to be “there” entails not being there in person. Even though Charles VIII is not there in person, the imaging consciousness brings him there—brings him into presence. Through the image, one is able to say that, “Charles VIII is at one and the same time over there and in the past” (23). In the imaging consciousness, the portrait as a series of brush strokes does not exist; there is instead only the image as the presence of the king. In perception, only the portrait exists as a physical object in the world, and the king is absent. Sartre’s thesis aims at showing how important it is that perception and image do not become confused, as he is concerned to show that an image is not a simulacrum. To think the image of a painting is not to think of it as a painted image. In a painting of Pierre, says Sartre, Pierre is not thought as the image of the painting; the painting is not an image of Pierre. Sartre concludes thus: “in the imaging attitude, the picture is nothing but a way for Pierre to appear to me as absent. So the picture gives Pierre, though Pierre is not there” (24). Through a similar logic an image as an imitation is not an analogon of what is imitated; the imitation, in other words is not a separate entity. Thus, the imitation of Maurice Chevalier does not produce a separate image in the mind which may then be compared with the imitated singer (25). Rather, the imitation is made by signs given by the imitator and these signs evoke Maurice Chevalier himself. In short, the imitator is Maurice Chevalier. As such, imitation evokes, according to Sartre, the possessed of primitive dances rituals (29). A visual sign in general is therefore an evocation. As such, Sartre’s argument implies, it brings what is envisaged into presence. An evocation qua evocation is thus entirely transparent. The sign of a man brings the man into presence as an image. It matters little whether this sign is conventionalized or whether it is iconic; the effect is the same, namely, to put consciousness in touch with what is evoked independently of the evocation. Of interest to a study of the image is the way imaging works in Sartre’s thesis in relation to reading fiction. Here, we have to do with “imaging knowledge” (savoir imageant). Thus, in the act of reading the reader is in the presence of imaging knowledge as an unreal world of latent images: To read a novel is to take a general attitude of consciousness: the attitude largely resembles that of a spectator who, in the theatre, sees the curtain rising. It is preparing to discover a whole world, which is not that of perception, but neither is it that of mental images. To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. (64)

286 

J. LECHTE

In effect, Sartre’s view of reading, as the view of knowledge consciousness, is not the critic’s view, nor is it the view of reflexive consciousness. Indeed, the image as here evoked is the sphere through which evocation takes place; it is thus a pure transparency—the mechanism through which the reader would participate in the world unfolded in the writing. Truly imaginary reading, then, is not first a reading of the words, then a transporting of the reader into the imaginary world of the novel. Similarly, reading fiction is not to be made aware of style, or of sentence formation. On the contrary, to read fiction is to be transported (metaphorized?) into another world; it is to be in another world. Knowledge of the fictive world does not derive either from the meaning of words, or from what words signify. No amount of effort is likely to make a world arise out of “office”, “third floor”, “building”, and “suburb” (65). The same is not the case when one reads in Sartre’s example that: “he hastily descended the three floors of the building” (65; translation modified). Here, words cease to be signifiers and become the intended thing itself. In this formulation, the words evoke a world and are effaced in the evocation. In Sartre’s version of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, the object of affect is in consciousness. Thus, joy is the joy of something, just as hate is the hatred of something. But this, Sartre says, is also the consciousness of something. In other words, affectivity is affective consciousness—not in the reflexive or “intellectualist” sense of consciousness where a possibility of a meta-language is opened up, but in the sense that consciousness is the access to the affect as affect. Or again, consciousness is the affective investment in an object such that the union of consciousness and a lived relation to the object are one and the same thing. In sum: “A consciousness is always transparent to itself; it must therefore be, at the same time, entirely knowledge and entirely affectivity” (72). For the Sartrian, there is no affectivity in itself any more than there is consciousness in itself or an image in itself. Language, too, has no existence in itself outside a meaning immediately evoked by words. This is to say that there is no reality of affectivity, consciousness, or of words. Instead there is intentionality: consciousness of something. Might there not be word-images, however? Sartre responds quite definitely by saying that words are not images; for when a word becomes an image it ceases to be a sign (word) (84).

3   Iconism and the Image in Semiotics Sartre not only differs with Hume on this point, but he also differs with a semiological approach like that of Umberto Eco. In the late-1960s and 1970s, semiotics and structuralism came to the fore as movements that opposed Sartre’s notion of the image. It was the age where, in relation to the image, the notion of “media specificity” dominated the theoretical landscape. In analyzing “iconism”, Eco begins with Charles Morris’s definition of an icon as a sign which “has the properties of its denotata” (Eco 1979, 192), and with Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of an icon as “similitude”. In both cases the semiotic approach then supposedly proceeds to dismantle the very

  IMAGE AND THE ILLUSION OF IMMANENCE IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 

287

notion of icon by showing that in fact no icon actually has the properties of its denotata, nor is an iconic sign entirely similar to what it signifies. Thus, a portrait of the Queen of England does not have the properties of a real person—let alone the Queen; while similitude, instead of being derived from a relationship of similarity between the qualities of sign and thing, ends up, in the great majority of cases, being conventionally established. Nevertheless, Eco concedes that the icon is a case of ratio difficilis, meaning by this that iconism is a difficulty for the code; icons, in other words, are instances of the difficulty to encode (or to think), but not of the impossibility to encode. And once encoding takes place, it is often the vehicle through which the presence or absence of iconism is evaluated. Invention, too, is a ratio difficilis: it is thus another instance of the difficulty of encoding. Ironically, perhaps, the very difficulty of encoding serves to strengthen the coding process; or rather, the difficulty in encoding renders the code more supple and subtle. Despite this, and despite a reputation as a semiotician of the code, it is interesting to note that Eco bases his theory of iconism on a thorough-going form of realism. For, in order to discern the multifarious ways in which convention insinuates itself within the icon, a comparison is often made with a real entity, or with a real process (cf. sweetness as being to do with an “interaction with our taste buds” (1979, 195)). And this comparison is made to appear entirely plausible and necessary. Thus, one knows that Morris’s definition of iconism as an identity between a sign and “its denotata” is defective because it is possible to compare a supposedly iconic sign (portrait of Queen Elizabeth) with an evocation of the real Queen: the latter is found to have none of the physical qualities of the portrait. What Eco defines as the qualities of the portrait, Sartre defines as perception, which is different from the image, as we have seen, so Eco, quite astonishingly, avoids the issue of the image here. And we shall return to this. Similarly, the glass of beer in an advertising poster is problematically iconic when the perceptual structure relating to it is compared to the perceptual structure relating to “an actual glass of beer” (193). Again, in analyzing Peirce’s definition of the icon as a similarity between a sign and its object, Eco can, it seems, only problematize the definition by comparing features of a signobject with those of a real object. This comparison is possible because no sign could be similar to its object in every respect. For then, not only would there be no difference between object and sign, but there would be no sign either. Similitude thus has to come from a choice of features between which there is deemed to be a relation of similarity. On this basis, similitude can exist between two triangles that are quite different in size. For, as Eco says, “one decides to recognize as similar two things because one chooses certain elements as pertinent and disregards others” (196). This view enables Eco to argue that it requires “a certain training” to recognize similitude. But he again reinforces the point with the example of comparing a real entity—the Cheops Pyramid— with its model: one would have to learn in what sense the model is similar to the real object.

288 

J. LECHTE

Exactly the same point can be made with reference to the way Eco uses the work of Gombrich. Thus, in citing Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros as referred to by Gombrich, Eco, almost inevitably, turns to the relationship between the drawing and a real animal. In fact, the semotician claims, Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros as a series of imbricated plates is not as farfetched as it might appear; for “if we were to examine the skin of a rhinoceros close to, we would notice such roughness that, from a certain point of view (in the case, for example, of a parallel between human skin and that of the rhinoceros), Dürer’s graphic exaggeration […] would be rather more realistic than the image in [a] photograph” (205; emphasis added). The italicized words, in particular, point to a relationship between a real entity, or object, and the sign. This relationship between sign and entity is based on difference: on the difference between a real rhinoceros and its icon; on the difference between real human skin and real rhinoceros skin—but equally, on the difference between each of these and its represented form; and on the difference, finally, between the photographic image, the drawing, and reality. In Eco’s analysis, if iconism in Peirce is founded on the similitude between sign and object, conventionality derives from the difference between the reality and the sign as such. As a result, not only does Eco rely on a negative approach to an understanding of the icon, while Peirces’s approach is affirmative (the sign is like the object), but conventionality as the undermining of iconic realism is in fact unthinkable without reference to a notion of the real as such. It is as though everything happens on two levels: the level of the sign and the level of reality. We shall not elaborate here on whether, for this reason, this aspect of Eco’s theory of semiotics is essentially nineteenth century in its orientation; rather, our interest is in the implications that Eco’s approach might have for Sartre’s theory of the image. In this vein, we note that Eco’s reference to the real as a way of establishing the conventionality of the iconic sign only displaces the key question that semiotics is supposed to illuminate: namely, what is reality, or the referent, semiotically speaking? By this, we are not asking about what reality is in an ontological sense, but about what it is in the interplay between the real and the sign system. More directly, Eco does not explain how the sign system makes it possible to refer to a “real” rhinoceros. It is as though a real rhinoceros—or real human skin—were quite divorced from the issue of signification. Another way of approaching the issue, however, derives from asking about how the sign gives access to the hypothetically real entity. That is, we want to know how language works when Eco is ignoring its working. How does the real object come to us if the sign system is essentially conventional? In by-passing this question, Eco is unwittingly forced into Sartre’s problematic of the image and the imaginary. And, in a general sense, he is forced into Sartre’s problematic because the opposition, “conventional-natural”, and more broadly, “nature-culture”, governs Eco’s approach to iconicity and to signification in general. Thus, the separateness of the conventional and the natural spheres leads directly into the illusion of immanence: the fact that signifying supposedly becomes an entity in its own right. Only through the illusion of

  IMAGE AND THE ILLUSION OF IMMANENCE IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 

289

immanence can an iconic sign be compared with a real object; only through the illusion of immanence can supposedly natural, perceptual processes be grasped as a separate realm from cultural representations. Eco’s approach—and his work is representative of a large number of semioticians—not only recognizes key oppositions which raise the question of the illusion of immanence (see 189–190), but also valorizes convention over its “natural” other. In a bizarre twist, Eco is in fact forced to valorize the natural in order to prove the predominance of the conventional, or signifying sign-system dimension, over the natural itself. Thus, a photograph we might think is a “motivated” or “iconic” sign of some note, given that it is the outcome of analogical processes (interplay between real, exterior light and a negative). Eco, however, says that, nonetheless, a photograph is digitally analyzable—digitality being the basis of conventionality. Eco’s interest, as semiotician, in a photograph (not just in photographs, but in all iconic entities and processes) is to do with its reality (as grasped in perception), not with its status as an image in Sartre’s sense. As a reality, the photograph can be brought into the sphere of conventional processes: it can be digitally analyzed. Digital analysis, then, confirms the photograph as a singular entity that is independent of what it signifies—independent of the imaged that it actually becomes when the illusion of immanence is avoided. Quite the contrary of Eco’s semiotic approach to the photograph is Barthes’s approach in Camera Lucida (2010)—a work written in homage to Sartre’s Imaginaire. Barthes proposes that, contrary to the imitations of painting or discourse, “in photography I can never deny that the thing has been there” (76). There is a “superimposition” “of reality and the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography” (77) (“noeme”, from Husserl’s “noema” and “noesis”: the minimal element of thought. From the Greek, nous as mind or intellect). For Barthes, the noeme of photography, encapsulated in the phrase, “that-has-been”, is also the mode of appearing of the image as image: which in fact means, in light of Sartre, the mode of appearing of the imaged as such. Barthes confirms this in his own way by explaining that: “It seems in Latin ‘photograph’ would be said imago lucis opera expressa; which is to say: image revealed, ‘extracted’, ‘mounted’, ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light” (81). The significance of the noeme comes in the (personal) response to a photograph as the vehicle of the real: “the Winter Garden Photograph, however pale, is for me the treasury of rays which emanated from my mother as a child, from her hair, her skin, her dress, her gaze, on that day” (82). A Sartrian, rather than a semiotic, approach enables an interpretation of Barthes’s treasured photograph of the Winter Garden, not just because it is Barthes’s mother who is there in the photograph. Much more is indeed at stake. For not only does Barthes identify the person in the photograph as his own mother, but the mother is alive for him. The image is his mother as she was, his mother who is present as having-been. This is the magical aspect of the

290 

J. LECHTE

image showing itself, but showing itself only through a making present of what is imaged. To those who, like Eco, say that the photograph is ultimately coded, that it is “nothing but artifice”, that “the photographic optic is subject to Albertian perspective” (Barthes 2010, 88), Barthes offers a Sartrian rebuttal for our time: This argument is futile: nothing can prevent the Photograph from being analogical; but at the same time, Photography’s noeme has nothing to do with analogy (a feature which it shares with all kinds of representations). The realists, of whom I am one […] do not take the photograph for a “copy” of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art. To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. (88–89; Barthes’s emphasis)

Along with the photographic image, therefore, the image is discernible. Its discernibility is the magic moment which enables one to accept that the that-­ has-­been is the presence of the imaged itself. To deny, refuse, or erase this ideal moment, as a real moment, is also to deny the image qua image. Such a denial or erasure arrives when the code becomes absolute.

4  The Image as Evocation and Incantation With the photograph, then, past-time is recaptured. As such, the image becomes an evocation of the viewer’s own death. To some extent, the image brings the presence of ideality (time). That is, the reality (object, entity, etc.) that the photograph depicts is a medium for the presence of time as such. It is in this that the photograph is sui generis, unlike other analogical procedures, such as a sketch or a painting, as analyzed by Sartre. For Sartre the image has the analogical features, and these bring the imaged object into presence. Because the image is not a copy of reality (Barthes), it can be a suggestion in the imitation of a human being or a thing. Whether as analogue or as a pure photographic authentication of time, we know that the image is not the thing itself. This is what makes the image so intriguing and so fascinating. The image, which can be what it is only through the difference between the image and the object or content that is imaged, is also that kind of entity which suppresses its essence totally. And were it not to suppress this essence, it would not be the image that it is. Nevertheless, do we not find that a moment of incarnation (the sketch, the photograph, etc.) is also part of the image’s mode of being, albeit in an entirely negative sense? Even though an incarnation must be entirely transparent so that the image can appear, is there not a sense in which incarnation is the obstacle—the difference—that the image must overcome—or better: must transcend—in being the image that it is?

  IMAGE AND THE ILLUSION OF IMMANENCE IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 

291

To answer the latter question fully would take us too far afield vis-à-vis our effort to outline the nature of Sartre’s notion of the image. However, a number of points are worth noting. Firstly, technology is a contingency which exists at the level of perception. By contrast, the ideal moment of the image is nothing technological. Secondly, within the Sartrian frame, technology may not even be relevant, even if an exact likeness of the object is sought. For if we pursue the logic of Sartre’s principle that the image can be an evocation, and not a replication, the image does not even have to be borne by any analogon. A word (a name), as well as a few strokes on the canvas, or lines on the page can bring the imaged into presence. Or again, given its minimalist vehicle, the imaged may well be evoked by music or an aroma, or by touching. In effect, the evocation of the image can be a synaesthesia. In such circumstances, realism is not the result of technique in the interest of resemblance; rather, the idea of realism brings the image with it. Realism is there to distinguish the image from the sign. Realism is the image as the presence of the imaged—the presence, for example, of a horse as evoked by certain undulating lines on a white sheet of parchment. Whether, in addition, the horse has a symbolic aspect, we leave to one side. The essential point is that the means of the image’s evocation can be absolutely minimalist in relation to what is imaged. It is in this sense that a word can evoke an image—that in saying the word, “horse”, I see the horse as present before me. Such then was the basis of surrealist poetry, especially as practised by Breton. In this, we find a certain “iconicity” emerging in the word; its arbitrary status as a sign, as grasped in perception, disappears in light of the presence of the imaged object. Perhaps it may still be objected that the claim that the content of the image is present is an illusion. We need to be precise here: does the objection turn around the notion that the content is supposed to be present when it is not, or is it that the image passes itself off as something real and actual when it is not? When I see Freud through the artist Valerio Adami’s black line drawing on a color field (Adami 1973)—when Freud is present as imaged—it is less the case that Freud exists, and more that his presence does not depend on the technical virtuosity of the representation. In effect, the representation disappears into the image. This is what is at stake—not Freud’s real or unreal existence. Freud’s existence would be an issue, were the question a technical one of representation, in which case, the drawing could be compared with the known, or existing object of the representation. In this context, there is a reality of the representation where existence is in fact at stake. With the image, on the other hand, there is no such duality, as we have seen. Rather, the image is the presence (of the thing or entity). A Sartrian approach comes close to grasping this when it is said—in the example mentioned above—that in an image of the Pantheon, one cannot count the number of columns. As a perception, the empirical detail of the Pantheon takes precedence and the image disappears. When the image, by contrast, appears, the empirical (perceptual) aspect disappears.

292 

J. LECHTE

When in pursuit of the image, however, even this insight has its difficulty. For in order, through a certain iconicity, to be the presence of the thing or entity, the image must entail a certain focus, or clarity, which makes possible the certainty regarding the identity of the image. An image which is not focused (as a photograph might be out of focus) cannot be read as the certainty of (a) presence. But an image which is in focus (as a photograph might be in focus) is also the outcome of a technique or mediation. As such, it does not qualify to be an image in Sartre’s definition. For a distinction can be made between the focusing and the content. Or, more accurately, the object and clarity are inseparable in a perception. Surely, however, a spectator does not perceive the clarity as such of a figure, and rather sees the image? Contrary to Sartre, when he comments on color in Matisse (2004, 190), as soon as the red becomes a pullover through focus and form, the image disappears and a perception emerges. That is, unless a pullover in general were being aimed at and not just one emerging at random. In the end, though, we are arguing that focus and form do not belong essentially to the image—that they do not belong to (its) presence. Surely, it will be objected, the reverse is the case: it is just when clarity emerges that the object becomes present as an image and that when things are out of focus, a perception is in play? In effect, it is when things are unclear and I cannot see the image as the presence of the thing that a painting as painting emerges. We have said above that it can be suggestion and a minimal evocation that brings the imaged into presence. To continue in this vein, an image is the ink blot, or more profoundly, the image is present in a Turner painting much more than in Holbein. Modern painting à la Rothko, is in this sense, painting as a profound study of the image. For it is only with Rothko that we see that indistinctness does not entail a perception of the canvas, or of the paint as such. An image, then, is not an imitation of perception. A super-realist painting does not, after all, put us in touch with the object; it is not transparent, however clear and focused it might be. For, like all realism, it is an imitation of perception and calls on the spectator to marvel at the virtuosity of technique. The image, by contrast, is borne by the subtlest evocation; often by an evocation that is barely one. This Sartrian argument is no doubt difficult to accept today because it implies that the image is very much part of the ephemeral and idealist side of things. Thus, the body becomes a medium for the image-soul, as Plato said. The body is, as it were, the appearance of the soul. Or again, in the example given by Sartre (2004, 67), the words “a beautiful woman” evoke the image of beauty, an image that is not reducible to a body as such. Words evoke the body which becomes the canvas through which the image of beauty appears. Or again, form and volume—shape, density, and size—is simply the medium of the body itself, a body that does not exist in perception but only in image. This presence of the body in image is also the articulation of the imaginary. In this regard, Sartre refers to the act of imagination as a magic act (125). This is because he understands the role of the image within the sphere of consciousness in the manner of phenomenology. But it could equally be said that the

  IMAGE AND THE ILLUSION OF IMMANENCE IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 

293

image is a magical mechanism, given that it brings the imaged into presence. In addition to being magical, the image (substituting “image” for “imagination”) is an incantation destined to make the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take possession of it. There is always in this act something of the imperious and the infantile. (125; emphasis added)

As an incantation, what Sartre calls the imaginary function—ironically—defies the existential level of perception. The latter always implies the division of subject and object, whereas no such division is implied at the level of the imaginary—or, as I prefer, the image. Incantation, in short, is the transcendence of the subject-object relation. The image-object is a non-real object (an objet irréel (125; and passim)). As timeless and spaceless, the image, as we can interpret it in Sartre’s text, is easily assimilated to the Husserlian notion of ideality, which is also spaceless and timeless.

5  Conclusion We cannot claim to be able to pursue here all the possible issues that are raised by Sartre’s study of the image as “immaterial”. There is, however, one point that we need to address. This may be encapsulated in the following dilemma: although Sartre even comes to claim that the image is the negation of the real object, what does this mean when a painting is destroyed by fire? More precisely, if, in fact, “l’acte négatif est constitutif de l’image” (the negative act is constitutive of the image), what would be the situation were Velázquez’s Las meninas (1656) to be destroyed by fire? Must we concede that the image still remains and that only the phenomenal form of the work has been lost? In arguing that we must make this concession (183), Sartre risks giving the image an autonomy that not only he himself acknowledges is not possible—cf. “When we speak of a world of irreal objects we use an inexact expression” (132), and: “an object as imaged is never frankly itself” (132–133)—but the illusion of immanence is only avoided if the real, so to speak, is a vehicle of the image. The image is not real, but it is only present in the real. Thus, when Las meninas is destroyed, the image must also disappear. The image, after all, needs an evocation (the painting) if it is to appear at all. That the evocation may be minimal does not alter the principle that where there is no evocation—no incantation, for example—there is no image. Unlike Sartre, perhaps, we are in the era of a minimalist (or potentially minimalist) evocation of the image. Thus, the actor playing Hamlet in the third decade of the twenty-first century does not have to imitate the unreal (fictional) figure of Hamlet (to the point of tears). Instead, the actor can evoke crying by mere suggestion; the actor lets the image work and in so doing marks out once more the debt we owe to Sartre.

294 

J. LECHTE

References Adami, Valerio. 1973. Freud. https://www.artprints.com/-­ap/Freud-­1973-­Posters_ p322294_.htm Viewed on 11 March 2020. Barthes, Roland. 2010 [1980]. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. by F. Kersten. Dordecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Volume 2. Trans. by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1986 [1940]. L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénomenologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1989 [1936]. L’Imagination. Paris: Qadrige/Presses Universitaires de France. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Trans. by Jonathan Weber. London and New York: Routledge. Wolf, Herta. 2007. “The Tears of Photography”. Grey Room, 29: 66–89.

Trait, Identity, and the Gaze in Jacques Lacan Andrei Gornykh

The initial push for Lacanian theory is given by confrontation with the neo-­ Freudists, who, in his opinion, led psychoanalysis to an impasse of the theory of autonomous ego. The autonomy of ego is defined by its ability to harmonize instinctual drives and requirements of the external world. Ego-psychological bios in psychoanalysis claims that the latter hinges on the identification of the analysand with “the strong ego of the analyst” (Evans 1996, 14–15). Correspondingly, this approach assumed a strengthening of the ego as a key to therapeutic strategy. But, according to Lacan, the ego is conditioned by the order of the signifier (the symbolic). As early as in 1938 Lacan claims that it is family complexes—which are interiorized social structures—that shape individual psychology (Lacan 1938). So, psychoanalysis radically breaks with any kind of biological reductionism in the understanding of the human being. And this is precisely what Freud did by his discovery of the unconscious in “The Interpretation of Dreams”. In standard point of view, the unconscious stands for the repressed (“latent content” of the dream, rooted in some organic incestuous drives). The motto of Lacanian psychoanalysis—the return to Freud—means something different: the unconscious is the very return of the repressed. The unconscious in the strict sense of the word is the very process (the dream-work) of transforming of hidden thoughts into the manifest form of dream images. Freud identifies two main modes of deforming the hidden thoughts of a dream—condensation and displacement, which are, for Lacan, linguistic mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy. Hence the main principle of structural psychoanalysis: “the

A. Gornykh (*) European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_18

295

296 

A. GORNYKH

unconscious is structured like a language”. Moreover, the very material of the operations of condensation and displacement is not so much images as words and letters: The condensing activity of the dream becomes most tangible when it has selected words and names as its object. In general words are often treated as things by the dream, and thus undergo the same combinations, displacements, and substitutions, and therefore also condensations, as ideas of things. (Freud 1913, 277)

This is the core of Freud’s discovery. Lacan elaborates it in structuralist terms as follows: the unconscious is a symbolic field of permutation of formal elements in accordance with linguistic rules within the framework of the signifying structure. This means that the relationship of the ego with the world is not reduced to adaptation (satisfaction of needs, discharge of tensions, harmonization). The unconscious takes them far beyond the principle of pleasure. Namely, in the dimension of symbolic repetition (see below), where the strengthening of the ego means undermining of the desire. The concept of “the mirror stage” Lacan considered the first strategic objection to the favour accorded in psychoanalytic theory to the supposedly “autonomous ego” (Lacan 2007, 684).

1   The Mirror Stage Two facts are starting points for Lacan. Firstly, the fact of prematurity of birth of the human child. The child appears to be a semi-autonomous part of the mother’s body. He is forced to build relationships with reality in a special, artificial way, for the simplest motor operations and movements in space are the most difficult problems for him. He cannot make any distinctions, with the main difference between “himself” and “not-himself” to begin with. He is a baby-blob, a blurry, amorphous, and fragmented body. Secondly comes the ability, acquired at 6–18  months, to recognize his reflection in the mirror. Manifestations of self-recognition in the mirror—facial expressions of insight, signs of euphoria—indicate that a significant shift is taking place in the child’s life. Namely, the mirror stage proves to be the basic mechanism of identification. At this stage, the constitution of the ontological structure of the human world begins. Seeing himself in a mirror, a child first gets an idea of himself ​​ as a whole body, as wholeness in general. The child assimilates his own visual image. From this moment, he quickly progresses in the use of his body. 1.1  Imago Such a mirror image Lacan denotes as imago. Imago is an image which is: 1. Ideal: a complete, well-formed object, or gestalt (when a seemingly chaotic set of points makes up a figure and is perceived, e.g. as a star tops).

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

297

The total form of child’s body is given to him “only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it” (Lacan 2007, 76). 2. Formative: able to shape personality and behavior. The paradox of the mirror situation is that the child, as it were, becomes the twin of his own reflection. The image projects a formal, visual integrity on him from outside. 3. Illusory: existing beyond the mirror, radically external, and alienated. This means that the way to get rid of one frustrating experience is no less traumatic. Adapting to the world, obtaining imaginary wholeness the child internalizes the self-alienating rupture. For the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity (Lacan 2007, 78). Identity in this way is ultimately a doomed attempt to remove alienation, to combine the “I” (je) in front of the mirror with the “ideal I” (moi) in the mirror. Thus, strengthening the ego does not lead to the original authenticity of coincidence with itself, but to the actualization of the gap itself on which the ego is hinged on. 1.2   Dialectics of the Imaginary The mirror duality of imaginary identity leads to the fact that objects in reality line up around the “wandering shadow” of his own self. They acquire a character, as Lacan says, essentially anthropomorphic, even egomorphic. That is, the very clear distinctness, autonomy, and integrity of any objects are possible as marked by the properties of the ego itself. In this relation to reality as to an open set of images, a person catches and constantly loses his own unity. Similarly, never a single object appears to be complete for him. The relationship with reality as an imaginary construct is reduced to a “series of mental experiences” that alienate a person from himself or undermine the ontology of the object (its autonomous integrity). The unity of object causes a state of tension in the subject who becomes unsatisfied desire. The perceived identity of subject makes the world decomposed, deprived of meaning. This “imaginary oscillation” determines the way the ego exists in reality (Lacan 1988, 166).

298 

A. GORNYKH

1.3   Madness of Egocentrism The “imaginary oscillation” between the loss of oneself and the object of desire is not a disease, weakness of the ego, but the human condition that sets the perception of the visible world, reality. When American Neo-Freudianism tries to turn psychoanalysis into a project of strengthening the ego, it’s based on “a complete misunderstanding of the mainspring by which Freud introduced the study of the ego into his doctrine—namely, on the basis of narcissism and in order to expose therein the sum total of the subject’s imaginary identifications” (Lacan 2007, 381). The struggle for the strong, unfrustrated ego is the effect of not understanding that the ego is frustration in its very essence. When the aboriginals motu-motu (New Guinea) first saw their reflection in the mirror, in Frazer’s description, they decided that this reflection was their “soul”. And according to the logic of Lacan, they are more right than the modern man who believes that “I am myself”. A madman is precisely someone who adheres to the imaginary, purely and simply (Lacan 1988, 243). Who merges with the ideal ego. Primitive identification through the image of a totem animal is more sound in this context: “One makes use of the ego in the same way as the Bororo does the parrot. The Bororo says ‘I am a parrot’, we say ‘I am myself (moi)’” (Lacan 1988, 39). 1.4   The Problem of Image Genesis But how the recognition of the mirror image takes place? Is this a happy spontaneous discovery of an individual that suspiciously takes place more or less in the same way in every circumstance? Lacan’s first answer to this seems to be that the child assimilates his external image through the so-called homeomorphic identification. For example, in the case of the migratory locust, the shift from the solitary to the gregarious form can be brought about by exposing an individual to “the exclusively visual action of an image akin to its own, provided the movements of this image sufficient resemble those characteristic of its species” (Lacan 2007, 76). But what then differs the human being from locusts? Later, developing the concept of traumatism of human destiny to its limit (which is enjoyment, jouissance), Lacan draws a radical distinction between human and non-human attitude to the image. It is the other form of identification—symbolic one—that allows to get out of imaginary impasses (first of all, to get rid of aggression). Symbolic identification lies in a different dimension—it is a way of grafting the signifier, language, to human existence. In order to set a landmark for the understanding the symbolic dimension of the image—in contrast to its realistic, mirror-like appearance—let’s put the following question. Why—both in the ontogenetic plan of children’s development and in terms of phylogenesis— do we come across a basic anthropological phenomenon: primitive line art, contour drawing?

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

299

And here the key to the Lacanian theory of the image is the concept of the unary trait, one single line (Einziger Zug in Freud). This is exactly what Lacan himself considers to be his fundamental contribution to the development of the Freudian theory of subjectivity: “(…) I will borrow something from Freud’s text and give it a sense that is not highlighted there, namely, the function of the unary trait, which is the function of the simplest form of mark, which properly speaking is the origin of the signifier. (…) Everything that interests us analysts as knowledge originates in the unary trait” (Lacan 2008, 46).

2   The Unary Trait The starting point for Lacan here is Freud’s example of identification of Dora with his father. She unconsciously imitates father’s physical symptom of coughing which becomes her hysterical symptom. What strikes Freud here is that “the identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from the person who is its object” (Freud 1955b, 107). Lacan gives this term of Freudian theory a new conceptual scope. A trait ceases to be a psychological feature and stands for the structuralist pure difference (differential feature). The most primitive example of which one can find in a notch made by a primitive hunter in wood or bone indicating a killed animal. The notch that distinguishes it with ten other killed animals without remembering which is which. What radical novelty comes to existence through this anthropological phenomenon? It is the possibility of an “extreme reduction of all opportunities for qualitative difference” (Lacan 1961–1962, 6 December). Lacan emphasizes that the notches on bones made by Neolithic hunters are not yet enumerations, but collections of units. These units could be called the first signifiers. Because the animal marked by the notch is a dead, radically absent animal. In this capacity, it becomes an element of a series of marks. What is engraved on the bone is the void that comes to be instead of a creature that no longer exists. The void, as it were, is doubled and transferred to another substance where it is perpetuated. Perhaps on the bone of the killed animal himself. But not the bone becomes a monument to its former living wholeness. It is the artificial void introduced into the object that becomes a new, simple whole beyond the life—the unit (the one “one”). This unit can be combined with other units (the other “ones”). Thus it forms the foundation for the primitive economy of reserve and sharing. 2.1  Tatoo But where do these notches themselves come from? The notch in Lacan serves as a visual allegory of the elimination of the instinctive body. It is a projection, a trace of fundamental anthropological phenomena. “The subject himself is marked off by the single stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers” (Lacan 1981, 141). The function of the unary trait is

300 

A. GORNYKH

interpreted by Lacan as a function of a proper name. But this original name has little in common with the name that adults give to a child at birth. It is inscribed on the body by the Other. In the dimension of the symbolic (of social structure, social positions), the individual is presented as radically absent. Killed animal is an allegory of “death”, symbolization of the instinctive body. “The subject represents the specific trait of being distinguished from the living individual” (Lacan 2008, 13). Tattoo—this proto-image—means: the beginning of identity does not lie in the moment of the original identity of the ineffable self, which is then alienated in social roles. On the contrary, it is a moment of pure difference with oneself, making social roles possible. The very fact that in the social dimension an individual is represented by means of a signifier that has nothing in common with its live uniqueness defines a radical absence in the order of the symbolic as a way of existing in it. 2.2  Repetition In the symbolic subject is represented as one “one”—such is the anthropological meaning of a tattoo, “notches” on the body. In this first signifier “one one” the possibility of all other signifiers is contained: the second one, the third one, and so on. As soon as the second trait appears (the second killed animal)—it turns out to be exactly the same as the first, despite all the possible physical differences. At this point in the repetition, the bodily uniqueness of the first killed animal is completely erased. One mark in itself can still serve as a non-­ arbitrary sign, like a “pictogram” of a singular entity or, as Lacan says, a unique hunting event, an adventure. But, being repeated, the notch loses all connection with what it refers to. One animal becomes identical with another. Both cease to exist, lose all their features, except one—they no longer exist. Thus, the notch as the primary signifier is the embodiment of the principle of repetition. The paradox of one single trait is that it always implies another, in a sense it is a repetition of itself. In this sense, Lacan writes: To be sure, the unary trait is never alone. Therefore, the fact that it repeats itself—that it repeats itself in never being the same—is properly speaking the order itself, the order in question because language is present and already there, already efficacious. (Lacan 2008, 155)

So, being marked by the trait, the individual becomes an element among other elements. He becomes that “empty place” for which you can substitute another individual. Not in the sense of a cog in the wheel in a social machine. But in the sense of a closed symbolic contour, in which social roles and corresponding discourses like cradles of the Ferris wheel are regularly filled and released by different visitors: the son becomes the father of the son, who will become the father in turn, and so on.

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

301

The tattoo certainly has the function of being for the Other, of situating the subject in it, marking his place in the field of the group’s relations, between each individual and all the others. And, at the same time, it obviously has an erotic function, which all those who have approached it in reality have perceived (Lacan 1981, 206). For the mark on the skin in fantasy inspires nothing other than a subject identifying itself as “the object of jouissance” (Lacan 2008, 49). But where do the tattoos themselves come from, who makes the very first cut in the body?

3  Enjoyment (Jouissance) Now it is necessary to refer to the Freudian narrative of the primal patricide. The dominant male of the primitive tribe has absolute power over all its members. The cruel despotism of the Father and severe prohibition of tribe’s females provokes his sons to revolt. The brothers kill and eat the father. The echo of this first event of history, according to Freud, makes up a core of various cults, namely, the “eucharistic meal”. When during the sacrifice—the symbol of the deity (usually an animal) is killed and eaten together. It is killed by one stroke, energetic, accurate, only one. For the second could not happen to be in case of an omnipotent Father. During Bedouin sacrificial ritual, Freud gives an example, a camel (a sacral animal) is bound upon an altar and when the leader inflicts the first wound the whole company falls on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of flesh and devouring them raw with wild haste (Freud 1955a, 138). All members of the tribe as one identify themselves with this patricidal gesture. For Lacan, this moment is an outburst of excessive enjoyment (jouissance): liberation from absolute dependence and at the same time access to all forbidden women at once. But that jouissance lasts only a moment—paternal enjoyment proves to be unattainable for the brothers. And the point is not so much that one of them would need to return the others to the previous state of absolute dependence (or simply kill), becoming the new Father. Without the paternal prohibition, the brothers are deprived of even the pleasure of fantasizing the enjoyment of the Father. The patriarchal figure of the Other acted as the barrier that made enjoyment possible as a fantasy: if it were not the Father who has this, this would be all ours. Protection against guilt and despair is the repetition of attempts to achieve enjoyment. This means defence from the Father by killing/reviving him again and again, which forms the neurotic basis of religiosity. In man, stresses Lacan, “in repetition, in the form of the unary trait to begin with, it is found to be the means of jouissance—precisely insofar as jouissance goes beyond the limits imposed, under the term of pleasure, on the usual tensions of life” (Lacan 2008, 48). The pleasure principle drives to the restoration of homeostasis, imaginary coincidence with oneself. The reality principle, on the contrary, is the work of the mechanism of undermining vitality repetitions (of a failure) that leads beyond of pleasure and life itself.

302 

A. GORNYKH

4   Sacrifice Where does the substitute of Father come from? What if the killer himself is identified with the victim? In the gesture of cutting repeatedly and turning on itself, the revived Father comes to be symbolic. This repeated reversibility of the trait, according to Lacan, clearly manifests itself in the sado-masochistic flagellation act, which establishes “the equivalence between the gesture of making a mark and the body, object of jouissance” (Lacan 2008, 49). The ritual incision provides identification with the totem, the bearer of the same “mark”. The individual gets cut as a “painkiller” from the unbearable affect of guilt and anxiety. He turns into a carrier of the signifier, a pure difference with his own body. The body turns into a white sheet for recording of signifiers. The signifier introduces pauses, deferrals, intervals, inhibitions, and blockages into the organic continuum of instinct. The very ability to voluntarily endure pain is such an artificial pause in the reaction. Not to mention the various forms of abstinence and ceremonies in relation to sex, food, and so on. One single trait, the first tattoo is the unimaginable prototype of the Father, the unpronounceable Name of the Father, the fatherly No in relation to natural instincts and individual drives. The basic cult practices of sacrifice and initiation we are dealing with cuts in the literal and figurative sense. A piece of flesh and a “piece” of instinct are cut out, Lacan repeats. And the emptiness of the deformed need becomes a substance of desire. Part of our “flesh” is drawn into the mechanism of symbolic exchanges, becomes subject to the rules of permutation, or an object of exchange par excellence.

5  Fantasy In the acquired ability to endure pain for the sake of another, suffering pain for my sake, with me, instead of me, the dimension of fantasy opens up. Subject, as it were, can see himself from the outside. This is the visual effect of pure difference with oneself. This is how the protective mechanism of fantasy works— an impossible flashback is made at that last prehistoric moment when, as a result of collective action, the space of enjoyment opened up before the subject. A trait is an inescapable memory of this flash of jouissance. The mechanism of fetishistic fixation is described in psychoanalysis in the similar way. The fetish is the last thing seen before the traumatic spectacle of “castration”—the female genital organ as a “scar” in place of the penis. So, for example, for Freud, an unbearable sight throws a little boy to the “fur” of pubic hair, underwear, stockings, legs, shoes, and so on. And this image turns into a frozen picture, jamming imagination during sexual excitement. Lacan expands the narrow family-patriarchal boundaries of classical psychoanalysis and emphasizes that the main characteristic of fantasy is the frozenness of image itself, the very opening of some other scene. Fantasy is like a frozen image on a cinema screen—in order to avoid showing a traumatic scene which follows, so is the fantasy scene a defense which veils

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

303

castration (Lacan 1957). Fetishistic fantasy could be said to be the most stable, materialized fantasy, so to speak. And it is the subject himself who appears on this screen, on the scene of fantasy in the appearances that are most difficult to recognize as the ego (see, for instance, the case of Wolf Man). These phenomena are based on the unary trait, the little stick, the element of writing, “insofar as it is the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance” (Lacan 2008, 77). The whole culture of upbringing the child is rooted in the rites of initiation and based on the removal of the narcissistic child “from the euphoria of its own omnipotence”. Be it just a real single slap or single stroke by a whip or a switch in masochistic fantasy, primitive trait, notch, or scar—what intervenes here is “something that strikes out the subject, crosses him out, or abolishes him—this something is the signifier” (Lacan 2017, 224). To enter into the world of desire means “to undergo, right at the outset, the law imposed by this something that exists beyond—that we were calling it the father is no longer of any importance, it doesn’t matter—the law of the rod”. Thus the fantasy reveals an essential relationship between the subject and the signifier (Lacan 2017, 226), for sexual drive is the most difficult to control. It becomes a model of taming instinct as such. The penis is entangled in the network of the most detailed and numerous regulations.

6   Phallus We can say that the penis is to the phallus as a dead animal is to its notch. The phallus is a void that has found its paradoxical body. The trait generates a virtual part—object “a”. Object “a” is a designation of the exchange function, metonymic displacement of one object by another. If, as a result of the “resurrection” of the Father, the brothers renounce all women of a clan, this means that they must exchange them for women from a different clan (paying the price of circumcised organ as Bible says, notes Lacan). The exchange process becomes valuable in itself. Because the object of exchange is ultimately the object “a”: the embodied emptiness of the mutual denial of group members. Object “a” circulates in the circle of brothers as a guarantor of their brotherhood. In other words, subject’s trait, mark represents him to another bearer of the trait as an equal, the same (the one one, the other one). The brothers are closely interrelated by this common materialized absence of a part of instinct, their readiness for self-sacrifice. Object “a” is an object that is one for all. It exists only in a chain of substitutions, in the process of exchange. Giving it, I get the same in return, albeit in a different material form. In the Freudian case of little Hans, Lacan finds a literal illustration of this paradoxical status of phallus. Once, Hans asks the father to draw a giraffe, whom they saw at the zoo. Father makes the rough outline of the giraffe. Hans asks to add wiwimacher (pee maker, penis) to the giraffe. A lively interest in penis (especially maternal one) became a phobia trigger. In response, the father offers him to do it himself. And Hans draws one single line. This line is depicted

304 

A. GORNYKH

as separated from the rest of the body. Then he lengthens it: a large giraffe must have a large wiwimacher. And then beneath he draws a puddle of pipi using the same single line horizontally. The penis turns into a separate trait that can be manipulated (lengthened, shortened) and repeated. It becomes a means of exchange—a drawing—between child and parents.

7   The Trait Hans’ key phobic fantasy follows later. Two giraffes—a big one and a little one—pop up in Hans’ room. The big giraffe screamed because Hans had taken from him the little one. The only thing that Hans knows about the little giraffe is that it was “crumpled”. Hans is asked—“what does it mean”? “That means that you can crumple it and sit on it”—replies Hans—and shows it practically by picking up a bit of paper and crumpling it. The little giraffe, concludes Lacan, is the part of a large giraffe. The detached line that has turned into a contour, another strange, incorporeal giraffe, a symbol that can be moved back and forth, exchanged, thrown away. These Hans’ drawings and fantasies are, as it were, illustrations of the passage through the Oedipus stage, during which the maternal Other is reduced to “the necessary support for the circulation of the signifier” (Lacan 1957). Thus Hans produces the series of mythic creations (horses, giraffes, and lions), obtaining the phallic object in relations with his mother, who serves that third, unpaired new element in the world of Hans, which must itself be integrated at the end to go beyond the intersubjectivity of the lure (Lacan 1957). It takes him out of a stasis of imaginary fixation on a mirror “double”. As a result, Hans “learns how to play with images” (Lacan 1957). The symbolic exchange blocks dual imaginary relationships (narcissistic fixations) and introduces into the game a system of asymmetries and distances that are foundations of social life. The function of a single trait compensates the individual for the loss of the instinctive sexual object (genitals of the opposite sex, capable of reproduction). The compensation proves to be the holistic image of the other. 7.1   The Trait and the Genesis of Image Why does the visual dimension of the beauty in the sexual object come to the forefront?—asks Freud. The feasible answer for him is that “the progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts” (Freud 1953, 156). Here Freud mentions the term “sublimation” for the first time. The latter denotes the possibility of the shift of interest from the genitals to the shape of the body as a whole. Moreover, despite the fact that the beautiful has its roots in sexual excitation, according to Freud, we never regard the genitals themselves as really “beautiful”. It is rather ugly and should be concealed. Lacan says that the phallus is not just covered up, it is removed from the imaginary, as if “it is

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

305

circumscribed (cernée) and, in a word, cut out of the specular image” (Lacan 2014, 39). The phallus (minus-phi) functions in the visual field as an empty contour that carries out the basic structuring of the world into a figure and background. It serves a condition for the possibility of any image. This is not a blind-spot that needs to be finished in imagination. This “cut-out” line creates a real support for building a holistic image of the body. The best example of this is the description of the genesis of the love image in Marcel Proust. At first, the face of the other consists of fragmented features that exist separately, in the form of a “nebula”. But as soon as a lover’s eye notices a certain feature—for example, Rachel’s thin, straight nose line—all other features get reorganized around it and the face turns into a constellation of features, a captivating image from which the lover cannot take his eyes off. This feature serves as a trigger for imagination, a crystallization point around which the image arise. Proust describes it as a “veil” that allows you to accumulate a host of beautiful visions. The fetishistic trait has an abstract character (straightness, subtlety, smoothness, etc.). It does not contain anything actually sexual. In contrast to the position of Freud, who tends to consider fetish objects like the nose, long hair, legs, and so on as mimetic substitutes of the phallus. The animal focuses only on those objects (prey, genitals of other sex), which are significant for adaptation and survival. And vision here doesn’t play a decisive role. Hearing or smelling, for example, can be more important when looking for a sexual partner. Structuring of the human world is unnaturally neutralized, “exceptionally loose in relation to his needs”: “The human world isn’t at all structurable as an Umwelt, fitting inside an Innenwelt of needs, it isn’t enclosed, but rather open to a crowd of extraordinarily varied neutral objects” (Lacan 1988, 100). In his reality, the subject of desire is able to see, as it were, all objects. And any of them could capture him as an object of love at first sight. 7.2  Screen Also the trait serves as a screen; it forms a “blind spot”, scotoma in our picture of the world (or reality as a fantasmatic “window”). The external captivating image (“the ideal Ego”) rests on one elusive trait that exists in the mirror as if before the image itself. It is “the ego-ideal”. Lacan speaks of its first appearance in the mirror in the form of one of the parents holding the child in front of the mirror. Recognizing the mirror image becomes possible due to the fact that somewhere near the image there is a parental look reflected in the mirror. This look is present there as a moving defocused spot on the periphery of the image. What is essential about this look is that it has symbolic function. It is a point from which speech comes. And this speech establishes the ego urging the child to recognize himself in the mirror, “naming” him (“look, this beautiful, smart, etc. one over there is you!”). Being the locus of speech, Parental Other stares at the baby as if from behind the mirror image. You can’t see her eyes—Lacan call it the Gaze. She sees in him nothing more than a part of himself, moreover, the best part. This especially

306 

A. GORNYKH

characterizes the maternal point of view, which sees the child as something that will fill all her lacks (that what is not achieved in her life, her lost youth, hopes, strength, etc.). In a word, she sees the child like a phallus falling from her, her own metonymic object, which she does not mind to reintegrate back. Such, for example, is the mother of Hans, who, as Lacan insists, wants to “devour” him: hide him in her all-embracing love like in kangaroo’s pouch, dissolve his nascent personality. The something else in the mirror besides imago, the ego-ideal is that point at which the child desires to gratify himself in being loved. The function of the Gaze is the most intricate effect of the single trait in the visual field, on the one hand, comes after the primary narcissistic identification. But, as Lacan notes, “very curiously” it could be grasped as “a sort of primal model which the father assumes, anterior even to the libidinous investment on the mother—a mythical stage, certainly” (Lacan 1981, 256). The subject finds support for himself in the Gaze. But this Gaze (petrifying Medusa’s Gaze) should be covered, veiled to allow the subject to grasp himself as an autonomous imago. This is how the visible world is structured for Lacan. That what subject sees in reality as Eye is conditioned by his mode of visibility under the Gaze due to the screen that veils the latter. The first triangle of Lacanian scheme represents the image as a window looking onto the world of objects. It refers to the drawing in the system of the linear perspective. The picture reproduces the object using a frame with a regular grid. But on the side of the object, beyond the image there is the Gaze. The inverse, invisible side of the image functions as a screen for the Gaze (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1  Jacques Lacan, The concept of the Gaze, 1964. From The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”. Illustration by the author, according to the reproduction in the book

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

307

Fig. 2  Albrecht Dürer: Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman, woodcut, ca. 1600; 7.7 × 21.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (in public domain)

The Dürer’s grid is the invisible “skeleton” of the image that functions like the screen. The Gaze is present in the image as a distortion of its coordinate system itself (Fig. 2). Hans Holbein’s painting Ambassadors (1533) is a famous Lacanian example of this anamorphic deformation (Fig. 3). We can say that the portrait of two young successful men, surrounded by various signs of wealth, is their imago. But there is something else in the picture that looks like an intrusion from an otherworldly dimension. The blurry spot hovering somewhere in front of the picture turns out to be a skull (a symbol of death). It is visible only at a different angle, not from the point of view from which the picture itself is visible. Anamorphic distortion is an allegory of the presence of an invisible dimension of the Gaze. In other words, the ideal ego is supported by the Gaze that sees me from the point from where I cannot see myself. This screening function is the hidden truth of the image. In the case of Hans, the only feature of the horse attributed to him is a strange spot in front of the horse’s muzzle. Hans describes this feature apophatically: it is not a harness, not teeth, and so on. This indicates that this spot does not fit into the coordinate system of the image. And the horse himself stands as a kind of “contour” to deliniate, to “catch” this wandering anamorphic spot of subject’s anxiety, and thus to protect him from the “devouring” Gaze. From this Lacan concludes that the Hans’ horse is not a father, but a maternal figure. 7.3  Contour The recent findings of the oldest known human drawings could be said to be a radicalization of Lacan’s allegory of linear perspective. These drawings—the first signs of symbolic activity—are either simple repetitions of one line (similar to the hunter’s notches but without any practical meaning) or complex repetitions both of vertical and horizontal lines (like in little Hans’ drawing). For

308 

A. GORNYKH

Fig. 3  Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, oil on oak; 207 × 209, 5 cm. The National Gallery, London (in public domain)

example, famous “hashtag” from Blombos Cave—grid and contour simultaneously (Henshilwood et al. 2018). The primary drawings appear to be not realistic copies of objects. The initial “sketch” of reality was made by means of one single trait. It is in this human reality that the first phenomenon of art and cult—a cave painting—arises. The outline drawing functions as a castration “hole” projected from the depths of human anxiety, circled by a single line and turned into a figure in the foreground. Outline drawing is like voyeuristic keyhole. That what is visible in its “frame” excites desire in the scopic field. But the condition for this desire is the prohibition by the external Gaze of the very position of voyeuristic vision. No matter how this Gaze could reveal itself—by the sound of a footstep or a light movement of a curtain, as Sartre emphasizes, from whom Lacan derives the notion of the Gaze.

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

309

Elsewhere Lacan compares the drawing with the primary implement or civilization machine: “You can quite legitimately call a little drawing you’ve done on a piece of paper a machine. (…) It is simply enough that you have conductible ink for it to be a very effective machine. And why shouldn’t it be conductible, since the mark in itself already conducts pleasure?” (Lacan 2008, 49). The nature of human fascination with drawing (and writing) lies in the very first line on a blank sheet of paper that serves as a means of conveying the primitive enjoyment from entering into a circle of symbolic exchange through the identification with the Other. 7.4   Symbolic Support of Image We are able to establish a satisfactory object relationship with the image that we can fill with desire, only through the relation to the Other. This means, firstly, to give the image stability. Without a distinguishing trait, the screen function we would merge with the image (or it would “devour” us). For the image is perceived as a ghost, a “ghost of unity”, which in the imaginary cannot be retained. This means that the object relationship is characterized by fundamental uncertainty. The narcissistic perception is extremely unstable. Human perception, argues Lacan, only gains stability within the symbolic zone of naming. If his connection with the images was exclusively narcissistic, the duration of the perception of objects would be instantaneous. Name is the way of duration of the object in time. Without the signifier, an imaginary system would turn into a “huge concentric hallucination” with paralyzing effects. To prevent this from happening, third-party intervention is needed to create a distance between the two mirror objects. To maintain the image is, secondly, to keep images at a distance, to avoid narcissistic fixations on it, to include it in the chain of metonymic displacements, formal commutation (“playing with images” in little Hans). “What in the end gives the specular image of the apparatus of the ego—summarizes Lacan—its real support, its consistency, is that it is sustained within by this lost object, which it merely dresses up, by which jouissance is introduced into the dimension of the subject’s being” (Lacan 2008, 50). Thus, the specificity and importance of Lacanian theory of image consists in that the image is: • considered as a part of the system of positions of vision (subject, the Gaze) within the general structure of the visible world; • analyzed in its relation to the identity of the subject (desire, fantasy, defense mechanisms); • placed in the fundamentally anthropological perspective, demonstrating the individual’s involvement in social symbolic structures.

310 

A. GORNYKH

8   The Reflections of Lacan’s Image Theory Lacanian theory of image develops primarily in the direction of the historization of the Gaze and its ideological criticism. His “transhistorical model” of the visual field has become the object of criticism for various approaches that place the Gaze in different historical contexts, from Foucauldian versions of the Gaze as the pivot of panoptic regime of modern power to Jonathan Crary’s conception of the observer (Crary 1990). Crary believes that the Renaissance “geometric optics”, with its dominant and all-knowing Gaze, is replaced by “physiological” optics, a bodily, subjective look of the observer in the nineteenth century. The observer is inscribed in the visual field, but does not organize it from the outside like the Gaze. Kaja Silverman admits that the distinction of the subjective look and the Gaze (the presence of sociality) is the fundamental anthropological split (in distinction with versions of historical relativism). While she believes that there are possible historical variations of how Gaze is perceived, how the subject experiences his or her own visibility, an imago is not so much a mirror image, rather a cultural image-repertoire screen, consisting of “cultural imperatives”, “normative representations” that embody sexual, racial, class and other social differences (Silverman 1996). Silverman highlights the Lacanian function of the Gaze as a “source of light”. The Gaze projects various cultural representations on individuals that determine their “free” acceptance of this or that ideal image as their own self. Thus, the projection of cultural representations onto the female body is more likely to fragment the image and force the woman to identify with images marked by lack, inferiority. Laura Mulvey’s texts are fundamental to this kind of feminist appropriation of the Lacanian theory of the image—patriarchal symbolic order imposing male fantasies on the silent image of woman (Mulvey 1999). For her, the movie provides the male ego with a relatively seamless identification with the male “mirror” image. The split Gaze/Look dramatically works in case of active male and passive female visual positions. She considers cinema to be a model of the visible world in general. It reinforces the ego by the stars system producing idealized images of ordinary people. Cinema serves as a better mirror to upgrade male ego as a more complete, more powerful ideal ego combining narrative power (control over story) and the power of Gaze on women. The image of the male protagonist complies with realism of mirror reflection (three-­ dimensional space, deep camera focus, camera movements determined by actions of the protagonist, and invisible editing). Female images, being different from that of male narcissistic identification, function as a support for the male symbolic identification with the Gaze itself. Cinema is structured by the neurotic needs of the male ego to circumvent castration whose spectacle is the female image. There are two modes of the male Gaze. The first, sado-voyeuristic Gaze when the castration anxiety is counterbalanced by the devaluation and punishment of the guilty object (like in film noir). The second is fetishistic-scopophiliс Gaze when the castration is completely disavowed by turning the represented figure itself into a fetish (the cult

  TRAIT, IDENTITY, AND THE GAZE IN JACQUES LACAN 

311

of the female star). The female image bursts through the unity of the diegesis and the Renaissance space as an “intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish”. Her image is constructed by montage of details (close-ups of legs, face, etc.) against flat background (light and shade, lace, steam, etc.), undermining the depth of visual and narrative space. Slavoj Žižek claims that in a proper dialectical analysis, universality and historicization are strictly correlative. The historical specificity of the image lies in the ways of symbolization of “the ‘unhistorical’ traumatic kernel of jouissance” (Žižek 1996, 3). Jouissance (excessive pleasure) is such a traumatic experience that makes individuals a “closed group” (in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” pleasure is symbolized by the invasion of the substance of eternal Life in all its indestructible expansion). The social symbolic order is unstable and requires jouissance as its last support. The symbolic universe of the group is structured around the black hole of excessive pleasure that is beyond the Law and cannot be symbolized, tamed (Žižek 1989). At the same time, Žižek proposes to consider the instance of jouissance not within the dimension of the prehistoric Primal Father (unthinkable dimension of incestuous-cannibalistic orgy), but rather as a psychic reality, the wrong side of the “normal” paternal authority (Žižek 1997). In the visual register, jouissance manifests itself as an anamorphic spot in the image—the sublime mysterious point from which the Other looks back at us (the Gaze) from a position that is invisible to the eye. And the extremes of voyeuristic objectification of others (pornography) for Žižek, unlike Mulvey, is not the transformation of real people into objects of our scopofilic pleasure, but becoming of the viewer himself an object, a “paralyzed look”. Because of that, we lose support for desire in the visual register—the fundamental split of the look (the eye) and the Gaze. Thus Žižek criticizes the tendency of psychologization of the Gaze in Visual Studies. The Gaze is the most paradoxical form of the object “a”—the remnant of primordial jouissance, immortalized, according to Lacan, in one single trait. Dedicated to the Memory of Valery Podoroga  “A single trait establishes a Rule, and the rule is astonishing, for in its originality it presupposes freedom from any rule that could become an obstacle or prohibition. (…) The pictorial image indicates the rules liberating the forces of the One (…)” (Valery Podoroga, Expression and Sense, 1995).

References Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer. On Visions and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1913. The Interpretation of Dreams (A. A. Brill, Trans.). New York: Macmillan.

312 

A. GORNYKH

Freud, Sigmund. 1953. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”. In: J. Strachey (ed. and trans.)  The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7. pp. 125–249). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955a. “Totem and Taboo”. In: J.  Strachey (ed. and trans.)  The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 13. pp. 1–165). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955b. “Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego”. In: J. Strachey (ed. and trans.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 67–145). London: Hogarth Press. Henshilwood Ch.; d’Errico F.; van Niekerk K.; Dayet L.; Queffelec A. and Pollarolo L. 2018. “An abstract drawing from the 73.000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa”. Nature, 562: 115–118. Lacan, Jacques. 1938 [1984]. Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu. Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie. Paris: Navarin. Lacan, Jacques. 1957. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: “The Object Relation” [1956–57], ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, unpublished translation by L.V.A. Roche. Lacan, Jacques. 1961–1962. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book IX: “Identification” [1961–1962], ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher. Lacan, Jacques. 1981 [1964].  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 1988 [1954–1955]. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: “The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis”, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2007. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2008 [1969–1970]. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis”, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2014 [1962–63]. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: “Anxiety”, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2017 [1957–58]. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: “Formations of the Unconscious”, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Russel Grigg. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1999. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1996. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. by Renata Salecl, Slavoj Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso.

Symbolic Exchange and Simulation in Jean Baudrillard Gary Genosko

Two competing concepts define the theoretical system of Jean Baudrillard. First, the anthropological notion of the symbolic—not to be confused with the symbolic register of language—and second, simulation, expressed in four stages. The Baudrillardian symbolic engages images in its later deployments in the zero-zero decade, while simulation is indexed to images of various kinds. The order of presentation in this article moves from an explication of the symbolic, to the orders of simulation, and then engages photography, specifically Baudrillard’s debts to Roland Barthes, his own photographic practice, and the role of photojournalism. These considerations are followed by a section on television, organized around reality shows. The concluding remarks briefly address the relationship between screens in the digital era and images.

1   Symbolic Exchange Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993a) is a radical, highly poetic anthropology that attempts to recover death and use it as a symbolic counter-­ gift that forces modern institutions, hitherto unilaterally giving the gifts of work as a slow death, social security, and the maternal ambience of consumption, to receive and respond in kind with their own deaths. Summoning the code or the system to receive the counter-gift makes it strange to itself, having been drawn into the symbolic field in which exchange is a circuit of giving, receiving, and responding in kind and with interest; if the field of dispersion of

G. Genosko (*) Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_19

 

G. GENOSKO

the code and simulation is the digital, the 0/1 binary, the field of the symbolic is ambivalence, agonism, circuits of obligatory giving-receiving and returning with interest. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York once served for Baudrillard as examples of the binary code, but they would become, upon their collapse in the course of the terror attacks of 9/11, examples of symbolic collapse, suicide, in response to the gift of death. This long passage in Baudrillard’s thinking from the mid-1970s to the events of September 2001 not only places death at the heart of this theory, but brings the image back into focus in a conceptual landscape in which it was at first displaced by the significance of linguistics (anagrams), psychoanalysis (jokes), and rituals borrowed from anthropology. Death must be regained through ritual and wrestled away from official agencies of Thanatos (coroners, funeral parlors, and priests). Baudrillard appropriates from anthropological sources symbolically significant practices that he adapts to his own ends, underlining that death is not biological but initiatic, a cultural rite involving a reciprocal-antagonistic exchange between the living and the dead. His main source is Marcel Mauss, from whom he adopts and then adapts the counter-gift by transforming it into the principle of reversibility: this is weaponized by Baudrillard and he believes it is “fatal” to any system that seeks to avoid the obligation of reciprocity, to respond in kind or with interest. Baudrillard (1993a, 1) proposes in this respect, then, to “turn Mauss against Mauss”. This reflects the importance of the principle of reversibility in Baudrillard’s thought; as Gerry Coulter (2012, 51) once put it, Baudrillard’s “one great thought is the idea that all systems lead to their own demise”. And from Robert Jaulin (1967) Baudrillard utilizes the fieldwork with the Sara people of Chad and the idea of initiatic rites involving the passage from childhood to adulthood, assisted by symbolic objects that metabolically mediate between the worlds of the dead and the living. This mediation has an accented beat, a scansion, that makes the relationship between life and death reversible, an act of exchange running in both directions. The necessity of scansion is linked to reciprocity. Baudrillard extends this analysis of death’s social articulations to the desocialization and ghettoization of the dead in the West (where it is not normal to be dead but rather chronically well and forced into surviving, even thriving) and tries to lift the social control over death that separates it from life because it is from this separation that all subsequent alienations arise. Baudrillard elaborated new forms of symbolic resistance beyond death by emphasizing the potlatch-like behaviors of the masses in “The Beaubourg Effect” (1982) and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983a). Baudrillard’s conception of the mass represents a critique of efforts to represent the masses as a source of potential energy in sociology and political theory. But under the terms of simulation, such representation is impossible. There is no more real social substance for a discipline like sociology to represent, except through simulation. Rather, the mass is unreachable, indifferent, opaque, and resistant to all entreaties and communications, which are absorbed and disappear. Every

  SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND SIMULATION IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD 

attempt in the dark rooms of social science to get the masses to appear by bathing them in an informational emulsion of statistics and surveys merely, for Baudrillard, volatilizes them further. Thus, Baudrillard entertained the hypothesis that the social no longer exists because social contracts and relations between state and civil society, public and private institutions, and citizens, individuals, and groups have given way to mere points of contact and information exchange between terminals. In the higher orders of simulation, general connectivity rules the day and in this new kind of post-perspectival space there has been a complete loss of critical distance that would allow for a distinction between a real and its models. And this entails the transfiguration of the real into the simulacral. Through an anti-productivist conception of agonistic, senseless seduction in Seduction (1990), Baudrillard explored consequences of reversing the accumulative and positive dimensions of production. Seduction was not exactly in its own right a power at all, neither negative nor oppositional, but a weak process that removed and annulled—signs and meanings from interpretive systems, accountability from systems of legitimation. Seduction works by undermining and diverting, setting reversibility against irreversibility. Seduction resists interpretation. It can be shared, but its exchange is symbolic and involves ritual and obligatory dimensions which ensure that there is no clear distinction possible between the seducer and seduced for there is no difference between victory and defeat. In addition to turning symbolic reversibility and cancellation against Michel Foucault in Forget Foucault (1987a), Baudrillard sought symbolic yields in The Transparency of Evil (1993b) from an inexchangeable hostage form, and the power to designate Evil, to reintroduce this accursed share into the artificially positive paradise of a society that can no longer tolerate negativity. The Vital Illusion (2000) reveals traces of the need for a symbolic principle by another name by taking refuge in singularity, as in Paroxysm (1998): an eccentric, antagonistic, self-destructing, anomalous figure, irreducible to individuality in a world of cloning, by valorizing imperfection (vernacular language resists universal digitization), and the beautiful frailty of never being fully present to ourselves. The circle of symbolic exchange threatened to collapse in The Impossible Exchange (2001), since now exchange is impossible, the general equivalent displaced, otherness becomes incomparable, and the condition of thought stuck in a paradoxical inability to confirm itself against any principle in the reigning speculative disorder. Yet in this disorder Baudrillard valorizes singularity as an absolute particular lacking self-being and hence that which has no equivalent. Dialoguing with architect Jean Nouvel in The Singular Objects of Architecture (2002a), Baudrillard deploys singularity—unrepresentable, untranslatable, and exhausted in itself—as an antidote to simulation that bears a virulent power against hyperreality. Like the symbolic, singularity is immanent to globalized exchanges and is an “integral monstrosity” that may be

 

G. GENOSKO

regained or perhaps glimpsed in some of the anti-globalization movement’s early demonstrations. Baudrillard’s controversial response to the events of September 11th in The Spirit of Terrorism (2002b) rehearsed his theory of symbolic exchange: the suicide planes that embedded themselves in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were symbolic forces of disorder bringing mass death to a system whose ideal is “zero death”, as Baudrillard put it, and which tries to neutralize the symbolic stakes of reversibility and challenge. In the 1970s Baudrillard used the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as emblems of the binary matrix of digitality, the “divine form of simulation”, in which competition and referentiality were eclipsed by correlation and replication: the Twin Towers are signs of closure and redoubling, not of a system that can still surpass itself with original edifices. The twinness of the towers remained for Baudrillard the “perfect embodiment” of today’s world order. But there is no longer at the macro level two superpowers mirroring one another’s irrationality. Binary regulation at this level is over in the triumph of global capitalism. Back in the mid-1970s, Baudrillard wrote of the dissuasive hedge against collapse provided by two superpowers. And it is precisely this question of collapse that has animated Baudrillard’s theorization of the events of 9/11. Importantly, it is collapse or crumbling by itself that is the key challenge to understanding the spirit of symbolic exchange in Baudrillard’s account. This is the place in his writing where the image is most virulent. The twin WTC towers, that incarnate the hegemony of US empire and monopoly, collapsed, that is, self-destructed. Baudrillard’s choice language for describing collapse by itself is suicide. His impression was that the towers collapsed as if committing suicide. For it seemed to Baudrillard “as if”—hedging his bets—the Twin Towers themselves completed the event by collapsing. The circuit of obligation in the gift economy is give-receive-return in kind. Here, as William Pawlett (2007, 145) explains, the obligation requires the direct response of the objects themselves: “the towers themselves commit suicide”. In Baudrillard’s theory of death, suicide is a superior kind of subversion in the politics of symbolic exchange circa the mid-1970s. What made suicide subversive and, in reverse, made all subversion suicidal, was that it escaped the monopolistic control over death exercised by contemporary societies of simulation through their sanctioned institutions (which prohibit suicide and either try to exclude symbolic relations or simulate them). For the West, thinks Baudrillard, symbolic and sacrificial death are difficult to grasp and are distorted in being given a value, by “calculating” their exchange value (against the afterlife; against state support for families through individual heroic martyrdom, etc.). Terrorism challenges the sole superpower with a gift to which it cannot respond except by the collapse of its emblematic buildings. The Spirit of Terrorism was written 25 years after Symbolic Exchange and Death, but is perfectly consistent with the theory contained therein. The events of 9/11 and the suicidal collapse of the Twin Towers are powerfully imprinted upon global spectators through circulating images. Images,

  SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND SIMULATION IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD 

Baudrillard writes (2002b, 26), are our “primal scene”. Yet the images of the terrorist attack in New York have an even greater power: they have “resuscitated” both the banality of images and “sham” events. Baudrillard considers this to be ambiguous since as images extend the event, exalting and circulating it worldwide, they also absorb the event. The event is transferred to the image in what Baudrillard (2002b, 27) calls the “image-event”. And there is a consequence that Baudrillard wants to underline here, a strange moment in which the real asserts its priority over the event out of jealousy of the image. It is in this duel relation that the real takes on a fictional tone. It is a duel because the stakes are based on challenges and not exchanges, hence duel supplants dualism in symbolic relations. The reversibility of the real and the image, and their “inextricability”, is the key problem of Baudrillard’s analysis of images. No matter how real the event seems, Baudrillard (2002b, 29) maintains, the reality principle itself has been lost. This calls into question the order or representation in which the image reproduces an anterior reality. In the case of 9/11, the real is “superadded to the image like a bonus of terror”. The real is an additive to the fiction that comes first. This makes the real worse than historical. It is symbolic. And with the symbolic is the singularity of the event that resists interpretation. Only in its defiance of history and politics does it express the meaninglessness of all efforts to model it on something familiar. For the event scatters all models.

2  Orders of Simulation Simulation is the other of symbolic exchange. Simulacra and Simulation (1994a) and Simulations (1983b) contain Baudrillard’s best known theory of the order of simulacra, summarized here: in italics law or value; underlined dominant form; bolded key semiotic features; and dotted underline machine-type. 1. natural 2. market 3.structural 4. fractal

counterfeit production simulation proliferation

corrupt symbol icon 2-sided psychical metonym/index

automaton robot android virtual

The first order of the counterfeit, the stucco angel, and theatrical automaton emerge in the Renaissance with the emancipation of otherwise closed, endogamous and cruel social relations and the surety of motivated signification and static social rank (caste). Counterfeiting corrupts cruel symbolic relations, a penchant of the so-called right-wing Baudrillard that kept him out of European leftist circles for many decades. The second order of production arises with the Industrial Revolution and production, perfect for worker robots, and serial signs of sameness (iconic simulacra) subject to the market forces of fledgling capitalism. The third order is post-industrial in which mechanical reproduction

 

G. GENOSKO

is transcended, conceived strictly in terms of reproducibility such that representation itself is commodified, with the exclusion of the referent in the rise of the linguistic sign that came to dominate semiological thought, and dichotomaniacal structuralism, a breeding ground for androids who live by the “anterior finality” of the code from which life emanates (operational DNA). In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard added a fourth level involving aleatory dispersion by infection, contiguity, and viral metonymy of theories of value, giving rise to the absorption of virtual media technologies (prostheses) by human beings without shadows, a topic explored in The Illusion of the End (1994b). The figure of the shadowless man, borrowed from German literature and cinema, expresses the idea that progress may carry on without an idea (in the absence of or indifference to) guiding it. Baudrillard’s fascination with doppelgänger fantasies in film (Der student von Prag) and literature (Peter Schlemihl, Faust, Dorian Gray), turns these parables of alienation into exercises in commodity critique: the images become fetishes that can be extracted and exchanged, but which takes revenge on the one who sold them. Again, borrowing from anthropology, this time from Michael Taussig (1980), Baudrillard balances pre-capitalist fetishism as a site of resistance against commodity fetishism under capitalism or, as a counter-gift against capitalism, certainly challenging exchange value by means of symbolic exchanges. For in pre-capitalist fetishism, the double is not a haunting image, but another with whom one can have a duel, non-alienated relationship. The third order is by far the most influential. It contains several important, related concepts. By simulation Baudrillard means that it is no longer possible to distinguish between, for instance, signs and their objects, questions and answers, and doubles and originals, because the terms in each of these pairs are equivalent to one another. He often expresses this by claiming one of a pair has absorbed the other. The inability to interrogate difference creates confusion. The entire edifice of representation, implying a logic in which images are yoked to a pre-imaged foundation, falters. The idea that a question can invent, anticipate, absorb, and regurgitate an answer not only neutralizes interrogation and dialogics, sender and receiver, origin and end alike, but suggests a more general principle: the accomplishment of social control by anticipation. Baudrillard uses the term “anterior finality” to explain that finality is already there, beforehand, determined by the combinatorial possibilities of the code (figured as social and genetic and digital). The code generates messages and signals that are totally preprogrammed for front-end control and occur in advance in the sense that an event is accounted for before it happens, a violation is already committed before its detection, a fact is truer than what it is about, a profile is greater than the person subjugated to it. Baudrillard has taken the semiological principle that all value issues from the code and turned it into a nightmarish principle in which everything appears to be written in advance (hence the precession of simulacra), all signals are suspended in matrices embedded in codes. Symbolic exchange stubbornly remained Baudrillard’s answer to whether or not there remains any hope of opposition.

  SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND SIMULATION IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD 

Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994a) presents his theory of simulation with an emphasis on images. Underlining both the loss of referentiality and the end of representation, simulation is embedded in a range of phenomena, including Borges’ fable of the map, simulators of illness, iconoclasm, and ethnology. But his point is “the murderous power of images” (1994a, 5) that destroys any exchangeability with the real. The image has successive phases: It is the reflection of a profound reality; It masks and denatures a profound reality; It masks the absence of a profound reality; It has no relation to any reality whatsoever; It is its own pure simulacrum (1994a, 6). Baudrillard advances this categorization from good to evil appearances, and then to sorcery (playing at appearances) and finally pushing beyond appearance altogether. Beyond appearance, there is the Disneyland effect: the amusement park presents an imaginary world as a cover, Baudrillard insists, that outside its gates the real remains, even though this is not the case, as all of America is hyperreal, that is, realer than real. The precession of simulacra echoes the role of models, both semiotic and genetic, that generate and circulate simulacra that have no originals. It becomes progressively more difficult for distinctions to be upheld and to isolate traces of the real in the processes of simulation. Simulation deters, that is, suspends principles, objectives, and references from getting a purchase on the difference between sign and object, inside and outside, and surface and depth. Simulacra inexorably proliferate, and meaning implodes and is absorbed. For anyone who might think that technological progress enhances over time the appearance of simulacra, making them even more real, Baudrillard claims otherwise, using holograms as example, an escalating “race to the real” never “has reproductive (truth) value” (1994a, 10).

3   Photography Mike Gane (2000, 96) has briefly traced the evolution of Baudrillard’s remarks on photography and exposed some of their inconsistencies. Richard G. Smith (2020) has traced the critical literature on Baudrillard’s engagements with photography. Gerry Coulter (2012, 175) has observed how enigmatic Baudrillard’s own photographs appear, yet both Gane and Coulter arrive at uncertainty as a guiding principle, grounded in reversibility between certainty and uncertainty. While Coulter excavates a gloomy affect, Gane (2009, 165) finds moments of ribald humor in Baudrillard’s photographs. Smith asserts that Baudrillard’s photography revels in the enigmatic that arises from the simulacrum’s imperfections. In an interview “The Mirror of Photojournalism”, undertaken at the site of the 2003 International Festival of Photojournalism held in Perpignan, France, Baudrillard (2011a) remarked that while the photographs on display are treated

 

G. GENOSKO

as “fragments of reality” both by those who take them and by most who view them, “the image is a representation of something other than the real.” What this something other may be is embedded in a series of dismissals—the widespread victimal aesthetic that renders viewers overloaded by signs; the image as a call for action that produces indifference by means of familiarization; the professional discourses of photojournalists that concern themselves with economics, technologies, and rights, but not with the ontological status of the image. Baudrillard’s provocative thesis is that photojournalism is somehow beyond representation. Photojournalism has become, therefore, hyperreal. Why Perpignan? Baudrillard’s comments about his specific visit there may be placed in the context of his scattered remarks about photo-reportage festivals (Baudrillard 1998, 93) in general, which may be generalizations from Perpignan. Perpignan is an important international institution for photojournalism and has been held there since 1989. Although Baudrillard has here and there in interviews claimed to have no interest in the role of the photograph in journalism (Hegarty 2004, 142), he admits taking pleasure in attending the annual Perpignan Festival and its potential to surprise him. Although he does not discuss specific works on display there, Baudrillard does remark that photojournalistic images like the so-called Madonna in Hell photograph from 1997, otherwise titled “Woman Grieves after Massacre in Bentalha” by Algerian war reporter Hocine Zaourar for Agence France Presse (AFP), “offer victims the mirror of their distress before dispatching the image to the ‘other side’ to be commercialized and consumed” as global commodities (or at least as prize winning photos—in this case the World Press Photo of the Year—considered collectible by the Newseum alongside the cameras used to take them). In other words, this bearing witness generates fetishism. Indeed, he also wonders whether pictures of violence in Rwanda and Baghdad are “photography”—as opposed to images in which the subject (photographer) disappears and “something arrives from elsewhere” (Hegarty 2004, 144). A further salient issue concerns how Baudrillard understands the “festival”. In interviews on photography, he often comments on the event itself but in vague terms: “I often go to the major international photographic exhibitions, but all of these photographs—with the possible exception of press photographs, and even these—are very aestheticized, very calculated, very carefully composed and so on, and that sort of photography is really of no interest to me” (Zurbrugg 1997, 35). Yet, he kept going back. Clearly, Baudrillard expresses a certain amount of ambivalence about photojournalism, on the one hand holding out hope for the press photograph while doubting its capacity to deliver the impact of singularity that he attributes to the power of the image; on the other hand, the photographic festival appears to be both the kind of conventional venue that would limit access to the kind of experience Baudrillard is describing, yet at the same time it held out for him the promise of a certain charmed encounter. Perhaps this can be attributed to Baudrillard’s longstanding interest in photojournalism, for

  SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND SIMULATION IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD 

example, his work assembling and commenting on the French publication of René Burri’s The Germans in 1963. Baudrillard’s sense of photography is heavily influenced by the writings of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981) and the “punctum” consisting of a foreign element that involuntarily arises in the image and touches the viewer— pricking or even bruising one. Baudrillard, too, wants to discover just such a punctum in the “image” and suggests that this does not exist in photographs that trade poetry for realism (documenting, confirming—the “mirror of events”). At times Baudrillard suggests that few if any contemporary photographs realize this ambition. He argues that the punctum—“that absent point, that nothingness at the heart of the image which gives it its power, no longer exists” (Baudrillard 1998, 93). Baudrillard’s theory of photography, developed in his essay “For illusion isn’t the opposite of reality…” included in a major catalogue of his works issued by the Neue Galerie in Graz, curated by Peter Weibel, is an extreme version of the Barthesean punctum insofar as the weight of agency is placed on the object: “If something wants to be photographed, that is precisely because it does not want to yield up its meaning” (Baudrillard 1999, 129). It is into this abyss that the subject must venture for the act of photography is one of disappearance, entering a world of stillness and silence. Baudrillard takes the punctum to be a powerful “figure of nothingness” that is often overwhelmed and driven out, especially at festivals and art galleries, by meaning. He laments the aestheticization of photographs, for photography does not belong to aesthetics at all. There is complicity between objects and camera lenses in which neither meaning nor vision play any part. All of the work is done by the object, Baudrillard concludes. Of course, few photographers would admit to this. In the aforementioned catalogue another essay, “It is the object which thinks us”, contains the provocative hypothesis: “The object is—and will be for some time yet—the living site of the disappearance of the subject” (1999, 145). Linking photography with the automatic writing practices of Surrealism, Baudrillard emphasizes the automatic, instant, and non-manual character of photographic technology and the objective lens in the digital age and the primacy of mobile phone cameras. The photograph does not grant meaning, despite every photographer’s desire to do so; it is rather an “acting-out on the world” which, for its part, is also acting-out by “foisting its fiction on the subject” (1999, 146). These two psychologized imbrications of substituting behavior for remembering expose a shared disappearance, of the object as it was, and the subject, who has withdrawn. Baudrillard (1987b, 2) once wrote in an essay introducing the work of artist Barbara Kruger that “you only think you are photographing a scene or a landscape. In fact, the scene or landscape wishes to be photographed. It determines you; you are merely a supernumerary in its staging”. Baudrillard has simply extended to photography one of his well-known and highly theatrical hypotheses about the object’s revenge on the subject, with all of the ironical pataphysical nuance that such a gesture requires.

 

G. GENOSKO

4  Television From photography, then, we shift to television. Baudrillard’s Telemorphosis (2011b) is a provocation that is among the richest in his oeuvre: reality TV is, he claims, our total social fact. This is not so far removed from his claims about ubiquitous images and the milieu of objects in which we live amidst. It is, however, on the face of it, the sociological outrage and bastardization of Mauss to whom Baudrillard owes so much. Yet it makes us wonder: has television, as Baudrillard claimed, in producing a global non-event that elevates parody and banality and the farce of the social, succeeded better than any radical critique or Situationist driftwork? Where Mauss saw the convergence of all the elements of indigenous societies in gift exchange as total social fact, Baudrillard speculates it is reality TV that gets the different parts of our society working together. Yet Baudrillard never really explains why reality TV is this kind of phenomenon on par with the gift; he merely asserts that total telemorphosis is evident in reality TV.  It would be easier to claim that reality TV is another thread that is woven into the total social fabric of the transmutation of reality. However, he is quite certain that reality TV is much more than a single thread. In taking his chosen route, he ruthlessly exploits Mauss’ famous undertheorizing of the total social fact, which seems to be in some respect a gauntlet that Mauss threw down for all those scholars who would not dream of a lofty totalizing impulse in the shadow of the master’s great learnedness. Likewise, Baudrillard harbors a similar ambition, and doesn’t eschew the notion of a totality that is metaphorically interwoven with all of the social’s threads, although it is a dead power, in other words, a “total disillusion” that we call simulation. Earlier in his career, Baudrillard probed an era prior to the current flood of reality programming with regard to a piece of “cinema verité” adapted to the little screen, An American Family (1973), produced by Craig Gilbert for National Educational Television and distributed by member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service in the US. This was a 12-episode serial documentary study of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. By the mid-1970s, Baudrillard had already exposed the paradoxes of “TV verité” that An American Family ushered in. The producer, Baudrillard claimed, waxed absurd: “‘They [the Louds] lived as if we weren’t there’, which also meant they lived ‘as if you were there’—a message to the 20 million or so viewers who followed the series. It is difficult to ascertain the truth of the Loud family: does it belong to the family or to TV?” (Baudrillard 1983b, 52). Neither, it turns out, for the despotic gaze of the camera has been displaced, diffused, as the many watch the few; gone are the imperatives to submit to the controlling gaze—you are the gaze, you are the event: “we are all Louds, doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and to blackmail by the media and their models, but to their induction, to infiltration, to their illegible violence” (1983b, 55). The truth of the Loud family is for Baudrillard indecipherable, yet post-panoptic. Some readers of Baudrillard, for instance Victoria Grace, have remarked upon these comments and related them to Australian versions of reality programming such

  SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND SIMULATION IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD 

as Sylvania Waters that equally make Baudrillard’s point about the implosion of the distinct poles between viewer and viewed; even the medium itself has collapsed into its messages and as a communication process the poles of sender and receiver are henceforth untenable (Grace 2000, 98). Symbolic exchange is an antidote in Baudrillard’s estimation to the non-communication fabricated by media and the kind of communication simulated in models of communication in which, specifically referencing Roman Jakobson’s poetics, is stripped of obligation and reciprocity and backfilled with concepts such as “phatic functionality” between abstractly separate components (sender-receiver) (Baudrillard 1981, 197). Ruminating on the French Channel M6 reality show Loft Story, Baudrillard emphasizes that at the heart of reality TV is an uninteresting, non-original event, whose power is to generate the fascination, first, of audiences, and second, of critics. Baudrillard underlines, however, that this nullity and banality is powerful, even if it only allows for a differential viewing experience: the viewer is always slightly less idiotic than the reality TV program on the screen. The question that holds Baudrillard’s attention concerns the “experimental niches” of reality TV situations—apartments, islands, and other micro-situations. Are these enclosures, little theatres, cut-off and isolated in some manner, or do they jump their experimental status as “universal metaphors” of the osmosis, what he calls the “telemorphosis” of the world: “nothing any longer separates” the screen and the world. Telemorphosis of the real traps everyone. We are all extras on the next call for contestants; we are on both sides of the screen, playing our parts, ready for sudden notoriety for no good reason. We are all Trumans! For Baudrillard reality TV announces the end of merit: there is no need to earn 15 minutes of fame, as Warhol is now superseded. According to Jeffrey Ruoff in his study of An American Family, in addition to factors relating to program conception and filmmaking, editing mitigated “reality”: “… the producers discovered that watching footage shot in real time was strangely unlike real life” (Ruoff 2002, 40). It was, in a word, boring. But boredom was also an existing aesthetic inherited from Andy Warhol. Moreover, it was also fuzzy, as one editor David Hanser recalls the experience of viewing hours of film of Loud son Lance and then seeing him in person: “Reality began to get blurred.” Here is a sense of the vertigo of implosion à la Baudrillard, and a fall into a fuzzy, speculative universe. Ruoff does not work out the implications of this boredom in relation to what TV critics, for instance, point out about reality programs such as Big Brother: the boring factor as legitimation. But for Baudrillard there is no such evidence, no such recourse to proof: there is only an accelerating “banalization of the world” that reality TV brings to a crescendo: reality is uploaded to the screen. “Running gags” between reality and the screen no longer work and are relegated to the cheapest form of comedy. Baudrillard has roughed-in the trajectory of reality television from the 1970s to the early 2000s. His is not an exhaustive accounting, but a landmarking. For him reality TV is a privileged funnel for the telemorphosis of the real, and this means television is his choice medium for such a transfusional absorption.

 

G. GENOSKO

However, after telemorphosis, is it still possible to speak of the screen? Indeed, is any reality TV program worth mentioning by name? What are the differences between them, anyway, except the early and mature ones that he dwells on? Perhaps we should pose to Baudrillard the question that Derrida posed of Mauss: Baudrillard’s discourse on Loft Story in a way arrests the process of telemorphosis by preventing it from escaping the confines of the program. The gift cannot make itself present, and for Derrida Mauss speaks of everything but the gift (Derrida 1992, 24). The gift’s condition is that of Being: disclosure and concealment. And as far as Derrida is concerned, Mauss qualifies “total” as something other than itself, making the perception of the whole impossible. How does this apply to Baudrillard? The process of telemorphosis stalls if the medium into which reality is transfused is still identifiable and describable after the process is well-advanced. We must be able to radically forget the screen, its features, frames, and textures. We can no longer see beyond the screen in full telemorphosis. We cannot compare the little to the big screen; cathode ray to flat screen; neither can we find where precisely the screen begins and ends. And in the end, the program must evaporate as a stable point of reference. So, too, must reality TV as a distinct genre. There is only a telemorphosed reality without television: full telereality: “Today, the screen is no longer the television screen; it is the screen of reality itself” (Baudrillard 2011b, 49–50). The screen, in short, that realizes the real has no frame. Indeed, such a screen is no longer a medium somehow different from that which surrounds it. Instead, it is as William Bogard (1996, 35) argues, “unsupported and unmediated” because the surface’s (medium’s) link with appearances is superseded.

5  Concluding Remarks There are many faces to the Baudrillardian image: his own approach to and practice of them, perhaps eliciting the “anthropological joy” noted by John Lechte (2010, 103) in the immanence of images among other images, a never-­ ending curation of the real without master signifiers; the image’s primacy as an object, its status as protagonist, wily and provoking, a non-representational diagram of the real that Baudrillard strongly identified with certain films that illustrated the precession of simulacra; and in the digital age, the threat of interactivity, the collapse of any aesthetic illusion, and a convolution of user and screen into an irredeemable undecidability. As Baudrillard put it, “there is no separation any longer, no empty space, no absence: you enter the screen and the visual image unhindered” (2002c, 177). This is the revenge of the image as tactile, immersive, the terrible price to be paid for heightened interactivity and user-friendliness: phatic dysfunctionality. Baudrillard has, throughout his career, been a critic of concepts such as the phatic function in the poetic model of communication, arguing that such a notion as contact reveals the metaphysical distance and abstract separation between communicative poles (Genosko 2012, 85). The condition of connectivity and the difficulties of disconnection expose what is perhaps a conflation in Baudrillard’s thought between screen

  SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND SIMULATION IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD 

and image, between medium and appearances. This telescoping by means of conflation toward disappearance is not only puzzling, but also humorous. For if the screen loses its frame, and support, as a medium, in addition to which it no longer has any content of consequence, nothing on the order of the photographic punctum, what remains? It is the desire to see into this condition and to play with its traces that animated Baudrillard (2009, 26) right up to the end of his life.

References Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Trans. Charles Levin. New York: Telos Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1982. “The Beaubourg Effect”. Trans. R. Krauss and A. Michelson. October, 20: 3–13. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983a. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and J. Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean. 1983b. Simulations. Trans. P.  Beitchman, P.  Patton and P.  Foss. New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean. 1987a. Forget Foucault. Trans. P.  Beitchman, N.  Dufresne and L. Hildreth. New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean. 1987b. “Untitled”. In: Barbara Kruger. New York: Mary Boone and Michael Werner Gallery, 1–4. Baudrillard, Jean. 1990. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. Montreal: New World Perspectives. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993a. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. I.  H. Grant. London: Sage. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993b. The Transparency of Evil. Trans. J. Benedict. London: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994a. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994b. The Illusion of the End. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Polity. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. Paroxysm. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 1999. Jean Baudrillard: Photographs 1985–1998. Curated by Peter Weibel. Graz: Neue Galerie. Baudrillard, Jean. 2000. The Vital Illusion. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. The Impossible Exchange. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002a. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Trans. R.  Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002b. The Spirit of Terrorism. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002c. Screened Out. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 2009. “On Disappearance”. Trans. Chris Turner. In: Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories. London: Routledge, 24–29. Baudrillard, Jean. 2011a. “The Mirror of Photojournalism”. Trans. Gary Genosko. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 8: 2. Baudrillard, Jean. 2011b. Telemorphosis. Trans. Drew Burk. Minneapolis: Univocal.

 

G. GENOSKO

Bogard, William. 1996. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burri, René. 1963. Les Allemands. Textes réunis et présenté par Jean Baudrillard. Paris: Robert Delpire. Coulter, Gerry. 2012. Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality. Skyland, NC: Intertheory. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gane, Mike. 2000. Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty. London: Polity. Gane, Mike. 2009. “Baudrillard’s Sense of Humour”. In:  Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories. Eds. D.B. Clarke, M. A Doel, W. Merrin and Richard G. Smith. London: Routledge, 164–80. Genosko, Gary. 2012. Remodelling Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grace, Victoria. 2000. Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading. London: Routledge. Hegarty, Paul. 2004. Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory. London: Continuum. Jaulin, Robert. 1967. La Mort Sara. Paris: Plon. Lechte, John. 2010. “Images”. In: The Baudrillard Dictionary. Ed. Richard G. Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 101–103. Pawlett, William. 2007. Jean Baudrillard. London: Routledge. Ruoff, Jeffrey. 2002. An American Life: A Televised Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Richard G. 2020. “Baudrillard’s Photographic Theory”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 16: 1. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zurbrugg, Nicholas. 1997. Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact. London: Sage.

Historicity of Observing and Vision in Jonathan Crary Łukasz Zaremba

The famous 1996 October “Visual Culture Questionnaire” presents a set of editors’ assumptions about the newly founded “interdisciplinary project” (VCQ, 25). “In a manner openly unsympathetic to visual culture” (Dikovitskaya 2006, 17), each question begins with the phrase “it has been suggested that visual culture”, leaving no doubt about the editors’ aversion: the inquiry starts with the proposal to radically separate the disciplines of art history and visual culture. While the former is built on the model of history, the latter is supposed to be grounded in anthropology. Their radical difference is accepted beyond doubt. Regardless of the authors’ intentions and precise foundations of this distinction—unclear also for many of the original responders—the place of history within an academic endeavor centered on image and vision is worth revisiting. If only because one of the most important interventions of historicizing the image and visuality comes from an author consequently writing about his mistrust in the “new academic precinct (regardless of its label)” (Crary 1996, 33)—Jonathan Crary, Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and co-founder of non-profit publishing house Zone Books. Crary’s two treatises—Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (2001)—propose a consistent and original history of the development of vision in Western modernity and have been recently supplemented by an analysis of our current late capitalist moment (Crary 2014). Even if their

Ł. Zaremba (*) University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_20

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

declared intentions are broader and their theoretical frameworks conceptualized in a different manner, all three works constitute a significant input—and not only critique—in the development of visual studies as a discipline. In this context, Crary’s often-repeated misgivings about an academic discipline focused on visuality could perhaps be read as methodological advice on writing the history of visuality. In fact, if only we choose to glide over the often ironic tone of his remarks, we may notice their similarity to W.J.T. Mitchell’s well-­ known countertheses which sought to critically question some of the “myths about visual culture” (Mitchell 2005, 342–356). Crary himself admitted that some of his reservations about visual culture studies are voiced “just in case”: […] I don’t have much interest in a visual studies if it is simply an enlarging or updating of traditional categories of imagery, if it is a staking out of some new cafeteria of contemporary media products and mass-cultural objects as a field of inquiry. I don’t know if this in fact is being done anywhere, but it is certainly easy to imagine it happening. (Crary 1996, 33; my emphasis)

The main aim of this chapter—less straining on the imagination—is to show how the history of visuality “is in fact being done” by Jonathan Crary.

1   Visual Past(s) From a certain temporal distance—a quarter of a century has passed since the October questionnaire—we can identify several versions of the narrative accusing visual culture of rejecting history. One of the main tropes, detectable also in Crary’s reference to the “new cafeteria of contemporary media products”, relates to the embedding of visual studies within the contemporary moment. This discussion was often waged in relation to the contentious “pictorial turn”—the category itself analyzed in depth elsewhere in this volume—and centers around the question of the possibility of delineating contemporaneity on the basis of its relation to visuality. The “fallacy of a pictorial turn” (Mitchell 2005, 348) would seem especially probable if one were to—as in the infamous proclamation that “modern life takes place onscreen” (Mirzoeff 1999, 1)— determine the contemporary moment through technological indicators of the development and widespread use of new visual media. Such accounts tend to consider contemporaneity (or modernity) as the first truly visual epoch or even equate visual culture with contemporary culture. As an obvious consequence, studying visuality would thus have to concentrate on contemporaneity, however broadly defined. Another important discussion waged among scholars, labeled as the debate on “visual essentialism” (Bal 2003), could be described as the reverse of the pictorial turn debate. This conversation revolved around the (im)possibility of pointing to the transhistorical essence of the image and the gaze, and can be seen as constitutive for the discipline of visual culture. If the first debate could have led to the elimination of the past as insignificant from the visual perspective, then the second would have us chasing for a purified and

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

timeless object of interest. This is a race that Crary would rather not participate in. According to the author of Techniques of the Observer: [A]ny critical enterprise or new academic precinct (regardless of its label) that privileges the category of visuality is misguided unless it is relentlessly critical of the very processes of specialization, separation, and abstraction that have allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today. So much of what seems to constitute a domain of the visual is an effect of other kinds of forces and relations of power. (Crary 1996, 33)

Crary will thus often counsel against the mistakes of abstracting and essentializing visual experiences, treating visuality as an “autonomous and self-justifying problem” (Crary 2001, 2–3). But the model of an abstracted, disembodied and independent viewer can hardly be seen as a model proposed by the discipline of visual studies, but rather as a model assumed in Western culture before the nineteenth century. Crary’s warnings do not work as isolated contentions. His interpretative methods and ways of analyzing modes of perception are always formulated against a historical context. A critique of contemporary visual studies (or—as I prefer to understand them—a set of methodological guidelines) is developed parallel to an examination of the subjectification of seeing and the incorporation of the viewer in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as well as the consequences of these processes in the 1880s and 1890s. Crary’s point of reference in his analysis of the radical changes of perception is, quite naturally, the model of early modernity. Most historians see nineteenth-century culture as a slight reformulation or direct continuation of dominant forms spanning from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Whereas, for example, the continuation model sees photography as a direct descendant of the camera obscura and cinema as a radical fulfillment of modern realism, Crary prefers to look at the nineteenth century as a radical break. To capture the nature of this break, the author of Techniques of Observer necessarily returns to early modernity. Of course, he is not the first to reconstruct the model of modern visual perception. Quite the contrary, it is precisely authors perceived as foundational for visual culture studies who have critically intervened into the study of early modern visual cultures and through working on the period developed basic disciplinary concepts and principles. As Michael Ann Holly reminded us: When the term “visual culture” was first nominated by Michael Baxandall in Painting and Experience (1972) and seconded by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing (1983), it was, after all, about Renaissance images and Dutch visual culture and thereby ripe for a re-energizing of early period studies. (in: Smith 2008, 174)

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

Early modernity is commonly regarded as oculocentric—privileging vision as the most important sense, one which facilitates cognition and is synonymous with reason. However, thanks to the contributions of authors whose work laid the ground for visual culture studies, we know that it is impossible to speak of one modern visual culture, even if we limit our field of study to the West. Or, as Jacqueline Rose noted, “our previous history is not a petrified block of a single visual space” (Rose 1986, 232–233). Two ground-breaking publications for the project of thawing our perspective on historical visual cultures focus precisely on early modernity. Both were published in 1972. The first one—Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience (Baxandall 1972)—has been recognized as foundational for visual culture studies (Dikovitskaya 2006), especially through its establishment of the category of the “period eye”, which enables us to conceptualize the framework of vision in a given historical period. The second—John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (Berger 1972)—had been published outside of the boundaries of academic art history and has somewhat belatedly earned appreciation within visual culture studies (JVC 2012). In Ways of Seeing, Berger demonstrates that modern practices of seeing should be differentiated not only diachronically (changing over time) but also synchronically. As he shows, in a singular epoch, various ways of seeing may emerge among different groups depending on their class status and gender identity. These groups see differently, create representations in a different manner, perceive and use visual objects in divergent ways. The tension between reconstructing a model (or strategy) of vision and various tactical practices of seeing remains in visual culture studies to this day. In another attempt to fracture the vision of a coherent early modern visual culture, Svetlana Alpers proposed an alternative for the Italian renaissance model, perceived as dominant. Her analysis of Dutch visual culture, published in the early 1980s (Alpers 1983, 1984), focuses on models of representation, specialized artistic cultures, as well as artistic tools and competences. However, these representational models are meant to point to concrete positions, properties and functions of the assumed viewer and practices of seeing. The southern, narrative model is represented by Alberti’s window and the perspectival grid. These figures presuppose a central, privileged and external position of both artist and viewer toward the world. The viewer gains control over the world through a disembodied, single and stable eye. The second, Northern model— represented by the camera obscura, an auxiliary tool for painters and also becomes a beloved object of portrayal—is defined by Alpers as descriptive. Instead of Alberti’s window through which the painter looks out onto the world, in the Northern model “the image of the world casts itself” onto the painting’s flat surface, as on a wall of a dark room or on a map. The viewer seizes to be the decisive point of reference, as the world exists before him and without him. “The artist of the first kind claims that ‘I see the world’ while that of the second shows rather that ‘the world is being seen’” (Alpers 1983, 37), she writes.

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

A similar gesture against hegemonic “carthesian perspectivalism” is undertaken by Martin Jay. Unlike Alpers however, Jay broadens his scope of analysis, moving from models of representation to models of vision. Adapting Christian Metz’s category of the “scopic regime” (Metz 1982; see more on scopic regime in this volume), Jay examines the modern visual field as a “contested terrain, rather than [a] harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices” (Jay 1988, 4). Writing about the same period as Alpers, the author of Downcast Eyes proposes to distinguish two visual subcultures, which exist alongside the model hitherto considered singular. The scopic regime of cartesian perspectivalism naturalizes arbitrary assumptions of linear perspective, accepting the gaze projected within the model as objective and scientifically proven. The first of Jay’s alternatives is derived directly from Alpers’ Northern descriptive model. Jay takes up the figure of the camera obscura, a tool which arbitrarily fragments the world, and supplements it with Baconian empiricism as its philosophic counterpart. In stark contrast to cartesian perspectivalism, in the second scopic regime, the viewer no longer bears a privileged position. Not only because he is now a material, embodied, binocular subject, but also because he seizes to function as the central hero of the story. The third scopic regime is described by Jay as the baroque model—in the place of the dominating figure we find “the anamorphosistic mirror, either Concave or convex” (Jay 1988, 17); in the role of the patron philosopher, Jay casts Leibniz with his “pluralism of monadic viewpoints” (ibid.); as the exemplary artistic style— post-reformation Baroque with its visual paradoxes, attention to detail and tactility of vision. It must be said however that both Alpers’ and Jay’s proposals provide a somewhat partial diachronic differentiation of models of vision. Although the category of the scopic regime would seem to suggest a dominant model, in relation to which “visual subcultures” emerge, in both theoretical proposals what we actually encounter is either a division of geographical spheres of influence (Alpers) or independently functioning models rooted in philosophy and painting (Jay). Neither Jay nor Alpers accounts for any sort of hierarchical conflict between described models or a challenge of hegemonic perspectivism. A multiplication of models does not necessarily elucidate the different ways of seeing among different social classes, gender and ethnic groups. The methodological call formulated in Berger’s popular essay—an encouragement to recognize the hierarchies and dependencies of visual cultures—will be taken up on a larger scale only four decades later in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look, in which the author proposes to examine the co-existent and co-dependent spheres of Visuality 1, Visuality 2 and Countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011).

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

2   Modernizing Vision The camera obscura is what Gilles Deleuze would call an assemblage, something that is “‘simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation’, an object about which something is said and at the same time an object that is used” (Crary 1990, 30–31). The camera obscura experiment, in which a wall of a darkened room with a single source of light becomes a screen onto which the world is projected, has been known since ancient times. It has also been used to imagine and theorize vision and cognition in authors “as remote from each other as Euclid, Aristotle, Alhazen, Roger Bacon, Leonardo, and Kepler” (Crary 1990, 27). But, as Crary claims, it is not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the camera obscura—a technical object functioning both in optics and in art—becomes the “dominant paradigm through which was described the status and possibilities of an observer” (Crary 1988, 31). This occurs as part of a complex philosophical and scientific network of re-evaluating the world and the human subject after the Copernican revolution. And even though there exist important differences in the ways in which the camera obscura is used as a theoretical model of cognition in the works of Descartes, Newton or Locke, Crary shows the importance of the recurring appearance of the technical object in the discussion about perception and cognition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Techniques of the Observer, the camera obscura functions as a theoretical object, or maybe rather somewhat like a hipericon, a picture theory in the understanding of W. J. T. Mitchell (1995). However, unlike the hipericons of Picture Theory, Crary’s camera obscura functions not as a visual expression of a singular theory but as an object conditioning theoretical thinking about the subject during a whole epoch. To understand this model it is crucial to notice that the hole through which light passes—sometimes equipped with a lens, other times, as in Descarte’s Dioptrique, consisting of a “dead eye of a newly dead person (or, failing that, the eye of an ox or some other large animal)” (Descartes in: Crary 1990, 47)— cannot be equated with a human eye. Understood as a picture theory, the camera obscura does not seek to describe the mechanisms of a seeing body, but precisely the opposite—disembodied perception. As such, it constitutes an abstract, metaphysical model, instead of a physical one. Only then does it— somewhat paradoxically—represent the cognizant subject. The model presupposes a radical difference between the external world and the internal reality of the subject. In accordance with the metaphysics of interiority, cognition is not only disembodied but also “isolated, enclosed, and autonomous” (ibid., 39), independent and securely sealed off from external influences. Although the model remains monocular and the subject is placed in the vantage point, we are no longer dealing with a singular God’s point of view of fifteenth- and sixteenth-­ century representations utilizing linear perspective. It is rather a monadic multiplicity of positions assumed by individual subjects. “It is a figure for the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual but who is also a

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

privatized isolated subject enclosed in a quasi-domestic space separated from a public exterior world” (Crary 1988, 33). Under no circumstances does that suggest a subjective character of cognition nor a radical passivity of a subject before whom the world reveals itself. For the philosophers of the epoch, the camera obscura is a tool of double revision—it protects the subject from disruptions caused by the senses (Descartes) and facilitates “reflexive introspection and self-observation” (in Newton and Locke, after Crary 1990, 40). Camera obscura does not make its first appearance in modernity, just as its rich social life does not end with the twilight of the early modern era. The persistent appearance of the figure—for example, in discussions about the invention and growing popularity of photography, and later the appearance of the cinematograph and the institution of cinema—would seem to suggest a certain stability of ideas connected to the figure, at least those relating to the functions of visual representations. However, as Crary emphasizes, despite the popularity of the figure of the camera obscura, the beginning of the nineteenth century constituted a radical redrawing of modernity, a break with its earlier ideas. The physical similarity of technical inventions, such as the photographic camera and cinematograph to the perspectival model of vision (Berger 1972) or the camera obscura, (cf. Jay 1993, 127–133) is thus superficial. If the camera obscura in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy can be seen as a paradigm as defined by Thomas Kuhn (1962), then according to Crary, at the beginning of the nineteenth century a radical change of paradigm occurs, one which influences the general framework of understanding the subject and cognition. Everything that has hitherto been eliminated from definitions of cognition, deemed as aberrations or disruptions—binocularity, extended temporality, selectivity of seeing and afterimages—becomes the ground for re-evaluating cognitive processes. In Techniques of the Observer, the year 1810 becomes the first symbolic date of the breakthrough that occurs on the junction between physiology and philosophy of the subject. It is in 1810 that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes his Theory of Color, in which he describes an experience initially resembling creating a camera obscura. But although he starts with sealing himself of in an enclosed, dark room with a limited amount of light seeping into the room through a break in the curtains, he swiftly proceeds to shut out light entirely. Darkness ascends onto the room, and specters of color appear on the walls. A distinct border between the internal and the external seizes to exist and the subjective embodied subject becomes a source of color. Seeing is no longer stable, starting to extend in time—the time of the afterimage, the time of reaction and possible time of concentration. The camera obscura as a figure of a sealed-off cognizant subject seizes to exist. “Vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomes itself an object of knowledge” (Crary 1990, 70). That the nineteenth century is a time of a reorganization of the visual sphere has been treated as a given for some time. However, regardless of whether these changes are considered a consequence of long developing tendencies (as in Bazin’s analysis of striving toward realism: Bazin 1967) or regarded as a

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

definite breakthrough, the climactic moment is always located around the middle of the century or in its second half. We have grown used to a set of dates: starting with the “invention” of photography in 1839 and the popularization of the medium, through a number of moments particularly significant for the visual field (be it the first-world expositions, Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris or even the photographing of the dead Communards) till the creation of cinema in 1895. Art history also locates its anti-realist breakthrough in the second half of the nineteenth century. Crary proposes an alternative vision of the significant moments in the nineteenth century, distinguishing two long and mutually connected breakthroughs: at the beginning and end of the century. Through recognizing a radical revision of the perception model already in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Crary rejects technocentric and medio-centric narratives. Not incidentally the mid-century, a period most often discussed in relation to the invention of photography, is not strongly present in Crary’s conceptualization of modernity. Rather, photography is framed as a consequence of the changes in perception, which take place in the three decades before its “birth”. Through this gesture, the author of Techniques of the Observer resists the urge of placing photography and film within a narrative of the prolonged desire to realistically represent reality. However, he also refuses to view photography and film as solely an element of the procession of disciplinary and ideological forms of representations (Crary 1990, 26–27). Of course, both photography and film can be categorized as disciplinary devices. However, the way they execute such goals has less to do with who and what they show, and more with the place and function that they assign to the embodied subject that they engage. If one wanted to supplement Crary’s story about the nineteenth century with reflections on photography, while simultaneously remaining faithful to his original theoretical framework, it would perhaps be best to explore the work of such authors as John Tagg or Allan Sekula (1988; 1986). Both Crary and Tagg heavily draw on the thought of Michel Foucault, beginning with his belief in the radical discontinuity between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both also build on the French philosopher’s conviction that the essence of producing and managing modern subjects lies in acting on their bodies. Photography and other visual technologies of the nineteenth century participate in producing power-knowledge, but they are also used to develop specific competences of modern embodied subjects. These competences are developed primarily for the use of new systems of surveillance, industrial production and mass consumption, as well as new ways of producing and defining value. As Crary notes in Techniques of the Observer, “photography and money become homologous forms of social power” (Crary 1990, 13). This is why the rapid proliferation of visual tools and techniques, too often seen as purely “democratizing”, was crucial for the development of modernity. Photography here is not the source of modernity, but rather the embodiment of its vision—a medium which seeks to become universal, to capture the entirety of the world is also an expression and reproduction of a new type of reference, new type of sign and

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

meaning (Crary 1990, 13). Seen in this light, photography disciplines and classifies bodies, not so much creating new norms, as securing the hitherto perceived norm as a universal point of reference. The uses and meanings of a new visual technology like photography are decided by “the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work” (Tagg 1988, 63). Crary also emphasizes that both photography and other visual tools: […] are inextricably dependent on a new arrangement of knowledge about the body and the constitutive relation of that knowledge to social power. These apparatuses are the outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus exchangeable. (Crary 1990, 17)

The modern embodied subject is thus an effect of a complex and intricate discursive machine, which focuses on normativizing perception (cf. Sekula 1986). Where others understand “the frenzy of the visible” as an “effect of the social multiplication of images” (Comolli 1996), Crary’s objective is to uncover the attempts at subjugating perception and bodily reactions through the use of science and visual tools. It should now be obvious that Crary’s perspective has to run against narratives privileging art as the avant-garde of vision, such as Svetlana Alpers’ belief that painters should be recognized as experts in seeing (cf. Alpers 1996). A similar centrality is ascribed to painting by art history, which locates the cause of the crisis of vision in “modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s […] as constituting an epochal turning point in the historical makeup of the observer and practices of vision” (Crary 2001, 6). For Crary painting does not possess “any sort of ontological privilege” (ibid., 7), nor can practices of seeing in the nineteenth century be divided into common (still realistic) and expert (already striving toward abstraction). In the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the analysis of vision seizes to be the domain of mathematical optics, vision becomes central for the new discipline of physiology, which in turn becomes influential for philosophers of cognition and subjectivity. One of Crary’s sources in this matter is the works of Johannes Müller, whose […] theory was based on the discovery that the nerves of the different senses were physiologically distinct. It asserted quite simply—and this is what marks its epistemological scandal—that a uniform cause (e.g., electricity) would generate utterly different sensations from one kind of nerve to another. Electricity applied to the optic nerve produces the experience of light, applied to the skin the sensation of touch. Conversely, Müller shows that a variety of different causes will produce the same sensation in a given sensory nerve; in other words, he describes a fundamentally arbitrary relation between stimulus and sensation. It is a description of a body with an innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive, of an eye that renders differences equivalent. (Crary 1988, 39; cf. Crary 1990, 89–90)

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

Seeing can thus lack a referent. In the place of an object, a stimulus appears, and the body, instead of functioning as a passive recipient, becomes the co-­ creator of sensations. Afterimages are perceived here not as an aberration but as part of the process of seeing. A wave of new visual apparatuses leave the physiologists’, physicians’ and mathematicians’ workshops and studies: the thaumatrope (“wonder-turner”), phenakistiscope (“deceptive view”), zootrope (“wheel of life”) and many others. Created with the goal of “mathematising perception” (Crary 1988, 37), these devices permeate popular culture and begin to test and train the new subject, producing an active observer, a consumer of attractions and simultaneously an object of research. To recall Jay’s description of the stereoscope: By removing the verification of touch—that three-dimensional images were only in the perception of the viewer—the stereoscope called into question the assumed congruence between the geometry of the world and the natural geometry of the mind’s eye. Nor was it possible to privilege any longer a monocular point of view, as the role of both physical eyes in vision was evident in the stereoscopic experience. (Jay 1993, 152)

Subsequent nineteenth-century scholars began to describe seeing as a complex and varying process, one extended in time and—most importantly—embodied. Embodied seeing became possible to measure. “The discourse of dioptrics, of the transparency of refractive systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has given way to a mapping of the eye as a productive territory with varying zones of efficiency and aptitude” (Crary 1990, 104). Whereas some devices tested the stability of an image on an eye (e.g., the afterimage effect or the illusion of movement), others—like the diorama— placed the body of the observer inside the device, engaging it in the process of creating an illusion of three dimensionality and the passage of time. The aforementioned stereoscope explored the issue of binocularity—by merging two slightly different images, not so much “tricking” the viewer, but dismantling and putting back together the process of seeing in front of the viewer’s own eyes. Early stereoscopes avoided illusory and theatrical effects, making “clear the atopic nature of the perceived stereoscopic image, the disjunction between experience and its cause” (ibid., 129). The image was actualized only in the process of seeing, the reference seizes to exist on the outside of the subject. Crary does not treat technical devices slowly adapted from science into the realm of popular culture as models of subjectivity or cognition, as was the case with Jay’s scopic regimes. The subject—here labeled as the observer—is not an empirically cognizable entity. The model of the observer appears as a set of conditions and possibilities, forces and tasks. It also comes into being as a result of diverse discourses—in the beginning of the nineteenth century dominated by physiology, at the end increasingly by psychology. All of them created “not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. It may

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places” (ibid., 6). Interestingly, Crary chooses to use the term observer in order to avoid a category more common in that time, that is, the spectator—“one who is a passive onlooker at a spectacle, as at an art gallery or theatre” (ibid., 5). In a perhaps unusual methodological move, the author of Techniques of the Observer reaches for a category meant to demonstrate the researcher’s own assumptions about the subject and perception of the epoch— although the category of the observer does not necessarily lead us to issues of embodied vision and perception, so often emphasized by the author. Through this specific category, Crary seeks to direct our attention to a different feature of the subject produced. The observer is meant “‘to conform one’s action, to comply with’, [he] observes rules, codes, regulations, and practices. Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations” (ibid., 6). It is therefore worth noting that although Crary will avoid distinguishing between a deep hidden model or structure and a myriad of surface practices, maintaining that no such stable structure exists and we can only attend to a kaleidoscope of events on a flat social surface, his choice of observer over spectator has important consequences. The observer from Techniques of the Observer does not belong to any specific social class nor any gender group, which can provoke the question of whether all social groups are conditioned for the same model of consumption and production (cf. critique: Mitchell 1995, 20–21). Paradoxically, the only time when the reader receives accounts of empirically existing subjects’ experiences is when Crary relates the often painful consequences of experiments undertaken by scientists of the era: Three of the most celebrated students of vision of this period went blind or permanently damaged their eyesight by repeatedly staring at the sun: David Brewster, who invented the kaleidoscope and stereoscope; Joseph Plateau, who studied the so-called persistence of vision; and Gustav Fechner, one of the founders of modern quantitative psychology. (Crary 1988, 34)

This relative absence of subjective reports will be somewhat alleviated in Suspensions of Perception, a book devoted to the second breakthrough of the second part of the nineteenth century. The last decades are presented here as a continuation of changes in the study of perception which occurred between 1810 and 1840. The embodied observer evolves into an attentive subject or rather a subject trained to be attentive. In many ways, however, it is difficult to assess how far this change, which results in the abandonment of sight as the primary object of interest, grows out of an analysis of historical sources. Instead, one might suspect that it may be, at least in part, motivated by Crary’s growing resistance toward the isolation of sight as an independent sense. In the first breakthrough of the century analyzed in Techniques of the Observer, the subject is consistently built around seeing, a practice which changes its nature with

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

time. In the second breakthrough, which becomes the focus of Suspensions of Perception, sight seizes to be a privileged sense and the work is structured around the category of attention—a hybrid process, which may be related with non-visual perception and whose basic field of actualization is time, not sight. Attention and attentiveness are seen here not so much as an overriding coordinated plan of subject management, but rather the primary field of discussion, a “constellation of texts and practices” (Crary 2001, 2) in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Poring over countless works from the domains of philosophy, physiology, psychology and management, Crary aims to reconstruct the theoretical framework of the category of attention, as well as various theories of concentration and distraction. Once influential and generative, today many of them have long been forgotten. The analysis of textual sources is complemented by analyses of painting, which—according to the author—constituted an important site of conceptualizing attentiveness. The author devotes less space to popular visual devices. The starting date of Crary’s analysis—the year 1879—is determined by the opening of Wilhelm Wundt’s first psychological laboratory: Irrespective of the specific nature of Wundt’s intellectual project, this laboratory space, with its newly codified research procedures and finely calibrated apparatuses, became the model for the whole modern social organization of psychological experimentation around the study of an observer attentive to a wide range of artificially produced stimuli. To paraphrase Foucault, this has been one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematize what they are”. (Crary 2001, 29)

The 1870s bring new attentiveness to the category of attention. The possibility of its measurement and its prolonging, as well as the consequences of losing attention—all these issues become crucial in the research of such influential authors as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Ernst Mach, William James, Hermann von Helmholtz, J.-M. Charcot, Sigmund Freud and many others. They also influence the philosophical inquiries of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Charles Sanders Peirce and many other philosophers of modernity. But the date 1879 also points in a different direction, as the year when Édouard Manet painted In the Conservatory, a painting depicting a greenhouse meeting, perhaps a lovers’ rendezvous. Crary’s daring interpretation of this and other paintings—Manet’s The Balcony (1868), Georges Seurat’s Parade de cirque (1887–1888) and Paul Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (c. 1900)—become the book’s driving force. And although, as already mentioned, Crary stresses that artists do not possess “any sort of ontological privilege” (Crary 2001, 7), it seems that his goal is not to diminish their social position or cognitive qualities, but mostly to uncover the unfounded character of isolating artistic reflection and experiencing art from the wider social, scientific and philosophical debate about attention.

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

I am insisting that certain works, and the specific aesthetic practices on which they are founded, are constitutive elements of that same field of events, that they are original fashionings of related problems. Thus, the use of Manet, Seurat and Cézanne as figures through whom to rethink developments in this period is hardly arbitrary. Each of them engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies and rifts within a perceptual field; each of them made unprecedented discoveries about the indeterminacy of an attentive perception but also how its instabilities could be the basis for a reinvention of perceptual experience and of representational practices (Crary 2001, 9). Perhaps the most valuable contribution of painters is the social context brought into view by their representations. Crary’s observer is suddenly revealed as occupying a specific location—the modern city with its public spaces and mass entertainment. The observer might be visiting a greenhouse, enjoying a circus performance, looking inside a Kaiser-Panorama or admiring a magic lantern show. The observer gains a body and with it a gender identity, revealing the complex economy of gendered practices of looking. Perhaps unintentionally, in Crary’s examinations of paintings, observer begins to blend into spectator, as the subjects portrayed often perform their roles in a social theater. The Foucauldian theoretical framework, in which the subject is subjected to practices of micro-management, conditioned to produce and consume, gains a spatial and relational aspect through painting, even if the main effect of being in a modern crowd is the feeling of alienation, and the only social glue is consumption. In Suspensions of Perception, Manet’s portrayal of a couple captured against the lush vegetation of an enclosed greenhouse is interpreted as a representation balancing between desperate attempt at perceptual synthesis and total perceptual disintegration. Crary sees the In the Conservatory as a parting with the potential of stable and cohesive perception, realized both through painterly style and technique, as well as choice of setting, way of representing the bodies and costumes of the portrayed couple, visual details hinting at tightening and closure, and finally in the impossible focalization of a representation only seemingly cohesive from a perspectival standpoint. The woman’s empty gaze might signify trancelike attention or quite the opposite—utter distraction. The man’s eyes seem to be looking in different directions, the coherence of sight impossible to uphold. And finally, the viewer’s gaze which—as if dealing with a botched visual trick—tries to integrate the line marked by the base of the bench, a line which falls apart into independent fragments, which cannot be coalesced. In the last quarter of the century, both scientists and painters recognize perception as temporally differentiated, fragmentary and unstable. Attention becomes a multidimensional spectrum, in which absolute concentration does not constitute the radical opposite of distraction, but rather rests right next to it. Complete attention is dangerously close to trans-like immersion. Specific types of attentiveness are distinguished and classified, and instability becomes associated with every type of perception. Simultaneously new borders are

 

Ł. ZAREMBA

drawn; new norms and pathologies of attention are distinguished. In the field of popular entertainment devices illusion cedes ground to mechanization of attention. Like in the Kaiserpanorama, a visual attraction from 1880s Berlin. As Crary writes, In one sense the history of the Kaiserpanorama belongs within that of the stereoscope and peep show, but its particular structure foreshadows the experience that Edison provided with his Kinetoscope in the early 1890s, that is, an individual viewing station located in a public place, for which a consumer would pay to observe a mechanized series of photographic images. […] common to both devices is a specific conception of how an audience could be organized in terms of an individual machinic engagement and of an economic consumption in which both hardware and software would be owned by an operator-entrepreneur. […] The interior contained a motor that rotated the slides at roughly two-minute intervals from viewer to viewer. A bell would ring just as the slides were about to change. (Crary 2001, 136)

Upholding the subject’s attention becomes the goal and stake of both consumption and production. Visual attraction machines are based on newly discovered scientific knowledge. They are capable of producing a high intensity of stimuli, mainly through delivering successive images. They also have the potential of training their users in mechanical perception and reaction, the sort of skills ridiculed by Charlie Chaplin in the Modern Times. “The administered perception of spectacular culture [implies that] attention would be made attentive to everything but itself” (Crary 2001, 359). The 2014 book 24/7 Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (Crary 2014) can be viewed as a supplement to the critique of attention in the late nineteenth century. This time, Crary presents attention as the most desirable condition for contemporary markets. In an age of never sleeping screens, the banal human act of sleeping becomes the last bastion of resistance to consumption, the last moment of inattentiveness. In this light, Suspensions of Perception is primarily a genealogy of modern capitalism—directly and shamelessly pointing to attention as its key commodity, scarce resource and thus the basis of economy. Simultaneously, Crary’s work tells the story of the dominant conditions of the existence of modern subjects: who organize their lives—never exclusively, but often mainly—through vision; for whom visual media—mixed media in corporeal multisensory experiences—work as tools of subjugation, training of consumption (and sometimes also resistance). Moreover, this story is told with a special attention to historical visual language, including historical artworks. They are treated as reflective sources and function parallel to the writings of philosophers, physiologists and poets. In this sense, Crary’s resistance to the label of visual culture studies seems like a symptom of a pictorial turn as W.J.T.  Mitchell understands it. Vision may not constitute the center of his research, may not be recognized as an organizing principle, but it remains a problem that the researcher constantly tries to solve.

  HISTORICITY OF OBSERVING AND VISION IN JONATHAN CRARY 

References Visual Culture Questionnaire (VCQ). 1996. October, no. 77. Journal of Visual Culture (JVC). 2012. no. 11. Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. “Interpretation without Representation, or the Viewing of Las Meninas”. Representations, 1: 31–42. Alpers, Svetlana. 1984. Art of Describing. Dutch Art in Seventeenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Alpers, Svetlana. 1996. “Response to a questionnaire”. October, 77: 26. Bal, Mieke. 2003. “Visual Essentialism and Object of Visual Culture”. Journal of Visual Culture, 2: 5–32. Baxandall, Michael. 1972. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Berger, John. 1972.  Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, Penguin Books. Comolli, Jean-Louis. 1996. “Machines of the Visible”. In: Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Ed. by Timothy Druckrey. Reading, PA: Aperture Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1988. “Modernising Vision”. In: Vision and Visuality. Ed. by Hal Foster. New York: Bay Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in XIX Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1996. “Response to a questionnaire”. October, 77: 33–34. Crary, Jonathan. 2001. Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crary, Jonathan. 2014. 24/7 Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep. London: Verso. Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2006. Visual Culture. The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jay, Martin. 1988. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”. Vision and Visuality. Ed. by Hal Foster. New York: Bay Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Bloomington University Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1999. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1995. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 1986. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. Sekula, Alan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive”. October, 39: 3–64. Smith, Marquard. 2008. Visual Culture Studies. London: Sage. Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographs and Histories. London: Macmillan.

Male Gaze and Visual Pleasure in Laura Mulvey Patricia Stefanovic and Ana Gruić Parać

1   Introduction Feminist film theory plays a crucial role in examining the concept of spectatorship. Ruby Rich puts it this way: How does one formulate an understanding of a structure that insists on our absence even in the face of our presence? What is there in a film with which a woman viewer identifies? How can the contradictions be used as a critique? And how do all these factors influence what one makes as a woman filmmaker, or specifically as a feminist filmmaker? (Rich, in: de Lauretis 1984, 157)

The feminist film critique begins with the analysis of the way patriarchal ideology is embedded within film text. At its center is the criticism of mainstream cinema on the one hand and the propagation of the alternative film on the other hand. This double task of the feminist criticism has been attributed for the first time to the Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, published in the journal Screen in 1975, and her theses presented there eventually became a significant starting point for feminist film theory. In the article she famously argued that the dominant and controlling gaze in classical Hollywood films is always male. Mulvey’s approach through this polemic essay has been criticized and her later works show a shift of focus from gender to technology: “In a world

P. Stefanovic (*) Palm Beach State College, Boca Raton, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. G. Parać Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek, Croatia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_21

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/ male and passive/female” (Mulvey 1989, 19); however, it seems essential to emphasize that for Mulvey there is no way that a woman could abandon her passive role; her gaze is irrelevant and non-existent. In her essay “Afterthought on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1981), she sets up a slightly different possibilities of female gaze, referring to Freud’s phallic stage. By questioning the terms of the male gaze and visual pleasure from today’s perspective, the question of their persistence and form in different modern film genres is enforced. Although the author herself did not much touch upon the recent film achievements, she noted that a new phenomenon had been created merging the female heroine with digitized special effects which resulted in recent versions of voyeuristic views since the active heroine was also enrolled in the traditional male scopic regime (Sassatelli 2011, 130). We will first present the main Mulvey argument of the male gaze and visual pleasure in the structure of the classical Hollywood film that the author, based on Sigmund Freud, connects to scopophilia. Furthermore, Mulvey initially explored the way that film develops in the narcissist aspect, where Lacan’s analysis of the mirror phase is shown as relevant. In the next section of the work, we will refer to Mary Ann Doane (1982), who, in the “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator”, sums up her structure of the gaze. Doane sets in front of a female audience two possibilities: an emotional overturn to identify with the heroine on the screen or to take the heroine as its narcissistic object of desire. The solution she proposes is the audience’s presentation of what she sees as a “masquerade”, referring to the concept of Joan Riviere’s Womanliness as Masquerade (Riviere 1929). Teresa de Lauretis in the book Alice Doesn’t (1984) approaches the concept of a female through double identification in which the viewer is identified with passive and active role interchanger. Tania Modleski in The Women Who Knew Too Much (2016), on the trail of de Lauretis, highlights the inconsistency of the male gaze by analyzing Hitchcock’s films and claims that for patriarchal interpretations to really work, they require acceptance from the woman’s side, and limiting the film to only one point of view emphasizes the existence of the other. In the end we will briefly present the ways in which the gaze is structured in action films, which in a very illustrative way depicts important binary opposition in feminist theory—passive-active.

2   Background and Perspective In her ground-breaking seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film”, first published by Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey argued that classic Hollywood narrative cinema is constructed specifically for the heterosexual male viewer’s erotic look which becomes the controlling gaze of classic cinema where women are positioned as object of this look. Mulvey’s essay, written in the context of 1970s feminist politics, was an examination and an indictment of the Hollywood system for the ways in which cinema both reflects and reproduces patriarchal

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

gender relations. Enlisting Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the Oedipus Complex, voyeurism, fetishism, scopophilia, and the mirror stage, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was one of the first feminist works to examine the sexually differentiated codes of film, for example, in arguing that the gaze in Hollywood film is male. Mulvey’s essay become invaluable in the exploration of cinematic spectatorship—albeit a male and gendered spectatorship—contributing to the understanding that cinematic viewers were both produced and constructed by film texts along a limited axis of sexual differences underpinned by a patriarchal reality. Mulvey focused on the “magic” and appeal of film and the structures of looking cinema offers, pleasures of looking, which for Mulvey are heavily invested in patriarchal ideology. Drawn from the Freudian concept, scopophilia is an erotic pleasure in looking and refers to a controlling desire to look, unobserved and sometimes, in extreme ideations, in perverse secrecy, through fetishistic voyeurism. Scopophilia refers to more than just an innocuous looking but rather to looking without being seen—voyeuristically—to have control and command over that which is being looked at. To look implies an object to be seen. For Mulvey, that object, of course, is the figure of the woman, who becomes subjected to the controlling looks of the camera apparatus and more specifically, the male gaze. The mechanisms of scopophilia, weighted in patriarchal discourse, according to Mulvey, are all at play in cinema. In presenting her seminal thesis, Mulvey conjoins three separate social discourses: Hollywood film industry, the women’s liberation, and psychoanalytic theory (2017, 385). As Mulvey explains: “Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (22). Prior to the early 1970s, the time in which Mulvey investigated looking relations in cinema, there were still very few female, feminist, or femme filmmakers. In an effort to counter mainstream Hollywood filmmaking practices that produced an endless circulation of reactionary narratives, filmmakers like Michelle Rich (1998) began to produce avant-garde and documentary films that seemed to provide the perfect opportunity to both resist and reimagine traditional cultural expressions of female representation and subjectivity. As a participant in counter cinema, Mulvey favored experimental avant-garde film practices because they offered a way to counter both the language and form of classic cinema. Mulvey’s desire was to create an awareness of the gender ideology in cinema by deconstructing looking relations through the lens of psychoanalytic theory: Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged. (Mulvey 1975, 25)

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

By engaging in alternative, non-narrative film forms, the objectifying mechanisms of cinema’s looking relations could be disrupted, that is, the traditional pleasure of cinema. If the female-driven narrative re-enacts the Oedipal narrative in classic cinema, then avant-garde film, which purposely subverts traditional narrative, provided an aesthetic resistance to patriarchal film practices. Avant-garde film rejects mainstream cinema, thought to be responsible for (re) producing patriarchal and bourgeois spectators and a suppression of femininity. Yvonne Rainer’s film The Man Who Envied Women, for example, attempts to deconstruct all narrative (Fischer 2014) in an attempt to dismantle patriarchal film structures (Fig. 1). By making her protagonist disembodied, Rainer literally de-centers her, subverting any attempt or opportunity for the male gaze. For Mulvey personally (Mulvey 1996), avant-garde film permitted a break with the dominant cinema, an opposition to the dominant voice of the patriarchy and therefore to dominant culture. It also permitted the refiguring of the female body not as an object for a male gaze but as one with subjective agency (Bovenschen (2001). The turn to avant-garde cinema directly addresses the tension between women and patriarchy as Fischer suggests, “The collision between feminism and film is part of a wider explosive meeting between feminism and patriarchal culture” (2014, 111). By deconstructing traditional narratives, the avant-garde film deconstructs the pleasure and identities associated with a male positioning and exposes the patriarchal underpinnings of mainstream cinema. Yet, paradoxically, the awareness created by the exposing of the patriarchal text at the same time positions the spectator as “other”—and therefore still outside the mainstream. One of the drawbacks of this strategy—subverting mainstream film techniques in an attempt to foreground their political aims—was the risk of not only alienating mainstream audiences but also those

Fig. 1  Yvonne Reiner, The Men Who Envied Women, 1986, screen capture (fair use)

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

for whom the film initially had been designed. Citron (1988) in her article “Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream” explains why this concern led her to combine both types of practices, avant-garde and conventional, in an intentional move to reach both a mass and more selective audience, acknowledging that “[…] A play on genres, with its mass culture familiarity and appeal, seemed to offer a way of entry into what would otherwise be an avant-garde film” (1988, 59). Ultimately, Mulvey’s essay posed important critical questions for the cultural mechanism of Hollywood as one that was becoming strained at the seams in its stereotypical and reactionary depiction of women onscreen. As E. Ann Kaplan (1983) argues: “Hollywood films reflect […] the unconscious of patriarchy, including a fear of the pre-Oedipal plenitude with the mother. The domination of women by the male gaze is part of patriarchal strategy to contain the threat the mother embodies, and to control the positive and negative impulses that memory traces of being mothered have left in the male unconscious. Women, in turn, have learned to associate their sexuality with domination by the male gaze, a position involving a degree of masochism in finding their objectification erotic. We have participated in, and perpetuated, our domination by following the pleasure principle, which leaves no options given our posturing. […] Female sexuality has been taken over by the male gaze (unlike motherhood, completely, for example)” (1983).

3  Three Types of Gaze Cinema constructs three types of gaze: that of the camera apparatus, that of the characters looking at one another onscreen, and that of the spectator. In traditional Hollywood cinema, the male is the “active bearer of the gaze; the woman is the passive object”, subjected to his look. The gaze is an abstract psychoanalytic concept that refers to the field of vision and the subjective positioning created by the cinematic apparatus. For Mulvey, “cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire” (32). In classic cinema, onscreen looking relations depict traditional gendered social relationships between the male and the female where the power of the gaze is gendered male. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972), famously conceptualizes this imbalanced relationship in a single phrase: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. In classic cinema, unlike radical and/or contemporary cinema, the camera’s presence and the audience viewer/spectator is subverted for the onscreen gaze, or field of vision, created by the camera apparatus. In Hollywood cinema, all three looking mechanisms—the camera, the character onscreen, and the spectator— reinforce the male gaze. Here, embedded by phallocentric and social structures, visual pleasure is coded male with male desire:

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure […] In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact […] (it) connotes (their) to-be-looked-at-ness. (Berger 1975, 27)

Visual pleasure in cinema is thus organized around this structure—one that mimics its real-life power relations in the real world. What the spectator sees is determined by the gaze of the camera. The onscreen gaze of the film’s character is the look of the central male protagonist, according to Mulvey, and it is that look which is determining and privileged in the film so that all events unfold through his eyes and his privileged point of view. We see through his eyes and identify with his gaze. According to Mulvey: The woman is displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threaten to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma […] or complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object so it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. (1975, 32)

The figure of the woman in classical cinema becomes key here as she is positioned either as a spectacle, “to-be-looked-at-ness”, or as a reminder of female lack, mobilizing castration anxiety. Structures of pleasure in looking derive from two seemingly incompatible sources: “The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act derives from unconscious desires” (ibid.). These are seemingly incompatible because one refers to the pleasure of looking at someone else while the other refers to the pleasure of looking at oneself (or perfect self as in the ego ideal). Cinema offers these pleasures in looking, or what Freud termed “scopophilia”, an active rather than passive state of looking. This pleasure of looking refers to the uninhibited circulation of male desire at the expense of female subjectivity, where the gaze of the camera, and by default the spectator, assumes a male gaze. It is important to point out that the notion of pleasure in looking does not work as smoothly as Mulvey suggests, especially concerning psychic processes of identification, and the idea of a strictly speaking male gaze has undergone radical transformation by subsequent feminist film theorists such as Gaylyn Studlar (In the Realm of Pleasure. Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), Mary Ann Doane (“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psychoanalysis, New  York: Routledge, 1991), E.  Ann Kaplan (“Is the Gaze Male?” from Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, London: Methuen, 1983), and from Mulvey herself in a well-known follow-up essay to Visual Pleasure and Narrative

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

Cinema, “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) in Visual and Other Pleasures, 1981. If not restrained by the ego, scopophilia can turn into its more perverse state of fetishistic voyeurism. Films like Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and many of the films of Hitchcock, who is well known for his self-reflexive play of psychoanalytic concepts in his films (Rear Window [1954], Vertigo [1958], and Psycho [1960]) replay and dramatize this extreme type of voyeurism (Fig. 2). Mulvey describes a second phase of looking in which scopophilia advances into a narcissistic state: The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination of likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. (Mulvey 1975, 25)

In other words, films create an illusion of “looking in on a private world” (25) which further binds them to identification with the images onscreen and provides the satisfaction of pleasurable looking. For Mulvey, the mechanisms of looking become increasingly more complex with the viewer in a type of double

Fig. 2  Alfred Hitchcock, The Rear Window, 1954, screen capture. Pictured is James Stewart (as Jeff) (fair use)

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

bind as the desire to look (scopophilia) becomes intermingled with the desire to be (identification with the ego ideal). This powerful alliance with the image onscreen suggests a vulnerability of the viewer to the images and narrative and the invisible mechanisms that are at play onscreen. Within these structures of looking, there is the imbalance of agency and power for the spectator subjective position—the active/male and passive/female. Even though the figure of the female is necessary to the narrative—in fact the narrative cannot exist without her as the “male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification”— thus she exists as paradox; she “freezes the flow of action” (27). The role of the male protagonist then is to advance the narrative, to become the “bearer of the spectator look”. Through this look, the spectator is able to identify with the male protagonist and male star who then becomes the Lacanian ego ideal. The power of this identification can be explained through Lacan’s mirror stage according to Mulvey: “Cinema’s pleasures include voyeurism, fetishism, and a return to the pleasures of infancy’s ‘mirror phase’ where the child’s image in the mirror represents something greater than he” (26). It is at this point—where pleasure in looking is derived from identification with the ego ideal—that Lacan’s mirror phase becomes especially relevant for Mulvey’s discussion: “The mirror phase occurs at a time when children’s physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body” (25). Lacan’s seminal metaphor of the first critical stage of ego development, the first stage of identification, and the creation of the subject, the mirror phase, is taken from his 1949 lecture, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I function, as Revealed in Psycho-Analytic Experience” ( Lacan 2006), and details the stage of development in an infant between the ages of 9–18 months in which it first perceives itself as separate from its mother. The significance of the mirror stage for film is its reliance on visuality and the mother’s gaze; the moment after the child becomes aware of its ideal ego image, its perception of itself, that is, the way it sees itself, is always mediated by the other and is an inherently alienating one. This is the basis for the concept of a split ego. Christian Metz makes an analogous comparison between the subject caught in the processes of identification established by Lacan’s mirror phase, from which he draws upon for his own concept of primary identification, to the experiences of the film spectator. Like the child who “misrecognizes” its own physiologically incapable body in the mirror as the perfect, coordinated ego ideal image, the film spectator in primary identification experiences an unrealistic sense of self, power, and control. Like the child in the Freudian pre-oedipal who must invoke a fetish to maintain the (mis)belief in a maternal penis, the spectator believes in the unreality of the screen but must constantly refute or disavow this same knowledge in order to maintain the illusion of control and wholeness. “Recognition”, as Mulvey explains it, thus becomes “misrecognition”. This misrecognition “as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

alienated subject which, reintrojected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future” (25). Cinema as metaphor for a mirror encourages this identification with the characters on screen. Through the “production of stars” or celebrity culture, for example, it encourages the connection with the ego ideal (“The glamourous impersonates the ordinary” or the ego ideal impersonates the ego) (25). The child identifies with the image in the mirror as a whole and powerful being just as the spectator identifies with the image on screen. In this way, then, women do not “advance” the narrative, but rather function as “spectacle”, disrupting rather than advancing its narrative. Scopophilia implies then to not a benign act of looking but rather to a charged looking that connotes power and control. Thus, whomever looks possesses the control and power over the object-to-be-looked at, as Susan Thornhill affirms: In this phase, as Lacan has said, the child imagines itself to be a whole and powerful individual by identifying with its own more perfect mirror image, an image provided in film by the figure of the hero. This of course only implies male pleasure for the male spectator. Women are objects, not subjects, of the gaze, their bodies eroticized and often fragmented. This division between active/male and passive/female, argues Mulvey, structures film narrative. The film’s hero advances the story, controlling events, the woman, and the erotic gaze. (Thornhill 2015, 54)

In classic cinema, the camera apparatus positions the women as objects of fetishistic and/or voyeuristic gazes for the pleasures of the male spectator. This relationship is dependent upon an active/male and passive/female dichotomy. The image of woman is positioned as both threatening (to the castration complex) and alluring. Women inspire a “dread” for men of being castrated. This fear is combated by the “twin mechanisms” of fetishism and voyeurism that act to disavow this threat. Disavowal of castration manifests as fetishism in the cinema whereby the camera fetishizes the female form. Classical narrative cinema produces both alternatives as visual pleasures such that the image is made into a fetish for the male spectators’ scopophilic gaze. Within the narrative then, the guilty or transgressive female character is “punished or forgiven”. An example of fetishistic voyeurism can be found in Mulvey’s analyses of Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, in which Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) is obsessed with the mysterious and beautiful Madeleine (Kim Novak), a woman he has only known from a distance, secretly watching and spying on her. Later, when he meets another woman, Judy (also, Kim Novak), he “reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, and forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish (of Madeleine)” (31). When Judy inadvertently breaks the unspoken contract of pretending to be Madeleine, she suffers the ultimate punishment and fate of most classical heroines who transgress and dies (Fig. 3).

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

Fig. 3  Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, 1958, screen capture. Pictured are Kim Novak (as Madeleine/Judy) and James Stewart (as Scottie) (fair use)

4  The Scope of Things to Come: Questions and Criticisms One of the most obvious and pressing questions to arise from Mulvey’s discussion is the primacy of a male gaze. How can we assume a male gaze? Is there such a thing as a female gaze? In a later essay, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun” and published several years after “Visual Pleasure”, Laura Mulvey addresses some of these questions: I have been asked why I only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator. At the time, I was interested in the relationship between the image of woman on the screen and the “masculinization” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real-life movie-goer. In-built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as a “point-of-­ view”; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of the masculine third person. (Mulvey 1975, 122)

Mulvey suggests that female viewers experience Freud’s masculine identification with male characters, a process that allows this spectator “to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity, the never fully repressed bedrock of feminine neurosis”. With her own “memories” of masculinity, a certain regression takes place in this deft “trans-sex identification” and, like returning to her past daydreams of action, she experiences viewer pleasure. Nevertheless, “the female spectator’s phantasy of masculinization is always to some extent at cross purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes”. In this important follow-up

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

essay, Mulvey allowed for a more mobile and fluid set of identification desire: women spectators may identify with male protagonists, male spectators with women protagonists.  Linda Williams (1989) believes that  fundamental to female spectatorship is the ability to hold simultaneously multiple and contradictory positions of identity as opposed to the supposed unity, linearity and coherence of male spectatorship. Feminist film theorists,  like Williams and others, then began to explore Mulvey’s model of visual pleasure into fruitful lines of inquiry. Not everyone, for example, agreed with the assessment that women can only derive pleasure from seeing through the eyes of the male. Women can return a gaze, but can they act on it? E. Ann Kaplan (1983) posed the following questions: Does a woman spectator of female images have any choice other than either identifying as female object of desire or if subject of desire, of appropriating the male position? Have we gotten used to as female spectators at finding pleasure in the to-be-looked-at-ness of female images onscreen? Elizabeth Cowie (1997), for example, in response to Mulvey’s concept of a controlling male gaze, suggested that there is “no single or dominant look, either with the male look or with the camera”. Cowie suggested: There is a continual construction of looks, and hence a shifting production of spectator-position, so that it is the structure of the looks in a film which is determining of the spectator’s place, not a content (image) for that look. Yet the spectator-subject must be available to the constructions of cinema; to be able to come to its positions of identification, including positions of sexual difference. (Cowie 1997, 40)

Other forms of enquiry centered on the role of a female spectator. What does she see? Whom does she desire? Through whose eyes does she look? Because the female spectator cannot have a castration complex (they lack the lack of the penis), perhaps they are forced to overidentify with the image onscreen, as Mary Ann Doane insists. Another concern for feminist theorists is that Mulvey’s essay collapses all women into one monolithic unlikely category called “Women”. The problem with this is that it does not consider the race, sexual preference, ethnicity, and class differences among women: cultural differences that would naturally disrupt the claims of a stable category. A critical avenue that arises from Mulvey’s original discussion is to explore the extent to which a female spectator may perceive or feel visual pleasure when a female protagonist (rather than a male protagonist) occupies the center of the narrative. Is her pleasure derived in the way that the male pleasure is derived (according to Mulvey) by its overreliance on male desire and psychoanalytic mechanisms such as libido, identification, fetishism, and voyeurism? How can the gaze function as a destabilizing mechanism when it is used between two characters onscreen, as Jane Gaines (2000) or bell hooks (1996) suggest? The power of the gaze can be neutralized when it has been “caught looking”, for example. Then, the power shifts between the looker to the one who has been

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

looked upon. Another concern is that Mulvey’s original concept does not wholly take into account other types of desire and is prefigured upon a heterosexual male desire. What about female to female desire? Teresa de Lauretis suggests that feminist thinking about film must therefore find a way to mediate between the social audience of a film (in which distinctions of class, race, and gender come into play) and the textual subject-positions constructed by it (in which relations of sexuality, subjectivity, and desire are mobilized)—a way to mediate between the social construction of feminine identity and the textual construction of female “viewing” positions (cf. de Lauretis 1987).

5   Proximity and Distance in Relation to the Image Although Mulvey presented psychoanalysis in her first essay as a possible political weapon in making visible the patriarchal structures that influence the film structure itself, however, in the analysis of the male, and above all the female gaze, it is necessary to include other theorists of spectatorship such as Gaylyn Studlar, Mary Ann Doane, and Teresa de Lauretis, who have focused exclusively on female spectatorship, female subjectivity, and female desire. Gaylyn Studlar (1988) suggests that the cinematic apparatus offers identificatory positions for both male and female spectators. Mary Ann Doane (1982) conceptualizes further possibilities for the female spectator in the potentiality of a female subject of the gaze. Teresa de Lauretis (1984) proposes a concept of narrative desire where the female viewer and spectator may occupy both subject (an active masculine gaze) and object (passive feminine image) positions in a double identification with the female spectator. Elizabeth Cowie (1997), contra to the concept of Mulvey’s controlling male gaze, suggests that there is “no single or dominant look, either with the male look or with the camera”. American film feminist theorist Mary Ann Doane (1982) offers an additional perspective and establishes the structure of the view through the proximity and distance to the image. Doane creates this structure by asking the question: if a woman on a film is the object of a voyeuristic and fetishistic view, what is there to prevent her from reversing the relation and appropriating the gaze for her own pleasure? (Doane 1982, 77). Christian Metz and his analysis of voyeuristic desires determined by socially conditioned hierarchical division of senses makes a starting point in her work: “It is no accident that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a distance, and that those which depend on the senses of contact are often regarded as ‘minor’ arts (culinary arts, art of perfumes, etc.)” (Metz in Doane 1982, 77). For Metz, the viewer takes a gap between himself and the image, which marks the distance between the desire and its object. Doane based the opposition of distance and proximity on the claims by an American film theoretician Noel Burch, who conforms to the observers’ wishes with spatial exchange, being too close or too far, have equal outcome—a losing image of his wish (Doane 1982, 78). The added problem in the position of the female view is placed in the image itself,

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

the woman functions as an image; she is the image. The image control, its possession, or loss through proximity and distance are determined by the possibility of observers that are based on sexual differentiation, and here the author takes Freud and knowledge of sexuality based on the structure of the view, namely the visibility of the phallus. The phallus of the boy becomes a part of him, but also a foreign object; it becomes his alter ego. Freud claims that a little girl when she first sees the phallus “she has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (Freud in Doane, 79). On the other hand, the boy at the first look at the girl’s genitals, he “begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disowns what he has seen, he softens it down or look about for expedients for bringing it into line with his expectations” (ibid.). In the film narrative, a woman who identifies herself with a female character, has to take either the passive or masochistic position, and her identification with the male protagonist implies masculinization of spectatorship. Here, Doane addresses Mulvey and her text “Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in which she highlights a type of transvestite oscillation between passive and active identification. The idea of such oscillation implies that nobody wants to stay in a woman’s position and every woman really wants to be a man. One alternative solution is to revisit Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as Masquerade” (1982) and her term masquerade, where what is seen on the screen is presented as a masquerade. For Riviera, the masquerading of femininity does not equate with transvestism, but is a reaction directed against him, against the female transsexual identification. Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. (Riviere in Doane 1982, 81)

While a woman is serving a transvestite identification form to keep the distance from the image, the masquerade “involves a realignment of femininity, the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of the missing gap or distance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image” (82). In analysis of the photograph of Robert Doisneau “Un Regard Oblique” (1948), Doane illustrates the process of negation of the female gaze (Fig. 4). The photo depicts a man and a woman looking at the window shop, and even though the man is at the very right end of the photograph, his view is the central issue of photography. His gaze cuts off hers, which appears to be empty, aimless, without representing a desire—her desire. His look is here, aimed at woman’s act inside the window shop, on the left side of the photograph. Although it is located in the very center of the photograph, the feminine

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

Fig. 4  Robert Doisneau, a photograph from the series Un regard oblique, 1948 (fair use)

presence is overtaken by the picture as object. The male gaze is the one in control, although it is coming from the periphery (85).

6  The Complex and the Contradictory Relation of Woman to Woman In the work Technologies of Gender (1987), Teresa de Lauretis reinvents and delineates the concept of sexual difference. If in the structure of the film narrative the male gaze takes all the power, regardless of whether the male’s main character, director (camera) or viewer, de Lauretis asks what happens to the female spectator? Can she watch the movie in the same way as a man? What happens if the woman is the main character in the movie? (de Lauretis 1987, 100). She takes the Federico Fellini’s film Juliet of the Spirits (1965) to show that the woman is not the Woman—real social being, a woman on a daily level facing up the Woman, cultural representation, cultural fantasies in media (Fig. 5). De Lauretis starts with the very title of the movie, Juliet of the spirits, as a suggestive verbal image of woman. The spirits can hunt this woman and allude to her secret and secret leads to a mystery. The image created in the title

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

itself sets up certain narrative patterns—expectation, projection, and identification. These patterns position the spectator in a “specific relation of meaning to gender: the spectator’s own gender is implicated and constructed (as self—representation) in relation to the representation of gender produced by cinema in each single film” (de Lauretis 1987, 96). Juliet (Giulietta Masina), a housewife from the rich suburb of Rome and the wife of Giorgio (Mario Pisu) who does not pay attention to her. Next to her, Susy (Sandra Milo), neighbor, high-class prostitute. These two women are contrasted—Juliet, a woman, and Susy, a Woman, Juliet’s desirable Other. Two spirits that surround Juliet look just like Susy. This similarity creates duplications, “the sense of being trapped inside a house of mirrors” (de Lauretis 1987, 101). In the opening scene, the camera acts as voyeur, sneaking through the darkness and briefly stopping at the scene of a house that would appear in a matter of minutes as just a nice outer shell. The first insight into the events inside the house takes place as a mirror game; we do not see the face of a woman, but the reflection of her back in the mirror gives us a clue to her actions. With great attention and anxiety, she tries on clothes, shoes, and wigs, which gives us a glimpse of the big event, the marriage anniversary. The lights are off, and with a slight flame of the candle, she is expecting the husband. Right before his entry into the house is the first time we see the face of Juliet, which is in a close­up, waiting to be noticed, in all her beauty. But he does not notice any of it. De Lauretis does not negate Mulvey’s thesis, although the woman is the main character, she still does not control what is going on around her, but the key question is who controls it? To resolve such dilemmas, she takes Carolyn Gebuld’s essay (“Juliet of the Spirits: Guido’s anima”, 1978) that connects

Fig. 5  Federico Fellini, Juliet of the Spirits, 1965, screen capture. Pictured are Sandra Milo (as Susy/Iris/Fanny) and Giulietta Masina (as Giulietta Boldrini) (fair use)

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

Juliet to the other Fellini’s film, 8 and 1/2 in which the protagonist is Guido, filmmaker going through artistic crisis, and she claims that Juliet is Guido’s anima. Two films are intertwining by exchanging a point of view. Juliet would then match Lisa, Guido’s wife, and two films would blend in as an 8 and 1/2 would be male view point and Juliet female view point. But such settings would be in too simplified, so Geduld claims that Juliet is the point of view, but Juliet as Guido’s anima. This kind of relationship finds its stronghold in Jung: According to Jung the conscious extravert is an unconscious introvert and the conscious introvert is an unconscious extravert. Similarly, every male has an unconscious female identity (anima) and every female an unconscious male identity (animus). In marriage, a man will tend to choose a woman who resembles his anima, and a woman will choose a man who resembles her animus. Thus, Juliet is both an individual woman and the unconscious feminine side of Guido-Giorgio. (Geduld, in de Lauretis, 103)

7   Woman’s Contradictory Situation Here we can refer to Hitchcock and the film Rear Window through the analysis of Tania Modleski move from Mulvey’s claims that the woman is always a passive object subjected to a male gaze. It is considered to be a key point and that the analogy of windows and screens that are always associated with this film can be considered misleading because the world that Jeff (the main character in the movie) is watching is only a small part of the world shown in movies, and all senses are reduced to visual, given that the sounds from another building are rarely heard. Invoking Virginia Woolf, Modleski repeats that a critical feminist strategy is “reclaim and revalue women’s actual experience under patriarchy” (Modleski 1988, 73). By describing the character of Lisa as truly passive, Modleski returns to the Lisa’s interest in fashion. Lisa’s interest in clothing moves, according to Mulvey, depositing herself only in the direction of Jeff’s view. But there is also Lisa’s professional involvement with fashion. Here we come to woman’s contradictory situation: interest in fashion implies interest in a look intended for a man, while on the other side are such interests ridiculed by that man (Fig. 6). Lisa’s direct sexuality that comes into her more aggressive form through fashion, could cause resistance of Jeff, of the male viewer, to find his relief in Lars Thorwald’s wife’s murder. Modleski uses the example of Robin Wood, the English film critic, who interprets Rear Window by a fraction of Jeff who was contemplating the liberation of Lisa by the murder of Mrs. Thorwald. Such an approach can also be rerouted to a male fear of losing or lack of masculinity. Jeff’s disability and impotence, forcing him to construct a story that takes place in bodies; the body of the murdered woman may have been dismembered; Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyhearts are being named by the parts of the body. In the words of Kaja Silverman, he is constructing a story that “attempts to resituate […] loss at the level of the female anatomy, thereby restoring to the male an imaginary wholeness” (Silverman 1988; Modleski

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

Fig. 6  Alfred Hitchcock, The Rear Window, 1954, screen capture. Pictured is Grace Kelly (as Lisa) (fair use)

1988, 74). Modleski insists that it should still be directed at a double point of view, considering the scenes where Jeff and Lisa are on the same side, watching the building next door, which gives us the right to regard Lisa as a representation of a female spectator. Through Lisa “we can ask if it is true that the female spectator simply acquiesces in the male’s view or if, on the contrary, her relationship to the spectacle and the narrative is different from his?” (Modleski 1988, 76). The key scene that exchanges roles is Lisa’s transition to the adjacent building, to the crime scene. This would blend in with the possibility of a female view of Doane, if Lisa’s transition is characterized as emotionally over-involved. But in this context, it is more important to look at what is going on with Jeff’s position. Looking at Lisa now on her screen, and he has to identify herself with her as she carries with her awareness of her own passive and helplessness. But when Mr. Thorwald unexpectedly invades into Jeff’s apartment, Jeff suddenly finds himself in the position of a victim of violence, the same as the one they had experienced earlier through Mrs. Thorwald and Lisa. The techniques that by then removed him, saved him, and served him as a shield (cameras, tele-lens, and flashing lights) no longer maintain distance, and Jeff becomes the actor of his own story. The last scene of the film shows Jeff with both legs injured, while Lisa dressed in a masculine clothes, pants and shirt, reading the book taking over mirror image of the man. Modleski claims that “difference is necessary” for cinema to live and therefore can never be destroyed, but only continually negated. “This is, after all, the conclusion of a movie that all critics agree is about the power the man’s attempts to wield through exercising the gaze” (ibid., 80).

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

8  Gender in Action—Female Action Hero As an opposition to the Hollywood classic film narrative that reflected the patriarchal language and female as the other, an avant-garde film was offered. An avant-garde film in terms of the demolition of binary opposition passive/ active, so Mulvey, through the director’s position, emphasized the active, strong, and creative women: aviator Amy Johnson (Amy 1980), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982). But the action film offers an abundance of interesting ways in which the female figures are represented. A female hero can be evaluated through performance, costume, and the camera angle, camera movement. These elements can be caught by the spectator and analyzed through cinematic language of male gaze. Most of the films featuring women taking the lead roles have them eroticized through necessary elements: tight clothes, attractive figure, and eternal beauty. On the other side, the action heroine has to dress like a male: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in the Terminator franchise (1984–2019) or Jordan O’Neill (Demi Moore) in G.I. Jane (1997). The structure of action films includes both passivity and activity, femininity and masculinity, interchangeable bodies of heroes and heroines. Action movie stars of the 1980s and 1990s are also shown as weak and soft, all to provide spectacular (and specular) triumph at the end. Elizabeth Hills in her essay states these powerful characters open up questions about representations of women, although “action heroines are often described within feminist film theory as pseudo males or as being not really women” (Hills 1999, 38). Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie set in a post-apocalyptic world, offers, however, a different perspective. The title of the film alludes to the story of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), prisoner of Immortan Joe, but Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has a leading role and occupies a lieutenant position (Fig. 7). At the very beginning, the name Furiosa suggests the verbal image of a furious woman. They have agreed to unite their efforts to fight Joe. The patriarchal structure in this film is shown in very extreme form; females are tools of reproduction, objects to keep bloodline alive. There is Furiosa, the only female warrior, and she is physically different from the women she tries to save. These women are tall, slim, and gorgeous, barely wearing any clothes. The images of these five women are examples of Mulvey’s male gaze structure; they are passive objects, but attractive to be looked at. As Marc O’Day suggests, the action film breaks open, or rather doubles up, Laura Mulvey’s dictum that in the classic Hollywood movie the active male protagonist operates as the “figure in the landscape”, the subject who advances the narrative, while “woman” connotes ­“to-be-­looked-at-ness”, freezing the narrative as the passive object of eroticized visual spectacle. (Tasker 1993, 203)

In action films both the male and female character “can be seen to function simultaneously as the action subject of the narrative and the erotic object of visual spectacle” (ibid., 203). No one would derive more pleasure than Mulvey herself of the emerging, complex, and multi-faceted images of women in

  MALE GAZE AND VISUAL PLEASURE IN LAURA MULVEY 

Fig. 7  George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015, screen capture. Pictured is Charlize Theron (as Furiosa) (fair use)

progressive narratives  (Mulvey 2004, 2006). For as she herself stated in her seminal essay originally produced in the context of emerging 1970s American feminism, “The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire” (1975). Theories of spectatorship and theories of the male gaze are indebted to Laura Mulvey’s seminal work (Holinger 2012). Reflecting upon Mulvey’s original thesis, “to disrupt the narrative pleasure of cinema”, Anneke Smelik declared: “Feminism did crack the mirror”, insisting “that gesture was necessary in order to open up the powerful camera eye to new fields of vision: to different angles, points of view, positions, images and representations” (Smelik 1998, 6).

References Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin. Bovenschen, Silvia. 2001. “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” In: German Feminist Writings. Ed. by  Patricia A.  Herminghouse and Magda Mueller.  London and New York: Continuum. Citron, Michelle. 1988. “Women’s Film Production”. In: Female Spectators. Ed. by Deidre Pribram. London: Verso. Cowie, Elizabeth. 1997. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

P. STEFANOVIC AND A. G. PARAĆ

De Lauretis, Theresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. London: Macmillan. De Lauretis, Theresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Doane, Mary Anne. 1982. “Film as a Masquerade”. Screen, 23 (3–4): 74–88. Fischer, Lucy. 2014. Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gaines, Jane. 2000. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory”. In: The Film Studies Reader. Ed. by Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings, and Mark Jancovich. New York: Oxford University Press. Hills, Elisabeth. 1999. “From Figurative Males to Action Heroines: Further Thoughts on Active Women in the Cinema”. Screen, 40 (1): 38–50. Holinger, Karen. 2012. Feminist Film Studies. London and New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1996. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York: Routledge. Kaplan, Ann E. 1983 “Is the Gaze Male?”. In:  Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Methuen. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. “Jacques Lacan and Bruce Fink”. In: Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Modleski, Tania. 1988 [2016]. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge and Chapman & Hall. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen, 16 (3): 3–18. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave. Mulvey, Laura. 1996. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 2004. “Looking at the Past from the Present: Rethinking Feminist Film Theory of the 1970s”. Signs 30 (1): 1286–1292. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second. London: Reaktion Books. Mulvey, Laura. 2017. “From a Faculty Seminar with Laura Mulvey: Reflections on Visual Pleasure”. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 15 (4): 385–387. Rich, Ruby B. 1998. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham: Duke University Press. Riviere, Joan. 1929. Womanliness as Masquerade. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 303–313. Sassatelli, Roberta. 2011. “Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology”. Film Culture in Theory, Culture and Society, 28 (5). Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Smelik, Anneke. 1998. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Studlar, Gaylyn. 1988. In the Realm of Pleasure. Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press. Tasker, Yvonne. 1993. Spectacular Bodies. Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Thornhill, Susan. 2015. On “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Feminist Media Studies, 15 (5): 881–884. Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reality, Fiction, and Make-Believe in Kendall Walton Emanuele Arielli

1   Introduction: Image Theory and Make-Believe Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton— born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity (Walton 2015). His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. This chapter will briefly introduce the central concepts of Walton’s theory, mention some of the main criticisms of it and develop further considerations on the role of his approach in the contemporary debate on images. If images

E. Arielli (*) IUAV University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_22

363

364 

E. ARIELLI

are entities used in an “as if” imaginative activity, the make-believe theory turns out to be relevant in illustrating the relationship between images and general phenomena of simulation. It is no coincidence that the question of make-­ believe has been the object of not only abstract philosophical investigations but also research in the field of cognitive and developmental psychology, in particularly around the issue of pretend play and the development of children’s ability to engage with fictional “as if” scenarios. Moreover, contemporary advancements in digital technologies have made available increasingly complex forms of interfaces and virtual environments in which images cease to be things that are simply “looked at”, but instead interact with viewers in more complex ways, sometimes blurring the boundary between fictional and real activity.

2  Games Children Play The starting point of Walton’s theory is the analysis of imaginative “make believe” acts, which build the basis of any type of representational art. Literary works are normally viewed as the domain of imagination par excellence, but Walton’s starting point is simpler: children’s pretend plays. Children devote a substantial quantity of their time and energy to games of make-believe, and it would be strange if this urge would disappear in adulthood. According to Walton, the instinct of make-believe game continues in “more subtle, more sophisticated” ways in our imaginative engagement with artworks (Walton 1990, 12). In their imaginative “make believe” games, children engage with entities that do not exist in the real world (such as fairies and monsters) or are not actually present or real during the game, such as when a child pretends to ride a horse or to be a police officer. Let us take as an example two children playing “shop keeper” at the playground: one child is the owner of a bakery and the other is the customer; they use sand forms as substitutes for pastries, and small stones serve as money for transactions. In this game, there are real objects (such as molds of sand and stones) that serve as props—physical placeholders— for the children’s fantasy game: a sand form is offered in exchange for a few pebbles, a larger and more “expensive” form is given for a larger number of small stones. An area of the space in which they are playing represents the shop, with its entrance, counter and shelves. The two children share the same imaginary game for which common rules apply, and if they realize that they are following slightly different rules (for instance, if the “customer” tries to pay with sticks), they then try to negotiate what the actual rules should be (e.g., only stones count as currency). Although make-believe games involve using the imagination in the broadest sense, Walton points out that they differ substantially from simple day dreams, private fantasies or hallucinations, since these activities are necessarily grounded in shared rules and operates with real elements, the props, that are integrated into the game. Therefore, when we consider a fictional world, we need to keep two levels of reality separated: statements like “I am the seller and you are the

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

365

customer” or “This is a bakery” or “these are five euros” are false in the real world, but true in the context of the fictional world. In Walton’s words, it is fictionally true that sand forms are pastry and that stones are money, and that a child trying to pay with sticks would be doing something wrong. The fictional truths are not purely reducible to an internal imaginative process, but are determined by principles of generation associated with rules that govern the use of props. Moreover, taking part in such a game means becoming oneself part of a fictional world. The child himself becomes a prop of the game as he embodies a seller or a customer, moves about the fictional space of the shop and acts in a specific way according to his/her role in the game. A central difference between the purely internal dimension of imagination and make-believe games is that fictional truths are independent of whether an individual is imagining them at any given time (Walton 1990, 36–37). When rules create a fictional world, they generate a domain of fictional truths that are independent of how they are used during a game by specific players. Taking an example offered by Walton, if two children play in a forest imagining that tree stumps are dangerous bears to watch out for, the stumps become props that generate a series of fictional truths, so it is true that even stumps that children have not yet noticed are “bears” in the world of fiction. Before Walton, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle were among the contemporary philosophers that devoted similar attention to the mechanisms of pretense. In the late work of Wittgenstein, language functions as a set of tools and it is therefore possible to use those tools in contexts in which their function does not apply, as when I say that a doll is “sad” or feels pain (Wittgenstein 1953, §282) or when I call “train” a simple wooden block. Wittgenstein calls this instance of linguistic “as if” a secondary use of concepts. He also highlights that we first need a knowledge of the actual use of a word in order to be able to use it in this secondary way: “Only children who know about real trains are said to be playing trains. And the word trains in the expression ‘playing trains’ is not used figuratively, nor in a metaphorical sense” (Wittgenstein 1982, §800). Gilbert Ryle observations on imagination and pretense reach similar conclusions: “Talking about a person pretending to be a bear or a corpse involves talking obliquely about how bears and corpses behave, or are supposed to behave. He plays these parts by growling as bears growl and lying still as corpses lie still. One cannot know how to play a part without knowing what it is like to be or do ingenuously that which one is staging” (Ryle 1949, 235). For Walton, as we will see later on, the generative rules of a game also rely on their relationship to our knowledge of how real phenomena occur in order for them to be effective. Walton credits Ernst Gombrich as his most important influence. In his 1951 essay “Meditations on a Hobby Horse” (in Gombrich 1963), Gombrich compares pictures and children games like riding a hobbyhorse (or a simple broomstick), while pretending it would be a horse. While an image can more or less realistically depict a horse, a hobbyhorse need not be an imitative representation of a horse, nor is a symbol that “stands for” the horse. Rather, a

366 

E. ARIELLI

hobbyhorse is a direct substitute that replicates certain features of a horse, such as the fact of being physically rideable. Gombrich also suggests that images can be understood in a similar way, in that they are neither imitations nor signs referencing their subjects, but as substitutes. It is also interesting to add that in the context of children at play, a hobbyhorse not only works well as a substitute for a horse, but indeed it works better than a real one, since a child would not normally be able to ride it. In this perspective, the substitute, thanks to its reduced size and functionality, is more apt than the original, in the same way that a painting of wild animals in a living room would “work better” than having such animals roaming in the house. According to Walton, Gombrich criticizes both image theories naively based on principles of similarity and conventionalist theories that see images as the product of a cultural code (as would be the case, for example, of Nelson Goodman’s theory of representation). However, Walton points out that Gombrich did not really follow the third way suggested in his essay, abandoning the possibility of developing a theory of depiction using the insights offered by the phenomenon of pretend play (Walton 2008). Instead of using Gombrich’s ambiguous notion of “substitution”, Walton suggests using the idea of fictional “make-believe” activity in our reference to images. Just as I can speak of a horse by indicating a hobbyhorse, in the same way I should be able to say “This is a horse” by pointing at a picture of a horse, without using the word metaphorically. This happens because, inside the fiction, those are horses, and from the external, “real”, point of view, those horses are “fictionally true”. As Walton writes: “Speaking in the real world, I must say that the horses are merely real-in-the-world-of-the-game, that it is only fictional that they are real. But if I could get inside the fictional world myself and speak there, I could say that the horses are real, period” (Walton 2008, 66).

3   Images as Visual Fictions Playing with a hobbyhorse or with stones in a playground are both cases of simulated activities (riding a horse and paying using money). However, actions are not limited to such scenarios: contemplating a scene, observing a situation and watching someone doing something are also activities that can be fictionally acted out as make-believe. Contemplation is an action and is the central feature of all representative arts. Specifically, across the visual arts, a person watching a play or looking at a painting does something: she imagines and pretends to be a witness of a scene, of a character’s action, of a situation. According to Walton, pictures are props in a perceptual game of make-­ believe. When someone looks at a picture of a scene, she imagines herself observing that scene. As Walton points out, these perceptual games embrace a very broad spectrum of representational phenomena that are not limited to visual images: “In all these cases appreciators participate in what I call perceptual games of make-believe: visual games in the case of paintings, sculptures, and Jasper John’s canvases, auditory ones in the case of representational music,

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

367

and games that are both visual and auditory in the case of theatre” (Walton 2008, 136). All genres of representational art involve games of perceptual make-believe, but there are games of perceptual make-believe that are not representational artifacts. This is the case of private imaginative games, like when we see faces or animals in clouds or in an inkblot. As we have seen, these perceptions are neither based on shared rules nor do they define a set of artifacts that could function as stable representations. This brings us back to a distinction mentioned earlier concerning the difference between what Walton calls “work world”, that is, the set of all fictional truths generated by a game and its rules, and the “game world”, the fictional truths generated by the specific engagement of a person in a given make-believe activity. In a specific visual game world, a person observes a painting and acts as if he were admiring a real landscape or watches a theater play and acts as if he were experiencing a real scene. In such a game, the observer himself becomes part of the fictional world. Like a child playing “policemen” or “store owner” on the playground, the members of the public “play” the role of witnesses observing fictional scenes or events. This leads to the crucial distinction between linguistic and perceptual make-­ believe representational activities. Imagining a scene described in a novel through words differs fundamentally from seeing it visually depicted in a painting or in a movie. Both texts and images are props that can lead us to figure out imaginatively a scene, but they differ in the type of experience they elicit. A text induces the reader to imagine a scene—even to imagine seeing it “with the mind’s eyes” and to think about it as fictionally true: Romeo and Juliet die at the end of Shakespeare’s play. However, pictures (such as a painting of Romeo and Juliet’s death) do something more, since they lead an observer to imagine that he is looking at that scene and not only internally imagining it. A painting depicting the death of Romeo and Juliet entails, so to say, two fictional facts: the first one is the narrative truth concerning the death of the drama’s characters (a “real” fact in the fictional world of Shakespeare’s work). The second fact concerns the make-believe game of the observer who, looking at the painting, imagines himself being in presence of the events, like a prying voyeur watching the unfolding drama from a corner. Additionally, the props involved in a visual make-believe game—images, paintings, sculptures and movies—function as mimetic objects that allow the viewers to explore a scene or a subject in way that a text does not permit. In fact, an image can be analyzed and investigated in the same way in which we search for particular aspects while observing a real scene. We inspect the details of a painting and notice people, objects and features of the landscape and gain information about the fictional world we are witnessing. Consequently, games of visual fiction necessarily depend on the degree of detail and representational realism they offer: “[…] Depictions are (to put it very briefly) things whose function in a given social setting is to serve as props in sufficiently rich and vivid perceptual games of make-believe” (Walton 2008, 136). This raises an issue we will come back later to: Walton criticizes Gombrich for not pursuing the

368 

E. ARIELLI

intuition inherent in make-believe activities and for getting back to similarity principles in his theories. However, make-believe games based on visual props seem necessarily dependent on similarity and a degree of realism with which representational artifacts are created and attended to. 3.1   Is Pretense Necessary? Walton’s image theory has been the object of various critical arguments. Two aspects in particular have been discussed: the first one concerns the question of whether a “make-believe” mechanism is necessary at all for the understanding of depictions, and the second one deals with the actual role of imagination in this process. A first criticism is whether the ability to understand an image is necessarily linked to the ability to engage in a make-believe game. Voltolini (2013) argues that research in developmental psychology has shown that children of five months of age are able to recognize what an image depicts, reaching a full understanding of its contents at nineteen months (Deloache et  al. 1979). A one-year-old child, therefore, can point to a figure in an illustrated book and name what it depicts—for example, “cat”—and can tell apart a real cat from the depicted one. On the other hand, according to classic studies by Piaget and Vygotsky that were later confirmed by Leslie (1987), the ability to master “as if” behavior and to recognize other people’s pretending (e.g., drinking from an empty glass or using a banana as if it were a telephone) does not seem to emerge before the eighteenth month of life, if not later. This might suggest that the ability to see something in an image precedes and is independent from Walton’s mechanism of depiction consisting in a game of make-believe in which, by looking at an image, we pretend to look at the depicted subject. This would mean that such a competence is not a necessary condition for the general ability to perceive images and recognize their subjects. Walton, for his part, does not seem interested in creating necessary and sufficient conditions for what pictorial perception is, but rather instead is occupied with offering a theory for what constitutes a mature mode of relating to images. In other words, recognizing what an image depicts (which one-year-olds are capable of) differs from more complex kinds of engagement with representations. To confirm this argument, even Walton conceives of the possibility of understanding an image without using it in a visual make-believe game, as in the case of a road crossing sign. Human shapes are recognizable in the sign, but we are not tempted to immerse ourselves in the picture and imagine that, by looking at those silhouettes, we are looking at real people: “We recognize it as a viable prop even if we are not tempted to use it as such” (Walton 1990, 281). The function of the sign and the absence of a degree of “minimal vivacity” (ibid.), which is to say that it lacks realism and visual immersivity, does not stimulate a participatory game of perception. Nevertheless, we identify a human figure in the sign, indicating that we recognize the formal features of the prop as a “human shape” well before we use it for a visual make-believe game.

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

369

Image recognition seems sharply different from non-visual cases of make-­ believe, for example, a child playing with a wooden brick as if it were an airplane. In this case, the fictional identification of the brick with an airplane is possible only thanks to the support of the child’s active imagination. An image would not necessarily require such support from an observer, since its structural similarity with the subject it depicts might be sufficient to elicit its recognition (as not only one-year-old children, but also today’s machine vision systems are able to do). According to this criticism, to recognize the content of an image would therefore seem to precede the act of looking at the image as a depiction of some scene, and only the latter would require an imaginative act of make-believe. 3.2   What Do We Imagine When We Look at an Image? A second type of criticism concerns the role of visual imagination in the perception of a depiction. Walton makes explicit reference to Richard Wollheim’s “seeing-in” theory and to the idea of the fundamental two-foldness of images, which are defined by the perception of the medium (the configurational aspect) and, at the same time, of the subject depicted by the medium (the recognitional aspect, Wollheim 1980). According to Walton, Wollheim’s theory is correct, but remains under-specified, since it does not explain the relationship between the two “folds”. His account based on make-believe activities aims to compensate for this vagueness and helps to clarify the nature of the “seeing-in”. Still, the notion of visual make-believe remains ambiguous. Walton claims that when we look at a picture, it is necessary to imagine that the perception of the image’s surface is the perception of the depicted subject (I look at a painting of a horse as if I were looking at a horse). In other words, I imagine that the experience of the surface of the painting I am observing is the experience of looking at the represented object. This does not mean that I imagine the painting being the represented object (I look at a painting of a horse as if the painting were the horse!). Moreover, this does not mean that by looking at the image, I somewhat imaginatively visualize a different object (a real horse) that is superimposed on the perception of the image’s surface (that would mean that when I look at a painting of a horse, I begin to imagine a real horse). The visualization of the subject of an image as a separate act from the perception of the medium is not a sufficient explanation, because this would make image perception undistinguishable from any mental act of imagination (e.g., visualizing a scene while reading a text, but also dreaming or hallucinating). The experience of the content of an image is spontaneously generated and intrinsically linked to the formal characteristics of the image and not simply “activated” by it. As Walton points out, the experience of seeing an image “is best regarded not as seeing the picture and also engaging in this spontaneous imagining, but as enjoying a single experience that is both perceptual and imaginative, her perception of the picture is colored by the imagining” (Walton 2008, 137–138). In this regard, some authors (Nanay 2004; Voltolini 2013) have

370 

E. ARIELLI

raised several questions concerning the exact definition of Walton’s mechanism. They highlight the fact that Walton’s mechanism involves the visualization of two different and somewhat incompatible phenomena: that of looking at a picture and looking at what the image depicts. Thus, it becomes impossible to avoid the idea of a fundamental two-foldness of images. Walton tries to clarify this issue by emphasizing the dual perceptive/cognitive (or sensorial/imaginative) nature of image experience: “a perceptual experience that is also a cognitive one”, he writes, and “a perceptual experience that is also an imaginative one” (Walton 2008, 137–138). Perception is never based on an “innocent eye” and is always marked by imaginative and cognitive processes. Consequently, a more precise explanation of what constitutes an imaginative experience, or imagination in general, is necessary to shed light to this issue. However, Walton explicitly denies the intention to develop a comprehensive theory of imagination. Imagining something might be generically defined as the act of “entertaining the proposition that p, to attend it, to consider it” (Walton 1990, 19), but “occurrent imagining […] involves more than just entertaining or considering or having in mind the proposition imagined” (20; see also Walton 2013). The ambiguous role of imagination in the perception of pictures is an old problem in philosophy. Not making the attempt to settle for a specific notion of imagining also leaves open the possibility of interpreting this phenomenon as a propositional “thinking about” something, or, on the contrary, as a kind of quasi-sensorial presentification by means of visual (mental) images. For example, in the phenomenological tradition, the connection between image perception and imagination has been the subject of debate, oscillating between quasi-sensorial views of imagination and approaches that consider imagination as an act of consciousness that is completely distinct from sensorial perception. Edmund Husserl defines the Bildobjekt (the object depicted in the image) as the product of a “fictional perception” and considers pictorial imagination as a kind of perception: “The picture’s object is a fiction, an object of perception, but an illusory object” (Husserl 1980, 19). Husserl speaks explicitly of “doppelten Gegenständlichkeit” (Husserl 1980, 112), double objectness, where the perception of images entails a conflict (Widerstreit) between the sensorial-­ material surface and its content. In the later phenomenological tradition, we see a different position in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous treatise on imagination (Sartre 2002). Sartre resolutely separates perception and imagination, the latter understood as a distinct state of consciousness through which we are able to make present to our mind entities that are absent or not existent (“object as a nothingness of being”). If for Husserl the pictorial perception is characterized by the conflictual coexistence of two sensitive modes, in Sartre we have instead the conflictual coexistence between a sensitive dimension (the perception of the medium) and the (non-sensory) domain of imagination that generates an image’s content. Consequently, images are characterized by a paradoxical duplicity that anticipates Wollheim’s notion of image’s two-foldness. From this

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

371

perspective, it is clear that the tensions in Walton’s theory are actually the manifestation of long-standing philosophical debates.

4   Participation and Immersion According to Walton, an essential feature of the imaginative activity of any “make believe” game is the fact of always being a first-person experience, something we imagine from the “inside”: “I am inclined to think that imagining is essentially self-referential in a certain way” (Walton 1990, 28). When a child is playing war and pretends to be a soldier, he is himself an element of the game: “The participants are props as well as objects”, writes Walton (ibid., 210). He defines this “imagining from the inside” as “a form of self-imagining characteristically described as imagining doing or experiencing something (or being a certain way) […]” (ibid., 29). This also applies for image perception; when someone looks at an image, depicting, for example, sailing ships, he is also a prop of a game that include his role as observer, that is he “makes it fictional of himself that he is looking at a group of sailing ships” (ibid., 215). In this role, the observer is able to generate fictional truths concerning the scene, such as the ability to point to the painting and affirm, “This is a ship”, and fictionally refer to a ship. Self-reflexive participation within the game of fiction is an essential ability that allows us not only to immerse ourselves in fictional realities but also to involve our emotional and psychological reactions. On this point, Walton’s theory raises an issue that has been hotly debated in the context of analytic aesthetics, namely the nature of our emotional engagement with fictional entities. For Walton, our affective engagement also takes the form of quasi-­emotions. The object of a representation is not the only element of the make-believe game in which we participate; our affective response is another important element. This conclusion allows Walton to give an answer to the so-called paradox of fiction, concerning the puzzling question of how it is possible to feel emotions in front of fictional representations and stories. Walton’s answer to this question is that it is fictionally true that we have specific emotion as observer of the fictionally presented scenario. Quasi-emotions differ from real emotions in that they are generated by “truths” within the fiction, and not external truths concerning our real world (see also Walton 2006). For example, the death of Romeo and Juliet is fictionally true within the Shakespearean drama and provokes an affective reaction in the fictional observer of the scene. This means that for Walton those emotions are not real, but are rather part of the imaginative pretense of the play. Sadness at the death of Romeo and Juliet results from our imagining that Romeo and Juliet die. Walton’s standpoint sees fictional emotions as different from real emotions as they do not involve the usual behavioral reactions of the latter. This has been the subject of various criticisms (see for instance Neill 2003) that pointed out, for example, the excessive intellectualism and the absence of emotional authenticity implied in quasi-emotions. In this somewhat

372 

E. ARIELLI

cynical view, we would just pretend to feel emotions because we know that a story’s characters (like Romeo and Juliet) do not exist. Quasi-emotions might nevertheless engage us in profound ways. Walton dedicates detailed analyses to the mechanism that allow being “caught up in a story” or being imaginatively immersed in a representational work (Walton 1990, 241). The potential for a representation to be engaging and immersive is dependent on its degree of vividness and to its ability to give an effect of reality, which is in turn linked to representational realism. In other words, works vary in the degree with which they induce or inhibit an immersive participation in the viewer. Walton avoids embracing a notion of representation as grounded on similarity principles and on imitation of reality. Moreover, cultural factors may play a role in our interpretation of what realism and similarity mean. Still, principles of similarity and realism, irrespective of whether they are cultural or natural, contribute to the ability of a representation to be vivid and engaging for a viewer. Participation, immersion and identification in perceptual “games” can thus vary according to different degrees of realism. For instance, a realistic painting provides richer features and information that allow a viewer to discover more details than a cubist painting or an expressionist painting by Van Gogh. A Vermeer painting allows a more vivid immersion in the observational make-believe game than a Matisse painting. The peculiar style of modern paintings can engage us from an aesthetic point of view, but the absence of realistic details limits the fictional game according to which we are observer of a real scene. This would not mean a difference in artistic or aesthetic value, but certainly a difference in the degree of fictionality. On the one hand, Walton writes that “participation is not everything […] The viewer will inevitably stand back, momentarily, from her game and marvel at how well the prop is suited to its role” (Walton 1990, 280). On the other hand, representational work that draws attention at a meta-representational level to the fact that they are fictions discourages participation. Stylistic features that attract attention to aspects of the material surface of a painting or the fictional construction of a scene (like a theater actor doing an aside toward the public) distract the participation of the public (“One obvious way in which works sometimes discourage participation is by prominently declaring or displaying their fictionality, betraying their own pretense”, Walton 1990, 275). For example, Walton describes how “the conspicuous brush strokes of Van Gogh’s Starry Night call attention to themselves and to their record of the process by which paint was applied to the canvas, possibly intruding on the viewer’s participation in his game … One can ignore the brush strokes enough to lose oneself in the fictional world” (ibid., 277). In sum, according to Walton, fictionality is strictly separate from reality, but at the same time engaging participation in a fictional world requires a not-distracted immersion in which we almost lose awareness of the medium, we are “lost” and absorbed in it (for an opposing view, in which participation need not to arise from immersion, see Simpson 2005). As a result, Walton cannot avoid defining realism as a principle that determines the efficacy of make-believe games. Props in a game differ according to

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

373

their degree of effectiveness in giving a realistic effect. In images, the strongest effect would usually be given by photography, which Walton considers as having a completely different quality than painting. Photography is a transparent medium that is causally and directly linked to the scene and the objects it depicts, instead of being the intentional product of an act of representation (Walton 1984). Photography is something through which we see reality, even though still in the form of a game of perceptual make-believe: when we look at a photo, we act as if we were observing what the photo (in a transparent way) is depicting. This does not exclude cases of blurred photos or photos where the subject remains scarcely recognizable. A realistic and detailed painting would then allow us to explore a scene in a more immersive way than a poorly defined photo, although the peculiar reality effect of a photo is still retained and consists in giving the viewer the presence of a real trace that causally produced the photographic impression.

5  Simulation and Substitution: The Contact Point Between Fiction and Reality Worlds of fiction and reality are clearly separated. According to Walton, they are two essentially distinct domains: a fictional character can kill another fictional character, but cannot kill a real person, and vice versa, a real person cannot really kill a fictional character, except when she “enters” the world of fiction by playing a make-believe game. Similarly, there is a difference between looking at a real scene and fictionally pretending to look at a real scene. However, the fact that fiction and reality are two different domains does not mean that they do not have any reciprocal relationship or influence. Walton emphasizes that one of the most important relationships between fiction and reality is the knowledge we acquire through imaginary games that is also applicable to reality (Walton 1992). For example, a child can learn to identify animals on a picture book by looking at drawings and, thanks to this knowledge, be able to recognize real animals when he sees them for the first time. Empirical research has shown that this already happens at the age of nine months (Strouse et al. 2018; Shinskey and Jachens 2014). More generally, fictions are a great tool to enrich our understanding of the world. Narratives and imaginary stories, no matter if they are pure fantasy without any link to real history or geography, still allow readers to become acquainted with (real) human affective dynamics. Knowledge acquisition still occurs because representations are somewhat analog to what they represent. This is particularly true for models and simulations, which could be considered representational works in all respects. For example, an atom’s model consisting of orbiting spheres is a visual analogy that gives us an idea of the atoms’ structure. In Waltonian terms, when we look at the model, we behave as if we were observing a real atom and were exploring its features, even though this representation does not realistically depict its real

374 

E. ARIELLI

appearance. The model works because it describes properties that we suppose are also present in reality. By using a model, moreover, we are also able to formulate hypotheses about the object, make conjectures and forecasts about its behavior and acquire further knowledge. If those hypotheses are empirically rejected, then the model proves to be inadequate in describing its object and needs to be revised or substituted with a better one. Simulations are more complex models that are not limited in mapping an object or a scenario’s features, but generate the behavior of what is modeled and, in some cases, allow an observer to immerse himself in the model itself. For example, a flight simulator is a visual representation in which a possibly realistic environment of an airplane’s cockpit and of the outside reality is recreated. Although simulations are fictional “make believe” devices, they are useful because they are able to involve a subject’s real (mental and physical) resources. In fact, flight simulations are used to train pilots’ real skills, including their cognitive and attentional resources. In some sense, a simulation is able to take the place of a real situation and have the same, or at least a very similar, effect on the subjects, even though they are aware of its make-believe character. This brings us to the following point: between fictional world and reality, many elements overlap and coexist, as is the case for all props (a stick, a sand figure, a picture or even a person), since they have both a material existence and an imaginary role in a make-believe game. On one side, according to Walton, fiction and reality are strictly separated, but on the other side, they often involve the same bodily and mental mechanisms: although riding a hobbyhorse is not the same as riding a real horse, our body, articulations and muscles would be the same both in reality and in the make-believe activity. Similarly, the anxiety and empathic involvement felt because a character in a movie or on stage is in danger involves the same affective and physiological mechanisms that are engaged if we were spectators of a real situation, even though they may be activated with less intensity. Not only does the fictional domain have an impact on real cognitive and affective processes, but fictional entities can in some cases overlap and take up the place of real ones. A prop can take up physical space and be a functional substitute of its real counterpart: a very simple example are mock-up books, fake objects that can be used to fill shelves in furniture stores and are usually employed as an economical substitute for real books for decorative purposes. A more complex example in which fictional entities take up the function of real ones are virtual currencies we could find in many multi-player computer games. Virtual currencies can often be exchanged for real money. This exchange is enabled by the fact that real money itself is a kind of “virtual” stipulation too: it is based on a collective agreement that coordinates our real behavior with institutionally backed “props”, allowing us to play the “game”, thanks to which a certain paper bill has the same value of a specific good. Gombrich, in his hobbyhorse essay, spoke of substitution referring to the situation in which a fictional prop takes the place of a real entity. In a substitution, we are not only dealing with the creation of fantasy worlds but with the

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

375

fact that these worlds partially take the place of what we usually expect to see for real. A depiction is a visual substitution, but substitutions do not need to be only visual. In the abovementioned example of mock-up books, those fake objects do not represent or depict a book; rather, they fill the (real) space on a shelf. We have here a game of make-believe that is not purely visual, but also spatial and physical. A similar case halfway between physical substitution and depiction is tromp-l’oeil pictures. Their illusionary effect does not consist much in the realism of the depiction (otherwise any photograph or realistic painting would be a tromp l’oeil), but rather in the fact that the depiction is placed in a specific location (a window, a wall and an arch) where one can expect to see exactly the real scene that is depicted. Now, the distinction between visual substitution (depiction) and other kind of substitutions can be elusive: according to Gombrich, a hobbyhorse does not depict a horse; it rather replaces a real one in the activity of riding. In our terms, riding a hobbyhorse is a simulation of the act of riding a real horse. However, a hobbyhorse could depict a horse if it were placed on a pedestal, becoming a semi-abstract sculpture of a horse and changing its function from something used for riding to something used to be looked at as a representation. Today, graphic entities on digital screens are example of both visual, physical and functional substitution: symbols representing buttons, levers and rulers not only depict but also functionally take the place of their real counterparts. An on/off button on a smartphone screen depicts a real switch and it has this very function; a file’s icon on the computer desktop can be dragged and moved in a trashcan’s icon, which is not only a visual representation of the act of “deleting a file” but an act that consists of deleting the file. We do not think of these representations as simple images that we contemplate as external observers, but we act in them by using those virtual objects as tool for performing specific functions. Technological developments have created types of images that previously did not exist: interactive visual interfaces (screens), virtual and immersive environment, video games, “augmented reality” and so on. They all constitute an expansion of the use of images and depictions. They cease to be props that are only looked at and become objects that can activate commands, influence the environment and bring about actions. We operate by means of them both fictionally (as in the case of “throwing” a file in a virtual “trashcan”) and factually (a file in the computer memory is actually deleted). The new functional possibilities of images offered by contemporary technologies demonstrate how “as if” imaginative actions pragmatically merge with real behaviors. In general, in a context where virtuality and simulation are progressively intertwined with reality, Walton’s analyses turn out to be an essential source of theoretical insights. His reflections on the functioning of make-believe mechanisms, the role of props in imaginative games and the relationships between fictional worlds and the subjects interacting with them, all constitute a fundamental basis for dealing in detail with the growing complexity of the intersection between real and virtual, between factual and fictional. Walton’s detailed

376 

E. ARIELLI

discussions on the nature of fiction reveal how these developments do not consist in a simple virtualization of the real or in a post-modern becoming fictional of reality. Rather, his theory shows that our constant engagement with imaginary worlds—from painting, to literature, to all representational artworks up to modern digital interfaces—is the evidence of how fiction has the power to become real by having an extraordinary impact on our cognition, emotions and behavior. I am grateful to Kendall Walton for his precious clarifications. Any errors left are of course my responsibility.

References Deloache, Judy S.; Strauss, Mark S., and Maynard, Jane. 1979. “Picture Perception in Infancy”. Infant Behavior and Development, 2: 77–89. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1963. “Meditations on a Hobby Horse”. Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays. London: Phaidon. Husserl, Edmund. 1980. Husserliana XXIII: Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Leslie, Alan M. 1987. “Pretence and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind’”. Psychological Review, 94: 412–426. Nanay, Bence. 2004. “Taking Twofoldness Seriously: Walton on Imagination and Depiction”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (3): 285–289. Neill, Alex. 2003. “Art and Emotion”. In: Jerold Levinson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 421–435. Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2002 [1940]. The Imaginary. Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge. Shinskey, Jeanne L.; Jachens, Lisa J. 2014. “Picturing Objects in Infancy”. Child Development, 85 (5): 1813–1820. Simpson, M. Carleton. 2005. “Participation and Immersion in Walton and Calvino”. Philosophy and Literature, 29: 321–336. Strouse, Gabriele A.; Nyhout, Angela, and Ganea, Patricia A. 2018. “The Role of Book Features in Young Children’s Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-­ World Contexts”. Frontiers of Psychology, 9: 50. Voltolini, Alberto. 2013. “Defiction?”. In: C.  Barbero, M.  Ferraris, and A.  Voltolini (eds.), From Fictionalism to Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 43–61. Walton, Kendal L. 1970. “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79 (3): 334–367. Walton, Kendal L. 1978. “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75 (1): 5–25. Walton, Kendal L. 1984. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18 (1): 67–72. Walton, Kendal L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walton, Kendal L. 1992. “Make-Believe and Its Role in Pictorial Representation and the Acquisition of Knowledge”. Philosophic Exchange, 23 (1): 81–95. Walton, Kendal L. 2006. “On the (So-called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance”. In: Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretense, Possibility, and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 137–148.

  REALITY, FICTION, AND MAKE-BELIEVE IN KENDALL WALTON 

377

Walton, Kendal L. 2008. Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walton, Kendal L. 2013. “Fictionality and Imagination Reconsidered”. In: C. Barbero, M.  Ferraris, and A.  Voltolini (eds.), From Fictionalism to Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 9–24. Walton, Kendal L. 2015. In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1982. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. G.  H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. “Seeing-As, Seeing-In and Pictorial Representation”. Art and its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Technical Image in Vilém Flusser Dario Vuger

1   Introduction The concept of the technical image can be discussed in few distinct positions which relate Vilém Flusser—Czech-born philosopher and a naturalized Brazilian citizen, 1920–1991—close to some of the most important philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Namely, we can discuss the notion of the image in terms of Heideggerian system through The age of the world picture (Heidegger 1977, 115), as a signifier of the contemporary mode of communication through the Society of the spectacle (Debord 1992) and as technique distinct in its individuation and relationship to that which is human from Gilbert Simondon to Gilles Deleuze’s notions of image, technics, time, film and so on. This means that the theory proposed by Vilém Flusser stands in the center of the contemporary debate on the image, image theory and its significance in the everyday life of the later twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Even though he actively wrote and gave lectures throughout the sixties, his most famous work Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie emerged in 1983 (Towards a philosophy of photography, 1984) alongside with the more elaborate and abstract work published two years later Ins Universum der technischen Bilder in 1985 (Into the universe of technical images, 2011b). It is there that Flusser sublates and postulates his most important and thought-provoking notions regarding the image. Drawing his influence from Heidegger’s two most famous essays on the Age of the world picture and The Question regarding technics, he will advocate that the image in the contemporary and radically new context of mass media, digital, virtual and overall technical reality brings about

D. Vuger (*) University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_23

 

D. VUGER

a fundamentally new outlook on our society as well as our everyday life. In that sense we can consider Flusser’s philosophy to be a direct symptom of new technologies of the philosophical concepts proposed and consequences anticipated by authors like Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Guy Debord and many of his contemporaries, from Jean Baudrillard to Bernard Stiegler. Most notable for his essayistic writing style  (compare, for example Flusser 2011a, Flusser 2013), we must consider the whole of Flusser’s eclectic attempt at the information image theory as a specific philosophy in itself or an invention of a specific attitude toward the most contemporary of the everyday phenomena. Even though one would not expect it in this place and in this time—that is, the time Flusser is writing his main essays—the position of photography as informatics and the photographic image as a technical image does not only imply but thoroughly starts of an age which we could call the post-photographic. This shift is rather simple to explain, and it will become even more evident through reaching the conclusion of this essay. Photographs, taken as technical images, are evenly and massively distributed over the whole of human material and spiritual landscape. In that sense, we are so overwhelmed by photographs and by images taken to ontologically simulate photographs promise of reality that we find them to be our natural environment, something which our existence as such revolves around. This is the photographic universe (Flusser 1984, 47), and it is post-photographic for it merely being a photographic universe would mean it is still something easily theoretically and practically divisible from us. Consider in this remark our post-electrical universe or today even our post-internet way of existence where we grow to rely on the Internet of Things not just to surpass our motions but our thoughts and emotions on the click of the switch networked between me, others, our others and our machines. It is not just that Flusser presents us with a new concept for the understanding of images in their new surroundings as technical images but he also brings about a new philosophical concept and prospect in the notion of techniques as image in the literal sense of the Heideggerian notion of the world picture. It is there that we should look for changes in our modes of thought about techniques as well as the world itself to fully grasp the consequences of Flusser’s project which is not just to academically acclaim new grounds for scholarly research but rather to present us with a guide for understanding the complex and heterogenous technical realities we today live by. That is to say that Into the universe of the technical image (IUTI) as well as Towards the philosophy of photography (TPP) should be considered as workbooks or better as field guides into the space of everyday perception of our contemporary reality, a hitchhiker’s guide through the galaxy of images if you will. Here we will consider the notions and the structure proposed by the book Towards the philosophy of photography and regarding the place they take in the whole of the work of Vilém Flusser. And by understanding the motivations behind the work such as Towards a Philosophy of Photography, we will be equipped with a new approach to the photographic phenomena and be able to consider photography and its image as a methodological tool for a critique and understanding of a much broader spectrum of contemporary phenomena.

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

2  The Invention As the introductory note of TPP states, the possibility for a philosophy of photography emerges in the age of—what Flusser calls—the second big turning point in the history of mankind and that is the invention of technical images (Flusser 1984, 5) with the photographic image as its paradigm. That is to say, the photograph is the paradigmatic image of the age in which technology overcame the rigorous bounds of linear writing and logocentricity, meaning that the image as a technique today transcends the confines of culture properly replacing it with an image. This image is at the same time a system and a spectacle, as we will see, of the informatic revolution. The extent of Flusser’s accounts on the notion of the image, photography—as well as his philosophical upbringing suggests—is highly etymological and relational in the manner of Martin Heidegger. That is why he will—in the first chapter of TPP—suppose the notion of imag(-e)-ination to be the bearer of the possibility for the coding and decoding or simply understanding of the images (Flusser 1984, 6). The complexity of this coding-decoding which takes place in our acting toward the image is—in fact—a direct reference to the abovementioned essay by Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture in which lies a statement: “What belongs properly to the essence of the picture is standing-together, system” (Heidegger 1977, 141). The standing-together, meaning the media system of the image implemented between the ecstatic state of the human in the world, is the conceptual center of the power of the image. And in line with the necessity to update the Heideggerian phenomenology of the image for the digital age, “the technical image is the one produced by an apparatus” (Flusser 1984, 10) by which we are obliged to conclude that the apparatus itself implies a system, a standing-together of the scientific text or theory with the techniques or the practice of science in the form of an image production. More importantly, what we are to have in mind here is the fact that for Flusser—as it is the case in Heidegger and a big part of the contemporary philosophy of the image—the thing such as a technical image with the photograph, TV image, digital image and so on as a paradigm is a phenomena which conceptually utilizes the notion of the image just so to present itself to the consumer without disturbing his own world of concepts and images. Namely, they are no longer images in the proper sense for their relation to the world and the observer is multi-mediated, pushed deeper into abstraction. And what they supply us with are no longer just representations or simulations but rather information and simulacra. Images proper are to be found for Flusser in the pre-history of mankind, before people made up language and therefore constituted its own history as an ephemeral event of commodifying images through more complex notions of culture, art, and technology. The magic character of the image remains, and it is exactly this implied realism, phantasm, and symbolism that still hold the power of the image in place even though its potentials and motivations today are radically different: for Flusser, as is for Roland Barthes studies of signs,

 

D. VUGER

photography brings about something fundamentally archetypical into play of the contemporary images. We are just now rediscovering the primal effect of the invention of the artificial image, image not from within our mind but more real than that, more representative, more informative, an image that complements, substitutes and commodifies the world to our own image (Flusser 2011b, 10). When we say that the new form of imaginative consciousness arose from the possibility of the cave painting (Flusser 2011b, 12), that is to say that the imagination was pushed into an observable spectacle, imagination pushed into the “real” image, abstracted or expropriated from the inner space of confined existence to a collective—objective—being. Mythical in itself, this process is fundamental of all representations and it repeats itself with every update of the “reality” of an image; that is precisely why we are not immediately aware of the images’ imperfections as it is in the case of ever evolving special effects in movies and so on. Now, what images do, fundamentally, is that they consolidate the phantasmal reality and give it a concrete form, so it becomes intersubjective and objective; besides the immersion in the world, the image gives way to standing-together with the world. And this is nothing new, but what comes to us as a radical break with this line of thought is that today we are not confronted with just new types of images but that we are being immersed in new worlds, new universes and new phantasies about those worlds. This is the fringe of the universe of the technical image. Technical image presents, therefore, the third order of world concretization in Flusser’s philosophy, which follows three main distinctions: (primal) image →(linear) text → (technical) images. As texts “made images blind” by pushing us back to the inner world of imaginative thinking so the technical images push back and make the text blind by making it a code for its own functioning. Technical image is itself an apparatus that is “blind” to the phenomena it represents because it just automatically responds to the input value, and it is its code, its underlying text (science, technology, theory), that makes possible the representative universe of technical images: “And that is what technical image is: a blindly realized possibility, something invisible that has blindly become visible” (Flusser IUTI, 16). The technical image is—being a coded medium of a higher order of abstraction—a message in a more profound way than it holds true of McLuhans’ new media (Flusser 2002, 70, van der Meulen 2010) insofar as the message is a code or a part of the program developed not just to update the application of scientific theories to the society as a whole but also to complement the newly developed phenomena of the postindustrial society such as more extensive leisure time. In the vast space of the everyday life, leisure time is programmable by the inflation and quantification of images (Flusser 2002, 72–73). With his essay on the Image in the new media Flusser advocates for the new understanding of our contemporaneity which arises directly from the profoundly new understanding of the image. Namely, images possess techniques and they exist as technology insofar as it is safe to say that the technical image stands strongly between two earlier mentioned Heidegger’s essays: it is a

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

system described in the Age of the world picture as it is also a technological enframing (gestell) or a process of subjecting the human attention to the productive goals of further technological development and mastery over life and nature in the Question regarding Technology (Heidegger 1977). This change is brought about with the total presence of images in our everyday lives. They are highly reproducible, ever-present and free; they are immaterialized, abstract and programmatic. It only means that the philosophy of photography as well as the notion of the universe of technical images suggests we are on the fringe of imagining a philosophical technology of the image. This philosophical technology could also be called the informatics of the image. This is mainly because—while Heideggerian notions of system, information and enframing remain in the confines of the initial reception and philosophical calculation of the impact of new cybernetical science to the realm of human lives—Flusser’s philosophical views come to us coupled with the totality of the up-to-then present and dominant scientific and technological discoveries, stretching even deeper into the applied science of cybernetics such as digital computing and networked systems of information production. As is well known, cybernetics is a science of governance over, by and through information which stems from a basic thermodynamic principle of entropy by which universe—in all its particularities—marches toward indifference, accumulation of kipple in terms of Philip K. Dick dystopian phantasy or simply a chaotic state of the so-called heat death (compare Finger et al. 2011, 109). By the same principle, information science is in part a science of production of neg-entropy, or human means of counteracting the effects of our entropic universe, and “seen in this way, technical images are reservoirs of information that serve our immortality” (Flusser 2011b, 18) precisely in the manner of immortality being a direct opposite to the notion of entropy in terms of individual, material and collective decay (Flusser 1990, 399). Indifference means not just the lack of difference from which we could understand any form of repetition but mainly it means a march toward the state of total disinformation.

3  The Informatics Technical images which arise from the human science and technical apparatus are, therefore, the organizations of the all too human idea of eternity as the means of preserving humanity outside of entropy’s reach. The informatics of the image should then be the theoretical means which we employ in the image practice so as to preserve their informative status which is conservative of our current way of existence. And to demonstrate this necessity stands the TPP in which Flusser follows the line of thought from the transformations of the notion and the role of the image to the shift in its informative nature at the fringe of our contemporaneity. The philosophy of photography acts as the critique of the everyday life in the light of social and epistemic potentials of photography as a phenomenon and in which we are able to talk about such a thing as a universe of photographic images, but also a photographic universe (Flusser

 

D. VUGER

1984, 50). This is the universe, or the world according to technical apparatus and its multitude which leads to programmable realities and calculated possibilities—a matrix, if you will. Notable to say is that the photographic apparatus is just one of many in our contemporary everyday. We should also keep in mind that for Flusser—building his essays on the legacy of Heidegger’s “end of philosophy and the task of thinking”—every philosophy of photography is essentially informatics because of the consequences cybernetic research left in the humanities of the second half of the twentieth century, where every humanism becomes an information-communication science proper (Heidegger 2003). Philosophy of photography comes then as a fundamental task of constituting a consciousness capable of grasping the notion of the program and information as fundamental problem of photography and constitute therefore the experimental photographer as a philosopher—in theory and in practice—of photography (Flusser 1984, 58–59). Now, why do we say social and epistemic? This is mainly because of the subtle but crucial difference between the representative modes of existence of the conventional and the technical image. While the first one is said to explain and constitute its subject as a relation to the world, event or a situation, the latter is said to visualize and project the information into the disorderly state of the vast nothingness of fields by which Flusser understands the whole of the space-time of everyday life coupled with the windows, screens and spaces of the virtual and the potential—it being a concentration of nothingness that gives space for simulations, significations and so on (Flusser 2011b, 47). In the context between Heidegger’s World-Image and Guy Debord’s Society of the spectacle, Flusser’s notion of the technical image takes an important explanative place, whereas it points to the radical presence of images as the basis and the surface of the contemporary society: “The traffic between images and people is the central problem of a society ruled by technical images. It is the point where the rising so-called information society may be restructured and made humane” (Flusser 2011b, 60). The basic notion of reinvention of humanism as the quest of thought in the age of cybernetics persists throughout Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, Debord’s deconstruction of society as a spectacle and Flusser’s constructive task of thinking the image as a technique and information. And the importance of the centrality of these two thinkers in Flusser is crucial and evident in Into the universe of the technical image even though we are not talking of being or the spectacle but something even more ominous, information society and its image. To study the images and technical images especially means to study the society, its science and technology as well as its culture and politics. But far from political and esthetical concerns, Flusser’s main research goals are to study communication and informatics of the image with regard to the abovementioned philosophical and critical grounds laid out to him by his predecessors. With the advent of technical images, epistemic notion of an image changes as radically as its social role. This is mainly because, as we mentioned earlier, the technical image needs an apparatus of its own (re)production, as well as the apparatus itself needs a system of programs to sustain its social manifestations.

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

Just think about all the technology—apparatus and programs—needed to be able to imagine, shoot, develop, reproduce, buy, sell and even see a photograph. The electronic apparatus and its digital image furthermore develops its own space of manifestation in the sense of virtual or better yet—cyberspace. And with its windows and screens we are no longer just observers of our naturalized world of culture in which we act, produce, reproduce, create and deconstruct images, things, movements and so on, but rather we are now pure observers of the spectacular states of the machine which is one of the main indicators of the so-called society of the spectacle or the information society, as Flusser would put it. Two fundaments of the society’s spectacle are the world being pulled back from immediacy to (theatric, image like) presentation and the transformation of communication between people into the communication (of people) between (and through) images (Debord 1992, 3–5). The technical image proved itself to be the most efficient medium for dissemination and general utilization of information to date, and that is precisely why—when we talk of images in our contemporaneity—we are talking about informatics and the social spectacle (Flusser 2011b, 67). We can consider screens also as being terminals for exchange, but the social role of this exchange has also profoundly changed. As we mentioned, the primal image and the linear text have all became radically inapt to compensate for the high communicative and representative demands of the contemporary society. That is why they have been pushed from immediacy into presentations as they remain hidden inside codes of programs and their ideological manifestations. Namely, while in interaction with digital machines, we exchange images through utilization of programs, codes and their “magical” visual manifestations that serve as to simulate immediacy and stimulate further production/reproduction of the code of exchange. We dwell on machines and the possibilities of technical images to compress image and text, theory and practice into one final commodity—information. And by that information, the active exchange of forms of communication—but not really the immediately communicating, because most of our communication today still accounts for making deals and arrangements for future supposedly immediate communication—gives rise to the so-called interactive modes of operation through and with the apparatus. In view of the exchange, social and individual behavior, we can clearly see that the interaction between man and machine means interpassivity between man and man as well as machine and machine. If this isn’t enough of a call for a new conception of our “telematic” society, we can now consider the critique of the image proposed by Flusser in the notion of the technical image as well as in the informatics of the image proper in discovering ways to play and create with information. Every information is created, and every disinformation comes from the information’s decay; to synthesize information from data was before the advent of the computing apparatus a task of educated, creative and in terms genius individuals. The speed of exchange of images and the computing power of the upcoming machines make

 

D. VUGER

the genius outdated. Even though computing produces a relatively big dump of disinformation, its low power usage and high computing power produces equal or even bigger output of information, making it more efficient than human in production, but not valorization of information. On the same note, the conventional image is outdated because it ontologically precedes texts all the while technical image is in fact ontologically based in text (as theory, scientific research, program and consequently an apparatus). They abstract the world on different levels, namely in the sense of Heidegger’s copulation of the word encompassing nature, history and being in one concept. Technical image’s more profound level of abstraction arises then from the quantity of the recorded history, quality of culture and philosophy as a pseudo-­ nature of men. Even though, technical images seem to be profoundly concrete and objective as they—as photography—naturally, necessarily and literally reflect the objective state of the world. How are we now to understand the dubious nature of contemporary image? First thing we need to reestablish, as said earlier, is to say that photography means fundamentally two things: a photograph as a seemingly objective product of a technical apparatus and a photograph as a process and a technology of which a photograph, in the meaning of a product, is just one common output. Taken together, a photography is a process of turning images into screens by means of technical simulation of immediacy of perception or an established trust between the observer and the image (Flusser 1984, 10–14). Image is therefore now grounded in the observer and not in the flat surface of the wall as it realizes itself as a world-image or a worldview which is the symptomatic conclusion of the utmost importance while Guy Debord and Martin Heidegger arrive at it, respectively, through their own image analysis (Debord 1992, 4; Heidegger 1977, 133).

4  The Technical Now, what Flusser fundamentally wants us to see can be summed up through this analogy. The symbolic image of the magical pre-textual, pre-linear, pre-­ historic world is a first-order abstraction; it symbolizes something as being a phenomenon of the world that is by no means concrete in itself but it is a space in which men find themselves fundamentally immersed; this is the world and the image without (linear) time making any kind of movement or difference in the world virtually impossible. The era of texts marks the beginning and the end of history as a progressive state of world concretization, through science, technology and culture as a means of making the world objective, keeping men out of its immersive reach; this is the world of linear time where image becomes the text, narration and creator of difference most evident in religious iconography. The technical image is a technological abstraction of the inadequacy of linear texts to keep up with its own pace at this objectivation. It is not just that text, theory and science are not enough but the world and its singular reality are not enough as with the digital technology new realities emerge. And all

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

those technologies and realities are representational and abstract. This is because we do not see perspective and we do not feel it as it is just a scientific theory describing through a concept of perspective a possible construction of an apparatus which could create something very similar to the way human eye sees, even though it would fundamentally remain a representation of the scientific theory and not a veritable depiction of the human sight. This is the technical image; the coded visual discourse of the “concepts concerning world ‘out-there’” (Flusser 1984, 11). By not recognizing this new ontology of the (technical) image people tend to accept the image as an opening into the now at the same time pre- and post-textual, historic, non-linear world of magical reality. And this is the technological hubris of the image as it changes the “concepts concerning the world out there. We are dealing, then, with a magic of the second degree, with an abstract sort of witchcraft” (Flusser 1984, 12). Technical image could be then nothing more than a transparent surface covering the electronic pixels of the computer and television screens on which every phenomenon of the real world gets translated into an image—which without a fixed surface acts as magic making our experience theatric—making the world itself fundamentally cinematic, open to montage and digital re-touching. The scientific certainty and theoretic soundness get translated into “situations” or “images” that obscure and falsify the texts just so to bring about “a new form of magic—namely, a programmed one” (Flusser 1984, 13). In that sense one more thing is symptomatic: as virtual world becomes ever more highly customizable, user or consumer oriented, the visual magic of it all becomes even more apparent in its programmed fashion of making people numb to technical infrastructure that follows the image on the screen. In that sense we are growing ever more inapt to deal with eventualities like program bugs, errors, glitches and even plain code manipulation, whereas they become objects for aesthetic contemplation in the sense of Immanuel Kant’s sublime encounters with nature; glitch is an overwhelming mess of the new technical nature of men. We established the language of computer code just so we could delegate it to consumer forgetfulness. This forgetfulness makes the contemporary digital technology spectacular. And that is just to say that we are once again on the common plateau of critical media theory or image theory in the prominence of Debord/Heidegger in which the singular technological apparatus—taken as a paradigm—rules over, corrupts, combines and sublates the whole of the world (history, nature, and being) into a mass culture, whereas “technical images thus suck all of history into their surfaces, and they come to constitute an eternally rotating memory of society” (Flusser 1984, 14). In a sense, as we talk about the apparatus which produces technical image as efficient compressions of the lived world which brings us to the fringe of historic thought, it is only natural for Flusser to test the possibility of understanding the photographic camera as a viewing machine or an apparatus which—like plain glasses or binoculars—bring a new quality into our viewing practice. The apparatus thus utilizes our viewing practice which in turn makes the observing a part of our everyday work. It uses us as we use him to apparently see a more

 

D. VUGER

focused, more condensed, more framed reality than with our everyday gaze; in that sense we speculate our reality through the camera, we frame it and recreate it to an image of the cameras technology and science making it aesthetic. And just the fact that we now need to work on our viewing, observing practice means that we find ourselves deeply immersed in a new cultural and industrial constellation. It is no longer work proper and it is no longer observation proper, but it is their common denomination or a sort of productive consumerism which acts as a materialization of the abovementioned self-centered “dialogue” of the spectacle making and rethinking its own infrastructure in the most informed way, through production and consummation of technical images. This means that the technical image has the ominous power to “produce work” (Flusser 1984, 15–22). And this is to say that to produce an efficient motivation for work is to inform it in a specific way, to produce an inflation of images that amount to an experience, and in that way to substitute the notion of work with that of information; here the possibility arises for a triad, that of work-image-information where we can really formulate such a question as what do pictures want (W.J.T.  Mitchell), why do we work for images (Jonathan Beller) and can they work for us? In an even more ominous way, this informative potential of automated image production means that the notion of work is not purely replaced by information but rather it is replaced with a game of chance, automatism that produces information by game of chance and in that respect our everyday work becomes the striving to do more, to be creative and to experience the full potential of production of technical imagery. “There are, then, two interwoven programs within the camera: the one moves the camera to produce images automatically, and the other permits the photographer to play” (Flusser 1984, 21). Thus, the photographer is programmed by the creative automata of the apparatus, its coded magic, to seek out information in the world and to frame this information into an objective worldview—to enframe it, with all the implications of the persistent Heideggerian perspective by the use of the term gestell. As we mentioned earlier, informatics doesn’t eliminate redundancy but rather produce it on such a large scale that the information becomes a positive and overwhelming side effect of the automated world states. This is also the main framework of the camera-works. Namely, its frame produces massive number of redundant images which stimulate the photographer to seek out new situations, to construct his environment and to work for his own enjoyment while also working for the informative statistic of the camera apparatus itself. Also, by any photographic production the text and the code embedded in the technical image get re-established and re-enforced in its efficiency as it is only the program of the apparatus that is essentially capable of producing new situations and informative images, given the right amount of automation established in the photographer (Flusser 1984, 23–28). This worldview, hidden in the texts of science, theories and institutes of what Heidegger themed the age of the world picture, comes out live in technical images and thus objectifying the world itself. And this is the world we embed ourselves

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

into with our images, and as it essentially no longer works as a world but rather as an image, we embed ourselves into the objective notion of the view of others. This psychologism is nothing strange for Flusser if we consider the communicative side—a more structured and dense side—of his theory (Flusser 1998), the photographic gesture, intentionality of the photographer, the magical and the pre-historic side of the story even though we should keep in mind the bigger picture: the general communicology of Flusser discusses in depth the implications of informatic language employed in his essays on the technical image, from discourse to code as to bring us to the fringe of communication. What Flusser, and so Heidegger and Debord respectively, aim at is the critique of cybernetics which should give grounds for the new social function of thought and thoughtrelated phenomena in the contemporary world. And that contemporaneity is rightfully defined as being grounded no longer in culture-text policy relation but technology-image aesthetics. We saw now how we transgressed from our “natural” or involuntary immersion in the world as magic, then dissociated from it via linear text of history just so to voluntarily dive back in and to find the world no longer of magic but rather its demise, simulation, technical reality of technical theaters and illusions.

5  The Critical Now, if we consider this cybernetically laden conversation to be an essential part of contemporary image theory—for Flusser and the likes at least—we should pinpoint what is the role of the critique of photography in the broader sense of the image as a material fact and the form of a phenomena essential for our everyday lives. The critique of photography is mainly the practice of decoding the gestures of photography, as well as the critique of the spectacle could be summed up as being the practice of re-establishing immediacy in the world overcame with media outposts. With the camera being a coding machine, we are on the critical quest of understanding what is the apparatus coding, for whom and to what end (Flusser 1984, 34). The code in the apparatus and the apparatus in the technical universe create a space in which human creativity becomes substituted by information, and it is exactly this seemingly trivial point that stands at the center of the critique of photography as a prefiguration of the universe of technical images as well as the information society. If we are to qualify and criticize photography, digital media, and the spectacular society at large we must first understand the difference between the creative and informative output in the man and in the apparatus. As we mentioned earlier, it is not strange for an apparatus to stimulate human creativity for the sake of production of information and not creative or aesthetic works. The question is do we understand it as such? And it should not be strange that the actual difference is practically nonexistent as creative act is in essence the informative reworking of some other information but rather what should stand out is that we are prone to talking about play, creativity, and the acts of a genius without understanding the technological translation of the linear-creative

 

D. VUGER

universe into technical universe of image production. The thought process that would be understood as some spiritual, magical, and intellectual act of creation is now an image standing before us as a system, representation, and information. With the age of the (world) picture the thought as a whole becomes a system (Heidegger 1977). The consequences of this translation are not known for Flusser because of his enthusiasm regarding the possibilities present to us in the wake of information networks and spaces that promise the explosion of informative or creative dialogue during the eighties and nineties of the past century. He suspected to re-introduce the situationist game of chance into the study of emerging information networks and by that sole act provoke a true telematic society as will one of his contemporaries in the sense of much closer connection of technology and (or better yet, as) art (Ascott 1998). It is in that moment that Flusser forgot about the magnitude and the gigantic influence of images on the way we do and think things. The notion of dialogue introduced in IUTI chapter “To Play” obscures for Flusser the fact that image, or the technical image in its described ontology, prevents dialogue because it is no longer a medium proper but the immersive screen-­window into its own world where the other is nothing more than a reflected self or a simulation about which one of the most prominent contemporary commentators of the society of the spectacle and information society, McKenzie Wark, says: the monologue of appearances [is replaced] with the appearance of dialogue. Spectators are now obliged to make images and stories for each other that do not unite those spectators in anything other than their separateness. (Wark 2013, 6)

Insofar as we can see that the importance of Flusser in the image studies of today is that he posed for the first time a series of until now unanswered questions in the wake of an epochal grounding of image theory in contemporary philosophy and critical media theory. Those questions are naturally connected with the modes of understanding the image as something as it becomes nothing in an absolute sense of their overpowering omnipotence in the virtual society of the spectacle “no longer found[ed] in any place or time but in imagined surfaces, in surfaces that absorb geography and history” (Flusser 2011b, 4). Therefore it remains important to conceptualize Flusser’s essays in Into the universe of technical images and Towards a philosophy of photography through humanistic and cybernetic discourse as well as through the notions of society and the everyday life, respectively. There is nothing in the notion of the image that should be taken lightly or for granted. What Flusser shows us is that we must be able—if we really want to proclaim a spectacular society, a pictorial turn or a technical image—to say what do we mean exactly when we talk about images. And, as we have shown, for Flusser the notion of the image has two roots. One is Heideggerian and in that (1) the image is a system. The other is Debordian and in it (2) the image is a spectacle. It is, then, understandable that the only possible way to come to terms with images is through informatics, cybernetics, and media theory: to name (3) the image as being a technical

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

image. The way it utilizes history (or the world) makes its own history redundant because it is always and already a part of its own program: a system, or a theatric spectacle of representations, or information. These are—conveniently—also the ontological criteria for creating a critical difference between the world and (its) image. And in that differentiation, we can understand Flusser’s point of view and thought to be a contemporary aesthetics of the utmost importance. His posthumously published the Shape of things (The philosophy of design, first published in 1993, Flusser 2012) continues on these remarks asking where do we find ourselves and what kind of space are we invited into when we relinquish the everyday things of their common background, that is, the environment, the material environment of the everyday life. With what is it substituted, and why isn’t that substitution more obvious? Is the shape of thing at large just a disguise? (Flusser 2012, 85). Once more, the crucial moment of any philosophy and aesthetics is the constructive moment of understanding the notion of information: “non-things now flood our environment from all directions, displacing things. These non-things are called ‘information’. ‘What nonsense’, one is tempted to say” (ibid., 86) and how accurately put, nonsense is exactly the way in which we could describe the overflow of information, or the—for spectacles purposes very efficient—oversaturation with images and image-­related technologies. On the side note, consider Debord: “The flow of images carries everything before it, and it is similarly someone else who controls at will this simplified summary of the sensible world” (Debord 1998). The information is an abstract form of software (Flusser 2012, 86) in a sense that it flows between things, informing them, making their potential radically different from before, making things aesthetic, making things designed (in-formed = de-­signed, making it soft), making their quality dematerialized, holistic and magical, just as the image of Gods themselves in the iconic science fiction book by Issac Asimov. Insofar Flusser will conclude in the chapter on the Non-thing of his Philosophy of design (Flusser 2012, 89) that it is an important distinction to make between the maker, man in action, and the player, the acting of a man as one is a producer and one is a product of design. Note here that our interpassive mode of existence comprises the everyday game playing. And note also that the game confines a player in the false sense of making, whereas he is only abiding the code, rule marching toward the games output. The radical gesture of anti-design, anti-media and even contemporary mode of iconoclasm would be the practice of opting out of the game before its conclusion, not following the messages of the media and purposely practicing the notunderstanding of images which would figure them once again as walls-borders rather than windows, flows and floods.

6  Concluding Remarks The range of themes proposed by Vilém Flusser in the area of image studies remains a crucial tool for merging the field of cybernetic research with the humanities’ own tendencies to overlap with information-communication

 

D. VUGER

theories. In that way it is exactly Flusser’s theories that bring the notions of image, technics, communication, spectacle and so on distilled from Heidegger and Debord into discussion of broad range of phenomena, from early attempts at information esthetics of Max Bense to the cybernetic cultures of Norbert Wiener, Gilbert Simondon and the likes. With his philosophy of photography Flusser gives an important philosophical, phenomenological and aesthetical contribution to the understanding of the notion of “postindustrial” qua “informatic” society as well as building a sound framework for introducing more radical cultural criticisms of the second half of the twentieth century into the discussions proposed by the image studies in our own century. As photography becomes the model of the recipient behavior (Flusser 1984, 41), and image itself a paradigm of human communication (Debord 1992, 2), the main contribution of Flusser’s approach is exactly in putting on display the often overlooked, simple, trivial or seemingly plain problems of the image in the contemporary world and describing exactly this trivial facts as means of images’ disguise. The informatics of the image is one such a point, whereas too many of today’s theories of the image pose the seemingly profound questions on the nature of images without the understanding of their profoundly fabricated, technical nature in which cybernetics really acts as the new, realized, metaphysics as Heidegger suggested. What remains is really just a pure image, no longer art, no longer a cultural fact, aesthetics or a policy but a fact of life as we now know it. Far from platonic idealism of forms, it is the information that shines through the image, and the sun is no longer a common way to see but rather it’s the flickering of our individualized electrical screens depriving us of the common grounding of our everyday life. So, to inquire into the nature of images is to ask about the essence of the everyday life by reaching into the network of prefabricated world of information production, construction and distribution. It is a journey into the matrix that will show to be a radically different thing than our common image system based on Baudrillard’s Keanu Reeves type of a Matrix. This one is the actual state of our own universe of technical images, personal spectacles and magical informatics of our everyday lives.

References Ascott, Roy. 1998. Art & telematics: toward the construction of new aesthetics. Tokyo: NTT Publishing Co. Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the society of the spectacle. New York: Verso. Debord, Guy. 1992. La société du spectacle. Paris: Editions Gallimard. Finger, Anke K.; Guldin, Rainer, and Bernardo, Gustavo. 2011. Vilém Flusser: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, Vilém. 1984. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Göttingen: European Photography. Flusser, Vilém. 1990. “On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise). Leonardo,  23 (4): 397–399.

  THE TECHNICAL IMAGE IN VILÉM FLUSSER 

Flusser, Vilém. 2013. Post-history. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Flusser, Vilém. 2011a. Does writing have a future? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, Vilém. 2011b. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, Vilém. 2002. Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Flusser, Vilém. 2012. The Shape of Things: Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion Books. Flusser, Vilém. 1998. Kommunikologie. Frankfurt/M: Fischer. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Perennial. Heidegger, Martin. 2003. The End of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. van der Meulen, Sjoukje. 2010. “Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory”. New German Critique, 110: 180–207. Wark, McKenzie. 2013. The Spectacle of Disintegration. New York: Verso.

Im/pulse to See in Rosalind Krauss Filip Lipiński

“After Greenberg, no one has had as much influence on American art critics as Krauss”, wrote David Carrier in his intellectual biography of the American critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss (Carrier 2002, 2). He refers to criticism, which he calls philosophical, based on a solid theoretical ground, though one that underwent diverse transformations throughout Krauss’ career. Krauss’ art criticism, at the beginning published in Artforum and since 1976 in October (the magazine she co-founded with Annette Michelson and Jeremy Gilbert-­ Rolfe), and the task she set for herself as an art historian to rewrite the history of modernism, first from the structuralist, and later from poststructuralist and psychoanalytical perspectives, are complementary and inseparable. In this entry I focus on two main issues, which in Krauss’ extensive academic oeuvre seem to be chronologically quite far apart: first, the question of vision and the image (or work of art) as a symptom of the work of the unconscious and, second, the problem of the medium. The former was extensively addressed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in her text “Im/pulse to See” and the book The Optical Unconscious; the latter became the main object in her writing from the late 1990s. In fact, however, both questions recurred throughout her career with different intensity and within varied theoretical ramifications, always in a productive tension with the Greenbergian paradigm of modernism,

The article is an edited, fragmentarily modified, and translated by the author version of an original text which was published in Polish as “Rosalind Krauss: przekraczanie modernizmu?” in Didaskalia 111, 2012, 41–50. F. Lipiński (*) Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_24

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

which will provide the most general framework here. Consequently, they need to be set in the broader context of Krauss’ thinking, which I will retrace below.

1   Greenberg’s Modernism Clement Greenberg’s vision of modernism was a felt presence in Krauss’ critical writing, addressed in a more or less direct, affirmative or critical, and most frequently ambivalent, way. In the 1960s Krauss, along with another leading American art historian and critic, Michael Fried, were largely influenced by Greenberg, their mentor, who, as she wrote quite recently, was “the most powerful critical voice and eye of postwar American art” (Krauss 2010, 113). While Fried has never broken ties with the basic tenets of Greenberg’s model, Krauss, since early 1970s, started to critically work it through, albeit with differing, sometimes ambivalent, effect. In his seminal, if relatively late, text “Modernist Painting” Greenberg outlined the main tenets of modernist art, in terms of both historical necessity and form (Greenberg [1960] 1995). The apostle of abstract expressionism and later of post-painterly abstraction believed that modernism, initiated by Manet, reached its peak with American abstract art of the mid-twentieth century. Inspired by Kant’s philosophy, Greenberg’s vision and evaluation of art was normative and essentialist in character: art was an autonomous domain, separate from life, ruled by the logic of immanent and intrinsic, historically conditioned formal developments within a medium specific for each artistic discipline. Concentrating on painting, he argued that its specificity lies in its flatness, the shape of the pictorial field, and applied pigment. Hence, what determined the identity of a painting was its material support. However, when it came to perception this materiality was marginalized in favor of the “purely optical experience” of the formal composition of a painting, which additionally rejected any involvement of the body, not to mention the effects injected by the psychical apparatus into the process of viewing. What is more, Greenberg disallowed any suggestion of spatial illusion or objectivity which might, respectively, generate projection of the spectator’s spatial situation into the picture or suggest its sculptural character—both of which violated the constitutive flatness of painting. This purely optical, vision-oriented character of painting was also related to the instantaneity of seeing it, viewed as a fully present, coherent, and successful whole, to be grasped in the blink of an eye. In consequence, the basic tenet of viewing a picture consists in temporal reduction, following Lessing’s famous division into spatial and temporal arts. The spectator is a transcendent, vision-oriented subject, whose residual experiences, psychology, memory, and body are neutralized in order to give space to “disinterested” seeing. This is exactly the aspect of Greenberg’s paradigm that Krauss takes to task in “Im/ pulse to See” and The Optical Unconscious. Greenberg’s hegemony of opticality and his attachment to form determined by the specificity of the medium were clearly detectible in Krauss’ first book,

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

Fig. 1  David Smith, Voltri XV, 1962, steel sculpture, 228 × 196 × 57.4 cm. Photo by Jeff Kubina, Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

The Terminal Ironworks (Krauss 1971), which is devoted to the sculpture of David Smith (Fig. 1). The analyses of the works focus on visual experience and are clearly influenced by the narrow application of Greenbergian categories, which are in fact inadequate for describing spatial forms, with the essential elimination of any relationship of the perceiving subject’s body to the object and the tactile aspect of sculpture. “Instead”, wrote Krauss, “the surface makes the work visually accessible, while defeating the desire for possession by touch” (Krauss 1971, 88). However, only a year later she published “A View of Modernism” in which she critically reflected on her own engagement in Greenberg’s modernist project (Krauss 2010). Krauss laid bare the limitations and mechanisms of this project, subjectivized (made it her own) the modernist perspective, which was allegedly “innocent”, objective and historical, and which discredited as “non-art” works and tendencies that did not fit in its tight corset of preconditions and was indifferent to any determinations on the side of the artist or critic. “Failing to see that its ‘history’ is a perspective, my perspective—only, that is to say, a point of view—modernist criticism has stopped being suspicious of what it sees as self-evident (…)” (Krauss 2010, 124). With no remorse, Krauss points to the aporias and blind spots of modernism, for instance, the notorious idea of the presentness of a work of art, purged of any hint temporality, posited by Michael Fried, who, at the same time, had no problem with considering individual artworks as elements of a series and looking for their connection with the modernist tradition, which created an obviously diachronic perspective (Krauss 2010, 124–125; Fried 1998). Modernist criticism was not capable of dealing with sculpture, minimalist in particular, due to not only its “theatricality”, as Fried had it, implying the temporal and

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

spatial, phenomenological experience of the changing relation of a work’s form to a moving and perceiving subject, but also sculpture’s reflexive character, which, as Krauss wrote about experiencing Richard Serra’s work, “makes a viewer realize that the hidden meanings she reads into the corporate body of the world are her own projections and that interiority she had thought belonged to the sculpture is in fact her own interiority” (Krauss 2010, 127). This is a very important moment, when she declares that a critic/modern art historian’s role is no longer limited to assessing whether or not a work of art fulfills the conditions of “medium specificity” and exemplifies the logic of formal developments, but becomes that of an active factor in the formation of meaning and the multilayered experience of the work, and thus an element of its content. This is not about the subjective stance that “anything goes” but the necessity of careful reading, a focus on signifying substance which often takes an interpreter into uncharted territory, difficult to determine a priori. From her own perspective, which is not to be confused with arbitrariness, Krauss wrote her next book—Passages in Modern Sculpture (Krauss 1977). Modernity is here seen as no longer a result of a continuation of tradition but of ruptures, turning points, and discontinuities. Even though the chapters are set out chronologically, implying some sort of development, they are based on a synchronic, structuralism- and phenomenology-based analysis of one or several works of similar kinds—for example, kinetic sculptures. Krauss’ objective is a detailed formal description (which tends to be interpreted as the aftermath of Greenberg’s formalism), whose function in the publications to follow will consistently and considerably be extended by the dynamics of the relation between the work and the spectator, supported by the structuralist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytical models of production of meaning with the diffusive signifier in play. In Passages she also provides a take on medium specificity that is clearly different from Greenberg’s: she deals with a number of different sculptural forms for which a common denominator is spatiality, broadly defined. Despite constantly wrestling with Greenberg’s legacy, Krauss did not manage—and perhaps this was never her objective—to fully disavow his vision of modernism. As Diarmuid Costello noted, the strategy of negating Greenbergian notions by coming up with opposing categories does not nullify them but “effectively reinstates their negative after-image” (Costello 2007, 219). Even though this claim is reductive of the complex character of Krauss’ theoretical procedures (indeed, Greenberg’s haunting presence is still felt in her texts; he functions as the Lacanian figure of the Father, establishing the Law), his modernist paradigm constitutes a permanent object of attack and rebellion. It becomes an object of internal differentiation but at the same time provides a relatively stable frame of reference and allows Krauss to function within a system (here: of art criticism), delineating a paradoxical space within which any critical action can take place.

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

2   Postmodern Demythifications Krauss describes the grand narratives of modernity as myths. Referring to the myth structure provided by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies as a “second-­ order semiological system” preying on the basic sign (Barthes 1991, 113), she writes in her piece on Cindy Sherman: Myth is depoliticized speech. Myth is ideology. Myth is the act of draining history out of signs and reconstructing these signs instead as “instances”, in particular, instances of universal truths or of natural law, of things that have no history, no specific embeddedness, no territory of contestation. Myth steals into the heart of the sign to convert the historical into the “natural”—something that is uncontested, that is simply “the way things are”. (Krauss 1999a, 105)

She embarks on deconstructing modernist myths in her collection of articles The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Krauss 1985). She seems to follow the footsteps of such poststructuralist authors as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes in her critique of notions that are fundamental for the humanities in general, but are here used in the context of the history of modernist art, such as “nature”, “author”, “oeuvre”, “intention”, “origin”, “unity”, and “development”. For instance, in the chapter “In the Name of Picasso” she demonstrates that the effect of coherence and transparency of meaning in Picasso’s work was achieved by the totalizing perspective of the artist’s biography, the hegemony of the proper name, which controlled the collage-like, complex and potentially dynamic weave of meanings in favor of the hermeneutic discovery of an intentionally motivated mystery residing in the work (Krauss 1985, 23–40). Krauss’ effort aims at revealing the semiotic, constructive character of the image, whose meaning appears as a result of a productive, differential play between signifiants and not their transparency onto a stable signifié. In that and many other publications she resorts to Derrida’s textual model: signs, whose meaning is preconditioned by spacing and relations of difference, not only constitute the “writing” of a work of art, but also determine the perception and the understanding of reality, which is always already mediated by memory, conventions, and historical, technologically determined changeability of vision. It is useful to quote a longer excerpt of another text from that volume, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism”, to demonstrate the logic of her demythification project: taking into account the indexical status of photography in relation to the real as a kind of deposit of the real itself, the manipulations wrought by the surrealist photographers—the spacings and doublings—are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithful trace. In this way the photographic medium is explored to produce a paradox: the paradox of reality constituted as sign—or presence transformed into absence, into representation, into spacing, into writing. (Krauss 1985, 110–112)

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

However, Krauss’ intention cannot be reduced to exposing the dissemination of the signifying substance of artworks; in fact, she uses deconstruction with moderation or even, it might seem, instrumentally, to combine it with a number of other aspects and present an overarching theoretical argument. In the essay “Originality of the Avant-Garde”, she carries out a critique of the notion of “an original”, based on the ethos of uniqueness, novelty and artistic genius exercising complete control over the work, replacing it with “originality” as a discursive construction. To do this she refers to such diverse works in terms of medium and historical context as August Rodin’s sculpture, Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings, and Sherrie Levine’s photographic appropriations (Fig. 2). However, as Craig Owens has noted in his insightful review of her book, despite her poststructuralist inspirations Krauss tended to search for a more general, logical principle or structure for a given artistic tendency or an individual oeuvre, which will become even more apparent in the texts in which she focuses on the idea of the medium (Owens 1992). A symptom of

Fig. 2  Sherrie Levine, Fountain (Buddha), 1996, cast bronze, 30.5 × 40 × 45.7 cm. Photo by Hesperian Nguyen. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

this ordering proclivity is the structuralist semiotic diagram, the so-called Klein group, which is recurrent in her texts. This helps her to develop the dialectic of binary oppositions, to form an expanded field, based on axes of opposing notions expressed positively (upper complex axis) and their negations (lower neutral axis) as well as relations established along the diagonals based on implication. This schema enables Krauss to come up with a set of useful inter-­ categories (even if some commentators considered them arbitrary, e.g. Carrier 2002, 33–49), while preserving a frame structure and logical order. The diagram can be regarded as emblematic for Krauss’ scholarly method and approach to modernism: while she effectively expands and diversifies the original structure, in the end she always remains within its horizon.

3  Im/pulse to See: Toward the Optical Unconscious “Im/pulse to See” marks another stage of Krauss’ struggle with Greenberg’s modernism and, in a broader perspective, the Cartesian idea of an incorporeal model of vision. It was published in 1988 in the collection of texts Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, Krauss’ student and collaborator at October magazine, and one of her key partners in rewriting modernism and theoretical, critical engagement in postmodernism (Foster 1988). The issues of vision and visuality addressed in the book were of primary importance for disciplinary reconfigurations in the fields of art history and visual studies and attracted a lot of attention from scholars identified with the so-called New Art History, analyzing the social-cultural ramifications of art and the historical contingency of vision. Around that time, the increased interest in diverse aspects of visuality and the shared conviction about the key role that images and ways of seeing have in the cultural construction of what we regard as reality were identified by W. J. T. Mitchell as the “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 1992) and, with some differences (which are addressed elsewhere in this volume), by Gottfried Boehm as the “iconic turn” (Boehm 1994). Even though “vision” suggests an order of nature and “visuality” one of culture, Foster stresses in his preface that such a dichotomy is misconceived: “vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical” (Foster 1988, ix). One of the key objectives of this discussion was to break up with persistent discursive and, in Martin Jay’s term, “scopic regimes” (Jay 1994) as well as binary oppositions such as the mind and the body. The main objective of Krauss’ essay was the discursive elaboration of the corporeal aspect of seeing, connecting the Cartesian “eye of the mind” with the psychical apparatus of the perceiving and creating subject. As mentioned above, it anticipated a larger project by Krauss, the result of which was the 1993 book The Optical Unconscious (Krauss 1993), which included fragments of “Im/pulse to See” and extended discussion of the issues that had been signaled a few years prior. The term “the optical unconscious” comes from Walter Benjamin, who wrote about the constantly expanding—as a result of new technologies, especially photography—field of vision, revealing what would otherwise remain in

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

the unconscious sphere of seeing. Technology, like psychoanalysis, archeologically brings into view the content that is out there but has never been consciously perceived (Benjamin 1979, 243). Krauss points out, though, that her use of the concept is “at an angle” to what Benjamin meant (Krauss 1993, 179). While Benjamin’s idea related to the inadequacy of human perception to register all the details of objective reality, Krauss is interested in the externalized traces or symptoms of what has always been invisible—the unconscious as a constitutive element of the complex psychological apparatus, which always subliminally intervenes in the field of vision and the vision-contingent process of constructing an image: If it can be spoken of at all as externalized within the visual field, this is because a group of disparate artists have so constructed it there, constructing it as a projection of the way human vision can be thought to be less than a master of all it surveys, in conflict as it is with what is internal to the organism that houses it. (Krauss 1993, 179–180)

On the one hand, Krauss makes a critique of the modernist regime of opticality; on the other, in a way, she “saves” opticality, making it more complex and stratified, indicating that Greenberg’s and Fried’s diagnoses were erroneous or at least lacking. “Im/pulse to see” starts with Fried’s anecdote about a baseball player who was admired by Frank Stella for his extremely quick eye, which was able to register all the details of a moving object: “a perfect metaphor of visual modernism” (Krauss 1988, 52). This serves to depict the autonomy of vision, separated from the body, with no sign of desire, disinterested—a prerequisite for the experience, posited by modernist critics, of a “successful” work of art, its pure presence, transparency, and timelessness. Meanwhile in Krauss’ model, vision is inseparably connected with the agency of psychical apparatus, driven by the flow of libidinal agency and primary processes of displacement and condensation. Moreover, visual perception is temporal: not only is it conditioned historically and technologically, as was demonstrated by Jonathan Crary (Crary 1992), but also determined by the complex temporality of psychical apparatus described by Freud and then Jean-François Lyotard, who drew on Freud’s model and whom Krauss brings into play to good effect in her analysis (Lyotard [1971] 2011). The pulse, beat, or rhythm is a result of the workings of libidinal energy, which permits seeing and can be felt in the work of such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso, whom Krauss calls in her book “the artists of the optical unconscious” (Krauss 1993, 206). Their works, seemingly irrational, ambiguous, or deformed, constitute a surface materialization of the desire-driven fantasy, a screen which visualizes fantasy, albeit always incompletely and imperfectly, becoming more like its symptom. The dimension of the optical unconscious is thus comparable to the Freudian Id, which disrupts conventions, tradition, and the socially and culturally legitimized systems of behavior regulated by the Ego and Superego. Here this deregulation concerns

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

the form of the artwork. Even though the eye always communicates with a psychical apparatus, the distinctness of the symptoms of the optical unconscious in art depends on the sublimatory mechanisms, that is, the neutralization of libidinal energy. Krauss selects works that pulsate with this energy. On the one hand, they manage to transgress the conventional system of representation (the Surrealists’ and Picasso’s works), and on the other, they successfully make this process of transgression their subject: the flickering of an image and rhythmic movement of wings in the zootrope depicted by Ernst; the continuous (de)generating pictorial forms created by Duchamp’s kinetic device; Giacometti’s sculpture, whose pendular motion deconstructs the stability of sexual difference; and eventually the variations of form in the later studies by Picasso that are seen successively as if they were pages of a flipbook, these neither conformed to the modernist paradigm nor were they acceptable by the supporters of Gestalt—“the good form”. Their “bad”, distorted kinetic and temporalized form must be read as a symptom of the work of the unconscious, making it their subject. The question of the form of the image is directly connected to the issue of vision. The analysis of Ernst’s collage demonstrates the inseparability of subject- and object-oriented vision. If seeing is always conditioned by our psyche, which functions as a location of a differential play of perception, association, dreamwork, or fantasy, then the perceiving subject can never be unified or fully self-present. Ideal, pure vision is disturbed by images generated by the psychical apparatus which, in consequence, becomes a factor that both enables seeing and interferes in it. Hence, the spectator, along with the object of perception, self-reflectively sees his/her own seeing and realizes he/she is also, to some extent, its object. Ernst’s collage is a depiction of a dream in which a girl is located inside a zootrope, a proto-cinematic device generating an impression of a continuous, moving image (a flying bird), but only when viewed from the outside; the view from the inside, possible if the viewer identifies him/herself with the girl, reveals the mechanism governing the illusion of continuity and hence disrupts it. Thus, vision also becomes an object of analysis. Simultaneous observation from the positions located on both sides of the cylindrical device, as implied in Ernst’ work, reflects the model of vision based on the complicated structure of a dream as a fantasy, whose “theatrical” character was aptly described by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: The fantasy […] is there in front of me, in the mode of Vorstellung: I (re)present it to myself. Better still, I (re)present myself in it through some “other”, some identificatory figure […] But the point from which I contemplate the scene—the fantasy’s “umbilical cord”, we might say through which it is linked with what is invisible for the subject—is not offstage. I am in the fantasy […]. (Borch-Jacobsen 1988, 44–45)

To specify the figural character of the optical unconscious, Krauss refers to Jean-François Lyotard’s work Discourse, figure (Lyotard [1971] 2011), in

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

which he indicates the mutual and inseparable relation between discourse and figure, language and the visual, a letter and a line. Defending—as he writes— the underprivileged eye, he positions himself in opposition to the skepticism toward visuality that was then dominant, especially in the Francophone humanities, and the belief in the dominant role of language, discussed at length by Jay (Lyotard [1971] 2011; Jay 1994). Lyotard presents his concept of the figure, conditioned by libidinal energy, which permits and ruptures discourse on every possible level. There are three basic kinds of figure: the figure-image which can be a hallucination, a dream, a painting, or a film; in a word, it is a representation of an object. The figure-form is visible but usually unnoticed; it “upholds the visible without being seen” and hence serves as “the visible’s nervure”. However, it can come to visibility by a “transgression of good form”, as a “bad form” (275). Finally, the figure-matrix remains invisible and cannot be ascribed to the sphere of either the plastic or the textual. “It is different itself, and as such does not suffer that minimum of oppositionality that its spoken expression requires, of image- or form-conditioning that its plastic expression entails” (275). It is located in the space where discourse, image, and form coexist. In consequence we are dealing here, respectively, with three kinds of desire-driven transgressions: “transgression of the object, transgression of form, and transgression of space” (276). The starting point for Lyotard is Edmund Husserl’s and Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty’s phenomenology in particular, which rejects notional a priori in favor of intuitive revelation of relations of perceived forms and body in the present and the unity between perception and the body in space. That kind of phenomenological unconscious as a primordial, pre-rational immersion in the world is supplemented by Lyotard with the unconscious in psychoanalytical sense, which is governed by desire. Phenomenology “cooperates” with psychoanalysis, as far as the bodily, spatial continuity opposing the structure of discourse is concerned. However, as Krauss noted, space in phenomenological terms is a space in which forms get shaped; clearly defined figures, a “good form”, Gestalt, is produced (Krauss 1993, 218). Meanwhile Lyotard is after a space which is heterogeneous, gathers oppositions that nullify one another, space that cannot be ordered, and as such remains invisible and generates “bad form”. This is exactly the matrix that manifests itself through errors, glitches, symptoms, fantasies, and “subcutaneous” activity on the visible. “The figure enjoys a radical complicity with desire. This complicity is the hypothesis that guides Freud in his exploration of the operations of the dream. It allows for a strong articulation between the order of desire and that of the figural through the category of transgression: the ‘text’ of the preconscious (day’s residues, memories) undergoes shocks that render it unrecognizable and illegible. In this illegibility, the deep matrix in which desire is caught finds satisfaction, expressing itself in disorganized forms and hallucinatory images” (Lyotard [1971] 2011, 268). Lyotard in his chapter “Fiscourse, digure”, the title signaling a differential combination of the figure and discourse, demonstrates the work of the figural

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

matrix using the example of the recurrent fantasy verbalized by Freud’s patients: “The child is being beaten” (Lyotard [1971] 2011, 327–355; Freud 1955, 179–204). Freud indicates that we are dealing there with a series of deep-level displacements and condensations and the fantasy is a symptom of masochistically oriented sexual desire. In the course of analysis Freud identifies a number of seemingly contradictory sentences which reveal the subject of the work of fantasy (or, more accurately, the subject is reconstructed by Freud)—the father and the object—“me”: “I am being beaten by the father”. The take on this fantasy points to a distancing change of the active voice to passive and a superposition of perspectives and roles: the subject of fantasy as one who is looking at the scene—the patient—is at the same time the object of the fantasy and the activity of beating itself. Initially the girl (Freud limits his discussion to this case) identifies with the father but later, due to the feeling of guilt triggered by the desire for a sexual relation with him, becomes the object of the beating. Freud makes it clear that being beaten is at the same time a source of pleasure and the incestuous fantasy expressed in a sexual sense as “My father loves me” gets transformed into “My father is beating me (I am being beaten by my father)”: This being beaten is now a convergence of the sense of guilt and sexual love. It is not only the punishment for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation, and from this latter source it derives the libidinal excitation which is from this time forward attached to it […]. (Freud 1955, 189)

Krauss noted that Lyotard appreciates the “but also” (Krauss 1993, 220) logic that presents itself here, which is based on a difference which nullifies the structuralist stability of binaries and synchrony, replacing it with undecidability, multi-level transformations: structure generates meanings, while Lyotard’s matrix abolishes meaning, resulting in illegibility, transgressing both discourse and representation. The “child is being beaten” fantasy was expressed verbally but it is permeated by the figure and it is connected with space—the domain of the visual. This fantasy is a figure of the matrix, both hiding a multilayered dynamics and—through this hiding—signaling it. Despite the fact that, as Lyotard noted, the matrix is a block-like grouping of strata, there is something that connects all of them: it is the jouissance-generating rhythmic beat, the pulse of beating. This is a pulse which does not carry the promise of eternal continuation; it is not a good, musical form, some regular structure; it is always under the threat of being stopped or disrupted; the death drive underlies the pleasure principle. “Im/pulse to see” also means a transgression of traditional media and the division it entails into high and low art, that is, mass culture. Anticipating the discussion of Krauss’ ideas concerning the medium, one can say that the artists of the optical unconscious invented alternative media as spaces conducive to connecting with this transgressive, fascinating pulsation. The most effective in this respect was their flirtation with mass culture: popular reproductions,

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

optical machines, kinetic devices, or, as in Picasso’s case, a book whose pages, turned very quickly, produced an impression of movement resembling the one known from an animated movie (Krauss 1988, 70–74). The im/pulsive model of vision and images or art objects which result from it, manifesting their stratification and pulsation with libidinal energy, negates modernity in a number of ways: not only does it infuse visual perception with spatial-temporal transformative, pulsatile energy, but it also uncovers the fragility of hierarchies and porosity of divisions that had been suppressed by the modernist model (Krauss 1993, 225). As Freud, “the master of suspicion”, uncovered the deep structure of the human psyche, so did Krauss manage to unpack the complexity of vision. The artists she discusses reveal the mechanisms that govern vision and present a persuasive alternative to the modernist opticality, the model of disembodied and disinterested seeing that implies a one-dimensional, given-to-be-seen structure in the work of art. Potentially, this model concerns any images and artworks, including those which seem to seamlessly reproduce the appearance of the real: vision, the images and forms it generates, is always already marked by desire which is neutralized or masked in different ways; the only difference is the degree of sublimatory mechanisms which either cover or reveal it. The project of deconstructing modernism was continued by Krauss, who returned, sometimes literally, to analyses known from the above-discussed publications in a book co-authored with Yve-Alain Bois, to accompany the exhibition they organized in Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1996—L’informe: mode d’emploi. There the key category became the notion of the formless coined by the French writer and critic Georges Bataille. The formless functions as a sphere of transgression of what is suppressed by the modernist attachment to the good form (Bois and Krauss 1997).

4   Medium Specificity or “who you are” The most recent two decades of Krauss’ writing have been dominated by her preoccupation with the medium in art and this concern also takes a central position in her most recent book, Under Blue Cup (Krauss 2011)—a special, very personal, and self-conscious book related to her struggle to overcome disease and her gradual recovery. This personal dimension is echoed by connecting the issue of the medium with the question of identity of a work of art but also, as it seems, the intellectual identity of the scholar herself. The modernist understanding of the medium, which in the American context is automatically associated with Greenberg’s writing, defined the identity of a work of art and excluded any “impure” forms of art. This exclusivity and inability to account for new art practices, in terms both of form and of their meaning, has been gradually eradicated and challenged in critical discourse. Aside from the famous controversy around minimalism, in the 1960s the strategies of pop-art negated medium specificity through the use of collage, assemblage, and silkscreens, which combined photography and painting, at the same

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

time transgressing the key modernist distinction between high art and popculture, art and kitsch. The formal and material character of an artwork was also challenged by the language-based utopias of conceptualist tautologies (in favor of “art in general”) and, to some extent, video art, body art, and ephemeral performative actions. Postmodernism, especially appropriation art, with its theoretical underpinning reflecting the reception of French poststructuralism (cf. Lejeune et al. 2013), clearly indicated the always already impure character of the media and the unavoidable, sign- rather than medium-­centered dissemination of meaning and unstable, hybrid ontological status of a work of art. For the purpose of brevity, one might generally say that the problem of the medium, due to Greenberg’s legacy reductively associated with form and material, was marginalized in favor of the semiotic and/or political dimension of art. This situation was abetted by dynamic developments in communication, computer technologies, digital imaging, and the Internet, which resulted in diverse forms of media (or intermedia) arts which further dematerialized artistic practices and eliminated the issue of material-based medium specificity. This apparent obsolescence or inadequacy of the question of the medium led to what Krauss called “post-medium condition”, echoing Lyotard’s “postmodern condition” (cf. Krauss 2010, xii–xiii). In this way she diagnosed the end of the grand narrative of the modernist fetishization of the medium. The notion of the post-medium condition has appeared in Krauss’ writing since about 2000 (Krauss 2000). A symptom of the post-medium condition and one of the main targets of Krauss’ criticism to date has been installation art. Associated with postmodernism, especially since 1990s, the term “installation art” designates a broad spectrum of artworks that consist of heterogeneous elements, use new technologies of sound and image, and hence, being by definition “impure”, do not fit in the traditional, medium-specific classification of the arts (cf. Rosenthal 2003; Rebentisch 2012). However, the post-medium condition is, according to Krauss, “a monstrous myth”, which she wants to “expose” by offering an alternative, as she wrote in the introduction to Perpetual Inventory, her 2010 collection of new and older essays (Krauss 2010, xiv). If myth hides the semiotic and historical complexity of its object, the post-medium condition would conceal or even nullify the signifying substance of the medium itself, whose invisible—because appropriated by the myth—activity would constitute the medium’s specificity. Hence, Krauss gives up the material-based definition of medium specificity and emphasizes the need to expand and redefine it as a constitutive element of signification. As she wrote, “there is no code (aesthetic or linguistic) that is not open to interpretation or careful reading. A medium is the articulation of such a code” (Krauss 2011, 3). Krauss keeps on thinking about the medium in “post-­ medium art” but proposes a whole new set of coordinates for it. The proposed recuperation of medium specificity would involve attention given to the signifying substance, “the culture of the signifier” which disappears in that art and art criticism that subscribes to the abolishment of the medium (Krauss 2011, 68). Importantly, she claims (echoing Greenberg’s and Fried’s esthetic

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

judgment-based criticism) that “the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art” (Krauss 2010, xiii). Krauss is fully aware of the risk she runs by adhering to the compromised notion of the medium. As she wrote at the beginning of one of her earliest texts on the issue: At first I thought I could simply draw a line under the word medium, bury it like so much critical toxic waste, and walk away from it into a world of lexical freedom. “Medium” seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically, too discursively loaded. (Krauss 2000, 5)

While since Greenberg it has been identified with a specific, physical, material support, like oil on canvas, clay, marble, and so on, which determines and reifies the work, Krauss decides to stick to the concept because of the possibility to work with and within its complex, layered meanings and functions. Her basic step is to replace the all-too-familiar notion of “material support” with what she calls, somewhat confusingly, “technical support” (Krauss 2010, 2011). The concept of “technical support” […] has the virtue of acknowledging the recent obsolescence of most traditional aesthetic mediums (such as oil on canvas, fresco, and many sculptural materials, like cast bronze or welded metal), while it also welcomes the layered mechanisms of new technologies that make a simple, unitary identification of the work’s physical support impossible […]. (Krauss 2010, 37)

The technicality describing the medium is understood here as a set of rules and conventions which is generated by the applied technology, material, or conception itself. These rules, which Stanley Cavell refers to as “automatism” (Cavell 1971, 101–108), specify the functioning, reception, and meaning of the work of art. To specify the relationship between the work and the principles that constitute its medium, to revive the idea of medium specificity, Krauss brings into play the notion of a recursive structure. It designates the potential of a work of art or artistic procedure for self-definition: some of the elements of a recursive structure produce the rules that generate the structure itself (Krauss 2011, 4). As Krauss herself confessed, “To wrestle new mediums to the mat of specificity has been a preoccupation of mine since the inception of October […]”, even if it were not to be addressed by her with such scope and emphasis until the late 1990s. However, already in her first article concerning video art for October, she focused on defining the principle that governed the self-­ presentation and the formation of the subject in the work of artists using this technology (Krauss 1976). In this case the medium of art, the rule or condition for video, was nothing technological, not a screen or real-time sound or image, but what the technology made possible: a narcissistic, specular concentration on the subject—the doubled, split, and displaced subject of video art. Thus,

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

the medium is defined by the principle, intangible but founded in the relationship between the image and the gaze, of the psychical apparatus. Another, quite surprising and at the same time revealing example of “technical support” is demonstrated in a more recent analysis of the medium in Edward Ruscha’s work, which oscillates between pop-art and conceptualism, between painting and photography. Krauss argues that his technical support, which produces the principles for a group of his works, is the car (Krauss 2011, 75–78). The car enables the artist to move along the road, specifies a perspective of seeing, but also determines the seriality or automatisms of certain actions: the car must be fueled at regular intervals which requires stops at gas stations and it must be parked somewhere, possibly in a parking lot. All these elements reappear in his works such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a folded photo book with sequences of photographs of both sides of the Los Angeles boulevard he drove along, and Twenty Six Gasoline Stations (1962), a set of photos representing gas stations he stopped at, taken from the same viewpoint, and a series of parking lot photographs (taken from a helicopter). Indeed, that automobile-determined, photographic point of view can also be felt in some of his paintings. A vehicle is then a technical—quite literally in this case—support which generates a set of procedures and possibilities, including the implementation of such processual aspects as repetition or seriality, within which Ruscha functions as an artist. The fact that Ruscha is not attached to any of the traditional media does not prevent Krauss from talking about a medium specificity based on the technical support that the artist invented for himself (Krauss 2011, 76). Ruscha re-invents the known medium of communication; displacing it as an operational element of its art, he constructs the medium of the car anew, without losing touch with its mode of mass functioning. In Under Blue Cup Krauss uses the formulation “inventing the medium” (in her 1999 essay she wrote about some photographic practices in terms of “reinventing the medium”, which she gave up later on; Krauss 1999b), particularly with reference to several artists whom she describes somewhat bizarrely as “the White Knights” and who, in her view, successfully oppose the post-medium condition and the “forgetting of the medium”. Even though these works by Sophie Calle (Fig. 3), James Coleman, Harun Farocki, William Kentridge, and Christian Marclay can be classified as the kind of installation art that Krauss had condemned, what distinguishes and “saves” them are, in her view, the new technical supports based, paradoxically, on obsolete technologies such as animation or slide projection. What she is after is not, however, any specific technology or procedure but a particular set of problems which, through this technological re-staging, set a kind of a conceptual framework, which generates meanings and exposes the technical support, such as the issue of synchronization of image in sound in Marclay’s work or the esthetics and procedures of photo reportage in Calle’s. As Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska put it, “‘inventing the medium’ is a question of ‘differential articulation’, recontextualization and displacements, which reveal the internal spacing, a moment of disfunction in the technology or convention in use” (Rejniak-Majewska 2010, 51). This

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

Fig. 3  Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself (installation, detail), 2007. Photo by Sascha Pohflepp. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

statement aptly reflects the gist of Krauss’ account, especially that from the essay A Voyage on the North Sea, in which she still talks about the “specificity” of “mediums, even modernist ones [which] must be understood as differential, self-differing, and thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support” (Krauss 2000, 53). However, this deconstructive language which suggests Derridean thinking of difference, implying the diffusion of any structural framework, tellingly disappears in her latest book to make room for the search for more solid ground. Krauss begins Under Blue Cup with the following statement: “Late in 1999, my brain erupted” (Krauss 2011, 1). As a result of the breaking of a brain aneurysm, which affected her neurological system, Krauss partially lost her memory. The months that followed a number of successful operations were devoted to rehabilitation and gradual work to restore her memory. A condition of successful mnemonic treatment, she writes, was regaining certainty as to “who you are”. It was, then, about the fundamental issue of identity, her own “specificity”, if you will. Krauss asked this “who you are” question in the context of her account of the medium. It constitutes a scaffolding, a foundation on which one can rely on and act—a form of memory. This kind of memory is at the same time collective, founded—she argues—in ages-long principles and practices of guilds, within the constraints of a specific artistic genre or a “muse”. “Craft”, “muses”, and “white knights”: all of these odd archaisms make Krauss’ argument even more provocative, directed against the “naturalized” discourse of the post-medium condition: “Who you are” is a question about a principle, a way of life, which makes the question of the medium first of all an ontological one. No wonder then that the targets of her criticism are not just conceptualism and installation art, but also such figures as Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Derrida, and what they represent. While Derrida’s theory was instrumental in Krauss’ project of the deconstruction of modernist myths, Duchamp was very much present in her work from the “psychoanalytical” period of “Im/pulse to

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

See” and The Optical Unconscious, acting as a close ally in her crusade against the hegemony of opticality and the disembodied vision. However, from the more recent perspective, Duchamp’s dissolution of medial distinctions through readymades, “proto-installations”, and the expansion of the media categories to “art in general” was decidedly destructive with reference to what has now become particularly dear to Krauss: it contributed to the negation of the medium, first by the neo-avant-garde and more recently by installation artists. Furthermore, the revival of the question of medium specificity (even if reinvented), the continuation of tradition, and the search for identity implied in the question about “who you are” constitute an overt declaration of breaking ties with deconstructive thinking of difference and the radical critique of the notions of truth and presence. However, Krauss does not give up on the mobility of signifiers but provides a framework for them, a field of “play”, the rim of a swimming-pool, which, she writes, provides us with a solid edge to push against and swim into the paradoxical, because restricted, “fluid” space of artistic freedom (Krauss 2011, 25). Importantly, the medium-related framework is a sine qua non of critical judgment of an artwork: one cannot evaluate a musical improvisation which does not take place within the structural framework of a specific genre. Such a logic is of course strongly reminiscent of Greenberg, for whom the content of a successful work of art was dictated by its acknowledgment of the limitations of its own medium which, in turn, testified to its quality: “the quality of a work of art inheres in its ‘content’ and vice versa. Quality is content” (Greenberg [1967] 1995, 269). It is difficult to resist the impression that the core, the “who you are”, which helped Krauss to restore her memory, was early stage of her career, under Greenberg’s intellectual influence, which has been foundational for her identity as an art critic and historian. That does not mean in any way a complete rehabilitation of or return to her mentor’s ideas, but a recognition of his essential role for her thinking as laws-giver, laws which she at some point criticized or corrected but which have always remained in the broader field of her thinking, like a category in her favorite Klein group schema. The awareness of the identity (specificity) of the medium facilitates successful improvisation in the case of an artist, and for an art critic, Krauss seems to suggest, brings the promise of Barthesian “pleasure of the text” (Barthes 1998), and the “erotics of art” posited by Susan Sontag, who wrote that “The function of criticism should be to show how it [art and its experience] is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (Sontag 1966, 14). Indeed, Krauss’ interpretations lean toward self-reflexivity and do not aim at establishing meaning, stop short of it, especially in terms of the political engagement of art and art criticism; instead, they tend to uncover the mechanisms, structures, and conditions for generating meanings that are constitutive of a work of art. Krauss calls the renouncement of such a pleasure in the name of “political moralism” a disease, which is strictly related to the forgetting of the medium (Krauss 2011, 68). Ultimately, we should concentrate on the “way of being” of a work of art and be close to it with our vision, our body, and our writing.

 

F. LIPIŃSKI

References Barthes, Roland. 1998. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland. 1991. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. New  York: The Noonday Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1979. “A Small History of Photography”. In: Walter Benjamin. One-­ Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB. Boehm, Gottfried. 1994. Was Ist ein Bild? München: Wilhelm Fink. Bois, Yve-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind. 1997. The Formless. A User’s Guide. Cambridge, MA: Zone Press. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1988. The Freudian Subject. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carrier, David. 2002. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism. Westport, CT and London: Praeger. Cavell, Stanley. 1971. The World Viewed. New York: The Viking Press. Costello, Diarmuid. 2007. “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (2): 217–228. Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Foster, Hal (ed.). 1988. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions”. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17. Ed. by John Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Fried, Michael. 1998. “Art and Objecthood”. In: Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Greenberg, Clement. [1960] 1995. “Modernist Painting”. In: Clement Greenberg. Collected Essays and Criticisms, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance. Ed. by John O’Brian, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Greenberg, Clement. [1967] 1995. “Complaints of an Art Critic”. In: Clement Greenberg. Collected Essays and Criticisms, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance. Ed. by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jay, Martin. 1994. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1971. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1976. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”. October, 1: 50–64. Krauss, Rosalind. 1977. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1988. “Im/pulse to See”. In: Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1993. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1999a. Cindy Sherman: Untitled. In: Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1999b. “Reinventing the Medium”. Critical Inquiry, 25 (2): 289–305. Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of Post-medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson.

  IM/PULSE TO SEE IN ROSALIND KRAUSS 

Krauss, Rosalind. 2010. Perpetual Inventory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 2011. Under Blue Cup. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lejeune, Anaël; Mignon, Olivier, and Pirenne, Raphaël (eds.). 2013. French Theory and American Art. Berlin: Sternberg. Lyotard, Jean-François. [1971] 2011. Discourse, Figure. Trans. by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1992. “The Pictorial Turn”. Artforum, 30 (7): 15–40. Owens, Craig. [1985] 1992. “Analysis Logical and Ideological”. In: Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition. Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rebentisch, Juliane. 2012. Aesthetics of Installation Art. Trans. by Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson. Berlin: Sternberg. Rejniak-Majewska, Agnieszka. 2010. “‘Kondycja postmedialna’ i wynajdowanie medium według Rosalind Krauss”. In: Tomasz Załuski (ed.), Sztuki w przestrzeni transmedialnej. Łódź: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych., pp. 42–52. Rosenthal, Mark. 2003. Understanding Installation Art. From Duchamp to Holzer. München: Prestel. Sontag, Susan. 1966. “Against Interpretation”. In: Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Delta.

The Power of and Response to Images in David Freedberg Maxime Boidy

1   Introduction The strength images may have in certain circumstances, the fear they can instill in people’s mind is an old, even archaic problem, anchored in Ancient idolatry. No doubt that the originality of David Freedberg’s image theory lies in his personal answer to this question of power: an answer formulated through his central concept of “response”, defined and applied in his most famous book The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. The very beginning of the introduction goes straight to the point: “This book is not about the history of art. It is about the relations between images and people in history. It consciously takes within its purview all images, not just those regarded as artistic ones” (Freedberg 1989, xix). As far as people in history made images long before and wide outside the scope of Western art, as far as cultures continue to use and share visual representations of all kind, these images are worth to be considered as well: the contention stands to reason. Nevertheless, in many respects, this statement goes against the grain of art history as an academic discipline and implies therefore a considerable reversal of focus. Freedberg’s research program is not about taking “everyday” images into account in order to extent knowledge about art. On the contrary, he pays heed to artworks as a specific class of images, and image reactions, with the aim of theorizing response as a general phenomenon. Quoting the art historian

M. Boidy (*) Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_25

 

M. BOIDY

Michael Podro (1982, 14), he underlines his personal ambition to deconstruct “the assumption that ‘in a work of art we overcome the responses which the material or subject matter most readily precipitate’”, claiming even his will to “escape from the tyranny” that the category of art, according to him, imposes “in our thinking about response” (Freedberg 1989, xxii). Therefore, the concept of response cannot be apprehended as such, nor as Freedberg’s exclusive contribution to image theory. Understanding response implies to scrutinize carefully the epistemological transformations required, both in theory and in practice, by a history of images. Here, I will pay almost exclusive attention to The Power of Images for several reasons. First of all, the book draws many materials from former studies on iconoclastic motives and Freedberg’s doctoral dissertation on Dutch art history (Freedberg 1973; 1985). The book also remains the most advanced conceptual framework for a history of images as an autonomous field of inquiry in the humanities. Last but not least, as far as the book is constructed as an open dialogue with various other art historians and scholars, it can be read as such, in order to shed relevant light on their shared positions or precise disagreements. In a first section, I will present and comment Freedberg’s main theoretical insights, among which his ambition to overcome the distinction between “magical” and “aesthetical” responses in art history as reproducing other ideological partitions in our ways of seeing. This section will discuss the concept of response and the way it can be applied to various cultural attitudes toward imagery, from idolatry and iconoclasm to religious ecstasy or sexual attraction. In a second section, I propose to go one step further by means of concise comparisons with three contemporary thinkers. Trained in art history, anthropology or literary theory, all have worked extensively on similar topics and pictorial examples, and one of them, W.J.T. Mitchell, is already quoted and discussed in The Power of Images. Since then, all of them have published inquiries related to central ideas or intuitions in Freedberg’s account. As a sort of personal version of response, Horst Bredekamp (2018) has forged the concept of “image act” by comparison with the linguistic power associated with the “speech acts”, which produce the reality they announce (like a judge’s sentence). The third thinker, the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1945–1998), will be the first called in; his understanding of an “image agency” (Gell 1998) shares some of Freedberg’s most peculiar case studies on iconoclasm, that is, destructive gestures against works of art exhibited inside museums. The absence of women scholars in this short list is my personal choice, in no case a reflection of Freedberg’s purpose— I will say a word about how the male gaze is considered from his point of view. Before to conclude, I will try to reopen differently once again the intellectual understanding of The Power of Images by considering more attentively the concrete situation of Freedberg’s thinking at the turning point of the 1980s and the 1990s in connection with contemporary art. I will focus on his essay about American artist Joseph Kosuth’s installation entitled The Play of the Unmentionable, exhibited in 1992 at the Brooklyn Museum in New  York. This, I hope, will contribute to clarify not only the way Freedberg (1992) had

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

to deal with one of the leading figures of conceptual art at the time, but how his ideas about visual responses are connected with artistic methodologies and creative processes outside the restricted area of academic image theory.

2  Responses to Images: An Answer to the Enigma of Power The concept of “response” is a concrete answer to the enigma of power that images may have on individuals or social groups in various cultural or historical contexts. The mere existence of any power is proved by its exercise. When someone is sexually disturbed or attracted by a picture, it means basically that this picture has a power to attract or disturb. When someone hits furiously a masterpiece with a knife in an art museum, hurting us as well as art lovers, it implies that the attacked painting is powerful enough to provoke such reactions of love and hate, “as if we acknowledge, in that very act, its power” (Freedberg 1989, 26). According to The Power of Images, there is no such thing as “magic” or “mental illness” to explain these gestures and feelings. The concept of response is forged to draw a framework of interpretation for reactions commonly judged as silly or abnormal, both for human acts triggered by images and for the acts accomplished by the pictures themselves. As Freedberg contends, one has to consider the active, outwardly markable responses of beholders, as well as the beliefs (insofar as they are capable of being recorded) that motivate them to specific actions and behavior […] We must consider not only beholders’ symptoms and behavior, but also the effectiveness, efficacy, and vitality of images themselves; not only what beholders do, but also what images appear to do. (Freedberg 1989, xxii)

In this section, I will muse on the meaning of response by confronting it concretely to sexuality, idolatry and iconoclasm. Before that, it is necessary to summarize Freedberg’s general project of a history of images understood as a history of the responses they are able to provoke. 2.1   From the History of Art to a History of Images David Freedberg’s history of images presents at once a disciplinary, epistemological and methodological background. First of all, from a disciplinary point of view, art history needs to be reframed due to the necessity of paying heed to reactions in front of ordinary images as well as responses caused by artistic masterpieces: “The history of art is thus subsumed by the history of images […] The history of images takes its own place as a central discipline in the study of men and women; the history of art stands, now a little forlornly, as a subdivision of the history of cultures” (Freedberg 1989, 23). Part of the disturbance entailed by this intellectual shift lies in the contest against an established discipline—an academic tension with profound epistemological implications. The Power of

 

M. BOIDY

Images basically refuses any kind of opposition between magic and aesthetics in visual explanation, the common background for establishing differences between “popular” and “elitist” reactions (i.e., social hierarchies), but also for building fences between “primitive” and “civilized” cultures (Freedberg 1989, xxi–xxii; see also 201–203). Epistemology draws inspiration from psychology, anthropology, and ethnography, not anymore from a form of art history focused on connoisseurship, on noble reactions entailed by noble pictures. While history remains the central concern, it is mixed with other disciplinary influences articulated around the methodological principle of induction as common denominator: While I am concerned with fragments and proceed by minutely examining them […] I view the whole of human relations with figured imagery in order to lay out certain aspects of behavior and response that may usefully be seen to be universally and transculturally markable. (Freedberg 1989, 24)

Theory does not proceed from an established set of assumptions in order to explain a specific response in a specific context. On the contrary, any response has to be interpreted in the specific context where it happens and then by comparing it to visual relations and human feelings in different periods or cultural areas, enriching theory in the process. The relevance of a history of images extended outside the restricted area of art can be exemplified basically by politics. If one had to preserve only one small intellectual space for the “magic” Freedberg wants to get rid of completely, it would be in the contemporary imagery associating a human figure, an ordinary man or woman and, at the very same time, a political abstraction like the State. The Power of Images takes into account the long history of this ordinary mystery up to the use of wax figures during the king’s funerals in France or England between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries (Freedberg 1989, 212–215). These artificial bodies were real substitutes of the dead bodies, dressed with royal clothes and honored with official rituals. Long before Freedberg’s inquiry, the medieval historian Ernst H.  Kantorowicz (1957, 419–437) has studied the same ceremonials as part of his famous thesis about the “king’s two bodies”, according to which the birth of the modern State has required the legal invention of a “political” body of the king (permanent and even immortal) clearly separated from his “natural” flesh: the body exposed to illness and death. The king’s funeral was not just the moment when the responses generated by the wax image of the political body were expressed and recorded: it was also the occasion when the natural body, usually visible, was locked in a coffin while the political body, usually invisible, was materialized publicly in order to be seen by everyone. “That kind of man-made irreality—indeed, that strange construction of a human mind which finally becomes slave to its own fictions—we are normally more ready to find in the religious sphere than in the allegedly sober and realistic realms of law, politics, and constitution”, concludes Kantorowicz (1957, 5) about the invention of the

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

political body. The history of images theorized by David Freedberg is one able to grasp how and why the common idea and imagery of the State remains attached to this medieval invention, rooted in a political idolatry still alive and well today. 2.2   What Is Response? Politics and Sexuality Politics is a relevant topic to consider here for more than one reason. As far as a form of elitism is shaken in existing hierarchies by the very project of a history of images, Freedberg’s intellectual process is, to some extent, political in itself— “In a sense, then, the aim is to democratize response”, according to his own words (Freedberg 1989, 433). I have already mentioned some basic outlines of response; it has to be added now that it is inseparable from the idea of “repression”. The two concepts are confronted in Chap. 1 of The Power of Images in order to point out that responses are culturally divided between those socially acceptable and those compelled to inhibition, which are the ones he is especially interested in: My concern is with those responses that are subject to repression because they are too embarrassing, too blatant, too rude, and too uncultured; because they make us aware of our kinship with the unlettered, the coarse, the primitive, the undeveloped; and because they have psychological roots that we prefer not to acknowledge. (Freedberg 1989, 1)

Response and repression, therefore understood in a socio-anthropological perspective, reveal the way a given society deals with itself. The fact that the “idolatry of the State” previously discussed is mostly understood as a necessary rationalization of collective life in Western countries for centuries could be assimilated easily to these ordinary repressions. The most blatant examples of repression in our contemporary Western societies concern sexuality and pornography. The overwhelming presence of nudity and sexual contents, formerly in men’s magazines and now on the Internet, is the irrefutable proof that images are able to provoke reactions (here, desire and lust), that this imagery has to be permanently renewed in order to do so and to fit to specific sexual practices and identities and that social repression is at work every time, an attraction of this kind is denied. According to Freedberg (1989, 345–377), this contemporary imagery is very helpful to comprehend the responses to sexualized pictures of the past, subjected to various kinds of reaction since the moment these artworks were painted, among which are Western art masterpieces like Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) (Fig. 1): The picture is plainly erotic, even though our perception of its sensuality may be comparatively muted. It is both a truism and a commonplace that the expansion of methods of reproduction—above all of photography—has frequently had the result of turning the shock of first sight into the near-indifference of familiarity.

 

M. BOIDY

Fig. 1  Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1534, oil on canvas, 119  ×  165  cm; Uffizi Gallery, Florence (in public domain) In any case, since 1538 people have become used to still more candid pictures, like Manet’s Olympia, or the centerfolds of a wide range of magazines. It is precisely responses to these that one should not neglect in considering images like Titian’s Venus. (Freedberg 1989, 19)

Arguing this, David Freedberg gives a psychological and conceptual pattern to intuitions formerly expressed by the writer and cultural critic John Berger in his famous book Ways of Seeing two decades before. Berger was no less interested in the relation between artistic nudes in classical paintings and the continuous extension of erotic imagery in magazines and advertising during the second half of the twentieth century. He expressed the problem of reaction in explicit terms in front of the naked portrait of Nell Gwynne, one of the mistresses of King of England Charles II, represented as Venus by Peter Lely during the 1670s (Fig. 2). Due to this royal owner, this nude painting did entail not only sexual reactions but also relations of power mediated by the submissive pose of the model: “The painting, when the King showed it to others, demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him” (Berger 1972, 52). Envy is a feeling deeply rooted in the sexual attraction experienced by heterosexual men confronted to a lascivious female body, but apart from the purely erotic response, in the context of the image display, the sexual content was a mean to mediate a singular political reaction, transforming a nude painting into a source of sovereign power.

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

Fig. 2  Peter Lely, Portrait of a young woman and child, as Venus and Cupid, ca. 1668, oil on canvas, 123.8 × 156.8 cm (in public domain)

2.3   Iconoclasm and Idolatry In the social uses of imagery, as well as in David Freedberg’s theoretical approach, idolatry, and iconoclasm remain the basic cultural examples of visceral reactions that images are able to elicit. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all condemn the production of graven images and the cult given to them—at least initially, with instructive exceptions by use of calligraphy that The Power of Images does not neglect to notice and comment (Freedberg 1989, 54–60). Idolatry and iconoclasm are two sides of the same coin, as depicted by classic representations of the biblical episode of the adoration of the idol melted by the Jewish people in exile with their gold jewelry, while the prophet Moses receives the written Tables of the Law from God on the top of the Mount Sinai. Opposing the ecstatic dance of the Jewish men and women around the impious idol to the furiousness of Moses, who breaks the divine Tables when he discovers the scene, Nicolas Poussin’s painting The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633–1634) puts the beholders in a paradoxical situation: “We admire— adore would not be entirely incorrect—a picture which has as its subject the epitome of the negative consequences of looking, admiring and adoring” (Freedberg 1989, 384). It comes as no surprise that such a paradox could have awaken an iconoclastic desire to hit the idol figured on the picture which,

 

M. BOIDY

according to the biblical narrative, is precisely about to be destroyed by Moses. Indeed, the painting has been hit at the London National Gallery in 1978, among several iconoclastic gestures (knife blows, acid sprays, etc.) against artworks inside art institutions. The declarations of museum’s officials confronted to these acts of destruction are especially relevant as “responses to responses” to images (so to speak), often as denials of the strong reaction processes that artworks are capable to provoke inside the supposed neutralized space of the museum. Iconoclasm has therefore much to do with a set of responses interwoven: the reaction of the iconoclast confronted to the picture, who cannot stand its existence and presence, and the reactions of the people who care about the image attacked and who cannot stand its damaging. If the responses are felt emotionally and individually, the logic of iconoclasm remains basically a social and public affair. Considering the case of the buddhas dynamited in 2001 by the Taliban regime at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, Freedberg (2005, 18) remarks that, according to the mullahs, these giant statues were more than offending images which had to be destroyed according to religious commandments (Fig. 3). “Of course there were other motives (as iconoclasts always have), such as the need to draw attention […] to the poverty of the people of Afghanistan. Ever since Eratostratos the destruction of images has served the ends of publicity well”. Apart from the similarity of process, what remains profoundly absorbing in the study of iconoclastic acts is the way images may be hit the

Fig. 3  Cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamiyan valley, Afghanistan. Photograph is taken on 2 August 2006, by Alessandro Balsamo. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

same way in our present context like centuries ago, with similar wounds, especially in the case of anthropomorphic pictures. “When image breakers run wild, they often rest content with scratching out the eyes (or faces) of the images” (Freedberg 1989, 415). Among countless examples, during an insurrectionary strike in north of France in 1907, a crowd of workers and their families attacked the bourgeois residency of the factory owners in the town of Fressenneville. Apart from destroying the whole furniture and setting fire to the house, they also took their daughter’s portraits and cut their eyes on the paintings (Steiner 2015, 58). The proprietors never wanted to live back in there reportedly because of the specific terror attached to this iconoclastic gesture.

3  The Power of Images: Theoretical Dialogues Despite the originality of his historical project and his specific approach of the relations between images and their beholders, David Freedberg is far from being the only contemporary visual thinker to cope with pictorial responses such as idolatry and iconoclasm. The reason is contextual to some extent, as reminded in the foreword to the French edition of The Power of Images (Freedberg 1998). The end of the 1980s has been riddled with case studies enlightening visceral reactions to visual materials. The period has been marked worldwide by the fall of the Berlin wall, the imminent collapsing of the Soviet system and destructive acts against communist statues and symbols. Similar to the symbolic and material destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan a decade after (Mitchell 2011), this situation has entailed a phase of deep reflection on the cultural meaning of image annihilation. Here I would like to compare Freedberg’s position with three theoretical frameworks forged at the same moment. This choice necessitates arbitrary selection and theoretical lacks: the German art historian Hans Belting, whose masterpiece Likeness and Presence is described as the closest intellectual endeavor to Freedberg’s account by himself, will not be discussed at length. The relation is at least worth noticing. Despite of these claimed affinities, Freedberg rejects completely Belting’s main contention about The Power of Images, according to which the whole book is based on the idea that the image is “an ever-present reality to which mankind has responded in ever the same way” (Belting 1994, xxi). Freedberg (1996) simply underlines the fact that he refuses historical, categorical and/or aesthetical partitions like Belting’s division between “the era of art” and “the era before art”, or between “holy images” and “other images”. 3.1   Response Versus Agency The three scholars considered can give precise insights concerning alternative ways to discuss and to name the power of and responses to images. Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art illustrates this assessment thoroughly. His book Art and Agency originally published in 1998 proposes a theory of action

 

M. BOIDY

which emphasizes the attribution of “agency”, a subjective intentionality, to images and objects “which are seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or intention, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events. An agent is one who ‘causes events to happen’ in their vicinity” (Gell 1998, 16). By assimilating images to “sources of, and targets for, social agency”, Gell gives a personal version of Freedberg’s dialectic between the response of the beholder and the specific action of the image. According to Gell’s perspective, idolatry no longer emanates from magic, “stupidity or superstition, but from the same fund of sympathy which allows us to understand the human, non-artefactual, ‘other’ as a copresent being, endowed with awareness, intentions, and passions akin to our own” (Gell 1998, 96). Art and Agency is never closer to The Power of Images than when Gell expresses his view concerning the realm of aesthetics in Western culture, which he describes as a rationalization of religious feelings and as a neutralization of idolatry under the label of art. These neutralizations and rationalizations are made blatant by the iconoclastic attacks on paintings in art museums, like the knife blows on Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf commented above. What has been described by art officials as a silly act is, to some extent, perfectly rational as far as the iconoclast has simply accomplished on the painting what Moses is about to accomplish according to the Bible, that is, to destroy the idol in order to obey the second commandment which forbids the production of images of any kind, either graven or painted. Another well-known example of museum iconoclasm is worth considering: the mutilation of Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (ca. 1640–1648) defaced by Mary Richardson, a young British suffragette, at the London National Gallery in 1914 (Fig. 4). Understood as a feminist manifesto in action, the gesture is quite rational insofar as Richardson herself has confessed many years after that the nude painting and the reactions it provoked on the male beholders were the primal motivation of the slashing: “I didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long” (quoted in Freedberg 1989, 410). In other words, the gesture is basically a “response to responses” (as I called it above), here articulated with gendered issues. Agreeing with one of Freedberg’s definition of iconoclasm, which “opens realms of power and fear that we may sense but cannot quite grasp” (Freedberg 1989, 425), Gell adds to the cultural and psychological interpretation of the Richardson case a personal (and quite iconoclastic) insight, assimilating her slashing to a creative gesture which has produced a new work of art: “Art-destruction is art-making in reverse; but it has the same basic conceptual structure. Iconoclasts exercise a type of artistic agency” (Gell 1998, 64). The scope of this comment could be enlarged to images more generally in order to follow Freedberg’s wish to overcome any kind of artificial separation between art and non-art. Image-destruction is the specular reflection of image-making; iconoclasts exercise a kind of visual agency on pictures defaced while pictures exercise a visual agency on the mind of iconoclasts troubled by what they look at.

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

Fig. 4  Detail from a photo published in 1914 (before the repairs) showing damage done to Diego Velázquez painting Rokeby Venus by Mary Richardson. The photo was released to the press and published on 11 March 1914. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

3.2   Response Versus Image Act The slashing of the Rokeby Venus is especially worth considering since the interpretation of the gesture can be developed one step further. Mary Richardson has not only described her act decades after as a feminist response to the male gaze, but in 1914 already, as a reaction to the repression suffered, at the time, by the female leader of the Suffragist movement Emmeline Pankhurst: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history” (quoted in Freedberg 1989, 502; Gell 1998, 64). The parallel is pretty clear. Two bodies are related together; the violence exercised on the first one, Mrs. Pankhurst jailed by the British Government, elicits the violence on the second one, Velázquez’s painting cut with a knife. This “response to responses” is also a renewed version of the “king’s two bodies” I have discussed above. Emmeline Pankhurst’s two bodies are connected together by a political gesture equating the wounding of her flesh-and-bones self with a pictorial body. This body in image allows the feminist activists to strike back and to redirect part of the violence suffered toward the beholders of the National Gallery, “men visitors [who] gaped at it

 

M. BOIDY

all day long”, considered guilty of the masculine domination exercised on women. Drawing inspiration from speech acts theory, according to which language does not only offer to describe the world but to produce reality, the German art historian Horst Bredekamp (2018, 137–192) has defined this kind of equation as a “substitutive image act”, through which an exchange occurs between a body and an image. Many of David Freedberg’s examples already mentioned can be gathered into this category (which does not correspond to all image acts studied by Bredekamp). The Bamiyan buddhas dynamited by the Taliban regime in March 2001 were provisory substitute bodies for the real people which have been struck and killed in the Twin Towers a few months later. The wounding of images in the eyes by iconoclasts is another aspect of the problem, especially during the Reformation in Europe: “Repeatedly, the senses were attacked through the relevant organs: in order, for example, to stigmatize the Catholic Church for its fixation on the visual, the eyes of those depicted would be scratched out […] In their belief that, along with the image, that which it represented was also destroyed, iconoclasts are the agents of the destructive aspect of the substitutive image act” (Bredekamp 2018, 171–172). The most pertinent fieldwork shared by the theory of response and the theory of the substitutive image act is the pictorial practice of the early Italian Renaissance which chastised condemned people by exposing infamous pictures of them— “Punish the absent miscreant by punishing his representation in our midst; visit odium upon it by public disfigurement, mutilation, or hanging” (Freedberg 1989, 247). In parallel to the legal invention of the king’s two bodies in European countries, here is an example of what could be called the “criminal’s two bodies”: one made of flesh, the other made of paint, producing equivalence between the responses to both. 3.3   Considerations on Living Pictures Other connections between flesh bodies and pictorial bodies are remarkable in Western culture; some of them are foundational to the discipline of aesthetics during the eighteenth century. In his famous essay entitled Laocoön, published in 1766, the German writer and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing contends that “if beautiful men are the cause of beautiful statues, the latter on the other hand have reacted upon the former, and the state has to thank beautiful statues for beautiful men” (quoted in Freedberg 1989, 372). Freedberg is not the only theorist at the time to take these mythical references to Antiquity and paganism into account in order to explore the background of the distinctions between religious and aesthetic representations, or painting and poetry. Discussed in Chap. 13 of The Power of Images around the topic of censorship, W.J.T.  Mitchell, considered as the leading intellectual figure of the “Visual Studies” since the 1990s, has also tried to make sense of the fear of images by studying, in his Iconology (1986), how images have regularly elicit a will to rule them as active social or political beings, like in Lessing’s account.

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

Idolatry, here again, is the very proof of a visual agency. According to one of Mitchell’s early definitions (quoted in Freedberg 1989, 376), an idol, technically speaking, is simply an image which has an unwarranted irrational power over somebody; it has become an object of worship, a repository of powers which someone has projected into it, but which in fact it does not possess. (Mitchell 1986, 113)

The power of images is then reconsidered rigorously: are images really deprived of any kind of power? Is this power exclusively located in the minds of their beholders? In his latter works, Mitchell (2005) has tried to give a very personal answer by rephrasing the question, asking no more “What can pictures do?” but “What do pictures want?”. By choosing to study “the lives and loves of images”, as he puts it, he has tried to reveal the very fact that images sometimes do not hold the power they are supposed to have; that pictures, like real people, can experience lack and weakness. More to the point, Mitchell has fully coped with the problem of the life of images moved not only by desires but also by forms of life of their own. The living image is an old topic repeatedly convoked in The Power of Images (see Freedberg 1989, 33, 48, 86, 283–285, 301), from the black meteoric stones worshiped in Ancient Greece to the poor people understood as “living images of God” by Christian medieval theology. All examples revolve around the same issue: “the kinds of response that follow on the perception of the image as lifelike” (Freedberg 1989, 159). But what about the living image in the era of genetics and cloning, of the possible reproduction of whole living organisms, of animals like the famous sheep Dolly and potentially of humans? One possible response, at least in the imaginary, is what Mitchell calls “clonophobia”, the possibility of the loss of identity and humanity through reproducibility—a fear already expressed by a philosopher Jean Baudrillard during the 1980s through the concepts of “simulacra” and “simulation”. “Clonophobia is, in short, the contemporary expression of a much more ancient syndrome known as iconophobia, the fear of the icon, the likeness, resemblance, and similitude, the copy or imitation” (Mitchell 2011, 32).

4   “The Play of the Unmentionable”: A Response to/ of Contemporary Art The general outlines of David Freedberg’s image theory can be grasped through a synthesis of his erudite amount of case studies or by means of theoretical comparisons with other visual thinkers. His personal approach of power and response can also be enlightened by his dialogue with Joseph Kosuth and his comprehension of the exhibition The Play of the Unmentionable. Invited by the Brooklyn Museum to think about their collections, Kosuth has given in 1992 a personal assemblage of paintings and sculptures spatially displayed, designed to reveal how an art institution can contribute to their effectiveness or neutralization. Using language and written sentences on panels since the

 

M. BOIDY

1960s in order to reflect on the meaning of art, Kosuth has included quotations once again, among which short excerpts of The Power of Images dealing with sexual representations and the influence of the context on the responses to pornography, such as this one: “Art is beautiful and high. The photograph is realistic; it is vulgar; it elicits natural and realistic responses. In art, nudity is beautiful and ideal; in the photograph (unless it has acquired the status of art), it is ugly and (therefore?) provocative” (Freedberg 1989, 353; 1992, 54). The acquisition of the status of art and the power generated by this gaining was the very object of Kosuth’s investigation for The Play of the Unmentionable, in a troubled context in the United States. The exhibition was held during the famous trial against the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center under the accusation of obscenity for having exhibited explicit pictures by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Therefore, “the essential background to ‘The Play of the Unmentionable’ […] is how a major conceptual artist came to select a series of historical works of art from a major museum in order to make a political intervention that, although less obviously theoretical than much of his previous work, was wholly in keeping with the concerns of his practice” (Freedberg 1992, 46), but also in connection with the “culture wars” at the turn of the 1980s–1990s, and—last but not least—with the possibility to transform image theory into a form of art in itself. The Play of the Unmentionable is an artistic response to the institutional influence on the power of images and, at once, an intellectual response to David Freedberg through artistic means articulating the readable, the sayable and the visible under the notion of the “unmentionable”. Almost three decades after, the intellectual meeting of David Freedberg with Joseph Kosuth remains worth commenting for the kinship materialized through the very form of the exhibition and by the lengthy essay written by the author of The Power of Images in order to verbalize it. Two connections are especially significant. The first one is epistemological. If Freedberg has drawn inspiration in anthropology in order to grasp the infinite cultural variety of responses to images, Kosuth has framed his working process as an anthropological version of artistic practice during the 1970s, inspired by “radical anthropology” professed by critical social scientists like Stanley Diamond (1969) in the United States. First and foremost, anthropology requires close attention for contextuality: My trajectory […] is not dissimilar to Kosuth’s; we have a kindred sense of the constructive and the limiting roles of context. It is instructive that, as if in alarm at my delineation of responses which intellectuals in general, and art historians in particular, either deny or seek to banish from their territories, choruses of art-­ historic fear arose. (Freedberg 1992, 61)

The second connection is institutional. At the very moment when the notion of “institutional critique” emerged as a new label in cultural discourse used to qualify a set of artistic practices dealing with the sociopolitical background of

  THE POWER OF AND RESPONSE TO IMAGES IN DAVID FREEDBERG 

art institutions (Alberro and Stimson 2009), Freedberg (1992, 40) has described Kosuth’s process as a “critique of the institution of art history”, beyond any spatial restriction to institutions narrowly localized inside the art gallery or the museum’s walls. This sort of critique is something Freedberg shares with Kosuth as an art historian who, since his early works, has tried to deconstruct the elitist unconscious of his discipline in order to “democratize response”. Apart from the importance of contextuality, both trajectories are not dissimilar in many respects.

5  Conclusion These are the main intellectual paths explored by David Freedberg in order to open the way to a renewed study of images as elements of culture. Since the publication of The Power of Images, this scholarly move has been underlined as one of the central contributions of visual culture studies to the humanities. “The importance of the shift from the history of art to the history of images cannot be overestimated”, remark relevantly Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (1994, xvi) in the introduction of their collective book Visual Culture: It means that art historians can no longer rely on a naturalized conception of aesthetic value to establish the parameters of their discipline. Once it is recognized that there is nothing intrinsic about such value, that it depends on what a culture brings to the work rather than on what the culture finds in it, then it becomes necessary to find other means for defining what is a part of art history and what is not. (Bryson et al. 1994, xvi)

Such recognition, associated with a strong conceptual framework and an interdisciplinary erudition, summarizes Freedberg’s contribution to image theory. Visual power and response designate not an obscure capacity of pictures anymore, but a basic condition of our everyday lives, whose comprehension provides cultural and historical intelligence to our common practices and feelings.

References Alberro, Alexander and Stimson, Blake (eds.). 2009. Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Bredekamp, Horst. 2018. Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Image Agency. Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter. Bryson, Norman; Holly, Michael Ann, and Moxey, Keith. 1994. “Introduction”. In: Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Ed. by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

 

M. BOIDY

Diamond, Stanley. 1969. “Anthropology in Question”. In: Reinventing Anthropology. Ed. by Dell Hymes. New York: Random House. Freedberg, David. 1973. Iconoclasm and Painting in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1566–1609. Doctoral dissertation. Oxford: University of Oxford. Freedberg, David. 1985. Iconoclasts and Their Motives. Maarssen: G. Schwartz. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Freedberg, David. 1992. “Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable”. In: The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum. New York: The New Press. Freedberg, David. 1996. “Holy Images and Other Images”. In: The Art of Interpreting (Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University). Ed. by Susan C. Scott. University Park: Penn State University Press. Freedberg, David. 1998. “Préface à l’édition française”. In: Le Pouvoir des Images. Ed. by David Freedberg. Brionne: Gérard Monfort. Freedberg, David. 2005. “Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry”. In: Anthropologies of Art. Ed. by Mariet Westerman. Williamstown: Clark Art Institute. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study on Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2011. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, from 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Podro, Michael. 1982. The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press. Steiner, Anne. 2015. Le Temps des révoltes: Une histoire en cartes postales des luttes sociales à la “Belle Époque”. Montreuil: L’Échappée.

PART III

Frequent Subjects

Ontological Dispute: What Is an Image? Andrea Rabbito

1   Introduction The idea expressed by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his phenomenological research on the image proves to be a particularly important contribution to those who are trying to answer the question “What is an image?” Sartre’s research was presented in Imaginary in 1940 after a four-year study entitled Imagination. In his analyses, Sartre sets important points that relate to other famous scholars’ studies focusing on the understanding of the ontological nature of the image and its different expressions. He observes that the term imagine always expresses a relationship between consciousness and object (Sartre 1973). No matter how it presents itself, an image is always considered the means through which an object makes itself visible to the consciousness of a user (“user”—because it is a broader term than viewer or observer). This aspect, which is a key element of every kind of image, is emphasized both in anthropological analyses and in aesthetical analyses. An example of the former is Régis Debray’s study where he states that the image fills a void—it not only evokes but also replaces by making present what is absent according to the unique characteristic of representation (Debray 1992). An example of the latter, the aesthetical perspective, is Hans Georg Gadamer’s idea that any artwork (poetry, novel, music, theater, film etc.) is a representation that distinguishes itself through the possibility to represent something for somebody (Gadamer 2007). José Ortega y Gasset observes that every representation offers the possibility to present different realities through the use of signs, pictures, symbols, as the Latin word repraesentare expresses. These alternative realities are

A. Rabbito (*) University of Enna “Kore”, Enna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_26

 

A. RABBITO

considered by the Spanish philosopher as image reality, or simply images (Ortega y Gasset 1958). It is for this reason that the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Wunenburger observes that, despite their different forms of manifestation, we can identify a common feature in different kinds of images, such as dreams, statues, body image and electronic images (Wunenburger 1997). Let’s start analyzing this ontological, general aspect of all images, that is, the ability to bring to life an absent presence. All the different peculiarities that characterize images and distinguish them from one another originate from this feature. What happens when we look at what Sartre defines as physical image? Before answering this question, it is necessary to clarify what it is meant by physical image.

2  The Physical Image Recalling Murray Krieger’s (1991) observations, we must specify that in the wide range of physical images it is possible to distinguish two main types of signs: (1) natural signs, that is, the mimetic signs offered by visual arts and more in general by the forms of expression where sight plays a fundamental role in their fruition (the noun “icon” derives from eikón whose root *weik means resemblance and eidolon, from which the words image and idol derive, comes from eidos whose root *weid means to see) (Wunenburger 1997); (2) arbitrary signs such as the signs of verbal forms of expression which refer to a concept through conventions and are, as Ferdinand de Saussure writes, a system of signs expressing ideas (de Saussure 2016). In the first system the mediation of the sign for the rendering of the represented seems less perceivable as a relationship of similarity is established and therefore a more intuitive, immediate, perceptual image is offered. In the second system, conversely, the idea of substituting the object with something different manifests itself remarkably since the reference is through pure convention and in this way the immediacy of the first group is lost. Charles Sanders Peirce’s classification emphasizes how the specific signs composing the image, gathered in the whole of the icon, refer to the represented thanks to a similarity that unites it to the representative. Symbols like words, on the other hand, are connected to their object through a correspondence as the icon perceptiveness is less evident. Furthermore, an indicator is a sign that refers to the object it denotes because it is really determined by the object (Peirce 2014). The matter of the signs of words, included in the whole of the symbol, is therefore completely indifferent to the meaning object because they are connected by a convention while the relationship between a painting and its referent is different and it relates to analogy. Similarly in the theater, considered as the privileged space for the icon, the body of the actor (and his voice) is offered as a basis icon (cf. Elam 2002; Kott 1969). The theater is also the only form of art where the sign coincides with what it refers to (the sign vehicle that denotes a rich costume can be conveyed by a real rich costume unlike painting where the costume is created by

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

pigments on canvas and differently from analog photography that expresses it through photonic prints). It must be considered, though, that mimesis plays a role also for words. The German cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, observes that immaterial similarity is at the basis of the genesis of the language system. Mimesis has had a strong impact on the formation of words because it made use of the capacity to imitate aspects specific to the object for which a name was needed. It was the onomatopoeic sound that linked the word to the object through terms with similar sounds (Benjamin 1991). Furthermore the sign itself of writing, as Wunenburger (1997) reminds us, can be attributed to figurative mimicry since the graphic character of writing is offered for scopic experiences even if they are not always conscious, nor developed. These aspects were analyzed by Roland Barthes (1970) in his study on Japanese Kanji where the scholar wonders how it is possible to distinguish in them the writing from the painting. Compared to arbitrary signs, therefore, physical images prove to be more intuitive and immediate but, as American theorist of visual studies, W.J.T.  Mitchell, observes, they appear erroneously transparent and natural. This happens because we do not keep in mind that they are symbolic constructions, systems of codes, forms of expressions we are used to (Mitchell 2002). Sight is a much more complex process than it appears to be, and this is the reason why it is necessary, according to the American scholar, to debate and analyze the experience of seeing in order to clarify that the sensation of familiarity and self-evidence are the result of a false perception of a much more complex phenomenon. It is then necessary to tear through the veil of simplification which envelops physical image and sight. It is still Mitchell to add a question of particular importance already palpable in Benjamin’s immaterial similarity and Barthes’s analyses on Japanese Kanji. More precisely, the father of visual culture studies shines a light on how every media could be thought about as mixed media, meaning that in each there is a hybridization of the forms of expression and senses. Literature has for instance a visual component in its presenting itself as a set of characters on paper; it also involves an auditive component in the reader’s choice whether to recite it aloud or remain silent. It follows that “it implies virtual or imaginative experiences of space and vision that, however indirectly expressed through language, are not any less real” (Mitchell 2002, 172). Cinema, considered a visual medium, is instead a multimedia revelation, as Virilio (2005) states. It is a polyphonic ensemble of quadruple register which gathers image, musical sound, words and writing, as Edgar Morin (2017 [1962]) observes. This proves not only that visual and verbal coexist and converge at all times (hence Mitchell’s interpretation of iconology as the union of eikòn and logos) but also that other forms of expression and meanings become interesting in the many communication systems. For this reason Mitchell considers incorrect the definition of visual media (used for television, cinema, photography, painting etc.) because all the media are mixed media. Mitchell demonstrates that the idea of literature as a form of expression lacking a visual element should be

 

A. RABBITO

reconsidered and he shows how literature is connected to images, to the visual dimension, not only by means of techniques like the emphasis that Hermogenes defines as a description able to put “the object before one’s eyes effectively”, but also through other strategies like the ones analyzed by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. In his book The Curtain Kundera observes how in the nineteenth century the novel re-established the present time “by presenting the past through scenes” (2013, 15). These scenes offer ontologically the current time, the event that unfolds and develops in front of us, here and now. Such statement is further articulated when Kundera links the novel to cinema in order to point out how authors like Honoré de Balzac were able to turn “readers into spectators looking at a screen (a cinema screen ahead of its time) on which the novelist’s magic showed scenes we cannot take our eyes off” (Kundera 2013, 15). By relating novel to the theater and cinema, the Czech writer not only highlights the possibility to offer images, scenes and sequences before the eyes of the reader, as they unfold at the very moment of the act of reading, but also he gathers how some of the most lively trends in the art world are the ones aiming at the increasing promotion of the visual to cancel the distance between user and representation, to research and to convey the presence and the immediacy of the represented. Moreover, in his text Kundera highlights the process defined by Ejzenštejn with the expression qualitative leap (Ejzenštejn 1994) which was developed in detail in his studies about the primal phenomenon in cinema by which this Russian director and theorist describes how the new medium can achieve the goals classical media attempt to achieve. One of the aspects evident in the different forms of expression is the effort to convey a presence through a representative in order to increasingly satisfy the desire intrinsic to the image reality, that is, the desire to make what is absent present.

3  Relation with Physical Images Referring again to Sartre, let’s analyze physical image taking into account the different questions the term implies, and what the physical image activates when we look at it. The French philosopher observes that a twofold action occurs: (1) the perceptual consciousness is activated. It acknowledges the presence of what Belting defines as a host medium, that is, like the canvas and color brush strokes for a painting, the sheet of paper and the pencil graphic signs for the caricature, and so on. This aspect should make us consider image and medium as the sides of the same coin, as Belting writes (2002, 39). (2) There is the intention to reveal, from the perceived signs, a determined reality with the aim of making present what is represented (Sartre 1973, 26). Gernot Böhme’s analyses relative to aesthetics are useful to understand this aspect, as they put at the center of the attention the emotional participation to the aesthetic object and not its intellectual evaluation (2001). Böhme recalls Josef Albers’s distinction between factual fact and actual fact (Albers 1997) and observes how on the one hand there is “the physical reality of the image”

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

(factual fact) that is the perception of the physical presence of the host medium; on the other hand, there is the actual reality of the image (actual fact) that is what is represented, what it is possible to experience solely in the perception of its immediate presence (Böhme 2001). Taking into consideration a painted image and all that takes place during its fruition, it is possible to state that at first what consciousness does is to perceive a canvas, the physical reality—a painting is fundamentally an object (Sartre 1973) such is the nature of every physical image—to then subsequently “act” with the purpose of admiring the painted image, bringing it to life and, in such manner, comparing it with the actual reality of the image. What Sartre emphasizes is that there is a specific intention in the beholder, that is the activation of an imaginative consciousness which is anticipated by perceptual consciousness. This allows to make present what is represented and what is not present. It becomes then clear that there is a further coexistence of two aspects, two dynamics within the image (in addition to the ones brought forward so far: actual fact/factual fact—image/host medium—perceptual consciousness/ imaginative consciousness—arbitrary signs/natural signs—absence/presence—material similarity/immaterial similarity). On the one hand there is the intention and the work of the person who creates the image (e.g. the artist who produced the painting); on the other hand there is the intention and the work of the person who observes and re-creates the image (the beholder who observes the painting). Image is permanent metamorphosis, as José Ortega y Gasset (1958) observes, and this is possible thanks to the contribution of its creator obviously, but also thanks to the contribution of the beholder and his imaginative consciousness. In ancient times, Gorgias’s apathetic theory considered representation a deceit with two main agents: (1) the person who contributes to the rendering of the image reality; for example, in the theater the actor is considered a deceiver, in a positive sense. In such case for Gorgias, “who deceives acts better than the person who does not deceive”. (2) The spectator must accept the deceit and fuel it in order to fully enjoy it. For this reason the philosopher observes how “who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived” (Gorgias 2007 [415 B. C.]). With reference to this theory, Ortega y Gasset emphasizes how image is to be considered a “farce”, and he observes how it “represents a constituent and essential element of human life, an inescapable part of our existence” (Ortega y Gasset 1958). This idea is linked not only to the apathetic theory but also to Coleridge’s renowned concept expressed in the statement “willing suspension of disbelief” (2014), according to which the spectator must accept the deceit and decrease his vigilance if he wants a dialogue with the represented world. Sartre believes that, during the fruition of a physical image, imaginative consciousness also carries out a negative act on making present what is represented; for instance, when beholding a portrait, the consciousness of the

 

A. RABBITO

beholder, in order to produce the object in the image, on the one hand denies the reality of the painting, of the carrier or host or figurative medium, and on the other hand he denies the image nature of what he sees so that the represented face in front of him emerges. With reference to these analyses, Georges Didi-Huberman observes that Sartre introduces an idea of image that does not include the object represented and the image itself is not a belittled object (Didi-Huberman 2003). Such a concept of image somehow returns in Belting’s anthropological studies on images, as he thinks that images need host media to be visible and also highlights how the beholder’s body proves to be the place where images are formed and thickened, where they come to life, where they are present. All this happens, as Sartre held, thanks to the action of perceptual consciousness and imaginative consciousness.

4  The Sacred, the Otherworld and the Primitive Relation with the World With regard to the action of the consciousness, Gadamer points out how the beholder of an image is an essential element of “the game that is defined aesthetic” (2007, 157). It is thanks to the beholder and for the beholder that the image comes to life. The image comes alive by taking part in the aesthetic game. Furthermore, the German philosopher notes how the verb participate comes from the term theoros that indicates the person who takes part in a sacred feast, in a sacred communion. This etymological reference clearly expresses the central and active role of the beholder in his fruition of the image—“theoria is actual participation” as Gadamer writes (ibid.). It also specifies a peculiarity of the image which is inscribed in its deepest and most ancient nature, that is its connection with the sacred, religion, magic, supernatural, spirituality; it’s the ability of an image to offer something that can have no relation with the real world and can stay anchored to another dimension. It is about this aspect that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy observes claiming that image always proves to be sacred; he also explains that in his interpretation the use of the adjective “sacred” (2002, 31) does not refer to religion, but it is used to express the characteristics of detachment and distance from the rest of the world that are typical of image. According to Nancy, image is sacred because it is separated, put at a distance, secluded, retired. And this distance and sacredness recognized in image highlights how image offers itself as the distinguished, free of links with the surrounding reality, an island separated from the rest of the world. In these characteristics highlighted by Nancy, the remote values and peculiarities of the image, its most ancient roots emerge, as Gadamer’s use of the term theoros shows. With regard to this, Debray notes how in the several Latin variations of the term “image” the sacred nature of image emerges, indicating on the one hand the opening of a reality that is distant from actual reality and, on the other hand, the offer of something we can take part in to access another

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

dimension. This is the reason why Ortega y Gasset defines the image and the dimension it is possible to access through the image with the term Otherworld: • simulacrum means specter; • figura is a variation to signify ghost; • eidolon, from which idol derives, signified the dead’s soul before it was used to refer to image; • imago signified the wax mold put on the face of the departed. In any case, it is clear that the image is intended as a supernatural expression that offers itself as the double of a reality and allows a dialogue with an otherworldly dimension, the afterlife, the departed, the deities. The image refers to and creates dimensions relative to religion, the sacred and magic. The creation of image, as Régis Debray observes, is connected to death, to magic—as for the latter the connection is underlined by the similarity of the two terms, especially in French image/magie. As Kris and Kurz analyzed, “image is an equivalent substitute of the dead person” (1979, 84), and it is from this concept, at the basis of representation, that its different variations develop; these variations gradually diversify by taking different forms and purposes. The essence of these doubles of reality will prove to be—from time to time and sometimes simultaneously—magic, exorcizing, ritual, propitiatory, initiatory, erotic, religious, playful, educational, but at the same time it will always preserve within itself also its aesthetic component. Regarding these aspects, Edgar Morin’s study is particularly important. Firstly, it emphasizes how image and the double (Morin 1965, 42) are to be considered the two sides of the same coin, two extremes of the same entity. Their centrality is such that it is possible to recognize in the double, and consequently in image, the only great universal myth. With regard to this, the myth of Pygmalion and the myth of Narcissus are to be taken into account. Narcissus is to be intended as an allegory of the desire to see a doubled reality and to be able to dive into it in order to escape and lose oneself into the otherworld as Narcissus melds with his double, his reflected image, and escapes the real world by dying. Morin recalls Ortega y Gasset and focuses his analysis on the primitive age of man in relation to the centrality of image/double which is a constitutive, unescapable, essential pair of human life. Morin in fact focuses on the rise of Homo sapiens and its two distinguishing aspects, burial and painting (Morin  2014, 103), which are connected as they result from the same trigger point, that is, the realization of death. Such realization provoked a deep sense of restlessness; therefore, it brought about the introduction of activities aimed at the exorcism of the horror—two of the most important ones were burial and painting and, in general, all the representations realized since the Paleolithic. Morin observes how Homo sapiens refuses to admit death and looks for support in myth, magic, funeral rituals and images which allow this dialogue with an other reality—they offer the presence of absence. The coloring of the bones of the dead, body paintings, parietal images, the carving on ivory are all phenomena that

 

A. RABBITO

demonstrate not only the inception of image, but also, and above all, the birth of Homo sapiens, as Morin underlined. In fact Bredekamp writes about the consolidation and the demonstration of the connection between the creation of images and human evolution (2007, 14) In his study entitled Les larmes d’Éros, Georges Bataille starts from the analysis of the hunting scene in the Lascaux Cave, he then focuses on the realization of parietal cave paintings that are functional to “charming ceremonies” and that developed in relation to a clear “awareness of death” (Bataille 1961, 14). Also Bazin highlighted the deep connection linking art to death, the double to funeral process when analyzing periods some millenniums after the ages analyzed by Morin and Bataille; he considered the religious process of mummification in Ancient Egypt as a fundamental event in the beginning of Plastic Arts. Bazin’s analyses anticipate Morin’s studies and emphasize how the fight against death proves to be the event that determines the inception of images. It is intended to “save being through appearance” (Bazin 1990, 12) and the conclusion coincides with the one expressed by the author of Le Paradigme Perdu: la Nature humaine, that is, “magic phenomena are potentially aesthetic and that aesthetic phenomena are potentially magic” (Morin 2014, 131). In Le esprit du Temps, Morin observes that the image allows an exchange between real and imaginary in the aesthetic dimension and in the magic/religious dimension an exchange between man and the afterlife; in both cases there is the reification of other worlds. When this kind of reification occurs, image offers a reality that belongs to an imaginary distant from reality, therefore the conception of image as separate prevails. In relation to Nancy’s writings, whose ideas are close to Seel’s (2005) as Purgar observes, “images are sign events which are not just objects about the world […] but they are also perceived as independent objects in the world” (Purgar 2019, 50). When the image offers itself as a copy of the external world, it proposes an imaginary that retrieves factual reality. In this case the idea of image is in a closer relation to the dimension of proximity and profane. It is true that, as Wunenburger writes, image is not the same thing as profane, otherwise it would be presentation and not representation. Image substitutes it and somehow signals a distance even if it is also true that it is perceived as the possibility to be close to what is represented. It is making the absent present. The absent becomes present only deceptively and, because the image is in close relation to the magic/religious dimension, the value of equivalent substitute of what it represents is recognized to this presence-absence. For this reason, Morin writes about a return of “a nearly primitive relation with the world” (Morin 2017, 132) in the aesthetic relation. When beholding an image thought and ancestral beliefs emerge—this way illusion dialogues with belief. Therefore the represented object, even when appearing particularly unreal, does not appear separate many times, but it seems close and present. This is all the result of a belief and of a game. It is also the result of a conscious fruition. Images in fact involve different consciousnesses; the one defined by Morin—demens which establishes a primitive, irrational, child-like, magic/

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

religious relationship with image realities (as well as factual reality) in order to dive into them; the sapiens that allows to establish a mindful, critical, analytical, detached relationship; then there is ludens consciousness, as described by Gadamer who writes about aesthetic game. It is Huizinga (2016) who mentions the idea of the playful factor as the basis of creation and of the fruition of representations in his analyses on Homo ludens. With reference to this, Ortega y Gasset writes that art is a game, a farce, fun, “as if”, and this aspect will be developed in detail by Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe. Art is also knowledge and education; it is no coincidence that the Greek term paidèia, which means education and learning, is very similar to the word paidià, which means play. Man plays and enters a state between the acceptance of the illusion and the belief in the illusion, the instincts of demens and of ludens contrast and compare between them and with the wise and critical sapiens. If we consider the example proposed by Roger Caillois (1967) where a child pretending to be a train refuses a kiss to his father because locomotives cannot kiss, even if he does not mean to make his father believe he is a real locomotive, we clearly see the acceptance of the influence of the demens’ most irrational stimuli. Such stimuli are enjoyed by the ludens element which accepts the game and the illusion (in-­ lusio), with the consent and the critical participation of sapiens which has to suspend its disbelief. The co-presence of demens-ludens-sapiens highlights the tripartite behavior in front of the image, that is that aesthetic act which gives shape to objects, spaces and compositions in relation also to our emotional involvement, as Böhme writes. He also identifies a tripartite division in the specific “iconic pragmatics” (2001, 86): • firstly, image is the object itself, in the sense that it offers an effectual reality and establishes a relationship with the demens side; • secondly, image is a sign of effectual reality, a concomitant presence of represented/representing where the represented element prevails and a relationship with the ludens side is established; • finally, image is intended as a sign created by man, it offers itself as a sign and it highlights a clear difference between the sign and the designate, thus establishing a relationship with the sapiens side.

5  The Mental Image Let us now analyze the mental image and what happens when we are in front of it. Because it immediately offers itself as an image and is not hosted in an object of physical reality, but it is in the body of the person enjoying it. It activates only imaginative consciousness which makes present something that is absent, as Sartre (1973, 32) writes. Perceptual consciousness is in fact indirectly evoked because senses are not involved to perceive data from the outside, but it is activated as the image of a pizza can make one delusively perceive the smell of it, the thought of a blade cut can make one deceptively feel a pain. The

 

A. RABBITO

senses recall and revoke experienced perceptions according to the image presented. Regarding this, Walton writes about “intermodal representation” (1990, 381) when a physical or mental image is transferred from a sensory modality to another (there is the illusion to perceive the smell and the heat of warm pizza). Vivian Sobchack (2004), recalling Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1976), observes that during perception the whole body is involved in the production of meaning by means of all senses, hence haptic vision and embodied simulation. Because the mental image enacts the specific action of making the represented present, an object is presented to consciousness. This type of image is also grouped with physical images. According to Sartre, physical images and mental images belong to the same family; forms of expression like photography, caricature and mental image all have the same form even if they are made of different matter. Later on Wunenburger will express the same idea, as mentioned at the beginning of this entry, he holds that all images have a common nature, but they offer themselves in different forms of manifestation. Belting as well considers the specificity of witnessing the absence of what is offered as present the distinctive trait of the ontological nature of image. Moreover, he states that the participation of the beholder is essential since his body is the place where images are grouped. According to Sartre, perceptual consciousness and imaginative consciousness are necessary to make present and alive the represented object; in the bronze or the stone sculpted by the artist, in a photograph or on television, a presence of something is offered, the represented, that is absent. This also happens with a mental image since it offers the presence of an absent object. The body of the observer is eventually the place where images are formed and thickened. Let us take the cinema image as an example. This image, as Debray observes, does not come to life on the canvas on which it is projected, but in the observer through association and remembrance. As for literature, Mitchell writes that it creates virtual or imaginative experiences of space and vision, mental images in fact. Mental images come to life involuntarily, like oneiric images, hypnagogic images or reveries, or voluntarily by means of our specific intentions or external sensory stimuli or even during the enjoyment of forms of expressions that trigger mental images because of what is seen, read or heard. With regard to this, Mitchell distinguishes images in two groups—pictures and images. The former refers to the physical fact and the latter to the representation in a mind, or of general cultural relevance.

6  The Semi-reality and Exceeding the Verisimilitude Norm Besides these distinctions, Sartre considers what is offered by any kind of image a semi-reality. What consciousness creates when looking at a portrait, for example, is not a determined combination of lines and colors, but it is a

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

semi-person with a semi-face and our attitude toward the image can be defined as a semi-­observation (Sartre 1973, 14). The same happens for mental images which offer a semi-reality as present (the adverb “almost” assumes a central role in image studies). The semi-reality is realized by the symbol, recalling Peirce, by the index and icon. The datum to which the semi-reality refers to can be an existing object, in present or past time, taken from the real-worldlike images of illustrations, photographs, caricatures, imitations of actors and so on or it can be a non-existent object, a make-believe object, that is, in this case taken from the mental world. Among the peculiarities of the semi-reality offered by physical images, one was highlighted by Sartre in his analysis of his own experience at a museum in Rouen—he happened to think that the pictures on a painting were real men (Sartre 1973, 42). In this case the semi-reality offered by the painting became actual reality for a short while. This shows how in some cases the beholder is facilitated in making present what is represented, thus denying the reality of the physical structure that hosts the image and denying the nature of image of the perceived object. In this way it seems, erroneously, that the contribution of imaginative consciousness is less or even nil. In such cases the specific intention of the consciousness, analyzed by Sartre, to animate and make the image present is not activated. The truth is that it all happens unconsciously. As Gestalt studies highlight, perception is a mental process where culture and the personal story of the observer merge with his memories, his imaginary, ideas, emotions, and all these affect what is perceived. Imaginative consciousness always cooperates with perceptual consciousness. This allows the perceptive deceit in relation to the images described by Sartre. Physical images always activate imaginative consciousness that interacts with perceptual consciousness; this happens also when considering images that seem to demand little or no effort for the beholder. Such an erroneous perception comes to life not only when a perceptive deceit, like the one described by Sartre, occurs but also more generally when images propose the sight of something that appears immediate. Specifically, the images that bring about a sight where the action of our consciousness is not accounted for and where the content of the image appears immediate are the ones where the likeness between image and its referent is particularly evident. They are the physical images that, as Lotman and Tsivian (1994) write, exceed the norm of verisimilitude. With regard to this, David Freedberg analyzes how the sight of a verisimilar representation leads to the implicit belief that the represented figures have the status of living figures and that semi-reality becomes reality, even if most of the times this kind of involvement or belief is not admitted. The author of The Power of Images states that we do not imagine that the reaction to a verisimilar image is based on the reconstruction of the living object and that this reaction is similar to the one we would have if the represented were really present. He also emphasizes that such power is not determined by the simple referral “because, if it were so, paintings and statues would not have their effectiveness” (Freedberg 1991, 32).

 

A. RABBITO

Let’s consider particular images like trompe-l’œil whose aim is to “deceit the eye” through a keen attempt to create a resemblance between represented and referent aiming to make the beholder believe that what is represented is present and real. In this case, the beholder is dealing with perceptual consciousness which makes him believe real what he sees since it is deceived by appearance. It is erroneously thought that imaginative consciousness is not involved. Instead, imaginative consciousness is activated, without the beholder noticing, in order to help make the represented “real”. During the first screening of L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat by August and Louis Lumière in 1896 the audience screamed and ran away at the moving image of the train. This shows that their imaginative consciousness helped make the deceit more effective because it compensated for the absence of sound, color and three-dimensional effect, thus making real the danger of a locomotive heading toward the spectators.

7  The New Images It was cinema, anticipated by photography, to innovate the field of images; as Roland Barthes (1975) observes, cinematic images offer the perfect illusion and Rudolf Arnheim (1957) writes that through such images reality is rendered very faithfully. With regard to this possibility to propose reality enhancing verisimilitude, or creating doubles that are illusively or deceptively present before the beholder’s eyes, Jean Baudrillard and Jurij Lotman, together with Tsivian, recognize a link between trompe-l’œil and photography and cinema. Baudrillard, in particular, writes about the link between trompe-l’œil and photography emphasizing how the two forms of expression can be ascribed to the same category and relate to a dimension that is not only aesthetic because both are linked to “the evidence of the world and to a resemblance that is so detailed that it becomes magic” (Baudrillard 1998, 62). According to Lotman and Tsivian, cinema is to be considered the extension of this idea of representation, whose example model is trompe-l’œil. The two different forms of expression, in their exceeding the verisimilitude norm, try to make believe real something that is the result of illusion but, moreover, they make the spectator think that the represented subject is independent from the author’s will. Therefore photographic and cinematic images bring about the qualitative leap highlighted by Ejzenštejn and develop what classical images had proposed until then. The Czech-born media theorist, Vilém Flusser, in fact writes that “photography, as the first technical image, was invented in the nineteenth century to load the images with magic again” (1997, 16). Technical images, such as photography, cinema, television and new media, are a new type of image that retrieves and proposes again intrinsic aspects of classical images (painting, drawing, sculpture, theater etc.):

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

• the magic analyzed by Flusser that allows the coming to surface of archaism (Morin 1965, 20) and new-archaism (Morin 2017, 120). This determines a “tribal scheme of involvement” that is the retribalization described by McLuhan (2001); • the deep connection with the world of shadows and of the dead and therefore with the demens’ beliefs; as Barthes observes, photography has a close relationship with death and with theatre, which in turn refers to the cult of the dead (Barthes 1980); • the double of reality and the possibility to develop in the dimensions of proximity and profane, to win memory, to immortalize human features, to freeze transience, highlighted by Ernst Kris (1967). These are actions that technical images perform more effectively. It is possible to have the sensation, as Walter Benjamin (1955) writes, to take possession of the objects, thus making them closer in space and emotionally (with the resulting consequences on the aura); • the illusion of the presence and the animation of the represented object, particularly for moving and temporal images. Such images make possible, as Thomas Mann (2003) holds, the shift from ibi et olim to the illusory hic et nunc and make the presentation of the represented datum possible, as Cesare Musatti (2000) writes; • free expression of the imaginary which finds new forms of expression in technical images by means of their features which merge objectivity and pretense. In this overview of the different kinds of images, it is necessary to define what characterizes technical images, which we can define as new images because they differ from classical images and bring profound innovation to the field of representation: • the new image creates an ontological relation with its real referent; “it always carries its referent with itself” , as Barthes writes regarding photography which can be considered the parent of new images (1980, 6); • the new image reproduces the external world in terms of mechanics/ chemistry/physics/electronics/digital; • the new image excludes the subjective, manual “re-creation of reality” of the author that Kris mentions (1967, 45) with regard to classical images since for the first time, as Bazin observes, it is possible to “enjoy the absence of man” (1990, 7) in representation; • with the new image the contribution of the machine prevails in the realization of the representation because it can record and document reality in a register and a mode that make the image objective and reliable; • the new image is very similar to its real referent, it exceeds the norm of verisimilitude, as Lotman and Tsivian write; • the new image offers a lively, evocative sensation of reality and increased immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 1999) of the recorded datum;

 

A. RABBITO

• with the new image a complete and exhaustive presentation of reality is possible since it offers the movement and the sound of the factual referent represented; in this way, as Morin observes, “life in its real movement” (2017) is directly reproduced. In conclusion, what emerges is a variety of types of images which makes it particularly difficult to give an exhaustive, complete definition of what an image is. It is possible nevertheless to identify two characteristics that summarize its most important specific features: on the one hand, image is the means by which an object is presented to the beholder’s consciousness. The absent is made present with the participation of the beholder and with a reference to magic, religious, ludic dimensions; on the other hand, image has a dual nature; therefore, it activates dual dimensions thus merging juxtaposed realities: presence/ absence; represented/representative; image/means; image/double; pretense/ reality; external/internal; distant/close; sacred/profane; paidèia/paidià; actual fact/factual fact; earthly life/afterlife.

References Albers, Josef. 1997. Interaction of Color. Die Grundlegung einer Didaktik des Sehens. Köln: Dumont. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1957. “The Thoughts that Made the Picture Move”. In: Film as Art. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. 1980. La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Éditions Gallimard, Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1970. L’empire des signes. Genève: Èditions d’Art Albert Skira. Barthes, Roland. 1975. “En sortant du cinéma”. Communications, 23. Bataille, Georges. 1961. Les larmes d’Éros. Paris: Société Nouvelle des éditions Pauvert. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. Car l’illusion ne s’oppose pas à la réalité. Paris: Éditions Descartes & Cie. Bazin, André. 1990 [1958]. “Ontologie de l’image photographique”. Qu’est ce le cinema?. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. Belting, Hans. 2002. Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Benjamin, Walter. 1955 [1936]. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, Walter. 1991 [1933]. Über das mimetische Vermögen. In Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Böhme, Gernot. 2001. Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre. München: Wilhelm Fink. Bolter, Jay David, and Grusin, Richard. 1999. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bredekamp, Horst. 2007. Theorie des Bildakts. Über das Lebensrecht des Bildes. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Caillois, Roger. 1967. Les jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige. Paris: Gallimard. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2014 [1817]. Biographia literaria. Ed. by Adam Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  ONTOLOGICAL DISPUTE: WHAT IS AN IMAGE? 

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 2016 [1916]. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Debray, Régis. 1992. Vie et mort de l’image. Paris: Gallimard. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Images malgré tout. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Ejzenštejn, Sergej Mihajlovič. 1994 [1958]. Towards a Theory of Montage. London: British Film Institute. Elam, Keir. 2002 [1979]. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge. Flusser, Vilém. 1997 [1983]. Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie. Göttingen: European Photography. Freedberg, David. 1991 [1989]. The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2007 [1960]. Wahrheit und Methode. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Gorgias. (415 B.  C.). 2007. Fragment 23. In:  I sofisti. Edited by Mauro Bonazzi. Milano: Rizzoli. Huizinga, Johan. 2016 [1938]. Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Brooklyn: Angelico Press. Kott, Jan. 1969. “The Icon and the Absurd”. The Drama Review, 14: 17–24. Krieger, Murray. 1991. Ekphrasis. The Illusion of Natural Sign. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kris, Ernst and Kurz, Otto. 1979 [1934]. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. A Historical Experiment. New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press. Kris, Ernst. 1967 [1952]. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New  York: Schocken Books Inc. Kundera, Milan. 2013 [2005]. The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. New York: Harper Perennial. Lotman, Jurij and Tsivian, Yuri. 1994. Dialog s ekranom. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Mann, Thomas. 2003 [1924]. Der Zauberberg. Frankfurt/M: Fischer. McLuhan, Marshall. 2001 [1964]. Understanding Media. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1976 [1945]. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002. “Showing Seeing”. Journal of Visual Culture, 1 (2): 165–181. Morin, Edgar. 1965 [1958]. Le Cinéma ou l’Homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie. Paris: Éditions Gonthier. Morin, Edgar. 2014 [1973]. Le Paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris: Seuil. Morin, Edgar. 2017 [1962]. L’esprit du temps. Paris: Éditions de l’Aube. Musatti, Cesare. 2000. “Psicologia degli spettatori al cinema”. In: Scritti sul cinema. Ed. by Dario F. Romano. Torino: Testo & Immagine. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2002. “L’image–Le distinct”. In: Au fond des images. Paris: Galilée. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1958. “Idea del teatro. Una abreviatura”. La Revista Nacional de educación, 62 c. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 2014 [1895]. “What is a Sign?”. In: Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. by James Hoopes. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Purgar, Krešimir. 2019. Pictorial Appearing. Image Theory After Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1973 [1940]. L’imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard. Seel, Martin. 2005. The Aesthetics of Appearing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 

A. RABBITO

Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. “‘What My Fingers Knew’: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh”. In:  Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Virilio, Paul. 2005. L’Art à perte de vue. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. 1997. Philosophie des Images. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Representation and the Scopic Regime of (Post-)Cartesianism Donal Moloney

1   The Scopic Regime of Cartesian Perspectivalism This chapter focuses on what I consider to be the development of the scopic regime of Cartesian perspectivalism over the last 500–600 years in representational painting. While several scopic regimes have emerged, especially since the twentieth century, Cartesian perspectivalism has endured and continues to have a considerable bearing, in particular on contemporary representational painting. I aim to consider why this scopic regime has sustained itself and what led to its expansion using several key case studies in the development of representational painting, namely the work of Francisco de Zurbarán, Johannes Vermeer, Lucy McKenzie and Helene Appel. Through an investigation of shifting approaches to depictions of space, light, the viewer’s body and digital imagery, I will argue that painting has continually disrupted Cartesian perspectivalism in order to open and expose it to novel interpretations of reality. Before I continue, the term scopic regime and its origins require defining and unpacking. One of the first uses of the term was by the French film critic Christian Metz in his book The Imaginary Signifier (1982). Metz used the term in its plural form to refer to there being many scopic regimes as a means of countering the misconception that the visual is encountered in one way above other senses. These multiple ways of seeing are interdependent upon the culture in which they emerge from and are not inherent solely in one’s visual faculties. While Metz (1982, 14) does not definitively state what he means

D. Moloney (*) Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_27

 

D. MOLONEY

when he refers to scopic regimes, he does allude to what he means by the term when he differentiates between our interpretation of the visual in cinema and in theater, between the object being there in theater and being at a distance in the cinema through the screen. A scopic regime for Metz is the impact of systems that surround the viewer that impact on how they apprehend what they see. In other words, how the conditions we are in while looking affects how and what we see, from the spatial context (dark theater, potentially seated and immobile in a theater or cinema) to the mechanics of the technology and conventions that make up the image itself (camera, acting, etc.). Metz’s decision to use the word regime is also not fully explained in his writing either. The word regime typically refers to systems of control and organization, as if the viewer has limited or no ability of affect what they see and are in a sense dominated by the spatial conditions and contexts they find themselves in. What we can take from Metz’s creation of the term scopic regime is that how we see is not simply corporeal but is influenced by our surroundings. What we see is formed through how our surroundings enable or permit us to see in one way or another. The word scopic has its origins in two senses. One is as an ending to a word, where it can mean to look and examine (microscope, etc.). In its use as a complete word in the Oxford English Dictionary it refers to “something aimed at or desired; something which one wishes to effect or attain” (Oxford English Dictionary 2020; “scopic” entry). Combined, the words scopic and regime could be seen as a chain of interactions when one looks at something purposefully, and this looking is being influenced and formed by the environment that surrounds the object itself. The most dominant and pervasive scopic regime is arguably Cartesian perspectivalism as outlined by Leon Battista Alberti (1967) in his 1436 treatise Della Pittura (On Painting). Alberti developed this treatise based on the discoveries and advancements in perspective in the Italian Quattrocento of the early fifteenth century by artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi and Masaccio, among others. When referring to scopic regimes going forward I will be focusing on representational painting in order to tease out something specific about the pervasiveness of Cartesian perspectivalism. The basic premise of Alberti’s thesis in his treatise, Della Pittura, is that we are to think of the rectangular painting’s surface as a “window” through which we see an image: “I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint” (Alberti 1967, 56). The material support (canvas, board, fresco, etc.) that the artist uses to paint an image on can be transformed from opaque to transparent and glass-like, using the system of linear perspective. Alberti was one of the first to write about linear perspective and methods developed by artists during the Renaissance of translating a three-dimensional space onto the flat twodimensional space of the painting’s surface through a series of procedures involving two inverted cones. One cone’s apex emanates from the viewer’s eye with the other emanating from the vanishing point within the painting itself that rests on an imaginary horizon line. Lines are drawn from this vanishing

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

point out toward the edge of the painting with horizontal lines being drawn from the edges toward the vanishing point in decreasing intervals, giving the appearance of a gridded space where the grids mapping the space diminish in size the closer they recede toward the vanishing point. This mapping of the space in the painting allows the artist to plot in figures, buildings, landscapes and so on, in a way that mimics vision, whereby a large object in the distance can appear small in our field of vision as well as a small object appearing large if placed close to the foreground of the painting. The image is located at the intersection between these two cones known as the picture plane: “vision makes a triangle […] and from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems no larger than a point” (Alberti 1970, 47). This alignment of the painting’s surface with the metaphor of the window through the use of linear perspective is central to Alberti’s treatise: “I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint” (1967, 56). For Alberti’s treatise, we have to think of vision as involving a singular monocular eye that is static rather than mobile and roaming in a mobile body. It is a simplification of how complex vision is in reality compared to how Alberti simplifies it for his conception of a system for creating representational paintings. One of the key writers on scopic regimes and in particular Cartesian perspectivalism is Martin Jay in his text “The Scopic Regimes of Modernity” (Jay 1988). In this text he charts Cartesian perspectivalism’s dominance as a scopic regime due in part to ways in which it mimics aspects of how we see in reality that aligns with a “scientific world view” (Jay 1988, 5). The realism of a painting using linear perspective was almost limitless. Painters began to fill these spaces with more and more depictions of surfaces that connected less to the narrative and sometimes even disrupting or distracting from it, be it biblical or allegorical, and so on, possibly suggesting that reality was quantifiable rather than divine and linked to religion. However, Jay points out that the artifice of Cartesian perspectivalism was that it is based on a single eye and that the cone of vision radiates out toward a single vanishing point, whereby in reality vision involves two eyes not to mention other complex factors that inform how we see. For Jay “[…] the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye” (8). The link between the viewer and the spaces depicted in Cartesian perspectivalism was thus severed as the space and narratives within the painting were placed at a distance in the rational and measured space of linear perspective, something that was designed for a monocular rather than the binocular vision of reality. The very means of measurement that made the painted surface transform into a window onto another space beyond also kept the viewer at a distance from the space depicted.

 

D. MOLONEY

s

2   Depictions of Space as Anti-Albertian in Francisco de Zurbarán’s Painting If we move from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and north of Italy to Spain and Holland, there are significant examples of the metaphor of painting as a window morphing into something more akin to a mirror. This was not so much in the way a mirror reflects reality, but in how it reflects back light and space rather than inviting the viewer in through its frame. This is a huge shift from Cartesian perspectivalism in terms of the viewer in front of the painting being somehow acknowledged and addressed by the painting itself. As I will discuss later, this is not a total rejection of the scopic regime of Cartesian perspectivalism but an expansion or testing of its limits by painters in the seventeenth century, namely Francisco de Zurbarán and Johannes Vermeer. One could argue that the body of the painter and viewer that were cut off from the space of the painting began to be incorporated into the space of these particular paintings that  I will discuss and how this newly expanded conception of Cartesian perspectivalism almost reversed the desire to look through the surface back out at the viewer, reflecting back their gaze. The mode of address that Zurbarán’s seemingly humble still-life paintings of everyday objects present to the viewer is what the writer Norman Bryson called “anti-Albertian” (1990, 71). This author gives a number of reasons to illustrate how Zurbarán works against Alberti’s system of linear perspective, counteracting, to a degree, the painting solely as a window through which we can see depictions of deep space. In Zurbarán’s still-life paintings, the vanishing point, which is central to Alberti’s thesis on perspective, is non-existent, according to Bryson (ibid.). It is blocked, somewhat, by the wall directly behind the arranged still life. The wall in Zurbarán’s paintings behaves like the black space caused by the short focal length of the digital scanner’s sensor, something I will return to later in this chapter. In restricting the depth of the painting, Zurbarán creates a compacted space, which brings every object close to the picture plane. By blocking the vanishing point, the wall in Zurbarán’s paintings constructs an intimate and shallow space, rather than a deep one. Bryson’s view is that Zurbarán creates intimate spaces that are particularly connected to the viewer’s body. Bryson calls this sense of shallow space within Zurbarán’s paintings “nearness”. The wall behind the still-life objects, which have blocked any reading of space beyond the table, is crucial to the construction of this shallow space. “Gestures”, according to Bryson, rather than successive levels of perspectival space, partly constitute the compacted and shallow space of paintings such as Metalware and Pottery (1650) (Fig. 1). Unlike the ways in which the linear perspective of the Renaissance served to plot out visual readings of deep space, Zurbarán’s paintings use different visual devices to read or measure space. The devices in question are, according to Bryson, “bodily actions”, recorded as “gestures” (72). By “gestures”, he is specifically referring to the bodily movements captured by the handmade construction of the clay and metal objects that Zurbarán depicts in his paintings.

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

Fig. 1  Francisco de Zurbarán, Metalware and Pottery, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 46 × 84 cm; Museo del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

In relation to the handmade quality of Zurbarán’s still-life objects serving to generate visual intervals of measurement akin to linear perspective, Bryson states that the “unit of direction” in Zurbarán’s still-life paintings is not the line, as in Albertian or perspectival painting, but “the arc, since bodily movements always curve” (ibid.). Rather than successive levels of space depicted using linear perspective, the space in Zurbarán’s painting is made up of implied rotating angles that are subdivided into degrees. Furthermore, each of Zurbarán’s depicted objects in Metalware and Pottery has handles all pointing in different directions. Together, the handmade and cylindrical quality of the depicted objects being thrust into the foreground by the empty black background moves and connects them closely to the viewer’s own body just on the other side of the picture plane. There is an inversion of Cartesian perspectivalism suggested by Metalware and Pottery. All the vessels in this painting rest at the same distance from the picture plane. A more varied composition would invite and lead the viewer’s eye to the background of the depicted space through the foreground and middle ground. However, in Zurbarán’s painting, the viewer is not welcomed, because the row of objects foregrounded at equal distances from us acts like a visual barrier, almost pushing against our attempt to gaze deeper into the painting’s spatial construction. This can also be seen in Zurbarán’s painting Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, Cup and a Rose (1633). This visual barrier, created by all the objects being arranged together on a common plane, somewhat acknowledges the viewer’s presence. Bryson’s belief is that this composition is “theatrical”, as the act of placing each object at an equal distance from the viewer appears to imply that the objects await, address and confront the viewer’s body positioned in front of the paintings themselves (74). This subtle

 

D. MOLONEY

acknowledging and returning of the viewer’s act of looking through the picture plane has more affinity with the metaphor of a painting as a reflecting mirror rather than solely as a transparent window aligned with Cartesian perspectivalism. In many senses, Zurbarán’s paintings are impenetrable for any viewer wishing to look past the depicted objects. Furthermore, paintings by the Spanish artist encourage a shallow focus that is just beyond the painting’s surface. The lack of a vanishing point, together with its inversion by the black wall and the handmade quality evident in the cylindrical objects, all combine to partly invert Albertian linear perspective. However, throughout all this disruption of the underlying principles of Cartesian perspectivalism, it remains omnipresent as a scopic regime throughout each of the paintings discussed here.

3   Depictions of Light as Anti-Albertian in Johannes Vermeer’s Paintings While Zurbarán’s still-life paintings partly reversed the scopic regime of Cartesian perspectivalism through his organization of space in the painting, at the same time in the mid-seventeenth century, Johannes Vermeer’s use of light could be seen as similarly reversing Alberti’s conception of a painting as a window and disrupting Cartesian perspectivalism. There was also a move at the time in Dutch painting toward another scopic regime. Through his outlining of a “contestation” and several “internal tensions” within Cartesian perspectivalism, Jay (1988, 10–12) identifies a second scopic regime defined as “The Art of Describing” by Svetlana Alpers (1983). Jay (1988, 11) notes Bryson’s (1983, 112) use of Vermeer as an example of a “possible uncoupling” of the painter and the viewers’ viewpoint, whose connection was crucial to Cartesian perspectivalism. The differences between Cartesian perspectivalism’s “privileged, constitutive role of the monocular subject” and the “Art of Describing’s” focus on the “prior existence of a world of objects depicted on the flat canvas” were considerable (Jay 1988, 12). Rather than the viewer being central to the conception of the world, as in Cartesian perspectivalism, the “Art of Describing” indicates a world “indifferent to the beholder’s position in front of it”. Jay highlights Alpers’ summary of the difference between Cartesian perspectivalism and the “Art of Describing”: Attention to many small things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects modelled by light and shadow; the surface of objects, their colors and textures, dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space; an unframed image versus one that is clearly framed; one with no clearly situated viewer compared to one with such a viewer. The distinction follows a hierarchical model of distinguishing between phenomena commonly referred to as primary and secondary: objects and space versus the surfaces, forms versus the textures of the world. (Alpers 1983, 44)

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

In relation to this, throughout many of Vermeer’s paintings there are profusions of specular highlights or pointillé, as described by Lawrence Gowing (1952). Gowing calls Vermeer’s use of pointillé a “visual paradox” (1952, 22). This, he notes, is due, in part, to the fact that, on one level, the specular highlights show a minute attention to detail in describing how light falls on an object’s surface. On another level, Vermeer’s use of specular highlights “spread and blend”, in one sense distorting the object of our vision (ibid.). In Vermeer’s View of Delft (1660–1661) (Fig. 2), the pointillé becomes “disconnected from the substance on which it lies” and, instead, could be said to create a “glittering, irrelevant commentary on light” (128). It appears that the pointillé moves from the surface of the depicted objects out to the painting’s surface. In some particular cases in Vermeer’s paintings, the “pointillé loses its function of representation [… and] gains its independence” (Gowing 1952, 111). Gowing’s description of the shift of the pointillé, from “representation” to “independence”, suggests it becomes a pan of paint as its materiality becomes foregrounded. Moreover, the pointillé in Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657–1659) appears on surfaces that would not normally reflect light, according to Gowing: “Granules of light are scattered irrespective

Fig. 2  Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, 1661, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 117.5 cm; Mauritshuis, The Hague. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

 

D. MOLONEY

of the textures on which they lie” (111). He notes that in much of Vermeer’s paintings, “wherever modelling approaches a palpable continuity there is a scattering of irrelevant light to contradict it” (142). These pointillé or specular highlights, which are depicted on the surface of the objects in many of Vermeer’s paintings, slip out of the picture plane and onto the surface of the painting itself, during the process of viewing the painting. This visual instability interrupts any reading of these paintings as a window and can thus be seen as partly “anti-Albertian” (Bryson 1990, 71). Wayne Franits also explores Vermeer’s use of excessive specular highlights, especially on objects that usually absorb light, rather than mirror it. Franits discusses Vermeer’s use of pointillés as adding a “tactile quality” to objects, such as bread, which would not normally reflect light as much as metal or glass. What is curious is Franits’ suggestion that there are more pointillés than would be seen with the naked eye: “In fact, the chunks (of bread) are encrusted with so many pointillés that these dots of paint seem to exist independently of the forms that they describe” (Franits 2001, 18). This suggests another plane that these white dots might exist on, perhaps the plane of the painting’s surface, rather than the imaginary plane of the interior depicted in the painting. In doing so, the depiction of specular highlights might draw attention to the painting’s surface. Gabrielle Townsend, like Didi-Huberman (2005), notes that the pan (which we could consider Vermeer’s specular highlights to be) “in its self-containedness”, as a passage of paint, rather than a detail of a larger whole, “can expand to dominate the whole picture” (Townsend 2008, 84). Similarly, for Griselda Pollock, the detail is “the discrete part of the whole”, while the pan “is a mysterious fragment which is the irruption of the materiality of painting, an accident in the painting which shows nothing more than the progress of figuration itself” (Pollock 2007, 56). This English author notes that the pan “may be termed a symptom, because it is the expression of the loss of representational value” (ibid.). The pan may be a symptom of the process of constructing the painting, which becomes disruptive toward the representational function of the rest of the painting in highlighting the painting’s surface. While Cartesian perspectivalism is not completely eliminated from Vermeer’s paintings, it is suppressed to a degree by the distortion caused by such a profusion of shimmering surfaces and specular highlights. As a theory of the particular scopic regime, Svetlana Alpers book The Art of Describing provides us both a way of general thinking and perceiving singular details in such representational painting. By reorientating the viewer away from perceiving depth, as in Cartesian perspectivalism, to surface, Alpers outlines an alternative scopic regime that contains within it links back to Cartesian perspectivalism. In relation to this scopic regime, the “pan” as a “stain” could be interpreted as an aspect of a painting that resists any clear reading and, thus, disrupts a narrative that may be depicted throughout the painting as a whole (Didi-Huberman 2005, 268–269). This could encourage the viewer to oscillate between a perception of depth and to simultaneously engage with a

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

painting’s surface and materiality. The “pan” is not descriptive like the detail, but is a disruption within the painting. It interferes with Cartesian perspectivalism. However, while Alpers’ “Art of Describing” and Didi-Huberman’s “pan” disrupt Cartesian perspectivalism, they are, I would argue, assimilated into its representational system in Vermeer’s paintings discussed and only serve to expand it as a scopic regime.

4   Trompe L’oeil and Digital Influences in Contemporary Painting as Anti-Albertian Cartesian perspectivalism continues to endure in contemporary painting. There has been a notable resurgence in the use of trompe l’oeil elements as well as echoes of digitally produced imagery across the broad spectrum of painting practices today, in particular in the work of Lucy McKenzie and Helene Appel. Trompe l’oeil painting and visual echoes of the digital scanner in contemporary painting, as I will discuss, could be seen to stretch Cartesian perspectivalism to its limits without completely collapsing it, often through the depiction of incredibly thin and shallow spaces. What connects McKenzie and Appel to both Zurbarán and Vermeer is the ways in which they depict space and light in order to partly reverse Cartesian perspectivalism and incorporate the body of the viewer into the space of these paintings. Trompe l’oeil painting’s roots can, partly, be traced back to Pliny’s story of a competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The competition, described in Pliny’s Natural History, was to paint the most convincing illusion (Koester 2000, 8). Zeuxis’ contribution to the competition was a painting of grapes so realistic that birds tried to feed from them. In contrast, Parrhasius painted a curtain so realistic that Zeuxis believed it was real and concealed the painting that Parrhasius had made. Zeuxis tried to move the painted curtain aside to reveal Parrhasius’ painting. While Zeuxis’ painted illusion had fooled birds, Parrhasius had won, as a result of deceiving Zeuxis. In more recent times Jean Baudrillard defines trompe l’oeil painting as having a number of set characteristics that distinguish it from still-life painting. They are the vertical field, the absence of a horizon and any kind of horizontality […] a certain oblique light that is unreal (that light and none other), the absence of depth, a certain type of object […] a certain type of material, and of course the “realist” hallucination that gave it its name. (Baudrillard 1988, 53)

Furthermore, there is also “no nature […] no countryside or sky, no vanishing point or natural light” in trompe l’oeil painting, according to Baudrillard (55). The game that trompe l’oeil plays on the viewer is presenting one with this fragment of reality, before one realizes that it is a representation one is looking at and not, in fact, reality (Sterling 1981, 152). Baudrillard notes that what is

 

D. MOLONEY

important is not so much the seamless blend with reality, but the aftermath of realizing you are looking at a representation and not reality itself: In trompe–l’oeil it is never a matter of confusion with the real: what is important is the production of a simulacrum in full consciousness of the game and of the artifice by miming the third dimension, throwing doubt on the reality of that third dimension in miming and outdoing the effect of the real, throwing radical doubt on the principle of reality. (Baudrillard 1988, 58)

Otrange Mastai states that the “special character” of a trompe l’oeil painting “deals not with suggestion but with ‘fact’” (1976, 19). Cropping objects would disrupt the special illusion trompe l’oeil seeks to achieve. According to Otrange Mastai, objects must be depicted “whole and complete”, if the artist is to partly avoid the “flat, two-dimensional surface” (ibid.). An example of what Otrange Mastai called a “self-contained” trompe l’oeil is Gijsbrechts’ paintings of letter racks, such as Trompe l’oeil Letter Rack with an Hourglass, Razor, and Scissors (ca. 1664) (Fig.  3). In this particular painting, there is a strong equivalence between the shape and flatness of the rectangular canvas and the depicted letter rack. This can also be seen in contemporary painter Lucy McKenzie’s Quodlibet XXVIII (Unlawful Assembly I) (2013) (Fig. 4). Gijsbrechts, like McKenzie, subtly blends real and depicted space. In both artists’ works, the thin ribbon holding the letters, combs and various small objects in place across the letter rack’s surface highlights its flatness and rectangular shape. The thin ribbon also crisscrosses through the center of both paintings and links the corners and edges. This further highlights the letter rack’s flatness in both artists’ works. The thin green curtain in Gijsbrechts’ painting highlights the flat surface of the letter rack even further than in McKenzie’s. Gijsbrechts’ use of a curtain, which appears to be able to cover the thin objects attached to the ribbon, without any protrusions, further reinforces the shallowness of the depicted space, which appears to be almost devoid of recessional depth. The curtain has been pinned to the side to reveal most of the letter rack and slightly crops the right-hand side of the painted frame, together with various letters. In overlapping the painted frame by appearing to rest on it, the curtain, again, subtly reinforces the shallow pictorial space between the surface of the letter rack and the frame, which is marginally closer to us. Both McKenzie’s and Gijsbrechts’ use of the ribbon and frame combine to describe different degrees of flatness depicted within the letter racks, creating a sophisticated blend of real and depicted space. The paintings go as far as to almost assimilate the shallow subject they depict, before revealing to the viewer that Cartesian perspectivalism is crucial to the construction of such a depiction. Anne Trubek discusses the “descriptive perspective” or “absence of perspective” that trompe l’oeil employs (Trubek 2001, 2). This can also be seen in contemporary painter Helene Appel’s Plastic Sheet (2) (2013) (Fig. 5). Unlike the Cartesian perspective, “trompe l’oeil seeks to present, rather than represent” (Trubek 2001, 2). There may be a connection between Bryson’s (1990, 61)

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

Fig. 3  Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Trompe l’oeil Letter Rack with an Hourglass, Razor and Scissors, ca. 1664, oil on canvas, 102 × 83,4 cm; Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

writing on “Rhopography”, “quodlibet” and trompe l’oeil elements within Appel’s paintings. Baudrillard’s (1988, 53) writing on trompe l’oeil focuses on “the exclusive presence of banal objects” and on trompe l’oeil’s presentation of objects, rather than on representation (Siegfried 1992, 28). Bryson notes that “Rhopography” in still-life painting is “the depiction of those things which lack importance”. This is certainly the case with Appel’s paintings, where she literally depicts things that are cast aside such as tape, fragments of food and twigs. The banality of such painted subjects is what makes them appear part of reality, as if we just came across them, cast aside, rather than looking through the picture plane at a representation.

 

D. MOLONEY

Fig. 4  Lucy McKenzie, Quodlibet XXVIII (Unlawful Assembly I), 2013, oil on canvas, 90 × 61 cm; Artist’s collection. © Lucy McKenzie. Image courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London

“Quodlibet” is translated from its original Latin into English as “what you please” (Siegfried, ibid.). The connection between objects in quodlibet trompe l’oeil paintings can appear ambiguous and even meaningless. Siegfried notes that the “quest for meaning may be endless” due to the “reticent or resistant set of images”. This lack of “syntax”, Siegfried writes, may put the viewer in an “active position” in piecing together a narrative and may even make us “pay attention to the act on interpretation” in a particular way (ibid.). Often these “quodlibet” paintings depicted closets or letter racks, dumping grounds for the odds and ends of daily life, such as scraps of paper, combs and quills. Siegfried

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

Fig. 5  Helene Appel, Plastic Sheet (3), 2013, watercolor on linen, 188 × 119, 5 cm; © Helene Appel 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York

notes that the “tension” that this creates in quodlibet trompe l’oeil paintings, which we could interpret McKenzie’s and Appel’s paintings to be, depends on the “factuality of depicted objects and the ambiguity of their meaning” (ibid.). Baudrillard states, “They are all blank empty signs, speaking an anticeremonial and antirepresentation” (1988, 54). In a sense, Bryson’s (1990, 61) writing on “Rhopography”, together with quodlibet trompe l’oeil painting and Baudrillard’s (1988, 54) writing on “antirepresentation” in trompe l’oeil painting, connects to Trubek’s (2001, 2) writing on the “absence of perspective that trompe l’oeil employs”. The ordinary, commonplace “quodlibet” objects could be said to aid the reversal of the vanishing point, by making the paintings more about presentation than representation (Siegfried 1992, 28). Baudrillard’s position is similar to Trubek’s: Instead of objects “vanishing” panoramically before the scanning eye (where priority is given to some centralised disposition of the world, the privilege of the “panoptic eye”), here it is the objects that by a kind of “interior” relief “fool” the eye (trompent l’oeil)—not in that they give us to believe in a real world that does not exist, but in that they counteract the privileged position of the gaze. (Trubek 2001, 2)

However, as Trubek notes, after one has been firstly tricked by what appears to be “a perspective from the real” and then realizes the artifice of a trompe

 

D. MOLONEY

l’oeil painting, “the viewer attains perspective upon recognising its absence”. In order for trompe l’oeil to function in such a way, it must first “suppress” a Cartesian “single-point perspective”. In this respect, Trubek notes that “trompe l’oeil reveals realism’s participatory valences, its ability to mobilize viewers precisely as it immobilizes and stills the real” (ibid.). Regarding this mobilization of the viewer, Siegfried (1992, 27) similarly notes that trompe l’oeil “emphasises the act of interpretation on the part of the viewer who is being deceived by the ‘trick of the eye’”. This mobilization of the viewer to switch between two modes of perspective highlights a particular slippage between the picture plane and the painting surface. Trubek describes this slippage as the ways in which the “paintings apparently picture a melting of inside/outside distinctions” or “blend the real and representation”. This “blend” is temporary, as, “when the viewer realizes the painting’s deceit, the gap between reality and illusion widens, and the real becomes ever more elusive” (ibid.). Siegfried describes the trompe l’oeil as operating like a “boomerang”, regarding how it first appears as an innocuous fragment of reality, before it subsequently reveals itself to be an illusion “turning back on itself” (Siegfried, 28). Perhaps this could be thought of as a slippage between the real space of the viewer and the depicted space of the painting. Trubek also discusses how the trompe l’oeil painting can cause the viewer to become or replace “the horizontal axis”, which was “repressed by the painting’s verticality”. This is the point at which “perspective is (re)gained” (7). While, as I have discussed in terms of the work of McKenzie and Appel, perspective is somewhat absent from a trompe l’oeil painting, Trubek is making the point that we, as viewers, somehow, become the horizontal axis that trompe l’oeil suppresses, in order to retain the effect of the real, rather than the illusionary. For him, the ways in which this perspective in trompe l’oeil acts is not a “controlling” one that affords the viewer a “distanced view”. It is a “participatory” form of perspective that allows a different way of looking at paintings than “single-point perspective”. Perhaps, Trubek, in calling trompe l’oeil paintings “participatory”, is suggesting that paintings like those I have discussed by McKenzie and Appel offer the viewer “greater mobility in front of the canvas that entails a certain address to the viewer” (ibid.). The illusion of reality partially remains, even when the viewer deviates from a frontal position in relation to the painting to a more oblique and acute angle. This resurgence of trompe l’oeil elements in contemporary painting does have particular links to another element that is very much prevalent in painting practices today: digital imagery. What links trompe l’oeil and digital elements in McKenzie and Appel’s work is the ways in which their use of a shallow picture space, overlapping and sometimes crammed arrangement of forms strongly resembles an image recorded using the short focal length of a flatbed scanner’s lens. This contemporary use of overlapping and superimposition has several historical precedents, prior to the advent of collage and the flatbed scanner. Panofsky notes that at the “close of antiquity (2nd to 6th century) […] the freely extended landscape and the closed interior space began to disintegrate”

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

(Panofsky 1991, 48). By this he means that “the apparent succession of forms into depth gives way again to superposition and juxtaposition”. The “coherent spatial system”, by which the individual elements of a painting follow, is “transmuted” into “forms” which conform to the picture plane. Panofsky notes that they are “leveled”, often appearing in “relief against a gold or neutral ground” (ibid.). This signals a “disintegration of the perspectival idea”. Panofsky states that the Abraham mosaic from San Vitale in Ravenna (c. 547) does not follow the idea of the painting as a window on to the world (49). Instead, the painting as “edge” to be “filled”, which the pictorial elements, such as the landscape, must cohere to, is as follows: The principle of a space merely excised by the picture’s edge is now beginning to give way to the principle of the surface bounded by the picture’s edge, a surface that expects not to be seen through but rather filled. (Panofsky 1991, 48)

According to Panofsky, “the former vista or ‘looking through’ begins to close up”. Space in painting has “been transformed into a homogenous and, so to speak, homogenizing fluid, immeasurable and dimensionless” (ibid.). This echoes images produced nowadays using the short focal length of the flatbed scanner’s lens and by extension the “look” of the digital scanner in McKenzie and Appel’s work. Even in Byzantine art, there is “a tendency to follow through with the reduction of space to surface” (49). Panofsky’s idea of the surface being filled with forms, rather than making them appear to recede into space, has close affinities to Steinberg’s writing on the “Flatbed Picture Plane”. Steinberg signaled a shift that happened around 1950 in the work of Jean Dubuffet and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work did not “simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals” (Steinberg 1975, 84). The surface was no longer the Albertian (1967, 56) window, but shallow, flat surfaces that could act as some form of dumping ground to collect information. There was a shift in the “subject matter of art […] from nature to culture” (2): They no more depend on head-to-toe correspondence with human posture […] The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion. (Steinberg 1975, 84)

This author further notes how Rauschenberg orientated objects on his canvases so as to elicit horizontality rather than verticality. In Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), “the consistent horizontality is called upon to maintain a symbolic continuum of litter, workbench, and data-ingesting mind”. This idea that the picture plane could resemble something that was once flat and is now vertical, along with the idea of it as a repository of “data” and “information” that is

 

D. MOLONEY

collected, bears close ties to McKenzie and Appel’s tight compression of objects in their paintings (84). “The painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes” (ibid.). McKenzie and Appel’s work could be said to strongly resemble a vertical image on a computer monitor created by dumping an assortment of objects onto a flatbed scanner. Perhaps McKenzie and Appel’s work could be said to discretely or implicitly “stress” how so much of what we see and experience today is mediated by technology (Shiff 2001, 154). As Richard Shiff notes, “much of our contemporary visual environment has been created by electronic scanners, rasters, and sets of interchangeable pixels”. Devices such as scanners “display a gridded disdain for hierarchy; they are equipped to translate any visual order into any other” (140). Furthermore, when writing about Chuck Close’s use of photographic models, he states: “To work from such a model is to stress how artistic media and the media of mechanical reproduction structure the data of our experience, as if nature were nowhere to be found. Nature is not the origin” (154). The same might be said about how McKenzie and Appel’s work strongly resembles images produced using the short focal length of the flatbed scanner’s lens. Like the ways in which Zurbarán’s use of a black wall directly behind the arranged still life blocks the vanishing point, the echo of the digital scanner in McKenzie and Appel’s work restricts depth in their paintings, creating a compacted space which forces depicted objects close to the picture plane. Cartesian perspectivalism is, I would argue in these examples of contemporary painting, being stretched but not ruptured.

5  Conclusion Throughout the last 500–600 years, while Cartesian perspectivalism has been disrupted at numerous key points in the development of painting, these disruptions appear to have bolted onto this scopic regime and become part of, rather than separate from, it. Rather than lose its purpose to represent space, these disruptions seem to highlight an expansion of it as a scopic regime since Alberti. One could look at the examples of contemporary painters I have discussed as working with a highly pressurized version of Cartesian perspectivalism to make paintings that comment on the role of the digital within our lived experience as well as representational painting’s sustained presence within it. As depictions of compressed space, glittering light and everyday objects almost collapsed the original conception of Cartesian perspectivalism, they ended up bringing the viewer into a more active rather than passive engagement with these examples of representational painting. As the paintings began to address the viewer’s own body more and more, they became part of the way meaning unfolded in the work. This expanded a once non-participatory scopic regime to one that involved the viewer and makes one acutely aware of the system or way of seeing being proposed by the paintings themselves.

Reference

s

  REPRESENTATION AND THE SCOPIC REGIME OF (POST-)CARTESIANISM 

Alberti, Leon Battista. 1967. On Painting. Trans., intro., and notes by John R. Spencer. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Alberti, Leon Battista. 1970. On Painting. Trans., intro., and notes by John R. Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. “The Trompe-l’Oeil”. In: Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. Ed. by Norman Bryson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryson, Norman. 1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bryson, Norman. 1990. Looking at the Overlooked; Four Essays on Still life Painting. London: Reaktion Books. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Franits, Wayne E. 2001. “Johannes Vermeer: An Overview of His Life and Stylistic Development”. In: The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer. Ed. by Wayne E. Franits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gowing, Lawrence. 1952. Vermeer. London: Faber and Faber. Koester, Olaf. 2000. Painted Illusions: The Art of Cornelius Gijsbrechts. London: National Gallery Company Limited. Jay, Martin. 1988. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”. In: Vision and Visuality. Ed. by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press. Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Otrange Mastai, Marie-Louise d’. 1976. Illusion in Art Trompe L’Oeil: A History of Pictorial Illusionism. New York: Abaris Books. Panofsky, Erwin. 1991. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books. Pollock, Griselda. 2007. Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis. London: I.B. Tauris. Shiff, Richard. 2001. “Realism of Low Resolution: Digitisation and Modern Painting”. In:  Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photographic Era.  Ed. by Terry Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Siegfried, Susan L. 1992. “Boilly and the Frame-up of Trompe l’oeil”, Oxford Art Journal, 15 (2): 27–37. Steinberg, Leo. 1975. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sterling, Charles. 1981. Still Life Painting, From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. London: Harper and Row. Townsend, Gabrielle. 2008. Proust’s Imaginary Museum: Reproductions and Reproduction in À la Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Bern: Peter Lang. Trubek, Anne. 2001. “American Literary realism and the problem of Trompe l’Oeil Painting”. Mosaic. A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 34 (3): 35–54.

The Iconic (In)difference Pietro Conte

1   Homo Pictor The opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is set in a desolate arid region millions of years ago, where a group of hominids is first seen munching on bushes and meager green plants amid a herd of tapirs. After being driven away from their water hole by a rival tribe, the defeated apes huddle together in a dark cave. As night falls, their eyes wide open make us, the spectators, aware of the countless unknown dangers they are afraid of: it is a matter of life and death, a Darwinian struggle for survival in which the fittest rule and the weak die. Overpowered by the fearsome antagonists and deprived of the most essential element to the lives in the desert, Kubrick’s hero apes seem to be doomed to perish. At dawn the next day, however, one of them notices a matte black rectangular slab standing perfectly upright among the rocks in front of the cave. Excited by the abrupt appearance of the towering object, he wakes his mates up and draws their attention to the enigmatic monolith by repeatedly raising his chin so as to point at it. All together, the apes chaotically leave the cave, form a circle around the slab, and start approaching it with extreme caution, flicking out a finger to touch its surface. Both the animals’ screaming and the unsettling sounds of György Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna associated with the apes’ tentative approaches to the monolith gradually increase in volume and in complexity, until the hominids finally pluck up the courage to carefully examine the mysterious object.

P. Conte (*) Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_28

467

468 

P. CONTE

At this point, the camera takes on the subjective perspective of “Moonwatcher” (the name traditionally given to the ape leader) and shows the monolith from an extremely low angle as it aligns with the sun rising at its top and a sliver of the moon visible above it. Seen from this quite unusual viewpoint, the slab directs his (and our own) gaze away from his (and our own) terrestrial origins toward the solar system and beyond, as if this would be his (and our own) future destination. At the music’s zenith, the film cuts back to the absolute silence of the desert landscape, where it seems like nothing had really changed. Yet this is not the case. After showing the ape-men once again ambling around by a collection of bones, the camera focuses on Moonwatcher scratching about in search of some edible vegetables, roots, or tubers. The shot of dawn over monolith is cut back to briefly, immediately after which Moonwatcher seems to have an epiphany: the animal skeleton, which the ape leader had ignored until then, suddenly catches his complete attention. As in a state of deep meditation, he keeps observing it with great care, tilting his head from side to side. He then lifts a large bone and starts striking—first tentatively, then with greater force and enthusiasm—the other bones. As he eventually smashes the skull with his newly fashioned club, two cutaways show a slayed tapir collapsing to the ground. The crucial importance of the moment is emphasized by the triumphal fanfare of Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the next scene, we see the apes eating meat, the kind of food that they had not realized had been wandering around all the while as they nearly died from starvation. They then move back to the water hole, where Moonwatcher, now able to walk upright, uses his club to bludgeon the leader of the rival tribe to death and chase off the rest. The victorious alpha male tosses his weapon into the air, where a monumental match-cut from the bone to an orbiting space-station propels us forward millions of years (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1  Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, screen capture

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

469

The first segment of Kubrick’s “epic drama” has been the subject of unending discussion, and it still remains open to multiple interpretations. From the perspective of image studies, what matters most is that the transition from ape to human is conceived of as resting upon the ability to see something as something else, a skill provided by imagination, which Plato significantly called eikasia, namely, the faculty of producing eikones. The idea that the imaginative power of “seeing as” played a key role in human evolution and in the development of cognitive thinking recurs as a veritable leitmotif throughout the scenes, being first illustrated by Moonwatcher’s use of his chin as a pointing device to indicate the monolith. With its smooth, jet black, sharp-edged, and perfectly regular surface, the slab stands out from the surroundings as something alien to the landscape, an unnatural object that cannot be but the product of a will and of some form of culture, however enigmatic and indefinite. This contrast, epitomized by the monolith, between nature and culture is also implicit in Moonwatcher’s gesture: the ape leader utilizes his chin as an index, as a tool to signal his fellow hominids the appearance of the uncanny new object. In so doing, he makes his own body an image. When someone points to something, we do not look at the tip of her finger, but rather at the indicated object. The finger turns into a sign that refers to something different than itself: freed from its subservience to the most elementary tasks of grasping, holding, and manipulating, it is repurposed to become a pointer (as in the German word for “index”, that is, Zeigefinger, meaning, literally, the “finger” that “shows”). A distance from nature and from the most basic needs related to physical survival is crucial for culture to arise and for an animal to become human. This distance is first provided by the image, which presents something and yet, precisely through this “something”, points away from itself to what it (re)presents. Thus, the performative act of seeing something as something else requires a simultaneous recognition of similarities and differences between the two things involved: thanks to imagination, a finger turns into a pointer, while at the same time it clearly remains what it is—a finger. The notion that the ability of seeing-as is rooted in the faculty of imagination as the main distinguishing feature of human beings resurfaces in the famous scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Moonwatcher suddenly realizes that the bone can be used as a tool. Ontologically, no change occurred in the object that would alter its true nature: the bone is still a bone. And yet, for the very first time, it is seen as something else, namely, as a weapon. What emerges is the possibility of employing a natural thing as something different from a natural thing. This potentiality, which would then turn into actuality at the exact moment when Moonwatcher hits his rival, is only granted by the emergence of the human gaze. The birth of technique and, with it, of culture, will lead humans, in a distant future, to the invention of technology, symbolized in Kubrick’s movie by the rotating space ship. The match-cut (possibly the most brilliant in the whole history of cinema) from the bone-as-a-tool to the much more advanced tool of the vaguely bone-shaped spacecraft gives visual expression to the analogic power of the human mind. To be sure, imagination is the

470 

P. CONTE

faculty of producing analogies. And analogy means seeing the same as different, establishing a caesura between the natural, empirical existence of things and their possible cultural meanings. Apes evolved into humans as soon as an embryonic form of culture appears, which is to say, as soon as a distance is given between securing the immediate needs for survival and accessing the necessarily mediated domain of meanings. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, this distance is first granted by the development not of a verbal but of an iconic form of communication, that is, by Moonwatcher’s ability to turn his own body into an image and to use his chin as an index in a primordial form of deixis. The “dawn of man”—as the title card of the prehistoric prelude to Kubrick’s masterpiece significantly reads—is the dawn of homo pictor: The image is a deeply rooted need of human being as such. Quite elementary manipulations are enough to make something not simply “occur” but “show” itself in the undifferentiated continuum of the physical world and disclose a meaning to the eye […]. The “iconic” is therefore based on a “difference” produced by the very act of seeing. This difference is what makes it possible to see something as something else, like for instance a few strokes as a figure. To define something as something is a basic act of conferring meaning—an act that is not the exclusive prerogative of the linguistic domain, since it extends to the relationship between the eye and the physical world as well. No matter how inconspicuous the threshold between mere thing and visual artefact may seem, a caesura is in any case established. The physical appearing of something non-physical that becomes visible in and through that very difference marks the dawn of man. The human being was born as homo pictor long before he defined himself as zoon logon echon. (Boehm 2004, 37–38)

2  Metaphor as a Paradigm To perceive analogies—that is, to see things as something different from simply what they ontologically are, transforming them into cultural objects—proved to be essential for human nature as such. First and foremost, the “power of images” (Freedberg 1989) is the power of performing a cut between the natural and the cultural meaning of things. In contemporary image studies, this caesura has been labeled “iconic difference”, a notion introduced by German art historian and aesthetician Gottfried Boehm as the theoretical crux proper of a genuine “image criticism [Bildkritik]” (Boehm 2011, 170). One finds the basic idea underlying this concept already sketched out in a text dating to 1978, Towards a Hermeneutics of the Image, where Boehm begins to meditate on the “convergent and at the very same time contrasting relationship between what can be defined as the ‘image language’ and the verbal language of communication” (Boehm 1978, 444). In its most general formulation, iconic difference thus refers to the distinctive features of “image acts” (Bredekamp 2015), whose performative character cannot be reduced to, or translated into, the equally performative character of linguistic acts. This is also

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

471

the core argument of the so-called iconic turn and of the assumption that images are to be accorded a specific immanent order, which, though never implying a withdrawal from language, nonetheless highlights “a difference vis à vis language” (Boehm 2006a, 12). The main issue concerns whether and to what extent image “language” should be regarded as analogous to verbal language. In this respect, Boehm’s theory of the iconic difference owes much to German philosopher of art Konrad Fiedler (Boehm is the editor of the two-­ volume German edition of Fiedler’s essays on art and aesthetics (Fiedler 2001)) celebrated as “perhaps the only author to have paved the way for a hermeneutic of the image by insisting on the necessity of a logic of the visible” (Boehm 1978, 446). As has been pointed out (Majetschak 1997), Fiedler’s doctrine developed through a close dialectical confrontation with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s expressivist theory of verbal language, according to which words do not merely constitute a nomenclature of labels for concepts that would be offered ready-made to the mind by the self-sufficiency of perception, and the function of language is not limited to merely attributing conventional tags to already existing ideas that should, in turn, be regarded as mental copies of already existing “things in themselves”. Humboldt’s philosophy has no room for the copy-theory of knowledge. Language is not merely designative, for it continuously produces new forms (and therefore new concepts) that would not come into being without it. As “the generative organ of thought [das bildende Organ des Gedankens]” (Humboldt 1836, 151), language grants us access to the world sub specie linguistica. Far from being the mere “adventitious or epiphenomenal outward manifestation or garb of thought for the utilitarian purpose of communication” (Aarsleff 1988, XIX), language is understood here as an original (or, to put it with Humboldt’s follower Ernst Cassirer, as a symbolic) form through which man actually constructs the world. In this sense, each language engenders nothing less than a specific worldview, so that the differences between languages are to be explained in terms of different worldviews: “The interdependence of thought and word makes it clear that languages are not really a means to represent the already-known truth, but rather to discover the previously unknown truth. The difference between one language and another is not one of sounds and signs, but one of worldviews” (Humboldt 1820, 255). In his most important essay, Concerning the Origin of Artistic Activity (1887), Fiedler takes his cue from the Humboldtian notion of language and from the idea that words cut up the chaotic, undifferentiated synthesis that the mind draws from sensory experience, thus securing the existence itself of concepts. Thanks to language we do gain access to reality—not to reality in itself, though, but rather to linguistic reality. The marvel of language, Fiedler concludes, is not that it “means a being, but that it is a being” (1887, 1: 120). Yet the same holds true for all other domains of human spiritual activity, including art. No reality can be given to the human mind that is not linked to a specific form, be it of words, tones, or images. And just as the different languages do

472 

P. CONTE

not merely say one and the same pre-constituted world, but each of them calls into being a different world, so the different art styles do not represent, in a more or less perfect way, a pre-existing reality, but each of them gives birth to a different reality. Fiedler applies Humboldt’s conception of language as a formative energeia to the realm of visuality and to seeing as a creative, perpetually structuring, form-giving activity that does not make available outside reality in itself, but a purely visual experience of reality that arises only from and for the eye and possesses distinctive qualities which are not to be found in any other kind of sensory experience. Such qualities are nothing other than light and colors, which in the ordinary perceptual processes give rise to an incorporeal, extremely unstable, elusive world that we can only momentarily and precariously grasp. Artistic activity is a spiritual-bodily process that makes it possible to progress from the confusion and indefiniteness of the natural process of vision to the stability and exactitude of its external expression. As a consequence, this conception undermines the whole notion of mimesis as just a copy-making of an already existing reality. The creative process that begins with ordinary seeing and only through the artist’s hand leads to the shaping of expressive forms does not aim to slavishly reproduce or transcript external reality “as it is”. On the contrary, it consists in making visible—in different and ever-changing ways—the process of visibility itself: “It is only through the activity of the artist that the visibility of a visible thing frees itself from that thing and now appears as an independent, autonomous structure” (Fiedler 1887, 192). To sum up, verbal language and image “language” have in common that they both transform the “raw” material of naturally given things so as to create—literally—a cultural, human world where “the crude character” of natural objects disappears and the material is “forced to deny and disavow its very nature” (Barasch 1998, 129). Such transformative power which is the hallmark of all symbolic forms is precisely what Boehm describes as the fundamental structure at the basis of both words and images, which therefore share “a very same figurality [Bildlichkeit]” (1978, 447). This image-character inherent to the iconic as well as to the verbal domain of human expression is best illustrated through the notion of the metaphor, which is not to be interpreted as simply the rhetorical device by which a characteristic of one object is ascribed to another, different but at the same time, in a certain way, similar to it. On the contrary, Boehm uses the concept in a far more radical sense in order to stress that any language (i.e., language as such) is originally and unavoidably metaphorical. To be sure, this comes as the logical conclusion of Humboldt’s argument that words result from an autonomous, creative activity of constant shaping and reshaping the chaotic wealth of sensory intuition into a linguistic form. Metaphors as figures of speech are in this sense only a particular case of the essentially metaphorical nature of language tout court. In the monumental Introduction to his treatise on the Kawi language, Humboldt remarked that metaphors, which had “wonderfully captured the youthful sensibility of earlier ages”, become over time “so worn out in daily

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

473

use that they scarcely continue to be felt” (Humboldt 1836, 87). Friedrich Nietzsche would reiterate this in his short essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, where he described language as originating from a process of “transference [Übertragung]”: “A nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor” (Nietzsche 1873, 82). From this perspective, any concept is but the residue of a primitive process of transference, that is, of an original metaphorical activity (trans-ferre being the Latin equivalent for the Greek meta-pherein). The formation of metaphors is presented as “the fundamental drive” of human nature (88). As is well known, the idea that language is essentially metaphorical was later taken up by Hans Blumenberg, who made it the cornerstone of his theoretical system. Interestingly, the father of “metaphorology” (Blumenberg 1960) draws a parallel between his own way of interpreting metaphors and the notion of “symbol” as outlined in the 59th section of the Critique of Judgement, where Immanuel Kant crucially observed that in language we have many indirect presentations modelled upon an analogy enabling the expression in question to contain, not the proper schema for the concept, but merely a symbol for reflection. Thus the words “ground” (support, basis), “to depend” (to be held up from above), to “flow” from (instead of to follow), “substance” (as Locke puts it: the support of accidents), and numberless others, are not schematic, but rather symbolic hypotyposes, and express concepts without employing a direct intuition for the purpose, but only drawing upon an analogy with one, i.e. transferring the reflection upon an object of intuition to quite a new concept, and one with which perhaps no intuition could ever directly correspond. (Kant 1790, 180)

It should now come as no surprise that in the introductory essay to What Is an Image?—a multiauthor volume standing as a milestone in the debate on the iconic turn—Boehm refers precisely to Kant, Humboldt, Fiedler, Nietzsche, and Blumenberg to make clear what the common trait is between the verbal and the iconic. The emphasis on the necessarily figural character of language is meant to highlight that there is no logos without images. But how is it that metaphor, a notion that seems to pertain solely to the linguistic domain of human expression, can be taken as nothing less than “the fundamental model of figurality” and hence as a synonym for the concept of iconic difference? Why should it be considered as a means “to shed light on the true essence of images” (Boehm 1994, 28)?

3  A Fundamental Contrast Boehm argues that both words and pictures participate in the notion of “contrast” which lies at the core of the metaphor as the poietic juxtaposition of terms that are not usually associated with each other. Such a combination

474 

P. CONTE

unpredictably generates a unity that discloses new constellations of meaning precisely through the contrast between the single terms that make up the metaphor. In this sense, the metaphor itself appears as a paradoxical harmonic dissonance, a construct that manages to reconcile seemingly incompatible elements without, however, hiding their original incompatibility. This is where the similarity between the linguistic and the iconic lies. Images, too, are characterized by a fundamental contrast that Boehm (1994, 30) describes as nothing less than the “birth ground of iconic meaning”: it is the contrast thanks to which “a piece of coloured surface can provide access to unprecedented sensory and spiritual visions”, so that “something becomes something to be looked at” (21). In this case, iconic difference refers to the opposition between the material support or vehicle (Träger) of the image and the meaning or sense (Sinn) that emerges in and through that vehicle. It is related to the fact that, just as we have learned from Kubrick’s movie, “actual reality can be seen as something different from what it is […]. Matter turns into meaning” (Boehm 2004, 52). As Boehm repeatedly points out, the logos of images is essentially based on such a generation of a surplus of sense: Whatever an artist aimed to represent in the twilight darkness of prehistoric caves, in the sacred context of icon painting, or in the inspired space of the modern atelier owes its existence, its shareability and its powerful effect to the specific optimization of what we call “iconic difference”. This is both a visual and a logic power that is characteristic of all images, which belong to the material culture and are invariably inscribed into physical matter, yet at the same time disclose a meaning that goes beyond the sphere of mere physical reality. (Boehm 1994, 30)

This surplus of sense with respect to physical reality is what characterizes the image as a “real irreality”, “a thing and at the same time a non-thing, something halfway between actual reality and the immateriality of dreams” (Boehm 2004, 37). All images draw their meanings from an operation of “covering” the physical support and making it somehow invisible or transparent; and it is only through this “devisualization” that a different meaning—a meaning that has no material referent—can be visualized. The act of making something invisible creates a new, specifically iconic visibility, which is grounded (and here we come to a new formulation of the notion of iconic difference) in the mutual relationship and sense-generating contrast between opacity and transparency of the medium. This peculiar form of making visible cannot be properly “said”; it can only be experienced (and, therefore, produced) by the activity of the eye. In this regard, Boehm’s theory of the iconic difference puts forward a radical criticism of iconology as the traditional way of describing and explaining images. As systematized by Erwin Panofsky in his highly influential essay Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art (1939), the iconological method of art historical interpretation famously rests on three different levels or “strata”. In the pre-iconographical description of

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

475

the work of art, pure forms—that is, “certain configurations of line and colour, or certain peculiarly shaped lumps of bronze or stone, as representations of natural objects” (Panofsky 1939, 28; emphasis added)—are identified as carriers of primary or natural meanings, the so-called artistic motifs. In the second level, that of iconography, a name is given to the subject(s) portrayed on the basis of one or more written sources. In this case, it is the interpreter’s task to detect the “themes or concepts” (29) that the artwork is meant to instantiate. In the third and final level, iconology focuses on the fact that any particular representation embodies far more general principles that reveal “the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion— qualified by one personality and condensed into one work” (30). Clearly enough, both iconography and iconology aim at reading the meaning of a given image by referring to something external to the image itself. While the former makes use of written sources to recognize the depicted scene and the characters involved, the latter focuses on the particular way in which that scene and those characters are represented to shed light on the cultural milieu of a certain period in a certain place. Iconography deals with the “stories and allegories” (29) underlying the image, and iconology has to do with the symbolic values embodied by the image. The crucial point is that in both cases the meaning of the image—what it has to “say”—is clarified by means of something other from the image itself, with the result that Panofsky’s hermeneutics is dominated by a fundamental heteronomy whereby the text to which an image refers becomes, literally, its linguistic pre-text: the image would be nothing but the re-presentation of something that would already exist before and independently of the image itself. It is precisely this anti-Fiedlerian conclusion that Boehm aims to challenge as he points out that those who are fascinated by images in the most fundamental way, those who have thoroughly examined and analysed great numbers of them and possess what one could call an image-sense, know with absolute certainty that there is such a thing as an iconic intelligence [ikonische Intelligenz] that the artist restores in order to free himself from the demands of language, from canonical texts, or from other mimetic instances, and to establish evidences of a unique type, also—and especially—in cases involving e.g. traditional historical images that re-tell the time-­ worn content of the bible, mythology, or history. (Boehm 2006a, 11)

The notion of “the iconic” is here brought to the fore as the backbone of a specific image logic insurmountably different from the logic of verbal language. In order to make clear what is at stake, in 1978, Boehm coined a new term, Ikonik, a noun meant to describe image thinking as the autonomous, productive ability of the gaze. This concept was subsequently taken up by Boehm’s friend and colleague, Max Imdahl, who made it the crux of his art theory. After emphasizing that “iconic” comes from eikon just as “logic” comes from logos, thus insisting on the urgent need for a specific logic of the visual, Imdahl argues

476 

P. CONTE

that any true understanding of the image qua image must lead to the recognition of not only what happens within the representation but also how it happens. In a way, this had already been underlined by Panofsky himself (1915, 466) as he had stated that “‘form’ (however general it may be) plays a fundamental role in the sphere of ‘content’”, its “stylistic meaning” being also part of the content-values. According to Imdahl, however, to admit that form and content, syntax and semantics, are nothing but two sides of the same coin does not, per se, mean to solve the problem, for all depends on what is meant by “form” and “content”. The notion of form which Panofsky alludes to is the mimetic reproduction of reality, and this does not exhaust, from Imdahl’s perspective, the complexity of the formal aspects of an image. The very same lines, the very same colors that are at the core of the iconographic “recognizing gaze [wiedererkennendes Sehen]” can also be the object of a “seeing gaze [sehendes Sehen]”, if only they are no longer understood as mere vehicles of a pre-determined content, but rather as simply what they are, namely, lines, directions, spots of color, in a word, visual fields of forces. The formal aspects of an image are in themselves meaningful not because they refer to something else that might be also, and perhaps better, expressed in words, but because they bring out aspects and relationships that are purely iconic, non-predicative, hence not fully translatable into verbal language. Images ask viewers to not only recognize a given content but also and foremost focus on how their gaze works: “Learning how to see is unlearning how to recognise” (Lyotard 1971, 151). Importantly, Imdahl describes these two different forms of gaze not as mutually exclusive but rather as complementing each other so as to generate a new form of “cognizing gaze [erkennendes Sehen]” (Imdahl 1980, 92) that, though never forgetting Panofsky’s methodological lesson, seeks to integrate it with an explanation of the specifically iconic ways through which a given image impacts upon the beholder. As Boehm (1995, 30) argues, to ignore such logic of the images is to fail to recognize their power and, with it, their irreplaceable meaning: “We lose sight of the fundamental otherness [Andersheit] of the image with respect to verbal language insofar as we focus solely on the iconographic identification of the content of pictures. […] To describe an image must mean more than just to reverbalise its linguistic content”.

4  Toward Iconic Indifference So far, we have been focusing on the distinction between the verbal and the visual order, mostly in relation to the iconic turn. Yet when looking at the many examples given by Boehm over decades in order to explain what his notion of the iconic difference accounts for, one cannot fail to notice that the German art historian has more and more insisted on the great variety of meanings that the “basic ambivalence” at the core of the iconic can assume when applied to different contexts and considered from different perspectives. Indeed, ikonische Differenz seems like an umbrella term (cf. Richtmeyer 2017) or a heuristic tool

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

477

that can be used in conceptually multifarious variants “without being captured into a theoretical overall system” (Boehm 2004, 16). So, in one case, it refers to the contrast between figure(s) and background, “between an encompassing overall plane and what it includes as internal events” (Boehm 1994, 30). Elsewhere, it indicates the phenomenological opposition where one or more “thematic focuses” capturing our attention relate to a surrounding “un-­ thematic field” (Boehm 2004, 48–49). Or it can designate the antithesis between the scenic simultaneity of the image and the linguistic successiveness typical of both spoken and written language: The image establishes a perceptible contrast between the surface and the properties recognisable on it, between a “one-after-the-other [Nacheinander]” and an “all-at-once [Aufeinmal]” which, unlike in texts or pieces of music, reveals its presence in a flash (although one may well plunge herself in the study of details). (Boehm 1995, 30)

Furthermore, ikonische Differenz can also describe the fundamental “indeterminacy”, “ambivalence”, or “vagueness” that is a positive and distinctive property of all images, whose power of generating meaning “does not transpire according to the pattern of predication (S is P), but rather according to one of qualitative perception of that which reveals itself in iconic difference” (Boehm 2006b, 228). This brief overview clearly reveals the wide variety of meanings that the concept of iconic difference can cover. And yet, as Boehm himself underlines, the notion has to be primarily referred “not to single phenomena but to the conditions of the medium itself” (1994, 29). In other words, iconic difference is meant to describe the image as a medial phenomenon, that is, as a peculiar way of mediating experience. Without a medium, there is no image. In this specific sense, iconic difference designates the essential distinction between a given picture and its visual environment, that is, between reality in the flesh and the peculiar irreality (or quasi-reality) of the image world. The mediateness that defines all images qua images goes hand in hand with their separateness from the real world. Traditionally, this separateness has been ensured by some kind of framing device, be it the frame of a painting, the pedestal of a statue, the theater stage, the borders of television, cinema, and mobile phone screens, or the so-called institutional frames like museums and art galleries. All these frames are but visual instantiations of the theoretical principle according to which the image is to be conceived of as a caesura, as a cut from the everydayness and “fleshiness” of the real world. The frame delimits the pictorial space—it is the gatekeeper of the image world. To access this world, one needs a pass, so to speak, which ultimately amounts to adopting the right aesthetic attitude, namely, the attitude of contemplation, pretense, and making as-if: “All picture frames define the identity of the fiction” (Stoichita 1993, 90). Significantly, “contemplation” comes from the Latin templum, which means the area of sky or land demarcated and consecrated by the augur for the taking

478 

P. CONTE

of auspices. According to Servius (ad Aen. I, 446), templum is the same word as the Greek temenos, from temno, “to cut off”. To con-template something is to circumscribe—that is, to frame—a certain surface from the field of the visible in order to endow it with a special significance, to “consecrate” it. In this case, iconic difference is a label for the possibility of distinguishing between images and non-images, between fiction and non-fiction. As a matter of fact, the double regime of picturality consists in the very fact that an image, just to be an image, must rest on a difference—however little it may be— between pictorial object and pictorial presentation: “The image displays something, and in doing so it displays itself” (Boehm 2001b, 16). Or, to put it with Martin Seel (2010, 177–78), “the picture not only contains certain appearances (of colour and form), it refers to its own internal references. It is through this reference to its appearing that it first becomes a picture”. Now, precisely the mediatedness and separateness that have been traditionally recognized as the sine qua non of all images are being increasingly challenged by two different kinds of iconic phenomena. The threshold, established by the frame, which keeps the fictional world of the image apart from flesh-­ and-­blood reality, can be trespassed from two different points in two opposite directions: from the image world to the real world, or vice versa. The first movement is best exemplified by hyperrealistic figures. Even though they are the non plus ultra of representational pictures, they do their utmost to trick the viewer into believing (if only for a moment) that they are perceiving reality in the flesh, not just its representation. The fusion of image and prototype can make the beholder unaware of pictorial differentiation, which is a necessary condition for experiencing something as a representation of something else. In order to achieve maximum transparency and convey the impression of non-mediateness, hyperrealistic pictures must dissimulate all elements that might betray their nature as representational artifacts. Take, for instance, the paradigmatic example of wax figures: as pointed out by Edmund Husserl (not coincidentally a source of great inspiration to Boehm), they present perceptual appearances of human beings that coincide so perfectly with the human beings depicted that the “moments of difference” between the image and its sujet cannot produce “a clean-cut and clear consciousness of difference; that is to say, a secure image consciousness” (1904–1905, 44). In this case, the notion of iconic difference does not refer to merely the physical differences between (1) the medium and the image that appears in or through it, or between (2) the image and its referent. On the contrary, it also alludes to the difference between two intentional acts, perception (Wahrnehmung) on the one side, pictorial consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) on the other. Here “the question of iconic difference becomes the question of the perception of difference” (Purgar 2015, 166): an image must be recognized as an image, that is, one must be aware (perceptually aware) of a certain difference between the image and what appears in (or through) it. Now, the objective of hyperrealistic pictures is to conceal precisely their being pictures: they are aimed to leave the fictional dimension of representation and enter our real-life environment. To

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

479

reach this goal, they must not be displayed in a context that could reveal what they strive to conceal, namely, their representational status. And given that frames are among the most conspicuous “moments of difference”, for they “say” to the beholder: “What you see in here is but an image”, we can conclude that hyperrealistic pictures and trompe l’œil in general require to be set out of frame. A wax figure is more likely to trick the viewer if it is placed on top of the museum staircase or among the shelves of the bookshop rather than inside an exhibition room behind a velvet rope. If they succeed in deceiving the onlookers by passing themselves off as fellow human beings, hyperrealistic figures are no longer images, for they do not show any iconic difference whatsoever, and therefore turn mimesis into perfect mimicry: “The image is neither the non-different simulacrum nor the self-­ disappearing camouflage; rather, it is the difference of the imaginary” (Boehm 2007, 39). This is where Boehm’s reflections meet the traditional criticism of mimesis as a process of duplicating reality. Contrary to “weak” images, such as wax figures, “strong” images—that is, images in the truest and only proper sense of the word—must provide the represented sujet with an “increase in existence [Zuwachs an Sein]” (Boehm 1996). However, crossing the borders of the frame, and thus the boundaries of representation, can also proceed in exactly the opposite direction as hyperrealistic figures, that is, from the real world to (or, more precisely, into) the image world. The ultimate goal of this second movement is to “pull” viewers into the image, plunging them in self-consistent virtual worlds. Throughout the history of mankind, the dream of immersion has resurfaced countless times, as attested by myths, legends, and science fiction narratives, from the allegory of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection on a water surface only to drown in the attempt to reach it, to the famous thought experiment of the “brain in a vat” proposed by Daniel Dennett (1978), taken up by Hilary Putnam (1981), and adapted into film by the Wachowski sisters with The Matrix (1999). Yet immersion is far from simply a matter of dreaming or imagination, as demonstrated by the stunning development of interactive virtual environments that elicit in the experiencer a strong feeling of being incorporated into alternative realities which convey the impression of immediateness, presentness, and framelessness heretofore regarded as the exclusive prerogative of flesh-bound reality (Pinotti 2017; Conte 2020). Boehm seems to allude to this fact as he observes that electronic simulation techniques make representation turn into a perfect as-if, so much so that Postmodernism tended to see the difference between image and reality itself as dwindling: factum and fictum converge. The media industry’s hostility towards images is unbroken, not because it forbids or prevents the production of images, on the contrary: because it unleashes a flood of images whose fundamental tendency is towards suggestion, towards an iconic replacement of reality. This tendency has always been based on concealing the limits which are inherent in iconicity itself. The much-invoked new age of the image is, indeed, iconoclastic. (Boehm 1994, 35)

480 

P. CONTE

Fig. 2  Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld, 2016, screen capture

Both hyperrealistic pictures and immersive virtual realities aim to conceal their being “nothing but images”, striving for a zero degree of iconic difference: they tend toward iconic indifference. And at this point, one may be reminded of the scene of the TV series Westworld where one of the main characters, before entering an uncanny “amusement” park designed to allow wealthy visitors to live out their most perverse fantasies with hyperrealistic androids, asks one of the hostesses whether she herself is a real person of flesh and blood. Her (or perhaps its) answer leaves no room for further inquiry: “If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?” (Fig. 2).

References Aarsleff, Hans. 1988. “Introduction” to Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (1836), VII–LXV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barasch, Moshe. 1998. Modern Theories of Art 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky. New York: New York University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1960. “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie”. Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 6: 5–142. Boehm, Gottfried. 1978. “Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes”. In: Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften. Ed. by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gottfried Boehm. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Boehm, Gottfried. 1994 [2006]. “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder”. In: Was ist ein Bild? Ed. by Gottfried Boehm. München: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 1995. “Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache”. In: Beschreibungskunst-Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer. München: Wilhelm Fink.

  THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 

481

Boehm, Gottfried. 1996. “Zuwachs an Sein: Hermeneutische Reflexion und bildende Kunst”. In: Die Moderne und die Grenze der Vergegenständlichung. Ed. by HansGeorg Gadamer. München: Galerie Klueser. Boehm, Gottfried (ed). 2001a. Homo Pictor. München: Saur. Boehm, Gottfried. 2001b [2012]. “Representation, Presentation, Presence: Tracing the Homo Pictor”. In: Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. Ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, and Bernhard Giesen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Boehm, Gottfried. 2004 [2007]. “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder”. In: Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 2006a [2010]. “Letter to W.J.T. Mitchell”. Trans. by Jennifer Jenkins. In: The Pictorial Turn. Ed. by Neal Curtis. London and New York: Routledge. Boehm, Gottfried. 2006b [2009]. “Indeterminacy. On the Logic of the Image”. In: Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image between the Visible and the Invisible. Ed. by Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf. New York and London: Routledge. Boehm, Gottfried. 2007. “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens. Deiktische Wurzeln des Bildes”. In: Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 2011. “Ikonische Differenz”. Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik, 1: 170–78. Bredekamp, Horst. 2015 [2018]. Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency. Trans., ed., and adapted by Elizabeth Clegg. Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter. Conte, Pietro. 2020. Unframing Aesthetics. Milan and London: Mimesis International. Dennett, Daniel C. 1978 [1981]. “Where am I?” In: The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Mind and Soul. Ed. by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. New York: Basic Books. Fiedler, Konrad. 1887 [2001]. “Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit”. In: Schriften zur Kunst, 2 vols. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, vol. 1. München: Wilhelm Fink. Fiedler, Konrad. 2001. Schriften zur Kunst, 2 vols. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, vol. 1. München: Wilhelm Fink. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1820 [1822]. “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung”. In: Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aus den Jahren 1820–1821. Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1836 [1988]. On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. Trans. by Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund, 1904–1905 [2005]. “Phantasy and Image Consciousness”. In: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Trans. by John B. Brough, ed. by Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer. Imdahl, Max. 1980 [1996]. Giotto—Arenafresken. Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik. München: Fink. Kant, Immanuel. 1790 [2007]. Critique of Judgement. Trans. by James Creed Meredith, ed. by Nicholas Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

482 

P. CONTE

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1971 [2011]. Discourse, Figure. Trans. by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Majetschak, Stefan. 1997. “Die Sprachlichkeit der Kunst. Konrad Fiedlers Sprach- und Kunsttheorie im Lichte der Sprachphilosophie Wilhelm von Humboldts”. In: Auge und Hand. Konrad Fiedlers Kunsttheorie im Kontext. Ed. by Stefan Majetschack. München: Wilhelm Fink. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1873 [1990]. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”. In: Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Trans. and ed. by Daniel Breazeale. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1915. “Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst”. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 10: 460–67. Panofsky, Erwin. 1939 [1955]. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art”. In: Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in and on Art History. Garden City and New York: Doubleday & C. Pinotti, Andrea. 2017. “Self-Negating Images: Towards An-Iconology”. Proceedings 1: 1–9 (https://doi.org/10.3390/proceedings1090856). Purgar, Krešimir. 2015. “What is not an Image (Anymore)? Iconic Difference, Immersion, and Iconic Simultaneity in the Age of Screens”. Phainomena. Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, 24 (92–93): 145–170. Putnam, Hilary. 1981 “Brains in a Vat”. In: Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richtmeyer, Ulrich. 2017. “Ikonische Differenz”. Image, 26: 82–94. Seel, Martin. 2010. The Aesthetics of Appearing. Trans. by John Farell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stoichita, Victor I. 1993 [2015]. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting. New, improved, and updated edition. Trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen. London and Turnhout: Brepols.

Seeing-as, Seeing-in, Seeing-with: Looking Through Pictures Emmanuel Alloa

What do we see what we look at pictures? What kind of vision is conveyed by and through pictorial representation? Such questions have been kept aesthetics and visual studies busy for decades. As it turns out, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein has proven to be a major source of inspiration in these discussions, and in particular his notion of “seeing-as”, which is sometimes also referred to as “aspect-seeing”. Indeed, it seems plausible to say that pictures never show things in general, but always only in a certain respect, from a certain point of view or under a certain aspect. Besides, what holds true for pictorial representation seems equally valid for the stance taken in front of pictures: looking at pictures requires seeing them in a certain way, that is, as pictures. Considering Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) as a rectangular object made of oil, canvas, and stretcher bars does not exactly correspond to the kind of vision pictures generally require (Fig. 1). Pictures, in that respect, usually present themselves as objects that should be seen as depictions of something else they are about, and in the case of the Hopper painting, say, of a late-night scene in an American diner, with four human figures seen through a wedge of glass. Other descriptions would be possible too, of course, such as one which would present Hopper’s 1942 painting as a depiction of solitude in high industrial modernity. While initially drawing upon Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing-as” too for devising a robust theory of pictorial representation, Richard Wollheim has

E. Alloa (*) University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_29

 

E. ALLOA

Fig. 1  Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, oil on canvas, 84.1 × 152.4  cm; Art Institute of Chicago. Artstor (in public domain)

come to see flaws in applying the theory of aspectual perception to pictures. Instead, Wollheim suggested an alternative concept, that of “seeing-in” (of which premises can be found in Wittgenstein too, in fact). Rather than saying that a specific object (the physical object taking space on a wall for instance) is seen as the depiction of something it is about, a more adequate description would have an onlooker capable of seeing the depicted content in the object (a late-night scene in a diner in a rectangular canvas covered with oil paint). Both notions—seeing-as and seeing-in—boast a considerable career in aesthetics and visual studies in these last decades and have risen to the status of key concepts in image theory. The chapter assesses the promises but also the limits of these two concepts, when trying to assess how pictures work in relation to their beholders. For sure, one might see a passing cloud as a rabbit as well as seeing a rabbit in a passing cloud. But what happens when this account of our perceptual structure is applied to pictures? Is the logic of pictures, and all the more of artifactual pictures, adequately grasped by transferring onto them merely a feature of our perception? Taking an object to display aspects of something that is not currently present, or using one’s power of imagination for seeing more than what actually meets the eye are certainly crucial features of what spectators do in front of pictures, but it might not grant sufficient space to the logic of pictures themselves, and to their peculiar iconic operations. Theories of depiction, so the argument, have not sufficiently taken into account the pictorial medium itself with and through which we see. The chapter thus critically assesses some of the advantages as well as some of the quandaries that arise when using Wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as” and Wollheim’s concept of “seeing-in” for addressing the plural realities of images. While putting into evidence the tensions that come into play when applying what was initially

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

a theory of the gaze to a theory of the image, the chapter shall subsequently discuss three modes of iconic vision: the propositional seeing-as, the projective seeing-in and the medial seeing-with.

1   Seeing-as In spite of their divergences, most contemporary image theories seem to agree on the fact that the constitution of an image’s meaning is fundamentally codetermined by the gaze directed toward it. Images thus do not have a single sense, but can have plural meanings, depending on the perspective from which one looks at them. Among the most frequently invoked authorities to consolidate such an assertation, we find Ludwig Wittgenstein and his notion of “seeing-­as”. Between 1946 and 1949, Wittgenstein devoted extensive thoughts on the phenomenon of “aspect seeing” as well as to the correlative one of “aspect change”, whereby, in accordance to his own example, in the drawing of a duck’s head, we suddenly invert perspectives and see it as a rabbit head. This phenomenon, also known as Gestalt switch, highlights the connection between sensoriality and meaning: a certain sensuous configuration will be taken as having a certain meaning, or, in this specific case, strokes on the paper will be interpreted as showing a duck, but through a change of attitude, one can also see them as representing a rabbit (Wittgenstein 1993, 204sq., §118sq). In the past decades, Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing-as” has unquestionably risen to the status of a key concept in contemporary theories of depiction, and some authors even ventured as far as claiming that the “as-structure” constitutes the prime feature of iconicity (Asmuth 2006). The adoption of Wittgenstein’s “seeing-as” for image studies can easily be retraced. Virgil Aldrich was among the first to adapt the concept, claiming that the possibility of an image rests on the capacity for aspect seeing (Aldrich 1958), but most influential was Ernst Gombrich with his Art and Illusion in 1960, which states that the question “rabbit or duck?” is the “key to the whole problem of image reading” (Gombrich 1984, 188). Some years later, Richard Wollheim’s first edition of Art and Its Objects asserts that the structure of seeing-­as is sufficient for understanding pictorial representation (Wollheim 1968). It remains to be clarified though whether Wittgenstein’s concept really describes (a) traits of pictorial perception and (b) traits of perception at all. Both can be questioned: Ad (a): When the concept of “seeing-as” is used, mention is often made of Wittgenstein’s analysis of the rabbit-duck drawing, which was initially devised by the Polish-American psychologist Joseph Jastrow (Fig.  2). This example might have induced this misunderstanding, according to which Wittgenstein is providing an analysis of how pictures work. But at closer inspection, it turns out, Wittgenstein only uses the drawing for investigating the grammar of the word “seeing”. First and foremost, the insistence on aspectuality is instrumental in rejecting the idea of an immediate grasp of things: seeing something, Wittgenstein insists, is taking it as something, from a certain point of view, and

 

E. ALLOA

Fig. 2  Joseph Jastrow, Rabbit and duck optical illusion, from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter (in public domain)

thus always already implies a form of interpretation. Perceiving—and here Wittgenstein joins the rank of a decisive insight of Husserlian phenomenology—is never about sensuous data, but of things: the sensation of redness is perceived as that of a tomato, the humming as that of a bee, and so on, and in that respect, the “as-structure” refers to a recognitional moment. Seeing-as thus seems to describe a feature of perceptual experience, but for sure, as it has been pointed out before, Wittgenstein never attempts to explain depiction in terms of seeing-as (Hyman 2006, 255). Ad (b): While Wittgenstein’s image examples thus induced the wrong impression that he was speaking about structures of depiction, the question has been raised whether, when eliciting the grammar of “seeing”, this involved actual perception at all. Indeed, a vast number of examples provided by Wittgenstein rather refer to structures of thinking, where perception only receives an illustrative function to making a point about the limits of one’s linguistic concepts. Indeed, when Wittgenstein talks about “aspect blindness”, he seems to be chiefly interested in a subject’s incapacity of understanding an alternative meaning of a word. The perceptual aspect blindness (i.e., not being able to see the duck in Jastrow’s flip-flop picture) mostly serves as an analogy to conceptual aspect blindness (where the “morphology” of a word creates a screen, occulting alternative ones). While “seeing-as” thus incontestably has to do with a structure of experience, it might very well only refer to “experiencing the meaning of a word” (Wittgenstein 1993, II xi, 210). It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to venture into the discussion about whether “seeing-as” is mostly conceptual or whether it has to be rooted

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

in some kind of sensorial perception nonetheless (for a survey of the various positions, see Day and Krebs 2010), but suffice it to say that it is by no means certain that Wittgenstein “seeing-as” can be seen as a contribution to a theory of perceptual seeing, let alone to seeing images. For now, it might be enough to stress that the seeing-as structure names a structure of propositionality. As mentioned, Ernst Gombrich played an important role in this conceptual import of Wittgenstein’s aspect seeing into visual studies, and the main side-­ effect of such an import was to rebuke a naturalistic conception of pictorial representation. Insisting on aspect seeing means to insist on the “beholder’s share”, or, in Gombrich’s words, “no two-dimensional image can be interpreted as a spatial arrangement without such a constructive contribution of our spatial arrangement” (Gombrich 1969, 41). Such a contribution is then further specified as a kind of projection (Gombrich 1978, 156 f.): we project more into a two-dimensional object than it actually contains, and it is this projecting-­ into which Wollheim then prefers rechristening seeing-in, rather than seeing-as. Before arriving at Wollheim’s conceptual reorientation, though, another moment in the debate must be emphasized. When Gombrich draws on Wittgenstein, he sees in him an ally against a naturalistic approach to seeing; yet, the notion of “seeing-as” also, and simultaneously, yields a propositional overload which he rejects on the other side. According to Gombrich, pictures can’t be explained through a grammar modeled on verbal language: “a picture can no more be true or false than a statement can be blue or green” (Gombrich 1984, 56), inasmuch as pictures, according to Gombrich, are fundamentally non-propositional. Hence an ambiguity in Gombrich’s adoption of a Wittgensteinian framework hasn’t been sufficiently underlined to this day. In short, it could be claimed that while Gombrich retains the active and constructive part of the attention switch between aspects, he contends that this switch is a switch between two propositional contents. This ambiguity might explain the flawed analogy, often stressed by commentators (see, e.g., Lopes 2004, 41): it is hard to see why the rabbit-duck example, which serves to explain a switch between two contents, should be helpful at all for addressing the switch of attention between a perceptual awareness of the material design of a picture and the recognition of its referential content. If Gombrich’s theory of projective depiction is read as a non-propositional rephrasing of Wittgenstein’s seeing-as, this allows for a better understanding of a feature of pictorial experience which has been often debated. While representational seeing might require to imagining seeing things in a surface which aren’t physically present, this insistence on the referential aboutness doesn’t deplete what “aspectuality” means for images. As a matter of fact, to take Nelson Goodman’s example, it is not enough to say that we take an object as a representation of Pickwick, we should say, as long as we aren’t tricked into a trompe-l’oeil illusion, that we have an awareness of being in front of a picture and that we see the picture as a Pickwick-picture (Goodman 1976, ch. 5). Now again, this representational aspect is by far not the only one: pictures often display objects, beings, and states of affairs in certain respects or under certain

 

E. ALLOA

aspects, and quite often, it is this phenomenal aspect which makes for the real significance of the picture. Thus, in pictures we do not simply see the represented subject as such, we see it in a certain guise, for example, we see Pickwick-­ as-­a-clown (Goodman 1976, ch. 5). To use an example that might be particularly speaking: in the case of the photograph of Winston Churchill taken at the age of ten (Alloa 2021, 243, Fig. 5.3), we recognize a number of his adult physical features, just as we note the already characteristic bowler hat. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid seeing him as a child: the picture is a picture of Churchill-as-a-child. If we wanted to sum up the image conception common to those theories, we could formalize pictorial perception as follows: we see pictures as an “x” depicting a “y”. What is more, in many cases, pictures are not only looked at for what they depict, but for the specific way in which they depict, for how they show a “y”. At this point, the difference between ordinary seeing and pictorial seeing is more obvious still: while pedestrian ordinary seeing generally involves an aspectual “seeing-as” that can perfectly go unnoticed, many cases of pictorial seeing imply a kind of “seeing-as-as”, an interest for the depicted aspect. This is particularly true of artistic pictures, but not exclusively (when looking at old vintage family photos, the main goal might not be to identify the persons, but to get a general atmosphere, the sign of times, a zeitgeist). Many other arguments have been put forward to reject the claim that aspect seeing in pictures is equivalent to propositional recognition. Such an attention to the “how” or—in other terms—to the style of the visually organized field is not restricted to the gaze of the art critic or the connoisseur. Experiments with pigeons (i.e., birds with a high capacity of orientation in landscapes seen from above) have shown that through specific training, the pigeons are able to distinguish between cubist and impressionist paintings (Watanabe et al. 1995). It would be hard, however, to seriously attribute a notion of “cubism” or “impressionism” to the birds; and it is improbable that they recognize women, fruits, or rags or the fact that their representation is twisted. Nevertheless, and very strikingly, the pigeon’s identification of the style of painting is almost flawless. Drawing on similar experiments, Arthur Danto thus concluded in his essay Animals as Art Historians: “Pictures as such are not like propositions, nor can we speak of a pictorial language, as Wittgenstein endeavored to do in his Tractatus, since animals demonstrably have pictorial competence while animal propositional—or sententional—competence remains undemonstrated” (Danto 1992, 20). To summarize, transferring “aspect seeing” to the structure of pictorial experience requires taking many other aspects into account, beyond a mere recognition of the represented object, and for that matter, the question has been raised whether “seeing-as” may aptly feature as a necessary condition for iconicity. For sure, the specific pictorial competence that can be acquired or trained is different from the seeing-as insofar as it cannot be taught independently of the perceptive situation. While seeing-as can easily be translated into similar expressions devoid of any sensory dimension such as “interpreting-as”

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

or “understanding-as”, the situated visual discrimination can only be made in front of the object. As opposed to linguistically mediated learning of the propositional content of the “as”, the discrimination is made along lines within the artifact. Or as Danto formulates it, beings without propositional competence but with pictorial competence like pigeons are, though not capable of seeing­as, capable of seeing-in (Danto 1992, 28), which leads to analyzing the second candidate as a defining feature of image vision, the concept of seeing-in introduced by Richard Wollheim.

2   Seeing-in While in his first edition of Art and Its Objects, Richard Wollheim drew on Gombrich’s aspect seeing, considering that the seeing-as was a necessary condition for image vision, he later reworked his position, claiming that what Gombrich describes as the projection into a two-dimensional object should be labeled more aptly as “seeing-in”. The aim of this shift, Wollheim explains, is to better account for the phenomenological situation: In the case of Vermeer’s View of Delft, we may of course say that we take the painting as one of the many paintings representing the Dutch city, and one might even imagine a catalog where all such paintings would be listed, but when looking at pictures, the merely conceptual recognition cannot account for the robustness of the perceptual experience. Rather than saying that we see a canvas—skillfully—covered by paint as a view of Delft, we actually see Delft in the picture. While taking the baton from Gombrich’s idea of projection as a necessary condition for representational seeing, Wollheim also adds a further condition: the localization requirement. Seeing-in is not an unbound form of imaginary projection; the pictorial projection is a projection within the strict boundaries of the material object taken as a picture vehicle. According to Wollheim, while we may analytically distinguish the configurational awareness of the markings on a surface from the recognitional awareness of the picture’s aboutness, in our experience, these two aspects are not temporally separated and make up for what Wollheim calls the simultaneous twofoldness of pictures. This insistence on the twofoldness marks a move away from Gombrich’s disjunctivism, whereby we may only either see what is represented or be attentive to the canvas, but we can never see both at the same time: “To understand the battle horse is for a moment to disregard the plane surface. We cannot have it both ways” (Gombrich 1984, 279). This position has not remained uncriticized. Michael Polanyi contested Gombrich’s disjunctive logic, inasmuch as he showed that the seeing-what and seeing-in do not operate on the same level but correspond to a “focal” and to a “subsidiary” or “peripheral awareness” (Polanyi 1970, 153). Wollheim, in turn, not only contests the claim that “we cannot have it both ways”, he moreover maintains that images require “simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium” (Wollheim 1980, 212). Images are neither fully transparent with respect to their referential object nor totally opaque, exposing

 

E. ALLOA

their material qualities of the medium: according to Wollheim, images always imply an attentional “twofoldness” (a trompe l’oeil would thus not meet the requirements for being an image, and some commentators have criticized Wollheim for such a counterintuitive perspective: see Levinson 1998, 228). To summarize: Wollheim’s concept of seeing-in firstly aims at readjusting the conceptualist bias of the seeing-as logic, which focuses on the fleshed out “recognitional” aspect, in order to rehabilitate a “configurational aspect”. Secondly, it aims at rehabilitating the material, objective qualities of the image’s medium, in which something is seen. This second point, although claimed by Wollheim, can be doubted, however. By insisting on the creational aspect of seeing-in, referring to our capacity to see dragons’ heads in clouds and vampires in a Rorschach inkblot (Fig. 3), Wollheim reduces the “recognitional” dimension intrinsic to seeing-as. But can we distinguish seeing-in from a seeing-­into? In other words: can we distinguish the perception of a form emerging from a canvas and an arbitrary projection onto a surface, regardless of its configuration? As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein’s theory of “aspectual seeing” (Aspektsehen) doesn’t deny its voluntarism. In front of an unstable image such as Jastrow’s rabbit-duck drawing, says Wittgenstein, I need to make a willful choice to change from one aspect to the other: The aspect “is subject to the will” (Wittgenstein 1982, 544). In that respect, seeing-as already implies certain imaginative projections Wollheim is keen on stressing with his conception of seeing-in: “The aspect is dependent on the will. In this way it is like imagination” (Wittgenstein 1982, 452). One might think of Leonardo da Vinci, who is famous for exhorting his apprentice painters to look at stained walls:

Fig. 3  Hermann Rorschach, Inkblot test (bat, butterfly, moth), 1921. Artstor (in public domain)

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. (da Vinci 2008, 173)

Still, according to Wollheim, a difference remains between pure imaginative projection into or onto things and pictorial seeing-in. Thus in order to avoid the impression of arbitrariness, Wollheim is required to introduce a further element: while in standard perception, we may virtually project everything into everything, pictorial seeing-in is only successful when we see in the image what the artist wanted us to see in it. Or, to put it yet differently, Wollheim speaks of a “standard of correctness”, and this standard, he goes on explaining, is entirely defined by “the maker of the maker of the representation, or ‘the artist’ as he is usually called” (Wollheim 1980, 205). A depictional seeing is only successful if and when we see exactly what the maker or “artist” wanted us to see in it. Wollheim has further elaborated on his notion of “seeing-in” in later essays. In the lecture “On Pictorial Representation” (Wollheim 1998), he takes the capacity of seeing-in to be a skill specific to humans (and possibly to some other non-human species), which emerged at some point in the evolutionary history, even before the stage of representation. Being able to imagine things into rock patterns, cave walls, or cloud formations would thus ontogenetically precede the capacity of representing things that aren’t there, through a material depiction. It is symptomatic that Wollheim then seems to omit this difference in the course of this lecture, and seems to equate seeing-in with pictorial representation. While objects can be looked at in many different ways, he asserts, not all of them can claim for the same standard of correctness: “the experience of seeing-in that determines what it represents, or the appropriate experience, is the experience that tallies with the artist’s intention” (Wollheim 1998, 226). If this wasn’t enough, the correct performances of this intention require a specific kind of standard spectators that would be “suitably sensitive, suitably informed, and, if necessary, suitably prompted” (Wollheim 1998, 217). While some artists may spectacularly fail in offering an artifact that would enable to realize their intention—most famously, Balzac’s painter Frenhofer in The Unknown Masterpiece who kept covering his canvas to the point of unrecognizability—the realization of the creator’s intention remains the goal to attain for the spectator. Now, of course, such a normative approach raises a lot of issues: Am I missing the artist’s intention when in a medieval fresco of the Mystical Lamb, I see the lamb in the fresco, but can’t identify it as a proxy for Jesus Christ? Does the artist intention require to see the Savior according to Christian faith or simply the animal which, according to zoological taxonomy, represents a young sheep? Already vast when it comes to figurative depictions, such puzzles are even greater when we move to abstract painting. But basically, it is hard to see why the artist’s intention should be the sole reference for a

 

E. ALLOA

picture’s meaning: After all, if the meaning of an utterance can very well diverge from what a speaker intended to say, why wouldn’t the same apply to depictions? It is somewhat curious how Wollheim, who claims to advocate an “object theory” of images, counterbalances the excessive subjectivity of the spectator’s gaze with the subjectivity of an artist’s intentional gaze. But a theory of the gaze does not yet provide us with a theory of the image. Once again, the co-­ constitutive function of the material medium of the image is eluded and rather than considering that the mediality of the image itself limits arbitrariness, Wollheim introduces the notion of the “artist’s intention” as a new standard of normativity. It is this normativity of intention which will then allow for a disambiguation of the multiple possible perceptions of an image. While arguments can be brought forth questioning the possibility of such a disambiguation (Lopes 2004, ch. 8.3), one could raise a number of further questions: Why does the ambiguity of images have to be reduced to the twofoldness of denotation and medium? Isn’t Wollheim’s “bivalence” theory yet another reduction to a static simultaneity of what is, phenomenologically speaking, constantly oscillating? Can we really exclude trompe l’oeil from the domain of images straight away, simply because they do not meet the requirements of the simultaneous perception of figure and medium? Isn’t Wollheim’s formalization of the structure of the image leading straight ahead to what Merleau-Ponty likes to call “bad ambiguity”? What remains to be answered is whether an image theory could be developed which would not think images in terms either of a disjunctive logic (like Gombrich) or of simultaneous twofoldness (like Wollheim), but rather in their very manifoldness. Fortunately, the theoretical debate has moved forward in the last years.

3   Seeing-with Beyond the question of whether beholders can have a simultaneous attention to the pictorial features such as style and to the depicted content, it was suggested that more importance should be granted to how pictures are organized themselves. In that sense, some advised describing the phenomenal-appearing dimension of pictures as an “inflection” of their content: that the way a picture is arranged—its “design”—inflects what they are about (Hopkins 2010; Nanay 2010). Instead of saying that in front of Seurat’s 1889 representation of the Eiffel Tower, spectators simultaneously attend a depiction of the architectonic landmark of the French capital and the light radiations of the painter’s brushstroke, it seems indeed more appropriate to say that the vision of the Eiffel Tower is strongly inflected by the unique painterly technique. Rather than trying to capture how images work by merely coming up with a theory of attention (whether disjunctive or conjunctive), such an approach at least grants some importance to the medium of the image itself. But is a theory of inflection really sufficient in this case, to explain how a subject’s vision is oriented and guided through image devices? To state that “our experience of pictures is sometimes ‘inflected’ by our awareness of

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

properties of the picture’s surface” (Hopkins 2010, 151) is a still rather cautious formulation, when it comes to making more space for how pictures are shaped and organized in and of themselves. Besides, one might suspect that with such a minimalist definition, the material properties of images could be easily subordinated to subjective stances again: if no word is said about how an attention to the surface properties is prompted by these properties themselves, one might well believe that how beholders attend pictures is entirely dependent on their mental availability or temporary mood. Furthermore, the claim can be contested that only some pictures are inflected, while others aren’t. Noninflected pictures would be tantamount to transparent pictures, that is, to pictures where the phenomenal appearance has no bearing whatsoever on the referential aboutness. The validity of such a claim can be doubted: to say that phenomenal features are overlooked doesn’t mean that such features don’t contribute to orient the specific attention to what appears in a picture. Although many visual media stress their neutrality and transparency toward their content, they are nevertheless already shaping and arranging what they visualize (for a more detailed account, see Alloa 2021). It is time to acknowledge that images can’t be equated with straightforward representations of things; rather than passive slates for mental projections, they are in fact agents that contribute to inflect and displace what we see. Accordingly, they aren’t only illustrations of what aspect blindness means (such as in the rabbit-duck example) but also devices eliciting different and new ways of seeing, which can at times end up correct aspect blindness. Or in other terms: images aren’t merely reproductions of what is already visible out there, but allow new visibilities to dawn. If this is true, then a new description of image-­ related seeing is required. Some strands of phenomenology yield such alternative account, which should then be reconnected with current attempts to descript the operativity of images. Beyond the propositional seeing-as and the projective seeing-in, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of visuality offers resources for a renewed understanding of what it means that images are key players orienting our gazes, and his remarks can be summarized into a new concept: the seeing-with. In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty affirms that we “do not look at [a painting] as one looks at a thing […] Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 126). This seeing-with underscored by Merleau-Ponty has long been underestimated in contemporary image theories, which either excessively focus on images as mere things or, on the contrary, focus on the constitutive force of the gaze. While Merleau-Ponty elsewhere criticizes the idea of images as “second things” (choses secondes), devoid of any own efficacy, in this statement, he implicitly targets the dominance of a gaze theory of images, in particular that of Sartre. Sartre’s L’Imaginaire is thoroughly based on a concept of consciousness that can be compared to that of Wittgenstein’s “change of aspects” (Aspektwechsel). In order to see an image, I need, according to Sartre, to “deny” the materiality of the painting. We may either look at the material qualities of

 

E. ALLOA

the image-object in a “perceptive attitude” (attitude perceptive) or, by changing our consciousness state and negating the material world, we may have an image emerging in an “imaging attitude” (attitude imageante) (Sartre 2004). For Merleau-Ponty on the contrary, an image does not emerge despite its material support, but thanks to it. In an unpublished manuscript, Merleau-Ponty notes: “What is a Bild? It is manifest that we do not look at a Bild the way we look at an object. We look according to the Bild [selon le Bild]” (Merleau-­ Ponty, BNF, vol. VIII: 346). In other words, we do not only see in images, rather seldom as images, never despite them but always with them and through them. Such observations are not by any means limited to artistic images. In Plato’s slave scene in the Meno (82b-84c), the geometric schema drawn onto the ground is neither seen as the theorem of Pythagoras, nor is the theorem projected into the schema, rather, evidence emerges with and through the schema which will only later become a theorem. Accordingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early technical drawings from the Manchester period for a novel type of aero-­ engine with propeller-blade tip-jets (Fig. 4) exemplify the shortcomings of any theory of seeing-as or seeing-in. It is only progressively, through a familiarization with the picture and its constructive principles that we begin to see what could not be seen in any other way, not even in front of the real combustion engine, had it ever been built. Indeed, it seems that very often images enable one to see what remains otherwise inaccessible, latent, or unseen. With the invention of his chronophotographic dispositive, in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge put a definitive halt to the speculations about the positions of the horse legs while galloping, famously depicted in Géricault’s Derby d’Epsom from 1821; today, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) or magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) visualizes what remains otherwise unattainable to the human eye. In this respect, imaging devices are not merely generating replicas of reality, they are decisively contributing to shape what counts as real, as one could argue with Gilbert Simondon (Hoel 2020). When using such visualizing devices, the images in play are not mere telescopes onto reality, let alone transparent windows: as Wittgenstein says in another context, one thinks “that one is retracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the form through which we see it” (Wittgenstein 1993, §114, modified trans.). There is thus an intrinsic opacity in all images that nevertheless only allows for images to become spaces of operation. In recent studies, creative inroads have been opened into how “operative iconicity” works (Krämer 2017). Beyond the traditional attention to artistic pictures, these studies insist on the epistemic function of practical tools of visualization, whether through sketches, outlines, plans, notes, or diagrams. It would be equally misleading though to oppose aesthetic pictures, which are looked at for their own sake, to operative pictures, which would be purely instrumental, meant for one-way and one-time use only. If images play a major role today in sciences and medicine, generating an entire new domain of “imagineering”, it is certainly not because they could be used interchangeably

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

Fig. 4  Ludwig Wittgenstein, A blueprint for a combustion chamber for aero-engine, Manchester University, 1908–1911 (in public domain)

with other communicational devices such as texts. Images may become arguments in science not despite, but rather because of, their relative intransitivity: the showing image becomes a demonstration because it shows what it, in fact, means. “A picture tells me itself”, says Wittgenstein, insofar as it communicates through “its own structure, its own colors and forms” (Wittgenstein 1993, 57, §523). At this very point, and if we follow the idea that Wittgenstein developed two separate image theories—one in the Tractatus and one later on in the Philosophical Investigations (Gebauer 2010)—it seems that the latter comes

 

E. ALLOA

closer to the former. Due to their finite character that forces the gaze to look on its very surface for what it gestures at, images have the character of “synopticity” (Übersichtlichkeit) which, according to Wittgenstein, is so essential to understanding. Due to their capacity of condensation, images become “catchy” (einprägsam), as Wittgenstein formulates it (Richtmeyer 2019, ch. 8). We must thus acknowledge that there is a paradoxical link between intransitivity and operativity that renders these two not mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent. In a general theory of use, which has often chosen Wittgenstein as its key reference, this intransitivity has been underestimated. Rather than deducing pictorial uses from a general theory of use, the contrary may prove to be productive (see also Mersch 2006). Describing images as bringing about a certain kind of seeing that can be characterized as seeing-with means taking into account this resistance to transparency: it is because we cannot eliminate the picture’s materiality that we have to see it along its own lines, use it according to its figural organization of the surface. Husserl, for instance, who spends much effort describing processes of seeing-in, which he also calls “perceptive imagination” (perzeptive Imagination), has to admit that we cannot have the appearing image-object without the medial support which, rather than being a purely neutral projective surface, sometimes “excites” (erregt) an image which the spectator hadn’t imagined himself beforehand. And yet, even in the “excited” image, the medial ground shines through, contrasts with the presented image and sometimes openly conflicts with it: “the rough surface of the paper (China paper) of this copperplate engraving belongs to the physical image. This determination conflicts with the female form appearing on the surface” (Husserl 1980, 137; 2005, 153). Stating that we see with images means that, rather than being neutral surfaces of the beholder’s projection, images generate gazes that, although never ultimately fixed, are by no means arbitrary. The form of the image, its figural organization, its material ridges, dales and crests, open up a space for potential vision. Between the unambiguousness of a communicational message or an artist’s intention inscribed into the object and the image as a space of free variation of consciousness, it appears that the density of images, their material stratification, and their phenomenological overdetermination demand a specific attention. Seeing with images then means that the evidence they provide the spectator resists generalization without further ado: iconic evidence is not a ladder that could be thrown away after we have climbed it, but remains inherently situation-­ dependent, case-sensitive, and thus, ultimately, precarious. Images help drawing distinctions, but these distinctions do not exist beyond the material medium which they organize from inside. Images thus yield a potential, but neither in the sense of a mere indetermination (the pura potentia of matter) nor in the sense of a preexistent form or meaning which the gaze would have to reveal, akin to the understanding of the sculptor’s practice as releasing the inherent form from within the marble. Rather, seeing with images entails following those veins in the marble of which Leibniz said that they signify a propensity inherent to matter toward certain unfoldings and individuations.

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

s

4   Concluding Remarks: Operating Through Image

This walk through some older and newer attempts at better circumscribing how image-dependent vision functions—with a special attention to Wittgenstein’s theoretical legacy on this specific point—hopefully led to a sharper understanding for the capacities but also for the inherent limitations of the respective conceptual approaches. Besides, the different approaches also often betray the theoretical backgrounds they are steeped in, which might explain some blind spots when it comes to considering what are non-standard cases in the respective contexts. In the meantime, the results can be summarized as follows: First and foremost, a theory of the gaze cannot become a theory of images without further ado. Secondly, a difference should be made between propositional seeing-as (where the picture is tantamount to the utterance “this x is a representation of y”), projecting seeing-in (where the picture requires “seeing y in x”), and medial seeing-with (where a kind of seeing is generated with the help of visual artifacts, and thus “through x, a y becomes visible”). Thirdly, evidence suggests that there are many images that don’t exactly match the standard cases analyzed by philosophical theories of depiction—representational images—and whose operative mode should be addressed by a comprehensive theory of visualizing devices. The late Harun Farocki suggested calling these images “operative images”. Operative images, the filmmaker asserted, are images “that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation” (Farocki 2004, 17). Most operative images were never meant to be released separately, or to be looked at for their own sake, but are moments in a wider technical process. While challenging traditional criteria such as distinctness and discreteness, today, these operative images carve out an ever-growing share in the large domain of images. Whether for military purposes (drone tracking, target detection), surveillance (CCTV installations in public space), virtual orientation (street view functions), satellite forensics, visualization of scientific data, astronomy, medical imagineering, MRT scans, real-time distant surgery, or recreational activities through VR headsets, these operative images aren’t strictly speaking depictions, and ask for an enlarged approach to their uses and practices. Meanwhile, they clearly belie the kind of normative implications as well as ideals of correct spectatorship which is found in many theories of depiction: What would be the correct intentional standard for looking at images taken by surveillance cameras? The excessive focus on either the referential object or the intentional stance of the viewers should be enlarged, so as to take into account the ways in which images work by drawing on their own intrinsic features. What Gombrich calls the method of “guided projection” (Gombrich 1984, 162) is by far not only initiated by the artist’s intention. The “aboutness” of images is not representational alone, but generates a new kind of visibility. Quite often, when seeing “through” images, things come to the fore that could never be seen otherwise.

E. ALLOA

Reference

s

 

Aldrich, Virgil C. 1958. “Pictorial Meaning, Picture-Thinking, and Wittgenstein’s Theory of Aspects”. Mind, 67: 70–79. Alloa, Emmanuel. 2021. Thinking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media. New York: Columbia University Press. Asmuth, Christoph. 2006. “Die Als-Struktur Des Bildes [The As-Structure of the Image]”. IMAGE. Journal of Interdisciplinary Image Science, 3: 62–73. Danto, Arthur C. 1992. “Animals as Art Historians”. In: Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Day, William and Krebs, Víctor J. (eds.). 2010. Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Farocki, Harun. 2004. “Phantom Images”. Public, 29: 12–24. Gebauer, Gunter. 2010. “Sich-Zeigen Und Sehen Als. Wittgensteins Zwei Bildkonzepte”. In: Zeigen. Die Rhetorik Des Sichtbaren. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Christian Spies. München: Wilhelm Fink. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1969 [1967]. “The Evidence of Images”. In: Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. by Charles S. Singleton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1978. Meditations on a Hobby Horse: And Other Essays on the Theory of Art. 3rd ed. London and New York: Phaidon. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1984 [1960]. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Revised 2nd. Indianapolis: Hackett. Hoel, Aurora A.S. 2020. “Images as Active Powers for Reality A Simondonian Approach to Medical Imaging”. In: Dynamis of the Image. Moving Images in a Global World. Ed. by Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Hopkins, Robert. 2010. “Inflected Pictorial Experience: Its Treatment and Significance”. In: Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. by Catherine Abell and Katerina Bantinaki. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1980. Phantasie, Bildbewußtsein, Erinnerung: zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1898–1925). Ed. by Eduard Marbach. Hua, XXIII. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 1898–1925. Ed. by John B. Brough. Collected Works/Edmund Husserl, v. 11. Dordrecht: Springer. Hyman, John. 2006. The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Krämer, Sybille. 2017. “Why Notational Iconicity Is a Form of Operational Iconicity”. In: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Ed. by Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer, and Christina Ljungberg. Vol. 15. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Levinson, Jerrold. 1998. “Wollheim on Pictorial Representation”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (3): 227. Lopes, Dominic. 2004. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. by Galen Johnson and Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Mersch, Dieter. 2006. “Wittgensteins Bilddenken”. Deutsche Zeitschrift Für Philosophie, 54(6): 925–42.

  SEEING-AS, SEEING-IN, SEEING-WITH: LOOKING THROUGH PICTURES 

Nanay, Bence. 2010. “Inflected and Uninflected Perception of Pictures”. In: Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction. Ed. by Catherine Abell and Katerina Bantinaki. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Polanyi, Michael. 1970. “What Is a Painting?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 10 (3): 225–36. Richtmeyer, Ulrich. 2019. Wittgensteins Bilddenken: 12 Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004 [1940]. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Trans. by J. Webber. London and New York: Routledge. Vinci, Leonardo da. 2008. Notebooks. Ed. by Irma A. Richter and Thereza Wells. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Watanabe, Shigeru; Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita. 1995. “Pigeon’s Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso”. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 63 (2): 165–74. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.1995.63-­165. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1982. Letzte Schriften über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Bd. 1. Remarks on the philosophy of psychology. Vol. 1. Ed. by Henrik Von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Trans. by C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1993. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. by Joachim Schulte and P.M.S. Hacker. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Wollheim, Richard. 1968. Art and Its Objects. New York: Harper & Row. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation”. In: Art and Its Objects. With Six Supplementary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollheim, Richard. 1998. “On Pictorial Representation”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (3): 217–26.

Varieties of Transparency John Kulvicki

1   Introduction Transparent things allow viewers to see through them. In the extremes, transparency approaches invisibility. Faced with an even and clear piece of blue glass, Bertrand Russell (1914, 88) suggested that we must “infer” its presence in light of the discoloration it occasions. Dirtied, scratched, or otherwise marred surfaces are more typical, and it is easy to overlook what distinctive things transparencies are. First, they allow viewers to see more than one thing, at the same time, in the same part of the visual field, like the glass and, beyond it, the yard. One cannot point toward the yard without also pointing to the glass through which it is seen. Second, panes of glass and the like are ordinary objects in all tangible and audible respects, unlike the air that stands between viewer and viewed. They have enduring shapes, hardness, and so on. Third, it’s not just that transparencies allow such dual experiences, they require them. You cannot see something as transparent without being able to see what’s beyond it. Perhaps this is why transparent seems an apt word for describing pictures. Making pictures, for Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti, amounted to imagining a canvas or panel to “function for me as an open window through which the historia is observed” (2011, 39). Marking a surface as if it were a window reproduces the experience of seeing a scene, Alberti’s historia, through it. So, viewing a picture amounts to experiencing two things at once. Whenever one points to the depicted scene, one points to the picture surface. Tangibly and audibly, pictures are just ordinary objects, but when seeing them one can, and cannot but, see other scenes, as it were, through them.

J. Kulvicki (*) Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_30

501

502 

J. KULVICKI

Pictures, however, are opaque, so calling them transparent has all the advantages, but also all the hazards, of figurative use. Whatever one means when describing pictures as transparent, it is not that people see through them like glass. Does extending the term enlighten, or obscure, the nature of pictures and experiences of them? Over the last forty years, philosophers working on depiction have appropriated the term transparency in three different ways. All of them cast the rough comparison with transparent glass as helpful for understanding depiction. The following presents these proposals based on their distance from the ordinary notion. First, Michael Newall (2015) suggests that we have experiences of depicted scenes because picture surfaces exploit the same mechanisms that allow perceivers to sort a scene into transparent layers. Even though they are opaque, pictures are patterned so as to elicit a scission between awareness of the picture surface and another scene. Second, Kendall Walton (1984) suggests that some pictures allow for indirect perception of the scenes that cause them. So, when experiencing a photograph and the scene it depicts, Walton suggests that we are genuinely, if indirectly, perceiving that scene, even if it is in the distant past, or from another part of the world. Third, I suggest (Kulvicki 2006) that pictures are transparent because of how they relate to one another. Under the right circumstances, a picture of another picture is indistinguishable from its object. In that sense, pictures are transparent to one another. These proposals are mutually compatible, even though they are presented as parts of competing accounts of depiction. Isolated from those accounts, they are not competing accounts of a single phenomenon, so much as different ways in which philosophers have tried to make sense out of the claim that pictures are in some sense transparent. After unpacking each of these proposals and worries about them, the final section asks how they all might relate to one another.

2   Exploiting Perceptual Mechanisms Richard Wollheim (1980) suggested calling the special visual state viewers are in when looking at pictures “seeing-in”, and he suggests that such experiences are “twofold”. They are experiences of picture surfaces, on the one hand, and experiences of the scenes pictures depict, on the other. Because experiences of transparent objects are naturally described as twofold, transparency presents at least an appealing analogy for the experiences occasioned by pictures. Newall first suggests that we understand twofoldness in a manner that brings it quite close to what happens in transparency perception. “A visual experience is twofold if and only if it is an experience of objects overlapping in which both overlapping and overlapped parts of the object are simultaneously perceived” (Newall 2015, 138; cf. Kulvicki 2009). When having a twofold experience, one is simultaneously aware of surfaces layered at some point in the visual field. Keep in mind that Wollheim would not likely have agreed with this description of twofoldness. He never described the experience of seeing a picture as one in

  VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENCY 

503

which the picture surface seems to overlap the scene that the picture depicts. So, this is Newall’s proposal for how to characterize such experiences, and its similarity to what happens when seeing transparent things should be obvious. This is a claim about experience. It is possible to hallucinate objects, or have otherwise illusory impressions as of objects, and this definition is meant to apply to all of those experiences as well as veridical ones. Given that account of twofoldness, Newall asks what might lead perceivers to have such experiences, and thus looks to research on transparency perception. While most transparencies involve different surfaces at different distances from an observer, it is striking that most research on transparency perception focuses on 2D stimuli. Patterns of light and dark (Metelli 1974), color (D’Zmura et al. 1997), and even texture (Watanabe and Cavanagh 1996) give rise to perceptual layering, where one seems to see two surfaces, in a given direction, one in front of the other. Such patterns occasion the perception of transparency presumably because the cues that trigger perceptual layering can be specified in two dimensions. Psychologists try to characterize these cues in detail as a way of investigating the human visual system. Picture-making is a practice of coloring surfaces so as to evoke experiences of other things. Newall’s main suggestion is that many pictures manage to do this by triggering transparency perception in those who view them. The scene is split into a picture surface and, behind it or in front of it, another scene. It’s no bother that there is no second scene or that the picture is, in fact, opaque. The point is that pictures lead the visual system to this kind of layering, and this is supposed to be what makes pictures perceptually interesting. Picture perception is, at least in part, a kind of non-veridical transparency perception. In this limited sense, pictures generate illusory experiences (cf. Gombrich 1960; Bantinaki 2007). Different kinds of picture will occasion different kinds of experience. Glossy photos, for example, are such that it is very difficult to attend to their surfaces. Viewers are brought right out to the scene depicted. Specular reflections from the glossy sheen are the only clues to the surface’s location and character (Newall 2015, 145). Robert Briscoe (2018, sec. 5) suggests an interesting variant of this proposal. By Briscoe’s lights, we see the picture surface at some depth and orientation but we do not attribute any color properties to it. All the chromatic features are attributed to the represented scene. By contrast, sepia photos can seem like colored glass (Newall 2015, 145–6) that obscures chromatic features of the scenes they depict. Thickly applied paint, by contrast, offers two options. In some cases, painted texture competes with the texture and flow of the depicted scene (Newall 2015, 146). This allows for a kind of textural scission as described by Watanabe and Cavanagh (1996). Textures of the depicted scene do not match the textures of the painted surface, and so one is aware of both, one in front of the other. Clare Mac Cumhaill (2018) helpfully relates situations like this to animal camouflage markings, which might confuse perceivers as to what is part of an animal’s surface, as opposed to the foliage behind it.

504 

J. KULVICKI

When texture of painting and subject cooperate, however, there is no transparency effect. We are left with an experience in which surface and subject are “imbricated” (Newall 2015, 148). This latter situation, which involves neither the mechanisms of transparency perception nor twofoldness, on Newall’s understanding of it, is actually closest to what Wollheim would call an exemplar of twofold seeing-in. He suggests that such experiences are a mix of surface and object “phenomenologically incommensurate with the experiences or perceptions—that is, of the surface, or of nature—from which they derive” (Wollheim 1998, 221; cf. Polanyi 1970 and Hopkins 2010). The upshot, for Newall, is that much of seeing-in, this special experience we have when seeing pictures, can be attributed to a transparency effect. That doesn’t cover all of pictorial experience, however. Some of it involves imbrication, where properties of the painted surface and depicted scene are combined in a distinctive whole. Recently, René Jagnow (2019) defended a Wollheimian approach to pictorial experience that, he claims, is compatible with Newall’s claims about transparency mechanisms being involved. For Jagnow, however, the space depicted, while seen in the same egocentric direction as the painted surface, is not experienced as spatially related to that surface. The surface is perceived to be at some distance from the observer, while the scene depicted is not experienced as being at any particular distance (see also Vishwanath 2011 and Zeimbekis 2015, whom Jagnow cites). Experiences of the sort Jagnow describes pull apart from Newall’s in an interesting way. For Newall, when transparency mechanisms are activated, viewers locate both scenes “out there”, egocentrically, with respect to themselves. For Jagnow, by contrast, the depicted scene is not experienced as spatially related to the observer. In that sense, while Jagnow can agree that transparency mechanisms might be involved in some experiences with pictures, he denies that they give rise to experiences as of transparency, in which the depicted scene is experienced as spatially related to the viewer. Jagnow is responding partly to worries raised by Robert Hopkins’s (2012) “rotation argument”. If viewers locate both the picture and the scene depicted within their own egocentric space, one should expect experiences of both to shift as one moves within that space. But experiences of depicted scenes do not change in that manner. One’s experience of a depicted scene remains much the same as one moves around the picture. So, the argument goes, depicted scenes are not experienced as located in viewer’s spaces. Newall (2015, 135) responds that scenes do change as one moves around a picture, albeit in different ways than they would were one to be seeing them through glass. This is, by his lights, consistent with seeing-in being a transparency effect. It’s just that the specific effect depends on the perspective a viewer takes on the picture surface, and thus changes as one moves from head-on to oblique vantage points. There is presently no consensus on whether and to what extent experiences of pictures involve mechanisms related to transparency perception.

  VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENCY 

505

3   Facilitating Indirect Perception Walton (1984) is famous for suggesting that photographs, but not handmade images, allow for indirect perception of the scenes that cause them. In that sense, viewers see through photographs to the scenes photographed. His argument is simple, and it has generated a lot of interesting criticism both in the philosophy of art and in the philosophy of perception. The reconstruction below follows Kulvicki (2014, Ch9). First, he points out that many agree we only perceive things when our perceptual states depend counterfactually on them. So, I perceive the mountain because if my relationship to the mountain were to change—I could look away or move to the left, clouds could move in or the sun come out, and so on—my perceptual state would also change. So, a necessary condition for perceiving an object is that the right kinds of counterfactual dependence are in force. Photographs also depend counterfactually on the scenes that cause them. Move the camera, change the lighting, and you get a different pattern of light and dark on the surface of the film, which ultimately results in a different photograph. As a result of that, one’s perceptual state in seeing a photo depends not just on the pattern on its surface, but, more distally, on the pattern in the scene photographed. Walton then suggests that this pattern of dependence is the right one for perceiving the scene and that any other conditions on perceiving a scene in addition to this counterfactual dependence are satisfied. This all gives Walton the conclusion that when perceiving photos, we are also perceiving the scenes that caused them. Because the connection to that scene is mediated by the photo, Walton points out that this is a case of indirect perception. You do not directly see your grandmother in the photo; you directly see the photo. But this does not prevent you from seeing her indirectly. The same is not true for handmade pictures like paintings and sketches, by Walton’s lights, because he thinks the process of designing pictures by hand undermines the proper, perception-enabling counterfactual links. For Walton (1990), pictorial seeing is twofold, though not in Newall’s sense. We see the picture, and imagine, of seeing the picture, that it is seeing something else, namely the scene it is supposed to depict. In that sense, experience with pictures has two aspects, one corresponding to seeing the photo and another corresponding to imagining seeing the scene. This might sound odd. Walton says we are literally seeing the causal sources of photographs, but that we are also imaginatively seeing them. But these two states are not incompatible: In viewing a photograph of a class reunion, for instance, one actually sees the members of the class, albeit indirectly via the photograph, but at the same time one imagines seeing them (directly without photographic assistance). (Walton 1997, 127 page number for the anthologized version in Walton 2008)

506 

J. KULVICKI

How does all of this relate to transparency? Unlike Newall, Walton does not suggest a role for transparency detection mechanisms in understanding pictures. He does think that experiences are twofold, however. So we experience more than one thing in a given direction at a given time. And when looking at photographs, at least, we are actually seeing two things at once. We are not experiencing two things at once in the manner we do when seeing through glass, because, for Walton, one of these folds is imaginative. And we are not seeing two objects in the manner we do when seeing through glass, even though we see both. That is because with photographs we see the photographed scene in virtue of seeing the photo and because the scene is not seen as occupying a place and time that coincides with that of the observer. You see your long-lost relative, posing for a portrait in Italy, from the present-day comfort of your home in New Jersey. Transparency, as Walton understands it, is also something that applies to audio recordings. They are mechanical means of producing artifacts that, when mechanically played back, present listeners with auditory patterns related to the recording’s subject. The same arguments presented above apply here. The recording depends counterfactually on audible features of some event. One’s perceptual state depends counterfactually on the character of the recording’s playback. In some cases, one’s hearing of the playback can depend in the right way on features of the event recorded. In that sense, the recording provides indirect auditory access to the events that caused the recording. Curiously, Walton does not discuss this point outside of footnotes (1984, n15; 1997, n42), and it has not made much of an impact elsewhere in the philosophy of art (but see Kania 2009; Beaudoin and Kania 2012). Recently, Grant Tavinor (2019) suggested that many virtual media allow for limited transparency in Walton’s sense. We will return to audio recordings in the next section. Note, for now, that the term transparency is rarely used in auditory contexts aside from when we are assessing recordings, transmissions, and the ways in which they are played back. I can hear the neighbors through the wall, even though I’m reluctant to call the wall transparent, but I am happy to say that the phone call, or the stereo system, is crystal clear. Walton’s proposal has generated a lot of literature, most of it suggesting that we do not indirectly see things via photos. From the brief presentation of Walton’s argument above, it should be clear that there are two places one might push back. It’s easy to agree that photographs depend counterfactually on the scenes that cause them. And perhaps it’s plausible that viewers’ states of mind thus depend, in a more rarefied way, on those scenes that cause the photographs. But why insist that the manner of dependence in the latter case is enough to support perception of those objects? Similarly, one might think that certain kinds of counterfactual dependence are only necessary, and not sufficient conditions for object perception. So, even if the right kinds of dependence are in place, one might think that the other conditions that allow for object perception are not. Let’s consider some of these.

  VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENCY 

507

First, one might deny that we can see anything that is not in our relatively immediate spatio-temporal surroundings. Perhaps the perceptual state we have depends in a fairly robust fashion on the state of your relative, back then in Italy, but the fact that this was so long ago, and so far away, makes it implausible that you see her. David Lewis suggests that someone sees when “the scene before his eyes” (1980, 239) causes an experience in the right way. It is necessary for there to be a “suitable pattern of counterfactual dependence” (1980, 245), but also that the relevant scene be proximal in space and time. Walton was aware of Lewis’s worry and suggested to the contrary that Lewis should have allowed for indirect perception of such distant scenes (Walton 1984, 275 n.12). Solveig Aasen (2016) offers a recent defense of Lewis’s condition that a scene must be present, perhaps “before one’s eyes”, to be seen. Second, Gregory Currie (1995) and Noël Carroll (1995) suggest that pictures are not counterfactually related to their scenes in a manner that allows for indirect perception. For them, we do not see unless our perceptual states depend on the position of the object with respect to us at that time. Photos might depend on the character of the scenes they depict in a fairly robust fashion, but they are detached completely from the scene’s time and place. Move the photo around, or let it grow old, and the photo’s relation to its scene changes, but nothing in the photograph changes to reflect this fact. As a result, they argue, we lack the proper kind of connections to those scenes and thus cannot see them, even indirectly. This line of response, and refinements of it, is perhaps the most trenchant, and so it pays to consider some of the back-and-­ forths it has engendered. Walton’s initial reply to this was that there are many non-pictorial examples of seeing things that are both uncontroversial and fail to give the perceiver a sense of where, exactly, the object happens to be (Walton 1997, 70). His helpful example involves seeing an object in a hall of mirrors. One knows that the object is there, somewhere, but one is unable to point it out because there are so many mirrors. Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin (2004) agree that viewers can often see things even if they are unable to determine where those things are based on seeing them. But they suggest that we nevertheless fail to see things through photographs because in those cases there is no counterfactual dependence of one’s experience on the location of the object. In the hall of mirrors, they suggest that one’s perceptual state will often contain information about the object’s location, but that information will not be useable. One is unable to exploit that information because one is unaware, for example, of where all the mirrors are. They thus argue that Walton ought to abandon the claim that photos allow for indirect perception of what we see. Helen Yetter-Chappell (2018) raises worries about Cohen and Meskin’s condition, suggesting in effect that their requirement on object seeing is much too restrictive. Bence Nanay (2010) also thinks that Cohen and Meskin set the bar too high for seeing objects. He nevertheless thinks that even a lower bar undermines Walton’s view that we see through them. For Nanay, a viewer sees an object only if there is a way of moving around in her space such that if she were to do

508 

J. KULVICKI

it, her experience of the object would change continuously as she did so. Typically, when we move with respect to things we see, our experiences of them change. If there is no way one could move that would change the experience of a putative object of perception, then one is not seeing that object. Susanna Siegel (2006, 369–371) considered a similar condition, to similar effect. If, she suggests, you look at a doll, and then suddenly none of your movements change your experience of it—it follows you in the creepiest fashion—you might not be perceiving the doll anymore. This is similar to what we find with photographs, according to Nanay. We see the photos, but move around the picture, and your experience of the person depicted in it remains pretty much constant. Pretty much. It is true (see Kulvicki 2014, 188; cf. Yetter-Chappell 2018 and 2024, n.12) that your experience changes, even if it doesn’t change as it would were you to be face-to-face with the object. It should be clear that the back-and-forth over this issue is helpful not just for understanding pictorial representation but also for understanding object perception. Also notice that it is structurally similar to the worry raised by Hopkins (2012) against transparency claims like Newall’s (2015). No argument against Walton has proven conclusive. In addition to the argument presented above, Walton (1984) consistently stresses that one price for denying the transparency claim for photos is that it might force one to deny more plausible cases of displaced perception (see Pepp 2019). At the time of writing this chapter, a pandemic lockdown forced unprecedented exercises in remote viewing. Do you see your friends and colleagues in these many online chats? It’s not the same, of course, but it certainly seems like seeing. Even outside trying times people pay good money to watch operatic performances, boxing matches, and football games live. This is quite different from listening to live commentary, which is often regarded as a second-best option, unless it’s baseball. None of these cases involve seeing the scene “before one’s eyes”, as Lewis said, even if they typically involve seeing things, more or less, now. Photos place viewers at some temporal remove from the scenes they depict, and perhaps this accounts for why they are uniformly less convincing as cases of indirect perception. But denying indirect perception in photographs risks denying it in the more plausible cases as well (see Yetter-Chappell 2018). Another side of Walton’s view is that handmade pictures, because they lack the relevant counterfactual connection to the scenes they depict, are not transparent. His reasoning is that when one involves the intentions of a maker, one has severed the kind of link one finds between perceptual states and the world generally. So, one also blocks the claim that such pictures can provide indirect perceptual access to scenes. A number of people have questioned what Jessica Pepp (2019) calls Walton’s “anti-transparency” claim. Dominic Lopes (1996, Ch 9), for example, suggests that many pictorial practices could preserve the relevant links. His discussion of lithic illustration (Lopes 2009) is particularly helpful and convincing. More recently, Yetter-Chappell (2018, sec. 4) suggests that preserving those links is not required for object seeing. She thus offers one of the more liberal accounts

  VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENCY 

509

of object seeing, which has the consequence that many, though not all, handmade pictures are transparent in Walton’s sense. Pepp (2019) argues for a similar conclusion, though on other grounds. She suggests that our ordinary intuitions concerning seeing, and the slippery slopes they entail, are not what should drive a case in favor of seeing through pictures. Instead, we should try to decide whether there is an interesting natural kind that involves seeing things, as it were, with one’s bare eyes, but excludes seeing things in pictures, photographic, or otherwise. Her answer is that there is not, and we should thus accept that many handmade and machine-made pictures enable perceptual contact with the scenes they depict. Walton’s proposal puts us at one further remove from the phenomenon of perceptual transparency than Newall’s does. For Walton, we actually see two objects, but not via the mechanisms that underwrite transparency perception, as Newall suggests. And the second object seen is not necessarily experienced as present before one, as Newall suggests. What Walton does have in common with Newall is that they both think the relevant phenomenon can be articulated in perceptual terms. And remember that it is possible for Walton and Newall to agree with each other, at least in general terms. Perhaps we discover that in interpreting certain pictures, the mechanisms of transparency perception are deployed. This does not preclude make-believe engagement with that experience, and it does not preclude being brought into indirect perceptual contact with the cause of a photo.

4  Structural Constraint My proposal about transparency (2006, Ch 3) is quite distant from the preceding two because it is not articulated in terms of what viewers perceive, can perceive, or seem to perceive. Instead, it is articulated in terms of how pictures relate to each other. Wollheim (1980) thought that any theory of depiction worth the time ought to be able to explain why color photography is a better exemplar of depiction than a similar system that just inverts its colors. The natural proposal is that color negatives don’t look much like the scenes they depict, color-wise. The red stuff looks green in the photo, green red. That is, the natural thing to do is locate what makes something pictorial in how it is perceived. Inverted pictures are interpretable, but the way we interpret them chromatically is more like deciphering a code than having an experience of their objects. Wollheim’s main target at the time was Nelson Goodman (1976), who claimed that nothing more than habit distinguishes the color-inverted system from the ordinary one. For Goodman, what distinguished pictorial representations from others is that they are parts of systems whose members relate to one another in certain ways. Those details are not directly relevant here. Suffice it to say Goodman did not think of Wollheim’s challenge as a serious one, because he saw the task of explaining the perception of pictures as separate from articulating the structural features that separated pictures from other kinds of representation.

510 

J. KULVICKI

Consider, however, this response to Wollheim’s challenge from someone on Goodman’s side of the aisle. Let’s not focus on the relation between the picture of an apple and the apple, but on the relation between the picture of an apple, and a picture of that picture. It doesn’t matter for present purposes whether we are dealing with handmade or mechanically produced pictures, but the easiest example is a color photograph. If you make a photo of another color photo, head on and without remainder, the result will be pretty much a reproduction of the original. A picture of an apple is not an apple, and it’s easy to distinguish pictures of apples from apples. But a picture of a picture of an apple is indistinguishable from a picture of an apple. In some sense, it might even just be a picture of an apple. This captures a sense in which pictures are blind to one another. A photo is an appropriate thing to take pictures of, but there is an interesting sense in which a photo of a photo is blind to that object. The only things that distinguish the different pictures from one another seem to be the scenes that they represent. Iterations of the process of picture-making leave you just as connected to the original scene as the first photo does, and in that sense, they are transparent representations. This result is applicable to black and white photos and even to handmade pictures, as long as we assume a certain kind of systematicity in pictorial practice (see Inkpin 2015 for worries). A black and white photo of a color photo is not identical to its object, just as a line drawing of a photo is not. But keep the picture-type the same as the object, and this kind of transparency holds. Nothing like this is true of language. A description of a description need not be anything like the original description, for example. Ben Blumson (2011) uses mention conventions as a possible counterexample. He points out that the word red itself has a name, and that that name is very much like the original word. This is a picture-like aspect of language, by my lights, and a counterexample to the claim that transparency can help us distinguish pictures from other kinds of representation, by Blumson’s lights. How does this notion of transparency help respond to Wollheim’s challenge? A color photo of a color photo, under the right circumstances, is identical to its object. But in a system that represents reds with greens, and vice versa, a photo of another photo is not identical to its object. The original photo of a red apple is green where it represents the apple. The photo of that photo is red where it represents the part of the original photo that represents the apple. These inversions continue as one makes photos of photos of photos. Similar things are true of black-white inverted photos, and those which are blurry, fisheye, or otherwise what we would call “distorted”. So, transparency in this sense helps to lock down an interesting phenomenon that seems quite close to capturing the pictorial representations and excluding many others. Transparency does not by itself constitute a full account of depiction, but it is an important part of such an account. Interestingly, representational systems that are transparent are also mimetic, in that representations systematically share properties with what they represent. So, this structural transparency leads us to expect pictures to resemble what they depict, at least in some limited

  VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENCY 

511

respects. Recently, Robert Briscoe suggested that pictures can elicit experiences that are “transparent to the visible properties of the original” (Briscoe 2016, 5). Though he does not have the same notion of transparency in mind that I do, the condition I suggest captures precisely that point. Pictures manifest some properties that they represent their objects as having, and making pictures of those pictures does not change that fact. Which properties do pictures share with the scenes they represent? At least those required by transparency. Similar considerations show that audio recordings are also structurally transparent. A recording of a playback of a recording is normed to reproducing the original. The better your equipment, the closer a recording of a playback comes to the original recording. If static, reverb, or other distortions intrude, they stand, as it were, between listeners and subject of the recording. It is perfectly ordinary to describe playbacks of recordings in terms of how clear or transparent they are, and this seems to be precisely the same thing at work in evaluating pictures. It is not first and foremost an issue about whether perceptual transparency mechanisms are at work, or whether pictures allow us to perceive things indirectly, but whether pictures are transparent to one another, and in that sense they deliver aspects of their contents in an especially intimate manner. The point of an account like this is not to deny that pictures are special perceptually, but rather to help explain what makes pictures perceptually interesting by appealing to how they are structured. We can experience pictures in special ways, the thought goes, because pictures are transparent in this structural sense. Goodman (1976) is known as a conventionalist. Many different systems met his structural conditions for being pictorial, and only habit, by his lights, distinguished the ones we regard as pictures from those we do not. I suggest that there is a lot more room to show how structural constraints can inform our understanding of what makes pictures perceptually interesting.

5  Relating the Transparencies The foregoing proposals are each situated within competing accounts of pictorial representation. Newall (2011) supports a hybrid account that mixes elements of the recognition theory and Wollheim’s views about seeing-in. Walton (1973, 1990) builds his view around make-believe engagement. And I (Kulvicki 2006) pull as far away from perception as possible, preferring syntactic and semantic structure. That said, the specific proposals concerning how pictures might be transparent are mutually compatible, and this shows something about the range of issues faced by those who study pictures. It is controversial whether pictorial experience involves the mechanisms involved in transparency perception, as Newall suggests. But that controversy says little about the prospects for indirect object perception in pictures. Walton in no way builds his proposal on ordinary transparency perception. Similarly, my claims about structural transparency are not dependent on any specific perceptual mechanisms being involved when experiencing pictures. And they say nothing, without further argument (see Kulvicki forthcoming) about whether

512 

J. KULVICKI

pictures allow for indirect perception of their objects. So, in theory, any combination of these transparency theses could be true, or, of course, they could all be false. Theories of depiction divide in many ways, but one important dimension that sets them apart is where they choose to base their explanations of what makes pictures distinctive kinds of representation. The most popular approach focuses on perceptual mechanisms, like recognition responses, experienced resemblance, and so on (see Kulvicki 2014 for overview and discussion). This makes a lot of sense because pictures seem distinctive precisely for the way in which they engage viewers perceptually. Newall fits comfortably within this trend, while Walton and I diverge from it, albeit in opposite directions. Walton identifies a fairly complex act—prop-based imaginative engagement, or make-­ believe—as the source of what makes pictures distinctive. I identify fairly low-­ level features of pictures—their syntactically relevant properties and how they have semantic significance—as the explanatory tools. This is the main reason that all three notions of transparency are compatible. They are sourced in radically different approaches to depiction. Both Walton and I think that depiction need not be visual, even if we have different reasons for saying so. It is thus easy for us to extend accounts of visual pictures to auditory media like sound recordings, or to tactile pictures. This also applies specifically to Walton’s treatment of transparency. His reasons for suggesting that photographs indirectly put us in touch with their sources seamlessly extend to other sense modalities. Transparency, in the ordinary sense, is a visual phenomenon. And pictures, at least on a first pass, seem to be deeply visual representations. An important question facing those who think through pictures is what we lose, or gain, by understanding depiction as being essentially visual, or something that transcends vision.

References Aasen, Solveig. 2016. “Pictures, presence, and visibility”. Philosophical Studies, 173: 187–203. Alberti, Leon Battista. 2011. On Painting. Trans. by R. Sinisgalli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bantinaki, Katerina. 2007. “Pictorial representation as illusion”. British Journal of Aesthetics, 47 (3): 268–279. Beaudoin, Richard and Kania, Andrew. 2012. “A musical photograph?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 70 (1): 115–127. Blumson, Ben. 2011. “Depictive structure?” Philosophical Papers, 40 (1): 1–25. Briscoe, Robert. 2016. “Depiction, pictorial experience, and vision science”. Philosophical Topics, 44 (2): 43–81. Briscoe, Robert. 2018. “Gombrich and the duck-rabbit”. In: Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein. Ed. by M. Beaney, B. Harrington, and D. Shaw. New York: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1995. “Towards an ontology of the moving image”. In: Philosophy and Film. Ed. by C. Freeland and T. Wartenberg. New York: Routledge.

  VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENCY 

513

Cohen, Jonathan and Meskin, Aaron. 2004. “On the epistemic value of photographs”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (2): 197–210. Currie, Gregorie. 1995. Image and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Zmura, Michael; Colantoni, Philippe; Knoblauch, Kenneth and Laget, Bernard. 1997. “Color transparency”. Perception, 26: 471–492. Gombrich, Ernst. 1960. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Phaidon. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett. Hopkins, Robert. 2010. “Inflected pictorial experience: It’s treatment and significance”. In: Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction. Ed. by C. Abell and K. Bantinaki. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Robert. 2012. “Seeing-in and seeming to see”. Analysis, 72 (4): 650–659. Inkpin, Andrew. 2015. “Projection, recognition, and pictorial diversity”. Theoria, 82: 32–55. Jagnow, Rene. 2019. “Twofold pictorial experience”. Erkenntnis.    https://doi. org/10.1007/s10670-019-00135-0 Kania, Andrew. 2009. “Musical recordings”. Philosophy Compass, 4 (1): 22–38. Kulvicki, John. 2009. “Heavenly sight and the nature of seeing-in”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67 (4): 387–397. Kulvicki, John. 2009. “Heavenly sight and the nature of seeing-in”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67(4): 387–397. Kulvicki, John. 2014. Images. London: Routledge. Kulvicki, John. forthcoming. “Prosthetic arts and the objects of perception”: In: Art and Philosophy. A. King and C. Mag Uidhir. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, David. 1980. “Veridical hallucination and prosthetic vision”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 58 (3): 239–249. Lopes, Dominic. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lopes, Dominic. 2009. “Drawing in a social science: lithic illustration”. Perspectives on Science 17(1): 5–25. Mac Cumhaill, Clare. 2018. “Nonsense and visual evanescence”. In: Perceptual Ephemera. Ed. by T. Crowther and C. Mac Cumhaill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Metelli, Fabio. 1974. “The perception of transparency”. Scientific American, 230: 90–98. Nanay, Bence. 2010. “Transparency and sensori-motor contingencies”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 91 (4): 463–480. Newall, Michael. 2011. What is a picture? Depiction, Realism, Abstraction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Newall, Michael. 2015. “Is seeing-in a transparency effect?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 55 (2): 131–156. Pepp, Jessica. 2019. “On pictorially mediated mind-object relations”. Inquiry. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1562372 Polanyi, Michael. 1970. “What is a painting?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 10: 225–236. Russell, Bertrand. 1914. Our Knowledge of the External World. London: Routledge. Siegel, Susanna. 2006. “Subject and object in the contents of visual experience”. The Philosophical Review, 115 (3): 355–388. Tavinor, Grant. 2019. “On virtual transparency”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77 (2): 145–156. Vishwanath, Dhanraj. 2011. “Visual information in surface and depth perception: Reconciling pictures and reality”. In: Perception Beyond Inference: The Information

514 

J. KULVICKI

Content of Visual Processes. Ed. by L. Albertazzi, G. van Tonder, and D. Vishwanath. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Walton, Kendall. 1973. “Pictures and make-believe”. The Philosophical Review, 82 (3): 283–319. Walton, Kendall. 1984. “Transparent pictures: On the nature of photographic realism”. Critical Inquiry, 11: 246–276. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walton, Kendall. 1997. “On pictures and photographs: objections answered”. In: Film Theory and Philosophy. Ed. by R. Allen and M. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. In: Walton 2008. Walton, Kendall. 2008. Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts. New York: Oxford University Press. Watanabe, Takeo and Cavanagh, Patrick. 1996. “Texture laciness: The texture equivalent of transparency”. Perception, 25: 293–303. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollheim, Richard. 1998. “On pictorial representation”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (3): 217–226. Yetter-Chappell, Helen. 2018. “Seeing through eyes, mirrors, shadows, and pictures”. Philosophical Studies, 175: 2017–2042. Zeimbekis, John. 2015. “Seeing, visualizing, and believing: Pictures and cognitive penetration”. In: The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. by J. Zeimbekis and A. Raftotoulos. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Photographic Images in the Digital Era Koray Değirmenci

This chapter attempts to understand the fate of conventional notions of photographic indexicality and referentiality in the digital era where digital images have replaced analog images almost completely. Following a critical overview of relevant literature on digital photography, the author makes a conceptual distinction between referentiality and indexicality with respect to their implications for the notion of photographic realism. With a particular focus on the concept of indexicality, defined herein as an element that radically determines the definition of photography, the author argues that what is represented becomes a “thing” in digital images in the absence of indexicality by using Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of “illusion of immanence”. This claim strongly challenges the view that digital images can still be regarded as photographs that themselves presuppose a particular relationship between an image and its object.

1   Introduction Despite having been defined in nearly countless ways, photography has long secured its place among other forms of imagery by representing objects in a reliable, consistent manner. Such supremacy may be considered a culturally or socially constructed outcome born of an entrenched affinity between seeing and knowing. Alternatively, photography might appear to be a product of its

Note: This chapter is a modified version of an original text which was published in the journal Art-Sanat, no. 8, 2017, pp. 553–570. K. Değirmenci (*) Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_31

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

social functions (i.e., proving and verifying). No matter the rationale, photography’s superiority in object representation remains essentially indisputable. Yet a solid corpus of literature has emerged along with the rise of the so-called digital revolution, or digital age, examining the issue of whether or not digitality has transformed the ties between reality and photography or, put more precisely, the ways in which reality is represented through photography. Even before digitality rose to prominence, many critical accounts in literature challenged the notion that the so-called direct and natural link between the external world and the photographic image is imperative to the indexical character of photography. Instead, some scholars contended that photographs are more akin to a factitious construction of reality than to the actual world. The ubiquity of digitality has since called into question more than ever photography’s power of proof, to the point that some claim it has been undermined completely (Punt 1995, 3). The effects of digitality on photography have rendered seemingly simple questions controversial, including the extent to which the traditional definition of an image applies to digital images and whether or not proper photography still exists at all. A trademark discussion of photography nearly always includes remarks about the “realism” that distinguishes photography from other image forms. More specifically, photography involves a somewhat complex relationship between an image and its referent in that the object being photographed is effectively etched on the photographic surface (i.e., indexicality, wherein the photographic surface is an index of the actual object being photographed). To this point, Susan Sontag argues that a photograph is “not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (Sontag 1975, 154–155). André Bazin suggests that “the photographic image is the object itself” (Bazin 1967, 14), insinuating that a photograph is an extension of the object pictured but not, as many scholars have argued, a “mirror of reality”. These depictions of photography as a trace, which emphasize indexicality, are common in the field’s scholarship. Rudolph Arnheim explains photography thusly: “the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light” (Arnheim 1974, 155). Rosalind Krauss (1986, 203) echoes this sentiment, noting that photographs “look like footprints in sand, or marks that have been left in dust”. Carol Armstrong (1998, 2) further defines photography as “first and foremost an indexical sign, […] an image that is chemically and optically caused by the things in the world to which it refers”. Thus, the photograph is “predicated on its relation to nature before it is mediated by a code of legibility”. Digital imaging techniques began to gain popularity in the early 1990s and have since come to constitute a new cultural practice. As such, an accompanying body of literature regarding photography’s now-fluid definition further complicates the already problematic notion of its truthfulness. I will attempt to offer a critical overview of prominent discussions in this vein to clarify the implications of the “digital revolution” on the changing meaning of what is

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

disputatiously referred to as photography with a particular focus on the issues of indexicality and referentiality. These discussions, I believe, share a few commonalities with respect to their theoretical frameworks. Initial approaches were more concerned with the representation of “new” images; that is, they examined whether or not the ways in which conventional photography reflects reality were significantly undermined or changed, thereby challenging the assumed vraisemblance of photography given the rise of digital imaging. This consideration was closely related to another concern, namely photography’s long-­ standing (but loosely established) status of certificate of evidence associated with photography’s entrenched notion of causality. This raises the question of whether or not the conventional notion of representation can still be used to describe adequately the relationship between photography and reality; or, alternatively, should we use the notion of simulation to depict this association following the so-called digital revolution? Perhaps not surprisingly, such theoretical accounts deal primarily with documentary or press photography to offer a somewhat pessimistic view of the future of these genres. They also suggest, rather provocatively, an overall dissolution of the link between the photographic surface and its referent. Complementing this second view is another line of thought which claims that the nature of photography has been fundamentally transformed due to digital photography, wherein the notion of indexicality has ceased to be a defining characteristic. This theory is largely concerned not with how photographs appear to us, but instead with the type of medium photography has become—that is, the ontological definition of what is now considered photography, for better or for worse. Lister’s (2009, 314) distinction between analog and digital may shed light on this issue. Images are conventionally analog in nature; they are formed by physical signs and marks on particular surfaces, which are not separable from the very surface that carries them. However, the digital medium does not transmit physical properties; it involves instead the transformation of information, a symbolization of physical properties via arbitrary numerical codes. In that case, analog images can be regarded as being based on continuity, comprising materials and techniques specific to that particular medium. Digital images, in contrast, are unitized (i.e., separate, quantifiable, and perfectly reproducible mechanically), constituted by materials and techniques that are not limited to the digital medium. These nearly irrefutable differences between digital and analog images gain more convincing meaning in the context of discussions regarding digital photography. For example, the duality between continuity and unitization calls to mind a discussion of whether analog and digital photography are irreconcilably different in terms of technical qualities such as dynamic range and tonal richness. On the other hand, the contrast between the irreversible and inconvertible characteristics of analog images, which rely on transmission, and the reversible and convertible characteristics of digital images, which rely on transformation, summons the issue of indexicality. More specifically, there is a question of whether or not digital photographs are considered indexical in nature.

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

2   Early Approaches: The End of Photography? As has been touched upon briefly, nascent approaches that emerged in the early 1990s tended to interpret the rise and gradual prevalence of digital imaging systems as a serious challenge to the definition of photography as a realist medium and a certificate of evidence (and presence). Undoubtedly, these approaches were perhaps over-reactive in their assessment of digital imagery because the phenomenon was new and undeveloped compared to the digital imaging techniques available today. Initial approaches tended to focus more on the state of photography’s power to reflect reality and, by extension, whether or not photography had lost its status as a certificate of evidence. In his book, which exemplifies perfectly these early approaches, Fred Ritchin offers an image of a science fiction dystopia in a passage in which he muses about photographic advertisements adorning the New York City subway: I tried to imagine how it would feel if, despite the evidence of the photographs, everything depicted in them had never been. It was difficult to do because the images seemed so life-like […] If so, the photograph referred to nobody […] I looked at the people sitting across from me in the subway car underneath the advertisements for reassurance, but they too began to seem unreal, as if they also were figments of someone’s imagination. It became difficult to choose who or what was “real”, and why people could exist but people looking just like them in photographs never did. (Ritchin 1990, 3)

Fast-forwarding a quarter-century, now that raw data can be processed to generate “genuine” images via computer, Ritchin’s reaction might seem rather archaic. However, his statements also convey the conventional belief that photography is a certificate of evidence. Ritchin points out new ethical problems in the realm of photojournalism in light of the emergence of digital post-­ production manipulation. For him, manipulation was common in conventional photography as well, but it was moderate and did not harm the integrity of the image. Ritchin’s critique is not confined to a particular realm of photographic practice, but rather it implies a general transformation of photography itself. In another work belonging to the same period, he argues that photography has gradually lost its immanent realism and declares the end of photography as we have known it (Ritchin 1991). Put simply, Ritchin was anxious—especially with respect to the future of photojournalism—because he feared that manipulated photographs that have very little to do with reality would become indiscernible from unmanipulated, “straight” photographs, a situation which would undermine the credibility of photographs altogether. Another influential critique with respect to photojournalism comes from Howard Bossen as early as 1985. Bossen (1985, 27) claims that as photography moves toward its optical-­ electronic-­computer future from its optical-chemical past, its sources of credibility and philosophical notions of truth will become obsolete. Such pessimistic approaches declaring the end of photography, or claiming the disappearance of the distinctive characteristics of photography given the rise of the digital era,

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

were especially common in early approaches (for other prominent examples, see Willis 1990; Mitchell 1992; Robins 1995). Probably the most influential and oft-referenced work in these early discussions was William J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye, published in 1992. In it, Mitchell declares the year 1989 (the 150th anniversary of photography) the end of photography, then prudently revises his observation by claiming that photography is being displaced radically and permanently by digitality much like painting was displaced by photography 150  years prior (Mitchell 1992, 20). Yet Mitchell’s assertion does not necessarily mean that he naively believes in the claims of truth and realism that pervade conventional photography: An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-­ photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato’s cave. (Mitchell 1992, 225)

Although Mitchell’s argument offers a critical and even groundbreaking perspective, it is still plagued by certain weaknesses endemic to the early approaches. For example, Mitchell (1992, 6) compares the amount of information generated by analog and digital images and then concludes that analog or film-based images offer an infinite amount of information whereas digital images have limited tonal and spatial resolution. This claim becomes essentially meaningless given the astonishing technical capabilities now offered by digital imaging systems. Michael Archambault (2016) contends that digital photography outdistanced analog photography some time ago with respect to grain and noise levels and dynamic range. Similarly, Lev Manovich (2006, 244) criticizes Mitchell’s discussion by raising the simple point that as early as the mid-1990s, digital technologies were capable of producing high-resolution images with few major pixelization issues. Manovich (2006, 245) goes on to challenge Mitchell’s perspective by contending that “normal” or “straight” photography has never existed. Although not directly related to the impact of digital imaging technologies on analog photography, Jonathan Crary’s (1992) perspective is quite impressive in its comprehensiveness. He investigates this issue in light of the overall transformation within what he calls the “modern scopic regimes”. Specifically, Crary (1992, 1) argues that sweeping progress in computer graphic techniques is a part of “reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation” and “transformation in the nature of visuality”. For him, this transformation is “probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective”. He adds that digital images operate not through the mimetic capacities of analog mediums, but instead relocate vision from the level of the human eye to someplace else where there is no reference to the position of the observer in a “real”, optically

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

perceived world. Crary’s position regarding the absence of referentiality in digital images, along with his prophetic vision during digitality’s nascent period, has become a cornerstone of subsequent literature: Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real”, optically perceived world. If these images can be said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data. Increasingly, visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and exchanged globally. (Crary 1992, 2)

Apart from these exceptional approaches, a common thread in early theories was the establishment of a duality between digital and analog photographs with respect to their capacity to reflect reality. There are a number of potential explanations for scholars’ initial reactions: widespread anxiety evoked by the common practice of manipulation in digital images, the assumed absence of the direct link between image and photographic object in digital images, and the relatively underdeveloped technical capabilities of digital imaging systems at the time. Thus, it is not reasonable to assert that early literature regards photography as a “mirror of reality” or that scholars overlook the fact that photography’s immanent realism is indeed a cultural construction. Sarah Kember raises a critical question that underlies this point: Computer manipulated and simulated imagery appears to threaten the truth status of photography even though that has already been undermined by decades of semiotic analysis. How can this be? How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always already lost in the act of representation? Any representation, even a photographic one, only constructs an image-idea of the real; it does not capture it, even though it might seem to do so. (Kember 1998, 17)

Thus, the anxiety that infiltrates early approaches is likely a result of threatening the subject’s position itself in the very act of beholding or, more generally, within the production of images themselves. As Martin Lister (2009, 321) notes, what is at stake is a “historical and psychic investment in photography’s ‘realism’”. These somewhat impetuous approaches led to more moderate and cautious discussions beginning in the mid-1990s. In his critique of early pessimistic approaches, Manovich (2006, 244–245) suggests that they were based on the comparison of manipulated digital photographs and unmanipulated documentary photography, a contrast which is hardly operational since, for him, the realist tradition and photography based largely on manipulation had already existed as two separate realms in conventional photography. However, I will argue that Manovich’s critique becomes ineffective because the anxiety surrounding manipulation, which infiltrated early approaches, was mostly tied to

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

an entrenched belief in photographic transparency. It was often closely associated with the indexical character of photography and sometimes regarded as a discursive element that challenges the conventional notions of representation. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s observation illuminates this point: It is not any one digital photograph that is disturbing. We are disturbed because we must now acknowledge that any photograph might be digitally altered. Digital technology may succeed—where combination of printing and other analog techniques have not succeeded in the past—in shaking our culture’s faith in the transparency of the photograph […] If the viewer believes that a photograph offers immediate contact with reality he can be disappointed by a digitally altered photograph. The reason is that the logic of transparency does not accord the status of reality to the medium itself, but instead treats the medium as a mere channel for placing the viewer in contact with the objects represented. (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 110)

Their observation insinuates that manipulation in the analog and digital eras are radically different and have distinct implications. Thus, Manovich’s criticism fails to explicate adequately the anxiety provoked by digital-era manipulation. With regard to Manovich’s seminal criticism, it is important to examine his attempt to answer the question of how digital images operate within their own peculiar semiological dynamics. Manovich is against a clear-cut division between digital and analog images. For him, when we look at concrete digital images and their uses, there are few notable differences from analog images apart from abstract principles. In fact, he even goes so far as to allege that “digital photography simply does not exist” (Manovich 2006, 242). A superficial reading of Manovich in this context would likely reveal that he analyzes photography on a phenomenological level. The minor structural details that cannot be discerned by the beholder do not have significant implications; as such, digital images retain meanings and functions inherited from analog images. In fact, however, this is not the case. Manovich’s claim can be interpreted as an expression of his core observation: the paradox of digital photography is its imitation of the cultural and aesthetic codes of analog photography. Moreover, the film look (i.e., “the soft, grainy, and somewhat blurry appearance of a photographic image”) has become fetishized in digital images (ibid.). He prefers the term “photography after photography” rather than the end of photography or post-­ photography, both of which were commonly used in earlier accounts. In a more provocative theoretical maneuver, digital imagery, for him, “annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic” (241). One could argue that within what Manovich conceptualizes as the paradox of digital photography, the digital image is itself being annihilated. John Roberts’ (2009, 289) observation is particularly illuminating in this context: He regards a central element in digital photography, digital effects, as a space in which “the real is self-consciously ‘put together’, transforming naturalism’s

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

idea of the photograph as a neutral transcription of appearances into its very opposite: the figural (metaphoric) construction of the real, as in painting”. Undoubtedly, Manovich’s observation two decades ago has proven prophetic today. In the contemporary economy of images, the fetishization of the characteristics of analog media is so pervasive that competition among digital media and images is determined largely by their ability to imitate analog media. To this point, Geoffrey Batchen (1997) presents the most radical view of the second generation of discussions with respect to the notion of manipulation in digital images. Specifically, he asserts that the photographic practice itself is an act of manipulation. For him, even documentary photographs, generally termed “normal” photographs, comprise various technical elements, such as cropping, flash use, exposure preferences, and so on, that render the emergent image an artifice. That is, the photographer manufactures an image by representing a three-dimensional object within a two-dimensional image (Batchen 1997, 212). Thus, digital photography upholds the very tradition of depicting an altered version of the world inherited from conventional photography, which suggests that the digital era is an evolution in photography itself rather than a revolution that breaks with photography’s tradition. Although Batchen has put forth many insightful analyses in subsequent works, his efforts to define digital photography as a continuation of the tradition of analog photography are hardly convincing. While one could understand Batchen’s rejection of earlier approaches’ laser focus on the notion of manipulation, his perspective again places this notion into the very center of the analysis in reverse. In other words, the centrality of manipulation prevents us from discerning other elements of digital photography that render it ontologically different from analog photography. However, a distanced approach to the notion of manipulation should not be interpreted to mean there is no difference between the use of manipulation in digital and analog photography. The very structure of digital photographic practice that allows the photographer to change images effortlessly is radically different from analog photography technology. Seamless alterations are possible in digital photography because manipulation is composed of the addition or removal of image pixels. What is defined as “pixel revolution” in literature leads to “digital wizardry” (Geuens 2002, 20) that allows for the manipulation of any part of an image without modifying its resolution or having any effect on the surrounding area. Thus, this is something of a perfectly immaterial process that leads to a proper “reproduction”. The conception of digital photography as a never-ending process and permanently in becoming generally emphasizes this feature. Yet such digital wizardry should be seen as the result of the ontological changes and features of digital photography, not the cause thereof. Its explanatory power is thus quite limited apart from ethical discussions common in photojournalism and documentary photography.

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

3   Indexicality and Causality in Digital Photography One could regard a digital image as having an ontological and causal relationship with the photographic object. However, the scenario is not so simple in the context of digital images. Digital cameras’ circuitry and software process sensory information to transform such data into something recognizable, which is then perceived as an image by the viewer. However, let us assume that this process generates images that are indistinguishable from analog images. In that case, is the only difference between these two image forms ontological, per se? Or, to put it another way, do ontological differences need to result in phenomenological differences? To parse out an answer to this question, we must first consider how causality and “iconic indexicality”, generally regarded as constitutive notions of photography, operate within the realm of digital images. Paul Willemen’s enlightening observation is a good starting point: An image of a person in a room need no longer mean that the person was in that particular room, nor that such a room ever existed, nor indeed that such a person ever existed. Photochemical images will continue to be made, but the change in the regime of “believability” will eventually leech all resistance that reality offers to “manipulation” from even those images […] The digitally constructed death mask has lost any trace of the dialectic between the skull and the face, any trace of the dialectic between index and icon. (Willemen 2002, 20)

The causality problem in digital photography has noteworthy implications. The cultural and historical investment in photography’s realism and the notion of photography as evidence of presence has gradually become more problematic, not only in the realm of digital photography but also for analog photography. A digital image acts as a photograph not because it has an ontological and causal relation with a thing (i.e., the photographic object); it does so because, as Rubinstein and Sluis (2013, 28) aptly state, the recorded data on the digital sensor is designed algorithmically so as to be perceived as a photograph by humans. As Hubertus von Amelunxen (1996, 101) contends, although digital images are still perceived within their representational features, they are no longer regarded as a transfer of a temporal and spatial moment. Another consequence of the problematic nature of causality and indexicality in digital images relates to the semiological meanings of the photograph. Indexicality can be seen as a distinctive feature of photography as long as it is tied to iconicity. As such, threats to causality also undermine the foundations of iconic indexicality. Later discussions on the algorithmic character of digital images muddy the issue even more. Eivind Røssaak (2011, 193) makes a clear distinction between analog and algorithmic culture. There is a causal relationship between storage and display in the former; in the latter, however, “the relationship has become not simply arbitrary, but dependent on the new interstice of software”. Røssaak’s observation can be clarified with an example: any medium stored in

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

your computer will be “read” in a considerably different way years later, as the tools and software through which you read them will be much different from those available today. Conceptualized accordingly, the digital medium is nothing but information born of a never-ending and amorphous process. The modernist notion of medium specificity loses much of its explanatory power in this context. Hayes’ observation frames the very process within a digital sensor as a kind of (re)construction, rather than a process that can be understood within a conventional notion of representation: Digital cameras already do more computing than you might think […] You might therefore suppose there’s a simple one-to-one mapping between the photosites and the pixels […] But that’s not the way it’s done […] a digital camera is not simply a passive recording device. It doesn’t take pictures; it makes them. The sensor array intercepts a pattern of illumination, just as film used to do, but that’s only the start of the process that creates the image. In existing digital cameras, all the algorithmic wizardry is directed toward making digital pictures look as much as possible like their wet-chemistry forebears. (Hayes 2008, 94)

Hayes’ argument has significant implications for the present discussion. Firstly, Manovich’s argument that digital images are coded on the basis of the “photographic” is confirmed by Hayes with respect to the technical aspects of digital image production. This point can be seen as a humble one; it is hardly unexpected that digital photographs follow the representational modes of conventional photography. However, this point has more radical consequences than might first be assumed. Digital images are increasingly coded to produce what I would prefer to call a sense of indexicality that would be a more proper term, for the purposes of the present discussion, than Manovich’s “photographic look”. The sense of indexicality can be attained through many forms. It can be a formal and aesthetic preference, such as emulating the grainy texture of analog images by processing noise accordingly; or the “memorization” or rendering realistic of smooth, plastic, and overly perfect computer images by adding textures believed to be particular to analog images. Secondly, the very nature of the primary level of photography, comprising the first encounter of light with the surface of contact (i.e., film or negatives in analog photography and sensor in digital photography), would have significant consequences for the ontological definition of the emergent image. Analog photography depends heavily on the causal relationship between the storage (i.e., the surface of contact) and the image. That is, the relative autonomy of the image is limited as long as the medium specificity is retained, which is mostly true in the case of analog images. However, as Hayes puts very clearly, light beams falling on the digital sensor constitute only the outset or trigger of the image. Given the absence of medium specificity, there is no act of “taking” a photograph; there is no causal or indexical relationship within the process. Because “no permanent traces are left since messages pass in and out of the theatre of digits without presuming continued residence” (Binkley 1993, 97), the digital medium

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

can be seen primarily as a space of abstraction that excludes the materiality needed for the existence of indexicality. Thus, what is at stake at this point is whether or not the surface of contact (i.e., film or digital sensor) perpetuates the very trait of the photographic object at the moment of contact. To be precise, a photographic image has referentiality only so long as this perpetuation occurs. Moreover, because the notion of referentiality existentially depends on that of indexicality, this statement inherently involves indexicality. Røssaak’s and Hayes’ discussions and findings imply that the trait of the photographic object is lost at the moment of contact; instead, it is coded instantly in digital photography (or any image process via computer). In the early approaches to photography beginning with the invention of the medium, the notion of indexicality had been regarded as a distinctive feature of the photographic image in which an essential part of the image was impressed on the surface of contact to leave some trace of it there, much like residual mud on a boot. Photographic realism has been conceived apart from any analogical association to define photography as a “supremely realist medium” (Walton 1984, 251) or “a kind of deposit of the real itself” (Krauss 1986, 110) by virtue of indexicality. Roland Barthes (1981, 5–6) echoes a similar conception in his account of the adherence of the referent in which the photograph “always carries its referent with itself”; “they are glued together”. Moreover, the loss of the photographic object at the moment of contact in digital photography brings into question many aesthetic forms of expression and particular artistic positions exalted in conventional photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of a “decisive moment” or the creative imagination that Ansel Adams frequently pointed out as an essential artistry of the photographer is largely challenged within the aesthetic realm of digital photography where “seeing the moment” is no longer a trademark of the photographic act. As Daniel Palmer (2015, 153) suggests, in contrast to “creative visionary engaged in a poetic encounter with the world” in conventional photography, there is the “deferral of creative decision making” in digital photography that can generate many unexpected forms. Whether or not digital images have lost any trace of reference has been the subject of many discussions in the literature. In an earlier assessment, Kevin Robins (1996, 44) regards digital images as increasingly independent from meaning and referents in the real world; in this postmodern situation, identity is formed on the basis of the image rather than reality. Geoffrey Batchen insightfully relates the absence of the referent in digital photography to the notion of representation: Where photography is inscribed by the things it represents, it is possible for digital images to have no origin other than their own computer program. These images may still be indexes of a sort, but their referents are now differential circuits and abstracted data banks of information (information that includes, in most cases, the look of the photographic). In other words, digital images are not so

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

much signs of reality as they are signs of signs. They are representations of what is already perceived to be a series of representations. (Batchen 2000, 139–140)

Batchen contends that digital images cannot be understood within a conventional notion of representation; they have instead come to simulate signs of signs rather than signs of reality. Moreover, his observation parallels Manovich’s claim that digital images imitate analog images. Batchen’s observation appears even more radical upon his assertion that digital images are already representations of representations. For him, digital images undermine the discourse of and belief in the truth claims of analog photography “which have never been ‘true’ in the first place” (Batchen 1994, 48). While mimesis is a notion that operates within “real” or ideal realities, simulation is tied to representational realities. The distinction between simulation and mimesis is especially significant in the context of the present discussion. If digital images operate through simulation and the trait of the photographic object is lost at the moment of contact, then there would be no reason to define digital images as photographs. Rather, the distinctive characteristics of the photographic image would effectively vanish. To sum up, as David Rodowick (2001, 36) notes, while analog images transform the substance which is isomorphic with the original image, digital images (or virtual representations) depend entirely on numerical manipulation. Thus, in contrast to the constructive nature of the Euclidian geometry essential in analogical representations, the computational power of Cartesian geometry comes into play in digital images. This observation brings to light the impact of loss or radical change in the nature of materiality on the aesthetics of the image. The status of certificate of evidence of analog images and their causality is conditionally reliant on spatial and temporal isomorphism and associated materiality. The loss of isomorphism and associated materiality operates within virtuality, which thereby transforms the ontology of the image. Furthermore, because the image has neither closure nor an end point, it is exposed to a multitude of changes. The mutant versions of the image are therefore subject to displacement and decontextualization at any point. That is to say, the image becomes in and of itself those altered or mutant versions, such that the notion of originality disappears altogether.

4  Digital Image as a Simulacrum The notion of simulation leads inevitably to a discussion including Jean Baudrillard. Being a photographer himself, Baudrillard (1996, 86) puts forth the following claim about analog photography: “The photo is not an image in real time. It retains the moment of the negative, the suspense of the negative, that slight time-lag which allows the image to exist before the world”. Then, he contrasts it with the computer-generated image in which, for him, “the real has already disappeared”. The conventional photograph “preserves the moment of disappearance” and “charm of the real, like that of a previous life”. The

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

distinction between digital and analog images relates in fact to images of “reality” and images of self-sufficient hyperreality in which images appear to be “truer than true” or “realer than real” (Baudrillard 2007, 27). Within this system, an image no longer has an “umbilical cord”, to borrow Barthes’ metaphor (1981, 81), which links the photographic object to the gaze; rather, it loses this connection with the photographic object within and through algorithmic codes. In this context, the digital image can thus be perceived as belonging to the third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s (1994, 6) famous systematization wherein the image “has no relation to any reality” and instead becomes “its own simulacrum”. As Cathryn Vasselau (2015, 174) argues, simulation models do not imitate the natural world; they undermine a naturalized metaphysical perspective and operate to produce a world-order composed of quantifiable and manipulative results. I would contend that within this new system of reality, the digital image has two related realms of aesthetic expression: it can be seen either as a form of expression that imitates the analog and extols the photographic, to use Manovich’s formulation explained earlier, or as a form that operates essentially through manipulation which involves perfecting the real through its fabrication (Frosch 2003, 177). Although these two processes are interrelated, the latter, I believe, seems to have significant implications for the future of digital images, in which they will no longer be regarded as merely analog image simulations but as generating new aesthetic modes of expression that can only be understood within terms particular to virtuality. Returning to the issue of referentiality in digital images, there remains a central question of whether or not the sheer absence of referentiality leads to the disappearance of indexicality. Winfried Nöth rejects a categorical distinction between digital images and conventional photographic images on the basis of the absence of referentiality, in light of various cases in conventional photography in which it is almost impossible to detect any referent at all (Nöth 2007, 98–102). That is, the presence of the referent cannot be a necessary and sufficient condition of conventional photography. However, as a critical point, Nöth claims that although these images have no referent, they do retain the feature of indexicality in contrast to digital images with no indexicality. He then categorizes digital images and non-referential conventional photographs using Jäger’s concepts in this way: digital images are in the category of “Concrete Photography”, which generates its own images without any abstraction, while non-referential conventional images fall under the category of “Abstract Photography”, which abstracts from the referent (Jäger 2003, 178, quoted in Nöth 2007, 103). Thus, in the post-photographic era in which there is an undeniable predominance of digital images, the distinctive characteristics of these images cannot be defined by non-referentiality but rather by the radical change within their nature. In a decisive move, Nöth regards these images as iconic in the strictest sense of the word. Moreover, he claims that these “genuine icons” do not operate in a conventional sense of mimesis; they refer to

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

nothing “but its own simple visual qualities of form, luminosity, contrast, or texture” (Nöth 2007, 104).

5  The Digital Image as a “Genuine Icon” The disappearance of referentiality seems to occur at the moment of contact, the first instance of the photographic act. This fact marks, I will argue, the end of the conventional difference between memory images and images to be seen. In contrast to conventional photographic images, digital images do not mask themselves as things in the past; they do not replace memory images. In other words, because they are devoid of materiality and referentiality, they refer to nothing but the images themselves. They thereby acquire the characteristics of intertextuality and conceptuality. To use Nöth’s terminology, the things on the surface of digital images as genuine icons never cease to exist because they have never existed outside this surface at all. The essential characteristic of photography, making its own object more apparent than itself, dissolves in the absence of indexicality. As such, if we reverse Barthes’ (1981, 6) famous definition, “a photograph is always invisible; it is not it that we see”, a digital image is perfectly visible; it is it that we see. Regarding truth claims in photography, as well as photographic realism in early and recent digital photography literature, we should also refer to Patrick Maynard’s (1983, 156) two different representational modes or types of authenticity. Maynard distinguishes between visual descriptions and manifestations that imply two modes of authenticity, the former of which refers to hand-­ made pictures and the latter to photographs. Although the first type is related to information or content, the second depends on causality. He cites the Shroud of Turin to exemplify the notion of manifestation; the shroud has a causal relationship with the “object” of which it carries the marks. Thus, for him, photographs are at once visual descriptions of their subjects and manifestations of what they depict. He asserts that these two characteristics are inherently conflictual: a symptom of a disease is the manifestation of that disease, not the image of it. In this example, the idea of a picture that is both the manifestation and visual description of a disease is confusing and almost impossible. Maynard is therefore echoing the conventional distinction between icon and index. Moreover, as Geert Gooskens (2011, 116–117) contends, Maynard’s distinction implies two types of photographic realism: epistemological and ontological. The early definitions of photography as a mirror or reflection of reality depend in part on epistemological realism in which what Maynard conceptualizes as information or content is of utmost concern. However, ontological realism speaks to the causal relationship between a photograph and its subject, with the photograph being the causal consequence of this relation. Both epistemological and ontological realism regard photography as having a direct relationship to reality. However, while epistemological realism defines this relationship on the basis of the notion of reflection, ontological realism focuses on causality.

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

Digital photography does not operate through ontological realism; that is, what it promises to depict as real has nothing to do with the ontological. As a concrete photography, to use Jäger’s concept, or a genuine icon, to borrow Nöth’s term, digital photography refers to nothing other than its own visual qualities. Digital images are also paradoxical aesthetically due to being detached from the referent ontologically: although they operate primarily through the loss of the referent at the moment of contact, they also imitate a modern representational form that depends largely on referentiality and medium specificity. While digital images pursue a notion of a so-called perfect image that beholds and shows everything, they also use aesthetic forms, such as textures and imperfections, that are traditionally unique to analog images. To examine this paradox from a broader perspective, digital images can be considered photographic images rather than photographs, a difference that is substantiated by self-reference and a sense of postmodern nostalgia for the modern. This sense of nostalgia does not mourn for the referent lost at the very beginning of the photographic act, but for the representation of the referent itself in conventional photography. The conception of digital images regarded here as genuine icons calls into question the distinction between medium and image. Within the notion of indexicality, there are two possible views on the relationship between these ideas: medium can be thought of as a surface “carrying” the image itself or, alternatively, image can be conceived as a thing that replaces the medium; it becomes the medium itself. However, while the medium already exists within its materiality, the image gains the virtue of materiality only in conjunction with the medium. Jean-Paul Sartre (2012, 5–6) noted that existence-as-imaged is a mode of being that is exceptionally hard to comprehend because we tend to think of all modes of existence in terms of physical existence, a deep-rooted habit that proves difficult to break. If we simplify the complexity of Sartre’s account and adapt it for our purposes, if we think of the notion of image without holding any preconceived notions about it, then we can begin to attribute the very features of the imaged thing to the image to bear in mind two different realms: one of the imaged thing and another of the image itself. This is where the image ceases to be an imaged thing but becomes an object that exists in the same way that the object does. Sartre (2004, 43) calls this tendency to consider two realms the “illusion of immanence”, wherein we see a respective realm of things and images and then place images on level ground with things, both of which have the same mode of existence. At this point, we can return to the distinction between medium and image in Sartre’s terms. Within the conceptual framework of indexicality, the image can disappear in the “transfer” of the photographic object only if it is tied to a sort of materiality. However, if we assume impartibility of medium and image for a moment, then the indexicality of this medium-image is conceivable within materiality. Paradoxically, however, this notion of medium-image can only be possible within the absence of materiality, or as long as the image is regarded as a “thing”. Can we continue to talk about the notion of image in its

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

conventional sense given this perspective? I think not. The digital image as a “genuine icon”, which shows nothing but itself (or, in other words, becomes a “thing” in itself), is clearly a perfect example of the situation in which what Sartre calls the “illusion of immanence” ideally occurs. This is especially true in the case of the absence of indexicality where there is no material ground (read as “medium”) for the image. When the digital image is conceived as a simulacra of a “modern” notion of the referent, it becomes its own reality; it is essentially a “thing” that refers to nothing but itself. The lens and the camera are indispensable to and inextricable parts of the transfer process in analog photography. In digital images, although these tools seem to fulfill the same functions as in analog photography, the photographic process ends just after what I have identified in the present discussion as the moment of contact. The data transferred to the digital sensor has nothing in it that is particular to the medium at hand; rather, this data carries the same ontological definition no matter the outcome (i.e., sound, music, visual image, text, etc.). Thus, the trace of the referent is lost after the very brief moment of the actual photographic act. The notion of reality refers exclusively to the self-­ reference of the digitalized data and a theoretically infinite chain of references. However, the highlighted difference between analog and digital photography does not amount to the photographic act being an inherently realistic and neutral process safe from ideology in which the objects in front of the camera are truthfully brought to the photographic surface without any intermediaries. The distinction only means that the photograph is a certificate of presence of a thing and carries traces of it, rather than encapsulating a specific association between the photographic representation and truth or a claim that indexicality reflects or reversely distorts reality. Relatedly, the presence of referentiality does not lend itself to the fact that a sort of immediacy between the photograph and its object made possible through the notion of indexicality entails any kind of inference about the nature of reality or truth appearing through the image. If we are supposed to decide whether or not digital images can be regarded as photographs (although it is quite problematic to pose the question in this way), we can content ourselves by claiming that digital images have lost some distinctive characteristics of photographic images, a statement which renders exceptionally challenging the task of determining if they are in fact photographs.

References Amelunxen, Hubertus von. 1996. “Photography after Photography: The Terror of the Body in Digital Space”. In:  Photography after Photography: Memory and the Representation in the Digital Age. Ed. by Hubertus v. Amelunxen et al., trans. Pauline Cumbers. München: G+B Arts. Archambault, Michael. 2016. “Film vs. Digital: A Comparison of the Advantages and Disadvantages”. http://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-­vs-­digital-­a-­comparison-­ of-­the-­advantages-­and-­disadvantages/.

  PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES IN THE DIGITAL ERA 

Armstrong, Carol. 1998. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1975. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. “On the Nature of Photography”. Critical Inquiry, 1 (1): 149–161. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Batchen, Geoffrey. 1994. “Phantasm: Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography”. Aperture, 136: 46–51. Batchen, Geoffrey. 1997. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Batchen, Geoffrey. 2000. Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. The Perfect Crime. Trans. by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 2007. Fatal Strategies. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Bazin, André. 1967 [1958]. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”. In: What is Cinema?, Vol. 1. Trans. by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Binkley, Timothy. 1993. “Reconfiguring Culture”. In:  Future in Visions: New Technologies of the Screen. Ed. by Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen. London: BFI. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bossen, Howard. 1985. “Zone V: Photojournalism, Ethics, and the Electronic Age”. Studies in Visual Communication, 11 (3). Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Frosch, Paul. 2003. The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry. Oxford and New York: Berg. Geuens, Jean-Pierre. 2002. “The Digital World Picture”. Film Quarterly, 55 (4): 16–27. Gooskens, Geert. 2011. “The Digital Challenge: Photographic Realism Revisited”. Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 3: 115–125. Hayes, Brian. 2008. “Computational Photography”. American Scientist, vol. 96. Jäger, Gottfried. 2003. “Abstract Photography”. In:  Rethinking Photography I+II: Narration and New Reduction in Photography. Ed. by Ruth Horak, pp. 162–195. Salzburg: Fotohof Edition. Kember, Sarah. 1998. Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Krauss, Rosalind E. 1986. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lister, Martin. 2009. “Photography in the Age of Electronic Imaging”. In: Photography: A Critical Introduction. Ed. by Liz Wells. London: Routledge. Manovich, Lev. 2006. “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”. In: The Photography Reader. Ed. by Liz Wells. London: Routledge. Maynard, Patrick. 1983. “The Secular Icon: Photography and the Functions of Images”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42 (2): 155–169. Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

 

K. DEĞIRMENCI

Nöth, Winfried. 2007. “The Death of Photography in Self-Reference”. In:  Self-­ Reference in the Media. Ed. by Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara. New  York and Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Palmer, Daniel. 2015. “Lights, Camera, Algorithm: Digital Photography’s Algorithmic Conditions”. In:  Digital Light. Ed. by Sean Cubitt et  al. London: Open Humanities Press. Punt, Michael. 1995. “‘Well, Who You Gonna Believe Me or Your own Eyes?’: A Problem of Digital Photography”. The Velvet Light Trap—A Critical Journal of Film and Television, 36: 2–20. Ritchin, Fred. 1990. In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography. New York: Aperture. Ritchin, Fred. 1991. “The End of Photography as We Have Known It”. In:  Photo-­ Video: Photography in the Age of the Computer. Ed. by Paul Wombell. London: Rivers Oram Press. Roberts, John. 2009. “Photography after the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic”. Oxford Art Journal, 32 (2): 281–298. Robins, Kevin. 1995. “Will Image Move us Still?” In: The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Ed. by Martin Lister. New York: Routledge. Robins, Kevin. 1996. Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision. London and New York: Routledge. Rodowick, David. 2001. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Røssaak, Eivind. 2011. “Algorithmic Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film-Divide”. In:  Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Ed. by Eivind Røssaak. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rubinstein, Daniel and Sluis, Katrin. 2013. “The Digital Image in Photographic Culture: Algorithmic Photography and the Crisis of Representation”. In:  The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Ed. by Martin Lister. New York: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004 [1940]. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Trans. by Jonathan Webber. New York: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2012 [1936]. Imagination. Trans. by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. New York: Routledge. Sontag, Susan. 1975. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Vasselau, Cathryn. 2015. “Simulated Translucency”. In:  Digital Light. Ed. by Sean Cubitt et al. London: Open Humanities Press. Walton, Kendall. 1984. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Critical Inquiry, 11 (2): 246–277. Willemen, Paul. 2002. “Reflections on Digital Imagery: Of Mice and Men”. In: New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. Ed. by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. London: British Film Institute. Willis, Anne-Marie. 1990. “Digitisation and the Living Death of Photography”. In: Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. Ed. by Philip Hayward. London: John Libbey.

Images and Invisibility Øyvind Vågnes

1   Introduction Most introductions to the theme of invisibility begin to approach the phenomenon with reference to the traditions of storytelling in which it has continued to figure so vividly and prominently, from its early appearances in ancient myth to its recurrent manifestations in the popular culture of the digital era. Narratives such as the legend of Gyges, cited from Plato’s Republic, occur with frequency in such introductions because they are testament to the lasting magnitude of the trope of invisibility, and its capacity to reflect and question desires and fascinations that are deeply embedded in human nature and culture (Ball 2015, 2–4; Birchall n.d.). Even the most basic etymological histories and genealogies suggest that as a cultural idea, invisibility remains appealing and provocative across centuries and cultures because the essential aspects of its conceptualization stay the same, even if its reiterations demonstrate its susceptibility to be rearticulated with the advent of ever new media and technologies. Thus, each reappearance in cultural narrative of, for instance, a “magic ring”—which typically provides protagonists and antagonists alike with cloaks of invisibility— tells us something about the motif’s persistent hold on the human imagination, while allowing the implications of the ethical ambivalence of its possession to stay new. We tend to define invisibility negatively, as the absence of visibility, and thus necessarily contemplate and come to terms with the invisible as a question of relationality: “The visible produces the invisible, in the sense that for

Ø. Vågnes (*) University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_32

533

534 

Ø. VÅGNES

something to be optically discernible to us within any given temporal frame, something else has to recede from observability” (Grønstad and Vågnes 2019, 2). Each iteration of the relationship between what is visible, and what is not, potentially raise not only ontological but also aesthetic, ethical, and political questions: Why does something appear visible to us, whereas something else does not? What are the ramifications of each manifestation of this specific relationship between the visible and the invisible, for visual culture and beyond? In engaging with invisibility, we are always already involved in an ongoing, complexly diverse critical conversation defined by the entanglement of different spheres of society; as Clare Birchall observes, science, as well as culture, mediates our understanding of the invisible (Birchall n.d.). In his engaging cultural history of invisibility as idea, Philip Ball recognizes how it as a concept figures in widely different discursive contexts simultaneously and across time: in early magic, in photography’s intersections with spiritualism, in microscopy and quantum physics, in the rhetoric of the developers as well as the critics of the contemporary surveillance industries, to mention some of the examples from his book. For these reasons and more, a handbook entry into invisibility can inevitably only scratch the surface of its topic. In what follows, I will limit my delineations in particular to questions concerning how the trope of invisibility continues to inform the cultural discourse of identity politics into the contemporary period, and to how relatively recent technological transformations indeed urge comprehensive reconsiderations of how we are to conceive not only of the very concept of invisibility but also of the ways in which it reshapes our notions of what visual culture is.

2   An Aesthetics of Invisibility When the coronavirus outbreak of 2019 was recognized as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, countries and cultures across the globe went into various states of exception as a result of the spread of the COVID-19 virus, including lockdowns that would include millions of people. In learning about the rapid escalation of events in news media and outlets on every existing platform, citizens across the world would often see reports and dispatches illustrated with a striking depiction of the structure of the virus. Declared the “iconic representation” in a New York Times article in the early spring of 2020, the “spiky blob” was designed by two medical illustrators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a US federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services), Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, who through their visualizations “make difficult medical concepts more approachable”, something that often “means bringing the unseeable into view” (Giaimo 2020). The act of illustration is also an act of pedagogy, of increasing intelligibility and access to knowledge, in the contexts of education and public information. The “loathed pathogens of the microworld” that we refer to as viruses were discovered in 1892, Philip Ball points out in Invisible, but “remained invisible,

  IMAGES AND INVISIBILITY 

535

inferred presences” until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, and they could be observed to be “exotic beyond the imaginings of conventional demonologies”, prompting Ball to describe them as “invisible demons appropriate for the sci-fi era” (Ball 2015, 219). As events unfolded in the spring of 2020, reports described how the visualization of the pandemic’s “invisible agent” had microbiologists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases work long shifts to produce microscopic images which “gained unprecedented foothold in popular culture and stirred our collective imagination” (Bishara 2020). No wonder, perhaps, that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), a thriller about a fictional pandemic of a virus called MEV-1, hit iTunes’ top 10 list of rentals in the US in March 2020 (Bisset 2020), appeared on Netflix, and attracted renewed media attention, as several of the film’s scenarios appeared to have predicted those of the coronavirus pandemic. Predictably, a visual culture of the coronavirus emerged, with internet memes and GIFs, including some that were in reality expressions of political protest, of which several were directed at the Trump administration and its handling of the pandemic. The pandemic was thus of course also a global media phenomenon, where images of masks, body bags, and empty streets documented the upheaval produced by the workings of something so infinitesimal that it cannot be detected by the human eye. All the attempts at visualization listed above profoundly demonstrate an ongoing cultural struggle with an aesthetics of invisibility. Such a struggle might be motivated by the extraordinary challenges brought upon humanity by a pandemic, for scientific, cultural, or political reasons, or might concern us for ethical reasons, and revolve around, for instance, questions of documentation, representation, or accountability, in human affairs of various kinds, across multiple societal spheres and sectors. Books have been dedicated to mapping “invisible crimes” and their implications, including various social harms, inviting a reconsideration of how these might be addressed by criminological and victimological scholarship (Davies et al. 1999, 2014). How is crime invisible? As several of the contributions to this particular scholarship argue, claiming “invisibility” is often a case of pointing to a lack of knowledge, or of political and media attention, or to insufficient regulations or strategies of public information. But it might also pertain to very specific circumstances that relate to questions of observability, materiality, and agency. Air pollution is, for example, literally invisible from sight and consciousness, as is also its associated consequences (Walters 1999). Thus, in numerous cases across the socially and politically engaged visual arts, documentary projects might be motivated by an engagement with what might in different ways be articulated as an aesthetics of invisibility. Consider, for instance, the medium of photography, and the various attempts to visually represent the nuclear age, as in the case of the Chernobyl disaster. As radioactive contamination “remains invisible for both human senses and the photographic medium”, Daniel Bürkner points out, “[t]he visual blank of radioactivity is considered with different iconographic and material techniques that prioritize a certain concept of nature in order to indicate the

536 

Ø. VÅGNES

Fig. 1  Peter Lam, Landscape of Chernobyl, photograph, undated. Photo by: unsplash.com (in public domain)

characteristics of the Chernobyl landscape”, thus evoking “a new mythological concept of nature in the face of radioactive catastrophe” (Bürkner 2014, 36) (Fig. 1). Likewise, in the realm of popular television, the HBO series Chernobyl was described by critics as “an environmental history of the invisible” (Walker 2019). Etymological inquiry will often demonstrate how tropologies of invisibility have evolved from the limitations of the human senses, based on the tangibility, materiality, and observability of any given phenomenon. Consider a different cloud altogether, namely the kind we depend on for remote storage and processing of data, which together with intangible software simulation encompass what Carolyn Elerding describes as “digital petroculture’s aesthetics of invisibility”, as both processes reinforce the invisibility of the comprehensive material resources that must be consumed in order to perpetuate digital culture (Elerding 2016). As John Durham Peters observes in The Marvelous Clouds, [t]he idea that the Internet is free of the grunt work of shelving is particularly clear in the rhetoric of the cloud as a universal space of digital storage […] The cloud evokes ancient ideas of a heavenly record containing everything ever said and done, a record both worldly and infallible. (Peters 2015, 332)

An aesthetics of invisibility is often invoked when materialities appear beyond the realm of the human senses, but nevertheless affect the conditions of the existence of our species in unprecedented ways.

  IMAGES AND INVISIBILITY 

537

3   Invisibility and Identity Politics Invisibility might also be reimagined, however, as an aesthetic in literary fiction, in a tradition of writing that has several parallel genealogies, but that might be traced, for instance, from a contemporary writer such as Teju Cole back to Ralph Ellison. In a reading of Cole’s Open City (2011) and Ellison’s Invisible Man, Sam Reese and Alexandra Kingston-Reese argue that both writers “draw on a Modernist French aesthetic regime to embed invisibility into the structure of their work, drawing analogies with music and photography to expand its implications beyond the act of not being seen” (Reese and Kingston-­ Reese 2017, 104). The two novels, Reese and Kingston-Reese claim, “ask invisibility to be understood as more than a state inflicted on [their] narrators. It is a perceptual mode, actively adopted, that inflects their perspective and shapes the structure of their narratives” (117). “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”, the narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man admits to the reader on the first page of that novel, which indeed remains an unmissable reference in any discussion of how the trope of invisibility continues to inform literature’s engagement with racism (Ellison 1947). Like the double phenomenon of in/visibility itself, its tropology is by nature entangled and relational, and holds a central place in our vocabularies, with no less than formative impact on how we understand and express ourselves. We have a profound tendency to describe our sense of being in the world with figurative reference to our ocular faculties, to our “insight”, our “blindness”, and so on, a fact that is demonstrated memorably on the first page of Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, which gathers twenty one visual metaphors in an entire paragraph suggesting “how ineluctable the modality of the visual actually is, at least in our linguistic practice” (Jay 1993, 1). Our ways of seeing and acts of vision are thus necessarily indicative of our ethics, of how we conceive of interhuman relationships, and try to engage in them performatively as well as articulate them. Consider, for instance, the complexity of the shifting dynamics of looking/not looking and seeing/not seeing, and how it has continued to shape the discourse on identity politics. Ellison describes the feeling of being “not a spook”, but rather “a man of substance”, of being stared at but yet not seen, an act of what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “the ocular violence of racism”, which “splits its object in two, rending and rendering it simultaneously hypervisible and invisible”. Invisible Man, writes Mitchell, “renders this paradox most vividly: it is because the invisible man is hypervisible that (in another sense) he is invisible” (Mitchell 2005, 34). To stare at someone is to single out an aspect of your range of vision, with infatuation, fascination, or disgust, knowingly or unknowingly engaging in a potential act of alienation; but to see can involve seeing the other, to acknowledge the existence of a fellow human being, and to express this acknowledgment as an ethical act. From such a perspective both staring at and refraining from seeing the other are active choices of dehumanization, even when naturalized into human behaviour in a way that

538 

Ø. VÅGNES

makes racism itself invisible—a central point in Claudia Rankine’s collection of poetry Citizen: At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking to that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black! I didn’t mean to say that, he then says. Aloud, you say. What? He asks. You didn’t mean to say that aloud. (Rankine 2014, 44)

Any conception of an ethics of invisibility would depend on its recognition of the performative aspects of the ocular violence of racism, for instance, in its more or less subtle appearance in the realm of the gestural, in the spheres of our informal communications. As Rankine’s poetry demonstrates quite clearly, this is where microaggressions flourish, often as invisible markers of acts of ocular violence. The struggle for recognition and acknowledgment of marginalized individuals and groups has often been expressed with reference to our basic senses, in the fundamental need to be heard and to be seen. From such a perspective, to attain visibility is a form of empowerment in the discourses of identity politics and human rights, both in a literal and in a figurative sense. This also affects our concerns with the politics of representation in visual culture more generally, and the mobilization in various media of different modes of visualization in response to questions of in/visibility. To make a phenomenon visible is to attempt to draw attention to it. Consider, for instance, the hybrid medium specificity of comics and graphic novels, for which an intensifying research interest in recent years has produced an emerging scholarship across fields and disciplines, in “comics studies” and beyond. According to Hillary Chute, several prominent non-fiction graphic narratives to appear since the 1990s are motivated by attempts to address and struggle with the unrepresentability of individual and collective trauma (Chute 2016). Drawing is a form of visualization that enables an engagement with psychology and memory that is markedly different from that of, for instance, photographic representation, and joined with words in sequential, visual-verbal forms of narrativization, non-fiction comics can equip artists with tools to interrogate and intervene into the relationship of what is visible and what is not. Arguably, the aesthetic properties of comics, a medium that often revolves around its defining interplay of word and image, allow for particular explorations of in/visibility. Fundamentally, “visible” and “invisible” are words we use in order to describe states of visibility and are as such typical of the “word/ image problem” W.J.T. Mitchell explores in Cloning Terror, where he describes “the word as a limit for the image, and vice versa”:

  IMAGES AND INVISIBILITY 

539

We see this limiting character most clearly when we note the way “words fail” to capture the density of signification in the image, or conversely we find ourselves unable or forbidden to make an image of that which we can nevertheless mention or name—God, the infinite, absolute chaos, or the void. (Mitchell 2011, 55–56)

As Mitchell observes, this word/image dialectic thus approaches “the frontiers of the unimaginable and the unspeakable, the place where words and images fail, where they are refused, prohibited as obscenities that violate a law of silence and invisibility, muteness and blindness” (57). With reference to Wittgenstein’s ambiguous axiom in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”, Mitchell argues that the word “cannot” may describe both a moral and a grammatical prohibition, both “the inability to speak and the refusal to speak” (58). When something appears visible to us and something else does not, this may reflect what Mitchell describes as age-old “rhetorical tropes that simultaneously invoke and overcome the limitations of language and depiction, discourse and display” (57). Perhaps nowhere is the creative interest around this “double prohibition” more evident and persistent than in the genre of the graphic memoir, where the trials and tribulations involved in the formation of identity are negotiated in the interplay of images and words. In what is regularly considered the classic of the genre, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the question of unrepresentability is addressed intergenerationally, as Artie narrates his own father’s narration of Holocaust survival in graphic narrative. In the early years after the publication of Maus, which was originally serialized from 1980 to 1991, several critics and scholars would refer to Theodor Adorno’s much-cited contention (in the 1949 essay “After Auschwitz”) that the Holocaust made poetry impossible, and ask what the implications of this sentiment would be for a work of Holocaust representation in the form of a comic book. In Present Pasts, which was published eleven years after Spiegelman’s book was awarded the Pulitzer prize, Andreas Huyssen suggested that Maus marked a shift in the ways in which the Holocaust and its remembrance were represented, and that its author belonged to a generation of artists “to whom the prohibition of images must appear like Holocaust theology”. The image-text of Maus was understood by Huyssen (and others) as a response to “Adorno’s rigorously modernist reflection” (Huyssen 2003, 136). In its complex, multi-layered engagement with the moral as well as the grammatical prohibitions against the production of its image-text, Maus continues to address the contested, ongoing visualization of the Holocaust across media, and the ethical ramifications of the in/visibility of its direct and indirect witnessing (Fig. 2). Several of the autographic memoirs to follow Maus have intervened into this problematic of the unimaginable and the unspeakable, interrogating the invisibilities of trauma in the cultural-specific context of ethnic and gender identity (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), or sexual identity (Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home), or disability (David Small’s Stitches). Importantly, this intervention into the double prohibition against the visualization of trauma also extends beyond the

540 

Ø. VÅGNES

Fig. 2  Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a detail from the comic book, chapter 6—“Mouse Trap”, p. 148; Penguin Books, 1973 (fair use)

confines of the first-person narrative of the memoir; it also remains a significant vein in comics reportage, of which Joe Sacco’s journalism continues to be the best-known example. In Palestine, for instance, Sacco draws how Ghassan, a Palestinian, is captured, interrogated, and tortured by Israel’s General Security Service, in a narrative that allows for a visual interpretation of an act of witnessing in the panels, while employing word for word testimony in its captions. The resulting visualization, ironically titled “Moderate pressure”—the terminology used by the GSS in its interrogation manuals to describe a form of torture that leaves limited physical trace and thus renders its considerable trauma invisible—unmasks the euphemism constructed to obfuscate its reality (Sacco 2007, fourth chapter). Likewise, the double prohibition described by Mitchell is a central theme in Guy Delisle’s books of reportage, where he finds his own abilities to describe visually the experiences of both himself and others that he encounters modified by the regulations of censorship in a totalitarian society, as in Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2004)  (Fig. 3), or the struggles of recollection of yet another torture victim, as in Hostage (2016). Whether the authors of these titles raise concerns that relate to the politics of identity in telling their stories on behalf of others, or on behalf of themselves, or both, the hybrid storytelling of all of them revolves around the assumption that visibility and visual representation are, in the words of Jena Habegger-Conti, “widely regarded as positive for selfhood and political recognition” (Habegger-Conti 2019, 149). But as Habegger-Conti points out in a reading of Satrapi’s graphic memoir Embroideries, there has been a shift in the discourse on the politics of representation in recent years. Across the humanities, “For Opacity” (1990), an essay by the Martiniquan writer and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), claiming the right to be opaque, has had a formative impact on an ongoing reconsideration of how the problematics of in/visibility affects identity politics. In attending to Satrapi’s graphic narrative, Habegger-Conti illustrates how “the concept of opacity suggests that to not be seen can be a path to maintaining selfhood” (150). Unmapping the medium-­ specific complexities of the image-text of Embroideries, she argues that the

  IMAGES AND INVISIBILITY 

541

Fig. 3  Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, a detail from the comic book, p. 36; Drawn and Quarterly, Montreal, 2004 (fair use)

reader, rather than seeing the story through the protagonist’s eyes, is invited to “view the world with another” and that the goal, rather than empathy, is “togetherness, mutual subjectivity” (159).

4   Invisible Images and Visual Culture This distinction is instructive and reflects a shift in how several artists have been concerned with the relationship between in/visibility and representation in the visual arts in recent years. It has become increasingly difficult to consider this relationship without accounting for the tremendous impact of the emergence of what David Lyon has referred to as “surveillance culture”. This conceptualization works better than “surveillance state” or “surveillance society”, according to Lyon, since our present world is characterized by “user-generated surveillance” where “users themselves act surveillantly as they check up on, follow and score others with ‘likes’, ‘recommendations’ and other evaluative criteria” (Lyon 2018, 8). With reference to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a “society of control”, Lyon compares the growth of surveillance, rather than to that of a tree, which grows “relatively rigid, in a vertical plane, like the panopticon”, to that of “creeping weeds”, since surveillance in our present age “twists and travels at speed, seeping and spreading into many life areas where it once had only marginal sway” (33). In Lyon’s words, “not only being watched, but watching itself has become a way of life” (29). This transformation in how we are to conceive of surveillance is articulated in similar ways across the humanities and the social sciences: Describing what she refers to as “social surveillance”, for instance, Alice E.  Marwick finds that mediated communities are “characterized by both watching and a high awareness of being watched” (Marwick 2012, 379). As an alternative, Pramod N. Nayar uses the neologism

542 

Ø. VÅGNES

“multiveillance” with reference to “the many layers of surveillance we willingly subject ourselves and others to” (Nayar 2011, 416). Provocatively, Lyon sees this shift as one from a Foucauldian notion of “panoptic surveillance” to one of “performative surveillance” (Lyon 2018, 34). In all of these conceptualizations of surveillance in contemporary society, the in/visibility relationship becomes fraught and conflicted. Consider, for instance, the expansive monitoring introduced by biometric technologies. With Facial Weaponization Suite, artist and scholar Zach Blas protests against the widespread application of biometric facial recognition across society by initiating the collective production of amorphous masks that allow the subjects who wear them to appear undetectable in a series of community workshops. One of Blas’ main arguments behind this critical intervention is that facial recognition technologies propagate inequalities. As Blas has observed in various contexts, when biometrics tend to fail, they tend not to be able to recognize minoritarian persons (see, for instance, Valentine 2014). In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne describes how the quantification of facial features in facial recognition technologies allows for a search for specific features, revealing the possibilities for racial surveillance (Browne 2015, 113). When whiteness is made normative, it is also “racially invisible”, and the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance technologies […] can be employed to do the work of alienating the subject by producing a truth about the racial body and one’s identity (or identities) despite the subject’s claims. (110)

These considerations necessitate a rethinking of not only the relationship between in/visibility and political representation but also of how we are to conceive of resistance and protest. Inspired by Glissant’s writings, Blas proposes the term “informatic opacity” to resist the normalization of transparency, of algorithmic standardizations across culture in the identification of human life, and the inherent “claims to make a person fully intelligible and interpretable”—which are barbaric in the way that they destroy “the opacity of another” (Blas 2018). Not only does the advent of machine vision introduce new visual regimes, it also introduces new paradigms of visuality. Among the genealogical maps that can be drawn in this context, Henrik Gustafsson observes, is one that traces Trevor Paglen’s thinking on operational images in recent years back to Harun Farocki’s influential conceptualization (Gustafsson 2019; Farocki 2004; Paglen 2014). In describing images as agents in operations, Farocki foresaw the extent to which operational images would, in Paglen’s words, be “overwhelmingly invisible, even as they’re ubiquitous and sculpting physical reality in ever more dramatic ways” (Paglen 2014, 3). As Paglen argued in 2016, this notion of the formative role of the invisible image invites a wholesale reconsideration of our concepts of in/visibility:

  IMAGES AND INVISIBILITY 

543

Visual culture has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has largely become invisible. Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop. The advent of machine-to-machine seeing has been barely noticed at large, and poorly understood by those of us who’ve begun to notice the tectonic shift invisibly taking place before our eyes. The landscape of invisible images and machine vision is becoming evermore active […] Invisible images are actively watching us, poking and prodding, guiding our movements, inflicting pain and inducing pleasure. But all of this is hard to see. (Paglen 2016)

The implications of this, Paglen points out, is that the advent of digital images that are machine-readable, and can only be seen by the human eye under special conditions, allows for “the automation of vision on an enormous scale and, along with it, the exercise of power on dramatically larger and smaller scales than have ever been possible” (Paglen 2016). Our abilities to critically engage with, interrogate, and intervene into this “invisible world of machine-machine visual culture”, according to Paglen, depend on our capacities “to learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like” (Paglen 2016). Future studies of invisibility, then, will demand new deductive and interpretive skills from us, as well as rigorous attempts to develop and furnish new critical vocabularies and methodologies that allow us to mobilize thinking around and engagement with a profoundly transforming visual culture.

References Ball, Philip. 2015. Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Birchall, Clare, ed. n.d. The In/visible. Living Books About Life. http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/The_in/visible. Accessed March 8, 2020. Bishara, Hakim. 2020. “The Pandemic’s Invisible Agent”. Hyperallergic, April 19. https://hyperallergic.com/549588/the-­pandemics-­invisible-­agent/ Bisset, Jennifer. 2020. “Pandemic Film Contagion Becomes One of iTunes’ Most-­ Watched Movies”. Cnet, March 4. https://www.cnet.com/news/pandemic-­film-­ contagion-­becomes-­one-­of-­itunes-­most-­watched-­movies/ Blas, Zach. 2018. “Informatic Opacity”. In: Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury. https://zachblas.info/writings/ informatic-­opacity-­2/. Accessed April 1, 2020. Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. Bürkner, Daniel. 2014. “The Chernobyl Landscape and the Aesthetics of Invisibility”. Photography & Culture, 7 (1): 21–40. Chute, Hillary. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Boston: Harvard University Press.

544 

Ø. VÅGNES

Davies, Pamela; Francis, Peter, and Jupp, Victor (eds.). 1999. Invisible Crimes: Their Victims and Their Regulations. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, Pamela; Francis, Peter, and Wyatt, Tanya (eds.). 2014. Invisible Crimes and Social Harms. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Delisle, Guy. 2005. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly. Delisle, Guy. 2016. Hostage. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly. Elerding, Carolyn. 2016. “The Materiality of the Digital: Petro-Enlightenment and the Aesthetics of Invisibility”. Postmodern Culture, 26 (2). https://doi.org/10.1353/ pmc.2016.0007 Ellison, Ralph. 1947. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage. Farocki, Harun. 2004. “Phantom Images”. Public, 29: 12–22. Giaimo, Cara. 2020. “The Spiky Blob Seen Around the World”. New York Times, April 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-­illustration-­cdc.html Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Trans. by Besty Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grønstad, Asbjørn and Vågnes, Øyvind (eds.). 2019. Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gustafsson, Henrik. 2019. “Archeologists of the Off-Screen: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen”. In: Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Ed. by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Habegger-Conti, Jena. 2019. “Reading the Invisible in Marjane Satrapi’s Graphic Memoir Embroideries”. In: Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Ed. by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Redford: Stanford University Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lyon, David. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity. Marwick, Alice E. 2012. “The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life”. Surveillance Society, 9 (4): 378–393. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2011. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nayar, Pramod K. 2011. “Smile: You are on Camera! The Rise of Participatory Surveillance”. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 3 (3): 410–418. Paglen, Trevor. 2014. “Operational Images”. e-flux Journal #59 (November). Paglen, Trevor. 2016. “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”. The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016. https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-­images-­your-­ pictures-­are-­looking-­at-­you/. Accessed March 8, 2020. Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. Reese, Sam and Kingston-Reese, Alexandra. 2017. “Teju Cole and Ralph Ellison’s Aesthetics of Invisibility”. Mosaic, 50 (4): 103–119. Sacco, Joe. 2007. Palestine: The Special Edition. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Satrapi, Marjane. 2003. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon.

  IMAGES AND INVISIBILITY 

545

Satrapi, Marjane. 2008. Embroideries. London: Jonathan Cape. Small, David. 2009. Stitches: A Memoir. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Spiegelman, Art. 1997. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon. Valentine, Ben. 2014. “Weaponizing Our Faces: An Interview with Zach Blas”. Motherboard, July 10. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdpzaa/weaponizingour-­faces-­an-­interview-­with-­zach-­blas-­715 Walker, Lauren. 2019. “HBO’s Chernobyl: An Environmental History of the Invisible”. Blogpost, NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), August 27. https://niche-­c anada.org/2019/08/27/hbos-­c hernobyl-­a n-­e nvironmental-­ history-­of-­the-­invisible/ Walters, Reece. 1999. “Air Pollution and Invisible Violence”. In: Invisible Crimes and Social Harms. Ed. by  Pamela Davies, Peter Francis, and Tanya Wyatt. London: Palgrave.

How to Make Images Real Wolfram Pichler

Many of our everyday dealings with images are philosophically less innocent than they may seem. For instance, if we are confronted with a piece of stone which has been carved to look like a human head, we will in many cases simply call it a head or “this head” and perhaps point to it and make remarks about the form and expression of its face including the lips, the nose, the eyes and the cheeks, and so on. We will perhaps say that we “see” this head, this face, these features and we will do all of this even if we agree (1) that the concept “human head” applies to a certain part of the human body (typically a body of flesh and blood which was born and has lived for some time and will die or is already dead); and (2) that if one claims to see something and describes it with its particular features, it is usually understood that one believes that a thing of this kind is actually where one claims to see it. Now, a piece of stone, be it carved or not, is very different from what one would usually call a human head. By definition, it is not of flesh and blood, is not alive, and will not die. How can one nevertheless point to the stone, call it a head, describe the expression of its face, and say one sees it? If one claims to be a rational being who remains true to the principle of non-contradiction, one will have to resolve this conceptual problem or somehow justify it. How can this be done? This problem falls neither within the scope of semiology nor within that of the psychology of perception. It is definitely a conceptual problem and is intimately connected to language and to certain standards of rationality. It concerns the conceptual preconditions of the use of images and words (such as “to

W. Pichler (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_33

547

548 

W. PICHLER

see”) in a large variety of pragmatic contexts and therefore needs to be recognized as an important issue in the field of image theory (cf. Steinbrenner 2011). It may even be considered as a touchstone for different theories of the image. Or, to put it more moderately: once the conceptual problem has been identified, it becomes possible to interpret some well-known theories of the image as different solutions and to discuss their relative merits in that respect. And this is what shall be done in this chapter. In the first section, I will try to show that the problem can be solved in at least two radically different ways and that these two solutions correspond to certain theories of the image. I will also mention a prominent theoretical approach which doesn’t solve the problem and may, however, be responsible for the fact that it usually does not get the attention it deserves. In the second section, I will argue that although the two methods described in the first section aren’t equally successful on a systematic level, the weaker method is nevertheless aesthetically fascinating and seems to have played an interesting role in the history and theory of art. On a methodological level, it will hopefully become clear that theoretical work isn’t necessarily detached from historical inquiry. Indeed, the former may pave the way for the latter, rendering objects of study visible which would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

1   Two Solutions In order to solve the problem sketched out above, we can explain our behavior in terms of fictionality. This solution includes an agreement that in cases like the one described here, we are, whether consciously or not, playing a game of make-believe and, more specifically, a “perceptual game of make-believe” as the philosopher Kendall Walton calls it, in an important book on the theory of art (Walton 1990). We, the participants of the game, behave as if we were taking a piece of stone for a human head and as if we were seeing things we only imagine seeing, referring to them and making claims about their form and expression—claims which can, as a consequence, only be fictionally true or false. That is why Walton talks of a game of make-believe. If he calls it, more specifically, a perceptual game of make-believe, this is because a perceivable image-vehicle (in Walton’s terminology: “a prop”)—in this case, a carved piece of stone—guides our imagination. For we are not dreaming, but imagining with our eyes open, as it were. And there actually is something to be seen, even if in the given case it is not a head, but a piece of stone—a stone which has, however, been carved in such a way as to help us imagine (and imagine seeing) a head with a certain shape and expression. This “method of fictionalization”, or “method a” as we shall call it here, may be the best-known, most consistent, and most far-reaching solution to the initial problem. Yet it is not the only solution. Instead of interpreting the problematic acts of referring to something and describing it (“the cheeks of this head…”) as parts of some game of make-believe and thereby justifying them, one may aim at resolving the conceptual inconsistencies which caused the

  HOW TO MAKE IMAGES REAL 

549

trouble in the first place. In order to do so, one may try to convince oneself (as well as others) that apart from human heads made of flesh and bone, there are other heads—heads made of stone or bronze, or gold, or rubber, and so on. One may say that all these heads are similar in form and differ only in matter. This conceptual rearrangement will have remarkable consequences. The carved piece of stone (to take this example) will no longer be what it was in the context of a perceptual game of make-believe, that is, an image-vehicle or prop guiding certain head-imaginations. It will have lost this function and turned into a special kind of head. In order to distinguish it from flesh-and-blood-­ heads, gold-heads, and rubber-heads, one may call it a stone-head. In any case all the qualities of the stone will, under these conceptual conditions, be qualities of the head. The head will, for instance, be carved, gray, hard and of a very dense material, and so on. Let’s call this the “method of conceptual adaptation” or “method b”. In another version of the same method, the head, while remaining where it is, becomes divorced from the stone and is vested with a strange presence in real space which can be looked at or pointed at and yet is not tangible. This is difficult to explain but can be easily elucidated by means of an example (cf. Spier 2018) (Fig.  1). One immediately understands that the head does not have to be as hard and dense as stone. On the contrary, it seems more natural to say that the cheeks are soft, even if this softness must then be of a very peculiar, even awkward kind: visible, but intangible. The whole head is now thought Fig. 1  Head of an old man, Egyptian, ca. third century BC, siltstone, 31.3 × 15 × 14.5 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ÄS 42

550 

W. PICHLER

to be intangible—and not without a certain plausibility—since the face does not perceive the damage done to the stone. It is as if the damage was unable to affect the face. More generally, one does not have to ascribe all the stone’s qualities to the head. For instance, the latter need not have a gray skin; it can be devoid of any particular color. This second version of the method of conceptual adaptation—b′—is, of course, still radically different from fictionalization (method a). What, according to the latter, is a head-imagination, once again turns into a real head—in this case, a head which is visible but untouchable. Once again these conceptual circumstances make it possible to non-fictionally refer to the head, describe it with its particular features, and claim that one actually sees it—and all this, at least in principle, without violating the principle of non-contradiction. In this way, the image-object becomes real. At the same time, however, method b′ also has something in common with method a: it is similar in that the head (or what is called a head) is conceptually separated from the carved piece of stone. Although method b′ may never have been theorized as such, it is certainly not an invention of the author of this text. It has been practiced many times and may be found in descriptions of mirror-images and paintings, in modern and contemporary texts, of very different kinds. Here are three examples. Number one is from Ernst Mach. In his famous book The Analysis of Sensations, first published in German in 1886, Mach talked about mirror-­ images as follows (Mach 1897): “The reflection of the tree, the fruit, or the fire in a mirror is visible, but not tangible… The visible is separable from the tangible, from that which may be tasted, etc.” Mach refuses to make a categorical difference between real objects in real space, on the one hand, and optical illusions on the other. Instead of saying that the tree we see through the window is real, while the tree we see in the mirror is, insofar as we think we see it in a space beyond the mirror’s surface, an illusion, he just says that the tree out there can be seen and touched, while the tree in the mirror can only be seen. However, Mach only talks about mirrors. What about paintings? And what about the spaces they help us imagine? Could one deal with them the way Mach tried to deal with mirror-images? Maybe. At least, that is what Marcel Proust tried to do, for instance, in a well-known passage of the novel In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, first published in 1918 (Proust 2015). The narrator remembers that, in a place called Balbec, he visited the painter Elstir in his studio and came across such things as a “splashing wave… no longer able to wet” and a jacket no longer able “to clothe anyone”. He seems not to think that a wave in the illusionary space of a landscape painting is only a wave-­ imagination, and therefore nothing to make nonfictional claims about. Instead, he seems to think that it is a special kind of wave, namely a wave that does not (or does no longer) wet or drench. The same goes for the jacket that no longer clothes anyone which Proust’s narrator imagines to be not a lone jacket, to be sure, but part of a “suit of white linen” worn by a young man “leaning on the rail of a boat”. This narrator conforms with Ernst Mach in that he dissolves the boundary between real objects and image-objects and reinterprets the latter as

  HOW TO MAKE IMAGES REAL 

551

objects of a special kind. He also is consistent with Mach in that he characterizes these objects as things which can only be seen; the objects he encounters in Elstir’s paintings seem to lack tactile qualities. Recently, the German philosopher Lambert Wiesing—example number three—made the claim that image-objects (as one may call them) in general, no matter whether they occur in paintings, photographs, films, videos, and so on, can only be seen, but not felt or smelled. According to Wiesing, it lies in the nature of image-objects to be “purely visible” beings (Wiesing 2005). Let’s try to understand why. Looking at a still life painting by Chardin, one can “see” a basket of strawberries, a glass of water shining in the light, white carnations, a pair of cherries, and a peach, arranged in a particular way (Fig. 2). All these things are purely visible beings in Wiesing’s sense. Or, as the art historian Louis Marin wrote about this painting (Marin 1999): “No palate will savor the strawberries, no mouth will slake its thirst with the water in the glass, no nose will breathe in the perfume of the two flowers”. It also seems impossible to grab any of these things—the peach, for instance. The hand that tries to do so will bump into the pigment-covered canvas. And although this collision actually is a tactile experience, it doesn’t sufficiently correspond to the visual experience

Fig. 2  Jean-Siméon Chardin, Basket with Wild Strawberries, ca. 1761, oil on canvas, 38 × 45.7 cm. Private collection, Paris. Photo: Bridgeman Images

552 

W. PICHLER

in order to be understood as an experience of the same object, since the surface of the painting is flat and a bit rough, while that of the peach gives the impression of being round and velvety. Furthermore, the tactile experience does not occur in the right place: The hand encounters a resistance before it can seize the fruit which, after all, doesn’t appear to be on the surface of the image-vehicle, but further back in the depth of image-space. Now, if one does not want to (dis)qualify this space as illusionary, one will have to characterize it as a special kind of space, just as one tries to characterize image-objects as a special kind of object. And although Wiesing himself did not explicitly comment on this, it seems that, from the standpoint of his theory, it would be logical to say that image-space is a space into which one can look, but which nobody and nothing can enter, not even light. Indeed, standing in front of the painting, you can do whatever you want with your pocket lamp: the shadows in the image-space won’t change (cf. Wiesing 2013). So much for methods a, b, and b′. One may want to know whether they exhaust the whole spectrum of possible solutions to the initial problem or not. Are there still other ways to solve the problem? Perhaps. The seemingly most obvious and elegant way of dealing with it, however, does not offer any solution at all. For it is certainly tempting to make use of well-known semiological terminology and say that the stone is a “signifier” and the head is “signified” and that, taken together, they make up some kind of “sign”. But whereas in semiology, signifieds are understood to be mental representations (cf. Summers 1991), the head one seems to refer to and describe when confronted with the carved piece of stone is, if anything, a spatially extended being at a certain location in real space. And if we are asked to conceptually account for the existence of such a being or else (in case we don’t believe in its existence) to justify why we nevertheless seem to refer to it and describe it the way we do, semiology has nothing to offer. The term signified doesn’t help here; it can only lull us into a sleep of reason in which the initial problem disappears from sight.

2   Discussion On a purely theoretical level, method a—fictionalization—may be preferable to methods b and b′ which both suffer from serious limitations. Method b cannot be easily generalized. While it seems to work for some images, it is difficult to see how it could be applied to others. You may convince yourself that there are things made of stone that at the same time are human heads. But what about something that is supposed to be both a piece of flat canvas covered with paint and a basket of strawberries, a glass of water shining in the light, white carnations, a pair of cherries and a peach, arranged in a particular way (cf. Chardin’s painting)? This seems to be conceptually impossible. In a different way, the success of method b′ is also limited since one is forced to characterize image-objects solely in terms of visibility. Yet it is not true that (to take a simple example) things like the face you see (or imagine seeing) in the mirror cannot be touched. Keep your eyes open and bring your face closer

  HOW TO MAKE IMAGES REAL 

553

to the reflecting surface, until the tip of your nose touches it. Doesnʼt it seem as if you could touch the face which approached the looking-glass from the other side? Wouldnʼt you say that the tips of the two noses kiss? The method of fictionalization, on the other hand, is able to explain all kinds of imaginations guided by perceivable image-vehicles, be they visual, tactile, auditory, or whatever, and it can do so in a philosophically appropriate way. Why can the tip of the nose of a face “seen” in a mirror be touched? With method a at our disposal, we need not deny, but can explain this possibility and say: because the tactile encounter with the mirror’s surface may, under certain circumstances, help one imagine that one was touching the problematic face with one’s own nose. Why is it that this head doesn’t seem to be affected by the damage done to the carved stone? While the answer provided by method b′— that we are confronted with an intangible head—has as its consequence that there are certain things that are intangible and soft at one and the same time (remember the cheeks…) or that there is a softness of the intangible kind, method a, on the other hand, leads to a conceptually less daring explanation: the fractures in the stone do not help one to imagine an injured or pain-­ distorted face, that is, they cannot (easily) be integrated into a game of make-­ believe of that sort. And this is so for contingent, not for essential, reasons. One may think of other cases in which the face and the damage have a different shape and the latter can be seen as injuries to the former. Given this capacity to elucidate images and their use across different sense modalities, method a is more likely to become the basis of a general theory of images than methods b and b′, especially in an age of touchscreens (cf. Petreca 2016). On a historical level, however, it may be more important to carefully reconstruct the different methods and stress that they are different solutions to one and the same problem than to judge their respective theoretical value. Some suggestions regarding the former approach may be useful. They will round off the present discussion and show what may be gained from it in terms of further research. Without using the terminology proposed here, Ernst Gombrich has suggested that method b is historically older than method a and that the development of illusionistic art goes hand in hand with fictionalization (Gombrich 1960). This seems to be a reasonable claim, yet it would be wrong to think of method b (exclusively) in terms of magic and to qualify it as archaic, as Gombrich tended to do. The discussion about things like stone-heads, gold-­ heads, or flesh-and-blood-heads can be interpreted in an Aristotelian manner. In terms of hylomorphism, the first part of the composite (“stone” and “gold”, “flesh-and-blood”, respectively) names the hylé or matter, while the second part (“head”) indicates the morphé or form. On the basis of such a description, images, at least some of them, turn (as we have seen) into real things. Historically, it was important that under these circumstances, image-makers (such as the makers of stone-heads) could be compared to the divine artisan who is responsible for the making of the flesh-and-blood-heads. This is actually

554 

W. PICHLER

how lots of things including images were understood in the European Middle Ages (and also in later times), namely as portions of matter which were given a certain form by some—divine or human—maker. According to the art historian Jean Wirth, “le moyen-âge considère l’image comme la réalisation d’une forme dans la matière” (Wirth 1989; cf. Panofsky 1968). While this is, at least in principle, well known, the history of method b′ remains to be written. A closer look at the three authors quoted above suggests this may become an interesting undertaking. The intentions of these authors were of course very different. Mach tried to establish a monist philosophy based on sensibilia (cf. Banks 2003). He wanted to do away with the difference between reality and illusion which he took to be a metaphysical distinction. Proust may have been influenced by philosophers like Mach but as a poet he was, of course, much more interested in words, and in the passage from which the quotes have been taken, he is actually speculating about the truth in metaphors (cf. Friedrich 1974; Billermann 2000; Yoshikawa 2010). And as for Wiesing, his aim is to defend and further develop a phenomenological theory of images, building on concepts and arguments taken from Edmund Husserl, Hans Jonas, Günther Anders, and others. These differences notwithstanding, they all share a common underlying tendency. Whoever thinks about image-objects along the lines of Mach, Proust, or Wiesing will (as has been shown above) accept these objects and welcome them as parts of reality. Concepts are not used to make evident the illusory character of would-be perceptions; instead, they are adapted to the observed phenomena until it becomes possible to “rescue” the latter and take them to be real. Proust’s narrator even seems to aim at a radical transformation of our concepts of everyday objects. For whether it be a wave that does not drench or a jacket that does not clothe, these things are almost as strange and fascinating as, say, a sun that never shines or a clock that never tells the time. They seem to be deprived of essential qualities. Someone in search of a general theory of images may see such conceptual maneuverings as the price to be paid for sticking to method b′ and come to the conclusion that the cost is too high. Proust, however, may have valued the strange wave and jacket precisely for their strangeness. For him, these awkward concepts may have been not so much a price to be paid, but a prize to be won by making images (or illusions) real. And there have certainly been other authors with similar tastes. It was Louis Aragon, the surrealist poet, who found what is arguably the most beautiful formula for this kind of aesthetic delight—a delight produced by a method which, with him, had become a powerful tool, both world-shattering and world-making (cf. Babilas 2002). “I no longer wish to refrain from the errors of my fingers, the errors of my eyes,” wrote Aragon in Paris Peasant (Aragon 1994, first published in 1926). “I know now that these errors are not just booby traps but curious paths leading towards a destination that they alone can reveal to me. There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses”. And further on in the same book: “Each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe”. Indeed, making images real, even if accomplished in

  HOW TO MAKE IMAGES REAL 

555

awareness of the principle of non-contradiction and in order to engage with what has been referred to above as the “initial problem”, will always tend to produce, like it or not, “strange flowers of reason”. It will populate the universe with astonishing, at times even marvelous, new beings. Note: This chapter takes up some passages of an earlier text, putting them into a new perspective (cf. Pichler 2019). For questions regarding terminology, especially the use of the terms image-vehicle, image-object, and image-space, see Pichler and Ubl (2018). Special thanks to Franz Josef Czernin, Richard Heinrich, Esther Ramharter, Irma Rappl, and Werner Rappl; conversations with them have been crucial in shaping the argument and wording of the present text.

References Aragon, Louis 1994. Paris peasant. Trans. by Simon Watson Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change. Babilas, Wolfgang. 2002. Études sur Louis Aragon. Münster: Nodus. Banks, Erik C. 2003. Ernst Mach’s World Elements: A Study in Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing. Billermann, Roderich. 2000. Die “métaphore” bei Marcel Proust. München: Fink. Friedrich, Hugo. 1974. The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century.  Trans. by J.  Neugroschel. Evanston:  Northwestern University Press. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1960. Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mach, Ernst. 1897. Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations. Trans. by C. M. Williams. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Marin, Louis. 1999. Sublime Poussin.  Trans. by C.  Porter. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1968. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Trans. by J. S. Peake. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Petreca, Bruna. 2016. “Können wir digitale Textilien fühlen? Designforschung, Körpererfahrung und ein Ausblick auf zukünftige Technologien”. Maske und Kothurn, 62: 170–186. Pichler, Wolfram 2019. “How to enter image-space”. RES Anthropology and Aesthetics, 71/72: 325–332. Pichler, Wolfram and Ubl, Ralph. 2018. “Images without Objects and Referents? A Reply to Étienne Jollet’s Review of our Bildtheorie zur Einführung”. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 81: 418–424. Proust, Marcel, 2015. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, ed. by W. C. Carter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spier, Jeffrey. 2018. Exhib. Cat. Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World, edited by J. Spier, T. Potts and S. E. Cole. Los Angeles: Paul Getty Museum. Entry Nr. 96. Steinbrenner, Jakob. 2011. “Zur Ähnlichkeit der Bilder: oder wie reden wir eigentlich über Bilder”. In: Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science and the Arts, vol. 1. Ed. by R.  Heinrich, E.  Ramharter et  al.  Frankfurt/Paris/Lancaster/New Brunswick: De Gruyter.

556 

W. PICHLER

Summers, David. 1991. “Conditions and conventions: on the disanalogy of art and language”. In: The language of art history. Ed. by S. Kemal and I. Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wiesing, Lambert. 2005. Artifizielle Präsenz. Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Wiesing, Lambert. 2013. Sehen lassen: Die Praxis des Zeigens. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Wirth, Jean 1989. L’image médiévale. Naissance et développement. (VIe—XVe siècle). Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck. Yoshikawa, Kazuyoshi. 2010. Proust et l’art pictural. Paris: Éditions Honoré Champion.

Images and Ethics Asbjørn Grønstad

1   Introduction In the winter of 2019, seemingly innocuous video footage of the Oslo homes of well-known politicians and magnates occasioned the resignation of the Norwegian Minister of Justice and Immigration. The footage, shot surveillance-­ style by associates of the Black Box Theatre, a small, independent purveyor of experimental plays in the nation’s capital, was used in the production Ways of Seeing, which premiered on November 21, 2018, and immediately caused considerable turbulence in the media and among the public at large. A self-­ consciously confrontational work about the rise of aggressive nationalism and its economic infrastructure—and, no less importantly, the modern surveillance state—Ways of Seeing prompted a chain of unprecedented events. Not only did the police charge the theater company with violation of privacy; the play also achieved what experimental theater rarely achieves, which was the discontinuation of the post of an important government official and the launching of a criminal investigation. Roughly fifty witnesses have been summoned to testify, including some of the crew from Ways of Seeing. In filming the domiciles that index a particular cartography of affluence and political influence, the play’s director Pia Maria Roll and her colleagues did not in fact violate any laws. Their work may be defined as an act of sousveillance, of watching the watchers (Mann et  al. 2003), and the play itself instantiates a form of aesthetic practice that recalls Walter Benjamin’s consideration of artistic positionality in his classic essay “The Author as Producer” (Benjamin 1999). Going beyond the question of the work’s “message”, or attitude vis-à-vis its political moment, Benjamin

A. Grønstad (*) University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_34

557

558 

A. GRØNSTAD

reframes the terms of this ageless debate by suggesting that some works transcend their commentative function to intervene directly in their historically specific relations of production and mediation. It is the notion of technique that, for Benjamin, governs the mode of operation that such works inhabit within a concrete political space. These ideas are taken up and further developed by the geographer Trevor Paglen, who points out that “the task of transformative cultural production” is “to reconfigure the relations and apparatus of cultural production” (Paglen 2009). For both Benjamin and Paglen, an art with the capacity for being socially transformative is defined by its willingness to lay claim to a particular space, topographical as well as experiential, and to perform what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called “the right to look” (Mirzoeff 2011). In their determination to film the residences of the national power elite, hiding for hours on end in the bushes outside, the Ways of Seeing crew comes to occupy a highly politicized territory. The authors become producers of a new space, and from that space they exercise their own right to look, aligning themselves in the process with previous anticolonial and anti-fascist movements that likewise have embraced strategies of counter-visuality in the service of a progressive politics. That images, even prosaic ones like those in this play, can have real effects beyond the aesthetic sphere is abundantly evident. Consider, for instance, Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl photograph (1972), the Abu Ghraib portfolio showing abuse of prisoners (2004) (Fig. 1), or the Charlie Hebdo massacre (2015) carried out by terrorists incensed by the satirical magazine’s depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The salient question is not whether images can cause things to happen in the material world, but rather what it is about certain images that give them this power. In order to try and answer this question it is not enough to gesture toward the kinds of meaning that images may have, because meaning, understood semiotically, is something that potentially can be attributed to all visual artifacts regardless of their cultural significance. We need to distinguish between meaning in and of itself and the related but distinct concept of value. While in principle meaning can be ascribed to any image whatsoever, value might very well be in short supply, assigned only to some images and not to others, or distributed in unequal measure to different images. Whenever we are concerned with the values that images convey or elicit, we find ourselves in the realm of ethics and of ethical reflection. Complex and not always easily paraphrasable, these values might occasionally be political or ideological in nature, or they could be predominantly socio-cultural, religious, psychological, emotional, epistemological, scientific, or aesthetic. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, the taking of images entails “an ethos, a disposition, and a conduct in regard to the world” (Nancy 2001 16). The ensuing section provides a rather compressed historical sketch of the scholarship on ethics and images, after which I delve into a number of more theoretical questions (there

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

559

Fig. 1  Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches. A photo from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, taken between 2003 and 2004. US Government copyright (in public domain)

is, inevitably, some overlap between the two). This part of the chapter then segues into a final section that considers the topic of images and ethics from a critical-analytical perspective.

2   Images and Ethics: History While this chapter considers mediated ethics rather than a broader philosophical ethics, it nonetheless has to begin with the inescapable background that is Greek Antiquity. Ethics derives from ethos, meaning “moral character”, and the pivotal treatises on the subject that have shaped later philosophical traditions are obviously Plato’s reflections on the good life and the just state in his Republic (375 BC), as well as Aristotle’s musings on the nature of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC). In Epicurus, furthermore, the ideal of the good is tied to the avoidance of unnecessary desires, while Epictetus envisages the good in terms of a pragmatic adjustment of one’s aspirations and appetites to the way in which the world works rather than the other way around. Later, with Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, ethics is subsumed under the Christian virtues, and, with political theorist Thomas Hobbes, it gets tied to self-interest in the social field. A watershed moment in the modern conception of ethics comes with Immanuel Kant’s development of a moral system based on his notion of the categorical imperative. The later historical trajectory of the

560 

A. GRØNSTAD

philosophy of ethics is one of heightened specialization, from the utilitarianism of Jeremey Bentham and John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin’s promotion of taste, Søren Kierkegaard’s emphasis on choice, Arthur Schopenhauer’s advocacy of compassion, Albert Schweitzer’s veneration for life, the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre’s focus on responsibility and authenticity, and finally to more contemporary issues such as animal rights, euthanasia, ecological accountability, and intersectional politics. In the field of aesthetics more narrowly, which is my main concern here, ethics intersects with the sphere of art at numerous historical junctures. Aristotle’s statements on the catharsis effect in his Poetics (350 BC) convey a clear awareness of the ethical potential inherent in dramatic fiction, and Plato’s notorious eviction of the poets from the polis bespeaks a deep skepticism of imaginative practices that predates the moral panic about Hollywood movies, cartoons, and “video nasties” by millennia. But aesthetics in the modern sense starts with the work of Alexander Baumgarten, Gotthold Lessing, Kant, and others in the eighteenth century, and since then the relationship between art and ethics has tended to petrify into two intransigent positions. According to the first, ethics and aesthetics are incompatible domains, a view that in its fullest expression leads to either autonomism (the stance that art is entirely evacuated of moral concerns) or ethicism (the stance that only art that serves a didactic purpose can be worth our time). This position emerged in the aftermath of the formation of aesthetics as a separate philosophical field in the mid-eighteenth century, partly as protection against the threat of censorship. The second position, on the other hand, assumes that ethics and aesthetics are vigorously interlinked. As Noël Carroll states, in premodern times art provided “enculturation” in a way that also encompassed the moral life (Carroll 2008, 90). One of the most eloquent defenses of this attitude post-Baumgarten is that of Friedrich Schiller, who in his The Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) underscores art’s morally formative influence. Schiller’s perspective is echoed a century later, albeit in a somewhat more severe form, by Leo Tolstoy in his What Is Art? (1897). More recently, such theories of interdependence have been voiced by a number of philosophers, critics, and writers. Marcia Muelder Eaton, for example, tries to reconcile “being good” with “looking good”, while Elaine Scarry has mounted the thesis that our ability to recognize beauty may cause an acknowledgment of “ethical fairness” (Eaton 2001, 93; Scarry 1999, 95). Inspired by the work of Simone Weil (1951) and Iris Murdoch (1967), Scarry argues that aesthetic beauty might have the capacity to trigger a “radical decentering” that opens up consciousness to the values of social justice (Scarry, 111). In his 1987 Nobel speech, the poet Joseph Brodsky captures the essence of this second position when he says that “every new aesthetic reality makes man’s ethical reality more precise” (Brodsky 1987). The statement is particularly fruitful in that it confers upon art the power to extend what one could call the epistemology of ethics. Elsewhere I have coined the concept of the ethical imagination to designate this imbrication of the aesthetic with the ethical:

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

561

Since aesthetics permits practically anything as its subject matter, it also emboldens a free play of ethics, a kind of experimental ethics that has little room to unfold within the stricter parameters of those other domains (politics, health, law, commerce, education, etc.). Artistic practices establish what is, in effect, a laboratory for research into ethics. (Grønstad 2016, 26)

On this view, ethics becomes something different from morality, which it might occasionally even help interrogate. Where morality is closed off and general, ethics is open and sensitive to contextual specificity. As Simon Critchley has noted, ethics is also fundamentally different from politics in that the former entails an “anarchic metapolitics” and a “disturbance of the political status quo” (Critchley 2007, 13). While autonomist models have exerted a strong influence on both modernism and postmodernism, the understanding of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics appears to have changed somewhat over the last few decades. To talk about “turns” in the spheres of culture undeniably implies a certain degree of projection, but as an organizational rationale it does have some pedagogical purchase. The last half century has seen the emergence of a “linguistic turn”, an “iconic turn”, and a “pictorial turn”, to name a few (Rorty 1967; Boehm 1994; Mitchell 1994). But has there also been an ethical turn? Literary storytelling before the ascent of structuralism and narratology was certainly committed to ethics, as some scholars have noted (Hawthorn and Lothe 2013, 1). In the 1980s and 1990s, this interest was reignited and made more explicit with the publication of a handful of key texts such as J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1987), Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep (1988), Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1990), Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992), and Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death (1995). It is worth pointing out that the critical preoccupation with matters of ethics does need to be signaled explicitly, as in some of the aforementioned studies, but may be conveyed through other means, as would be the case with much scholarship that has grappled with issues of alterity within fields such as cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonialism. The work of Booth and Nussbaum, in particular, inscribes a set of principles regarding the ethical value of literary art that are equally germane to image-­ based media. Booth navigates a critical course beyond the limiting methods of ideological analysis and staunchly textualist approaches such as structuralism, insisting instead upon the indissoluble union between work and reader. “The quality of life in the moment of our ‘listening’”, Booth writes, “is not what it would have been if we had not listened” (Booth 1988, 17). Accepting the work into our consciousness and thereby into our lives, we let it become a part of us, at least for the time it takes to read it, but in principle it could potentially have a more lasting effect, too. This is what Booth means by his phrase “the company we keep”. We incorporate, at least provisionally, the world and the values that the work of art makes manifest. That literature and art may have the possibility of sharpening our sensibilities with regard to the nurturing of

562 

A. GRØNSTAD

empathy is also one of Nussbaum’s assumptions (1995). In Love’s Knowledge, she additionally proffers an argument for the contribution that works of fiction can make to our ethical health. First of all, she discerns that the specificity and formal uniqueness of literary prose (and by extension other aesthetic languages) might embody existential alterity—other ways of thinking and being. This makes art a subversive practice, at least hypothetically. Second, artistic expressions are generally committed to exhibiting complexity, thus representing antidotes to the reductionism of other fields. Lastly, art for Nussbaum teaches us the value of non-instrumental experience, or “a mode of engagement with the world that does not focus exclusively on the idea of use, but is capable, too, of cherishing things for their own sake” (Nussbaum 1998, 238). These are all insights subsumable under the notion of the ethical imagination, which I shall return to in the next section. In the fields of film and media studies, art history, and visual culture, the ethical turn has had a more belated arrival. We do need to keep in mind, however, that a preoccupation with ethics does not necessarily have to coagulate into a tangible movement to be real. In my previous work, I identified four precursors to the post-millennial ethical turn in cinema studies: (1) what I call the “canonical humanism” of filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Theo Angelopoulos, and Abbas Kiarostami, to name a few; (2) the more recent tradition of “controversial cinema” (comprising, but certainly not limited to, directors such as Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, and Carlos Reygadas), which often traffics in various cultural taboos that instantly raise a host of ethical issues; (3) the history of art manifestoes, from that of Dziga Vertov to Dogme 95, which tends to flag up an array of procedural values that frequently have an ethical inflection; and finally, (4) arbiters of classical film theory such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, who in their philosophical perspectives sometimes touch upon aspects of cinema that display an ethical orientation (Grønstad 2016, 45–47). Bazin’s famous ontology essay, for example, in which he considers the “aesthetic qualities of photography” in light of its power to present the external world for us in its “virginal purity”, hints at an entire theory of ethics (Bazin 1967, 15). The quotation from Nancy mentioned earlier, I would argue, is beholden to a line of thinking that we might understand as Bazinian. In his Theory of Film, moreover, Bazin’s contemporary Kracauer considers the quite direct, ethical question of what “the good” of watching film might be (Kracauer 1960, 285). It also bears mentioning that much of the work on “the gaze” and on theories of looking from the 1970s and onward is tinged with an awareness of ethics that sometimes remains just beneath the surface. A vital distinction pertaining to the relationship between images and ethics is that perennial conflict between form and content, which for works of fiction might translate into James Phelan’s terms “an ethics of the telling” and “an ethics of the told” (Phelan 2011, 56). A decisive criterion for the identification of an ethical turn, as I argue in Film and the Ethical Imagination, is the shift in

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

563

criticism and theory from a focus on narrative content to an enhanced attention to matters of aesthetic form (Grønstad 2016, 53). When critics examine classical films like Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951) and Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957), they may address ethical matters, but typically on the basis of the way in which these are animated by the plot and characterization— in short, by narrative action—rather than on the basis of the stylistic fabric of the work. We might say that such films illustrate rather than embody ethical issues. An explicit interest in the unequivocally aesthetic dimensions of a cinematic ethics surfaced in the 1980s and early 1990s with the emergence of some key film theoretical texts, texts that could be seen as harbingers of the shift from content to form that prompted the ethical turn in the noughties. Vivian Sobchack’s analysis of ethical space in documentary film was a pioneering effort (1984), as was Bill Nichols’s chapter on axiographics in his book Representing Reality (1991). Influenced by Sobchack’s article, the latter’s particular importance is to do with the straightforward connection it makes between aesthetic form and value. Nichols defines the key term “axiographics” as “the attempt to explore the implantation of values in the configuration of space, in the constitution of a gaze, and in the relation of observer to the observed” (Nichols 1991, 78). Another rich investment in ethics can be found in the work of Kaja Silverman, who in books such as The Threshold of the Visible World (1996) and World Spectators (2000) provides a philosophical account of what it might mean to look ethically. Individual theorists aside, a different way in which to chart the critical territories of the ethical turn is to delineate the most fertile topoi toward which scholarship on visual ethics has gravitated. In my previous research, I have located three discrete yet occasionally transecting sites: the thematic, the conceptual, and the artistic. The first is that of Holocaust studies, which has undergone a transition from a discourse informed by unrepresentability to one primed by a new openness to the work of the imagination, and which has also attracted a significant amount of attention from film and media scholars (see Insdorf 1983; Avisar 1988; LaCapra 1994; Bartov, 1996; van Alphen 1997; Loshitzky 1997; Lang 2000; Hornstein and Jacobowitz 2003; Hirsch 2004; Baron 2005; Walker 2005; Haggith and Newman 2005; Kaplan 2007; Saxton 2008; Pollock and Silverman 2011). The second site revolves around the intellectual legacy of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ethics constituted as “first philosophy”. A deep commitment to exploring the concept of alterity flows through the Lithuanian-French philosopher’s work, an allegiance pursued further by many film and media scholars of the last two decades. The journal Film-Philosophy, for instance, ran a special issue on Levinas in 2007, and some of the major publications of the ethical turn have been clearly indebted to his work (Zylinska 2005; Cooper 2006; Downing and Saxton 2010; Girgus 2010; Kenaan 2013). Downing and Saxton’s Film and Ethics is an epochal intervention here, re-situating conceptualizations of ethics from the letter to the image. In a culture increasingly drenched in images, they claim, “the visual, rather than the written word, becomes a privileged locus of exploration of the

564 

A. GRØNSTAD

ethical” (Downing and Saxton 2010, 1). By centering on the capacity of ethics to question “acculturated norms”, Downing and Saxton also advocate a reorientation from what ethics is to what it does (ibid., 3). A cause of much perplexity and theoretical speculation among later interpreters of Levinas’s work—and which obviously has a particular relevance for scholars in the visual disciplines— is his cryptic and inscrutable thesis that “ethics is an optics” (Levinas 1969, 23; for some attempts to grapple with the implications of Levinas’s phrase, see Kenaan 2013 and Grønstad 2016). A third context for the ethical turn is what I call the artistic strand, which denotes a body of criticism anchored in readings of particular directors and films. Individual titles such as Birth of a Nation (D.  W. Griffith 1915) and Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl 1935) (Fig. 2) surely invite ethical analyses, but in this context what I have in mind are the studies of complex and often provocative auteurs such as Patrice Leconte (Downing 2004), Michael Haneke (Wheatley 2009), Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, and Lars von Trier (Grønstad 2012), and Claire Denis (Hole 2015). That films themselves can be a source of ethical reflection, as much as if not more than philosophy or theory, is borne out by the rather illustrious case of Kapò (1960), Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s Holocaust drama that almost single-handedly generated a central

Fig. 2  Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during the 1934 rally in Nuremberg, photograph, 1934. Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2004-0312-503. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

565

strain of ethical criticism in cinema studies. Conceivably more famous than the film itself is critic-turned-filmmaker Jacques Rivette’s highly disapproving review “On Abjection”, published in Cahiers du Cinéma the following year (without which, film historian Antoine de Baecque alleges, the film would hardly have been remembered at all) (2012, 74). Rivette’s critique zeroes in on a specific scene, one in which the character Teresa, a prisoner in an extermination camp, commits suicide by throwing herself onto an electrical fence. After a brief pause in which the shot lingers on the figure of the dead woman in a medium-to-establishing shot, the camera begins to move in closer toward her, reframing her body to accentuate her “crucifixion pose” (Pollock 2011, 263). It is this camera movement that infuriates Rivette. “[T]he man who decides, at that moment”, he writes, “to have a dolly in to tilt up at the body, while taking care to precisely note the hand raised in the angle of its final framing—this man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt” (Rivette 2012). Maintaining that cinematic realism as an aesthetic choice is immoral in depictions of the camps, Rivette emphasizes “attitude”, “tone” and “point of view” at the expense of both content and form, and seems most offended by (in his view) the despicable sensibility that Pontecorvo discloses in his infamous track­in (Rivette 2012). Rivette’s appraisal of Kapò should also be seen in the context of his colleague Jean-Luc Godard’s remark in a 1959 roundtable on Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais 1959) that tracking shots are a matter of morality, a proclamation that Libby Saxton considers “the best-known critical statement about film and ethics” (Saxton 2010, 22). One should note here that Godard’s aphorism is a rewriting of Luc Moullet’s original formulation that morality is a question of tracking shots (Moullet 1959, 14). For the later critic, Serge Daney, Rivette’s text would prove foundational for his own endeavors to come to terms with the relationship between ethics and film form. In his essay “The Tracking Shot in Kapò”, Daney puts forth what should probably be taken as a normative view of cinema aesthetics, one which subscribes to the idea that it is the responsibility of images to introduce value into the world. In a startling turn of phrase that recalls the enigmatic tone of Levinas’s “ethics is an optics”, Daney writes that “every ‘form’ is a face looking at us” (Daney 2004). The ethics of images is thus not only locatable in their figurational affordances but represents something that also comes to implicate us, the viewers.

3   Images and Ethics: Theory This compressed history of the ethical turn in image-based disciplines, as well as of its antecedent discussions in the fields of aesthetic philosophy and literature, is unmistakably laced with theory. In a sense, it provides an overview of various theoretical positions, which makes it a history of different theorizations of the relation between art and ethics. But in this section, I want to offer more of a close-up of a specific theoretical perspective that may be helpful in the practical interpretation of film and other visual media. A guiding premise is that images can produce ethical experience not only or even primarily through their

566 

A. GRØNSTAD

narrative content but rather through their formal specificity. My philosophical position, in other words, is built on the assumption that artistic expression and ethics are defined by indivisibility. For the ancient Greeks, ethics was regarded as equally if not more important than law and religion, and theirs was an ethics that also served as “an aesthetics of existence”, to borrow Michel Foucault’s words (1984, 343). In modernity, artistic practices become gradually entwined with ethics, and one could perhaps make the argument that art’s only real claim to instrumentality lies precisely in its ethically instructive potential. Aesthetics stimulates a richer knowledge of our ethical being. To backtrack to the philosophical attitude espoused by someone like Rivette, we may come to understand that the entire apparatus of cinema can be a technology for the generation of ethics. Griselda Pollock thinks along these lines when she offers that, for Rivette, cinema implicates an ethics that penetrates every aspect including its technological, formal and aesthetic procedures. This does not imply transparency; rather Rivette is trying to specify what makes the image qua image visible to us as a procedure that represent decision, thought, attitude, rather than as mere essence in the mirror of the camera. (Pollock 2011, 268)

The postulation that aesthetic form is inherently ethical is the first of the six theses that to varying degrees characterize an ethical imagination. Art establishes a singular mode of address. By unfailingly affirming for us not only the existence of the world—with all its people, objects, buildings, landscapes, events, experiences, and so on—but also the irreducibility of everything in it, art tutors us on the subject of alterity. Aesthetic experience, even when it encourages self-reflection, can ultimately make us forget ourselves a little, refocusing our attention on the exterior world. This is a theme that has been addressed by several critics and authors, among them Irish Murdoch (1986), Tzvetan Todorov (2010), and Leona Toker (2010). The thesis that aesthetic form is intrinsically ethical because it pulls us away from ourselves and contributes to making alterity perceptible applies to all the different media of art—text-based, image-based, and sound-based. More empirically circumscribed than this is the second thesis, which proposes that images are generative of a distinct kind of ethics that might be called biovisual (Grønstad 2016, 87). Whether primarily understood as maxims for doing good/living a good life or as principles for moral conduct, ethics is essentially both a product of and mediated through language. But can ethical knowledge and value also be created visually? One question that I pursue in Film and the Ethical Imagination concerns how “the materially particular enunciation images produce” might come to constitute a different configuration of ethics (2016, 87). It seems apposite that a historical situation during which our culture becomes increasingly saturated by images (Debord 1983; Baudrillard 1987; Ross 1994; Downing and Saxton 2010; Bernstein 2012) should require a profound reconceptualization of what it means to think and act ethically. The

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

567

notion of biovisuality, which draws on facets of the image theories of Hans Belting, W.  J. T.  Mitchell, and Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (Belting 2011; Mitchell 2005; Kember and Zylinska 2012), dissolves the human-image binary and broaches the question whether images should be thought of as particular life forms unto themselves. The realization that images cannot be quarantined from the real but in fact form an inseparable part of it opens up a host of new questions: what should, and what should not, be visualized, and why? What is the value of a given image? What values might be conveyable by an image that cannot be expressed otherwise? What makes an image good and what makes it bad, respectively? Rather than an ethics about images, such queries call for an ethics that emanates from inside the image itself, and this is what is meant by the term “biovisual ethics”. In an essay published a few years after The Company We Keep, Booth states that an ethical interpretation may be epistemologically enrichening (2001, 16–17). The third thesis develops this idea that ethics and hermeneutics are intimately entangled. To put it a bit bluntly, the act of comprehension is always made qualitatively better by ethical perspicacity. How does cinematic ethics, then, contributes hermeneutically? Film as a sensorial medium is embodied thinking. Its variegated figurations of sound and image incarnate what Martine Beugnet evocatively calls “the intelligence of the affective” (2007, 178). This is also a form of knowledge, and since it is steeped in the otherness that cinema as a “worldly” technology so readily can make visible, it is often ethically inflected. We can call it the affective dimension of an aesthetically based hermeneutics. In addition, images tend to bring something new into our world, something that was not there before, which is the generative effect of a visual hermeneutics. As Ronald Bogue has said of Deleuze, “thinking differently is fundamentally a matter of seeing differently” (2010, 127). Related yet different from this is the perspectival dimension of a hermeneutics of the image, which refers to the power of images to challenge or alter what we know as opposed to merely consolidating our pre-existing convictions. The history of the various modernisms emphatically illustrates this function. The affirmative aspect of visual hermeneutics, finally, involves art’s abundant potential for modeling ethical skills such as compassion, empathy, and sensitivity. Closely related to the affective, generative, perspectival, and affirmative properties of visual hermeneutics condensed above is my fourth thesis, the aptitude cinema has for picturing difference, or alternative ways of being in the world. In order to see this, we need to look beyond genre and mainstream film and bring into focus the broader landscape of world cinema, with its incalculable heterogeneity of experience, thought, and modalities of living. The fifth thesis advances openness, uncertainty, and opacity as features that epitomize the ethical imagination. These qualities are at once constitutive of an overall ethics and act as indices of a specifically poetic ethics. I would also like to point out that they share a family resemblance with a multitude of other critical ideas, ranging from Simone de Beauvoir’s foregrounding of ambiguity to Stanley Cavell’s work on skepticism and doubt, Édouard Glissant’s notion of a poetics

568 

A. GRØNSTAD

of opacity, Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, Rosi Braidotti’s materialist philosophy of becoming, and Janet Wolff’s investigation of the place of the oblique in art, just to name a few (de Beauvoir 1976; Cavell 1971; Glissant 1997; Agamben 1993; Braidotti 2006; Wolff 2008). Agamben’s non-­ essentialist viewpoint throws light on the centrality of these qualities: The fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done. (Agamben 1993, 43)

Any ethical reflection is thus contingent upon the fundamental open-­endedness of the human. If ethics has somewhere to be, it is in the space between potentiality and actuality. The sixth and final thesis of the ethical imagination concerns the phenomenon that I have termed scopic entelechy. Clyde Taylor’s reading of the concept of entelechy, arriving to us from Aristotle via Kenneth Burke, defines it as “a process of idealization through which the dominant class manifestation is framed as the generative and normative instance of all other manifestations” (Taylor 1998, 58). Entelechy works by subsumption and subterfuge. It reorganizes a given empirical field so that other instances of the same concept become subsidiary elements of a standard model, while in reality they exist on the same level. For this process to operate efficaciously, the normative case has to disguise its status as mere example. Prosaic cases-in-point would be brand names such as Taser or Sharpie, which have taken on generic identities. The equivalent of this in the domain of aesthetics would, for example, be the way in which Hollywood cinema becomes a paradigm for film, and Western art for that of all art. In his work on method, The Signature of All Things, Agamben presents an argument concerning the notion of the example that is reminiscent of Taylor’s understanding of entelechy. The example, he asserts, represents merely “a single case that by its repeatability acquires the capacity to model tacitly the behavior and research practices of scientists” (Agamben 2009, 119). My own claim is that the ethical imagination refuses the work of scopic entelechy by highlighting “minority visual practices”, alternative modes of image production, representations of non-hegemonic bodies and subjectivities, and artworks that are culturally or politically offensive (Grønstad 2016, 93). While scopic entelechy gestures toward a “hegemonic ensemble” of ways of seeing, the ethical imagination fosters multiplicities of seeing (ibid.). Films that, say, unflinchingly scrutinize illness and bodily decline (Amour, Michael Haneke 2012), the gaze and emotions of Muslim women (Shirin, Abbas Kiraostami, 2008), the realm of the non-human (Leviathan, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel 2012), or the experience of being homeless (Stray Dogs, Tsai Ming-liang 2013)

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

569

materialize such ways of seeing ethically. In the following passage, I attempt to convey the crux of the work that the ethical imagination does with respect to entelechial practices: The interrogation of scopic entelechy involves questions about the reasons for making a particular image in a particular way, about the audience for whom it is made, and about what other images it undermines or contests. It is precisely in the active engagement with such questions that the ethical exigency of image analysis and critique becomes especially evident and urgent. Both as producers, distributors, and consumers of images we are faced with the ethical responsibility that comes with acts of depiction and figuration. This responsibility does not only apply to controversial or scandalous images—the question of how something is depicted—but also to issues of cultural representativity—the question of who and what gets depicted. Imagemakers have an obligation to contribute to the multiplication of perspectives from which to see the world. (Grønstad, 94–95)

Any poetics answerable to such a commitment finds itself invested in the labor of the ethical imagination.

4   Images and Ethics: Criticism To return to where I started this chapter, with the tumultuous reception of Ways of Seeing, I would like to suggest that the play, no less than the art cinema I have pondered elsewhere, is emblematic of the way in which images and visual narratives enact an ethical situation through their very form. While the inclusion of the house fronts may appear mundane and even somewhat gimmicky, they are in fact crucial for the effects and meanings of the performance. Strung together like beads, the houses of the financial elite and the kingpins of the populist right are almost continuously projected in the background, furnishing the scene of the action with a thematically consistent narrative space. Against these projections the play unfolds as a series of monologues, dialogues, and musical interludes that, among other things, talk about the Algerian War of Independence, the aftermath of colonialism, the Rassemblement National, the accelerating nationalism and racism across Europe throughout the last decade, the incremental normalization of right-wing values in Norway post-­ July 22, the secular and anarchist self-governing province of Rojava in northeastern Syria, and the mechanics of the modern surveillance state, to name some of the topics that surface in Ways of Seeing. For the most part, they are narrated by the French-Algerian Hanan Benammar, her deceased father Halim (played by the Iranian immigrant Ali Djabbery), the Kurdish-born Sara Baban, and the former Supreme Court Justice Ketil Lund, all of whom play themselves (Djabbery excepted). Shooting the footage, the actors placed their own bodies in the immediate vicinity of the private dwellings of the people that ultimately are responsible, either politically or through patronage, for their imperilment. Through these acts of sousveillance, the results of which become an intrinsic

570 

A. GRØNSTAD

part of the tapestry of the work, they produce an experiential space that was not there before. What is clearly exercised here is the right to look, and this act of looking may be framed ethically because it forms part of a larger investigative project that seeks to gather more knowledge about dealings and interrelations that impinge directly upon the lives of the vulnerable and the marginalized. The images of the abodes of the privileged are sutured into a larger compositional whole that shines a light on their interconnections, as well as on their connection to a wider cultural climate that increasingly enables xenophobic sentiments to flourish with impunity. Ways of Seeing is narrated from the point of view of the subaltern, perhaps more in the sense that Antonio Gramsci uses the term in Notebook 3, §14, than in the later postcolonial sense associated with Spivak’s work (Gramsci 1992; Spivak 1988). The actors playing themselves, or a version of themselves, speak from the vantage point of a cultural, political, and economic minority. Their story directly confronts broadly sanctioned perceptions of national values. Both through their personal experience and through the referencing of Rojava the actors manage to relay an awareness of other modes of being, which, as we recall, constitutes one facet of the ethical imagination. But of the six theses that I discussed, the one most acutely at work in Ways of Seeing is inarguably the critical assaying of scopic entelechy. Knowingly quoting John Berger’s celebrated television series and book of the same name, the play signals its attentiveness to optical ecologies already in its title. Berger’s book profoundly expanded the reach of art history as an epistemic formation by insisting upon the need to take into account the (often hidden) political and ideological forces that exert an influence upon not only the objects themselves but the entire institution of art (Berger 1972). In its own way, Berger’s book was a gesture of decolonization. Its spirited analyses of art historical representations of gender, class, colonialism, ethnicity, and the female body—as well as its insightful appraisal of commercial images and its productive use of collage—were all elaborations of its central tenet: that an image is a sight that has been reproduced and that every image represents a way of looking at the world (Berger 1972, 9). Pia Roll’s play re-mobilizes this knowledge, exposing the ways of seeing that facilitate the naturalization of racism while at the same time giving shape to other ways of seeing more sensitive to the experience of alterity. The persevering gaze that intrepidly interrogates the entanglement of wealth and xenophobia, and that turns the look of surveillance back on the watchers, is a prime example of not only the meaning but more urgently the value of images. In the final instance, the ethics of the image resides not in what it shows but in the manner in which it shows it, to invoke the tenor of Rivette’s argument. Tracking shots are indeed a matter of morality, as are also the surveillant shots taken by immigrant artists amidst the shrubs and branches surrounding an affluent neighborhood in Oslo.

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

571

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1993 [1990]. The Coming Community. Trans. by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio 2009.  The Signature of All Things: On Method. Trans. by Luca D’Isanto, with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone Books. Avisar, Ilan.  1988.  Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baron, Lawrence. 2005. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bartov, Omer.  1996.  Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation. New York: Oxford University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1987. The Evil Dream of Images. Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts. Bazin, André. 1967. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”. In: What is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belting, Hans. 2011 [2001]. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. trans. by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1934].  “The Author as Producer”. In:  Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–1934. Trans. by Rodney Livingstone et. al., eds. Michael W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC & Penguin. Bernstein, Jay. 2012. “Preface”. In: Ethics and Images of Pain. Ed by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson. New York: Routledge. Beugnet, Martine.  2007.  Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boehm, Gottfried (ed.). 1994. Was ist ein Bild? München: Wilhelm Fink. Bogue, Ronald. 2010.  “To Choose to Choose—to Believe in This World”. In:  Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Ed. by D.  N. Rodowick. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Booth, Wayne. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Booth, Wayne. 2001. “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple”. In: Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Ed. by Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brodsky, Joseph, “Nobel Lecture”, December 8, 1987, https://www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/, accessed March 23, 2020. Carroll, Noël. 2008. “Art and Alienation”. In: The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics. Ed. by  Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon. London: Tate Publishing. Cavell, Stanley. 1971. The World Viewed. New York: Penguin. Cooper, Sarah. 2006. Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary. London: Legenda. Critchley, Simon. 1992.  The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas.  Oxford: Blackwell. Critchley, Simon. 2007.  Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso.

572 

A. GRØNSTAD

Daney, Serge. 2002 [1992]. “The Tracking Shot in Kapò”. Trans. by Laurent Kretzschmar.  Senses of Cinema, 30.  http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-­ articles/kapo_daney/, accessed March 25, 2020. de Baecque, Antoine. 2012 [2008]. Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema. Trans. by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff. New York: Columbia University Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1976  [1947].  The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Carol. Debord, Guy. 1983 [1967]. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Derrida, Jacques.  1995.  The Gift of Death. Trans. by David Wills. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Downing, Lisa. 2004. Patrice Leconte. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Downing, Lisa and Saxton, Libby. 2010. Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters. London: Routledge. Eaton, Marcia Muelder. 2001.  Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984.  “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”. In: The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Girgus, Sam. 2010.  Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine. New York: Columbia University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1997 [1990].  “Transparency and Opacity”. In:  The Poetics of Relation. Trans. by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1992.  Prison Notebooks, vol. 1. Trans. by Joseph A.  Buttigieg and Antonio Callari. New York: Columbia University Press. Grønstad, Asbjørn.  2012.  Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-­ Millennial Art Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grønstad, Asbjørn. 2016. Film and the Ethical Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Haggith, Toby and Newman, Joanna (eds.). 2005. Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933. London: Wallflower Press. Hirsch, Joshua. 2004.  Afterimage: Film, Trauma and the Holocaust.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hole, Kristin Lené. 2015. Toward a Feminist Cinematic Ethics: Claire Denis, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hornstein, Shelley and Jacobowitz, Florence (eds.). 2003. Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Insdorf, Annette.  1983.  Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust.  New York: Random House. Hawthorn,  Jeremy and Lothe,  Jakob. 2013.  “Introduction: The Ethical (Re)Turn”. In: Narrative Ethics. Ed. by Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. 2007.  Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kember, Sarah and Zylinska, Joanna. 2012. Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kenaan, Hagi. 2013. The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. London: I. B. Tauris. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London: Oxford University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 1994. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

  IMAGES AND ETHICS 

573

Lang, Berel. 2000.  Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969 [1961]. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 1997. Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mann, Steve; Nolan, Jason, and Wellman, Barry. 2003. “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments”. Surveillance and Society, 1 (3). Miller, J. Hillis. 1987. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas.  2011.  The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality.  Durham: Duke University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Moullet, Luc. 1959. “Sam Fuller sur les brises de Marlowe”.  Cahiers du Cinéma, 93: 11–19. Murdoch, Iris. 1967. The Sovereignty of Goodness over Other Concepts: The Leslie Stephen Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Murdoch, Iris. 1986. Acastos. Two Platonic Dialogues. London: Penguin Books. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami. Trans. by Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley. Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert. Nichols, Bill.  1991.  Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha.  1995.  Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press. Nusbaum, Martha. 1998. “The Literary Imagination in Public Life”. In: Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Ed. by Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paglen, Trevor. 2009.  “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space”. In: Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. Ed. by Nato Thompson: Brooklyn: Melville House. Phelan, James. 2011. “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication: Or, from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences”. Soundings, 94 (1–2): 55–75. Pollock, Griselda. 2011. “Death in the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog”. In: Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. Ed. by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman. New York: Berghahn Books. Pollock, Griselda and Silverman, Max (eds.). 2011. Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. New York: Berghahn Books. Rivette, Jacques, 2012. “On Abjection”. In: Order of the Exile. Trans. by David Phelps with Jeremi Szaniawski, http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/abjection.html, accessed March 25, 2020. Rorty, Richard (ed.). 1967.  The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

574 

A. GRØNSTAD

Ross, Andrew. 1994.  “The Ecology of Images”. In:  Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Ed. by  Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Saxton, Libby. 2008. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London: Wallflower Press. Saxton, Libby. 2010. “Tracking Shots are a Question of Morality”. In: Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters. Ed. by Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton. London: Routledge. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1984.  “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary”.  Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9 (4): 283–300. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. by  Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, Clyde R.  1998.  The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2010. The Limits of Art: Two Essays. Trans. by Gina Walker. London: Seagull Books. Toker, Leona, 2010.  Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Tolstoy, Leo, What is Art? 1995  [1897]. Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Penguin. van Alphen, Ernst.  1997.  Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walker, Janet Ruth. 2005.  Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weil, Simone. 1979 [1951). “Love of the Order of the World”. In: Waiting For God. Trans. by Emma Craufurd, foreword by Malcolm Muggeridge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wheatley, Catherine. 2009.  Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image.  New York: Berghahn Books. Wolff, Janet. 2008. The Aesthetics of Uncertainty. New York: Columbia University Press. Zylinska, Joanna. 2005. The Ethics of Cultural Studies. London: Continuum.

The Beholder’s Freedom: Critical Remarks on the “Will to See” Mark Halawa-Sarholz

1   Introduction It is a commonplace to conceive of images as enormously powerful media. Iconologists may have quite different views on how the notion of iconicity ought to be understood and defined, but they hardly question the widely shared belief in the power of images. In fact, it seems that for most scholars the existence of a certain kind of “iconic power” represents a key element of the very essence of iconicity as such. Hence, it is not surprising to see that the belief in the power of images is often liberated from any need of further explanation or justification—it is simply taken as an indisputable fact, as a “natural given” prevalent and effective in any kind of imagery whatsoever. This chapter argues against such an ontological rendering of the power of images. Power is never a natural phenomenon, but always a relational feature. It is the result of social practices that are deeply influenced by cultural, political, historical, and many other factors. Far from being a natural given, it is something made. To put it in a Foucaultian manner: Power is the outcome of discursive practices.

Note: This chapter is a revised version of my article “Vom Freiheitsverlust des Betrachters. Einige kritische Bemerkungen zum ‘Willen zum Sehen,’” published in: Maßlose Bilder. Visuelle Ästhetik der Transgression, edited by Ingeborg Reichle and Steffen Siegel, Munich: Fink, 2009, pp. 37–50. I would like to thank Stefan Schaden for his help in the preparation of an English version of this paper for the present volume. M. Halawa-Sarholz (*) Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_35

575

576 

M. HALAWA-SARHOLZ

Of course, this is not to say that our common talk about the power of images is mere nonsense. Who can seriously doubt that images have taken on a tremendously powerful role in contemporary life? Yet, it is important to highlight that this role is not based on the essence of visual representations, but rather on the use of images within particular discursive practices (which can of course proceed by means of visual media and therefore may not be reduced to purely linguistic practices alone; see Mitchell 1986, 1994). Thus, any attempt to grasp the fundamental “ground” of the power of images needs to start with an analysis of such practices. In doing so, one is eventually able to acknowledge what purely ontological accounts of iconicity tend to ignore—the historicity of our talk about the power of images. It is of course correct to say that this kind of talk can be traced back to the earliest examples of Western thought (and beyond). But it is even more correct to insist on the fact that the scope and content of this talk is highly flexible, often quite ambiguous, and sometimes even contradictory. What Plato found to be characteristic of the power of images (the capacity to disguise the image’s true ontological status by presenting as real what in truth is nothing but mere appearance; see Plato 2013) is entirely different from, say, Lambert Wiesing’s account of iconicity (according to which the power of images consists in its capacity to create objects of “pure visibility” which are entirely freed from the worldly laws of physics; see Wiesing 2014). The tenacity with which scholars tend to endow images with a certain kind of power has certainly remained stable over the centuries. However, the background against which all this has been done has changed constantly. At first sight, it may well appear trivial to highlight the fundamental discursive character of iconicity. Closer inspection, however, reveals that seemingly trivial realities are far from being widely accepted and acknowledged within the mainstream of recent iconological thought (I should highlight here that I am primarily talking about European forms of contemporary iconology, Anglo-­ American debates on the topic are usually well aware of the discursive formations that shape our ideas of iconicity). In fact, most prominent figures in contemporary iconology (Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp, or Dieter Mersch, to name but a few) cling to a decidedly anti-semiotic notion of iconicity, which leads them to develop a profound skepticism against even the slightest influence of anything that might be labeled as “discursive.” Oftentimes, this skepticism goes along with a general rejection of iconological approaches inspired by hermeneutics and reception aesthetics. Drawing on the idea that traditional tools of interpretation inevitably lose sight of the image’s singular presence, modern iconologists primarily focus on the aisthetic effects of pictorial phenomena (for a detailed account of the aisthetic power of images, see Marcel Finke’s contribution to this volume). What an image does by means of its sheer visual presence is believed to be of much greater iconological importance than what an image means or stands for. Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 16) put this idea quite pointedly when he demanded that, instead of “grasping” the intellectual content of a visual representation, we should let ourselves “be grasped” by the aisthetic power of the image.

  THE BEHOLDER’S FREEDOM: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE “WILL TO SEE” 

577

Why do I find this plea problematic? Because it leads to a fairly iconocentric point of view which deliberately weakens the position of the image’s recipient or beholder. Being overwhelmed by a power that is believed to exceed the discursive realm of interpretation and rationality may well be enriching and instructive in aesthetic contexts. In political contexts, though, such an understanding of iconicity is not only unconvincing but also dangerous. In what follows, I will try to demonstrate why the position of the beholder should be put in the center of a general theory of the image. More pointedly, I intend to show why the fundamental freedom of the beholder is worth protecting in an environment that has continuously bound the Will to Know to a Will to See. In doing so, I will provide an alternative, decidedly non-iconocentric interpretation of the so-called iconic turn. As will become clear in an analysis of the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, the obvious “turn” toward the image can be seen as a symptom of an era in which the sayable is increasingly—and simultaneously quite problematically—dominated by the seeable. A crucial starting point for this endeavor is Jean-Paul Sartre’s reception aesthetics, which explicitly highlights the importance of the recipient’s freedom, and to which I will turn in the next paragraph.

2   Sartre and the Freedom of the Reader In his essay “What Is Literature?,” first published in 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the existence of a work of literature fundamentally depends on the reader. For Sartre, it is the reader who constitutes an object as literature by means of a reading gaze. “The literary object”, writes Sartre (1988, 50), “is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view, a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper”. The “life” of the literary object is quite fundamentally tied to the thin thread of the reader’s gaze. Even when the author has literally put his prose, his poem, or his theory “on paper”, thereby eternalizing it, his work only exists “for and by others” (ibid., 52). According to Sartre, from all this follows that an author is always forced to appeal to the reader’s freedom. Only the reader is able to allow the author to “carry to a successful conclusion the enterprise which I [the author] have begun” (ibid., 56). Thus, literature does not begin with the act of writing. Instead, this very act marks just the beginning of a process that is fundamentally dependent on what Sartre calls the reader’s “pure freedom” (ibid., 56), a freedom he associates with a quasi-demiurgic “unconditioned activity” (ibid., 56). For Sartre (ibid., 55), then, a book “does not serve” the freedom of the author; it primarily “requires” the freedom of the reader without whom the work of literature may never come into being. It goes without saying that Sartre’s remarks remain silent about the various social, historical, rhetorical, stylistic, and material influences that both enable and constrain the freedom of the reader. Just as the author is never in total control of his work, the reader is never entirely autonomous in his reading

578 

M. HALAWA-SARHOLZ

process. Not only the structure and form but also the style and content of a text may often urge the reader toward a specific direction of the reading process, thus leading to ways of reading (and interpretation) that are more likely than others. But even if one concedes that Sartre’s ideas about the freedom of the reader are at least partially one-sided, I still believe them to be of great value for a general theory of the image. Indeed, I am convinced that especially his ideas on the aspect of freedom may be fruitfully applied to the study of images: Just like a literary work, an image is also fundamentally dependent on a “gaze” that recognizes and interprets it as an image. Thus, an image owes its existence not only to its producer but first and foremost to its recipient. There is no image without a beholder. Quite similar to the literary work, it can only exist “for and by others”, which is just another way of saying that the “life” of the image is based on the freedom of its beholder. This point of view stands in stark contrast to what W.J.T. Mitchell famously claimed in his later writings on iconology. For Mitchell (2005), visual representations are not unlike living beings. They can have needs, requests, desires, and many more human-like feelings and intentions. Hence, Mitchell argues that one of the most important questions for iconology is: “What do pictures want?” With this deliberate humanization of the image, Mitchell has undoubtedly made one of the most interesting contributions to recent iconological thought. At the same time, though, his radical anthropomorphism of the image loses track of one of the most decisive constitutive moments of iconicity when he states that sometimes pictures may just want “nothing at all” (Mitchell 2005, 48). If one accepts Mitchell’s anthropomorphism at least as a “thought experiment” (ibid., 30), it may indeed be true that pictures do not want to be “interpreted, decoded, worshipped, smashed, exposed, or demystified by their beholders” (ibid., 48). What they can never want, however, is to not be seen or looked at by anyone. If a picture was really a living being, it would surely long to be seen. In order to be or come into existence, it not only has to want to be seen, but also must be seen. Hence, the desire to be seen or looked at represents the basic appeal every picture directs to its environment. With Sartre, we can add that this appeal is simultaneously directed at the freedom of “an other”, namely the freedom of a beholder who has the power to “carry to a successful conclusion” what the producer of a visual artifact initially started. Just as there are “only black marks on paper” if there is no reader involved, there are only “colored dots and areas on a certain surface” if there is no beholder involved. Therefore, the right answer to Mitchell’s question is: “Pictures want to be seen!” Or to put it more sharply: “Pictures need to be seen!” For “only the seen picture has in truth become entirely a picture” (Boehm 2007, 49). Returning to this chapter’s initial remarks on the power of images, we can now draw a first important conclusion: If the gaze of the beholder is a vital element in the constitution of iconicity, it seems wise to draw our attention to the beholder as well when we seek to understand the power of images. Indeed, from a Sartrean point of view, the notion of “iconic power” refers to an inverted power relation, a relation in which the freedom of the beholder has been

  THE BEHOLDER’S FREEDOM: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE “WILL TO SEE” 

579

severely weakened. From this perspective, “iconic power” is based on conditions that make it impossible for the beholder to not endow an image with his “life-giving” gaze. In short, it is the inability to ignore the image that constitutes its power. So far, we have dealt with the dialectics of freedom and power only on an individual or local scale. However, with regard to the notion of the iconic turn—a term widely used to highlight the growing influence of images in basically all areas of contemporary culture—one might ask how this dialectics works on a larger scale. Is there reason to believe that our common talk about the “power of images” is basically a symptom of a profound erosion or even a major loss of freedom?

3  The Loss of the Beholder’s Freedom Looking at the current state of public discourse, there is indeed some evidence for a thorough weakening of the beholder’s creative power and freedom. In my opinion, an essential effect of the so-called iconic turn consists in the creation of an environment that takes hold of the image-constituting power of the beholder by means of an all-embracing Will to See. In our present era, the attainment of knowledge is hardly separable from the use of visual media. To put it in Foucaultian terms once again: The sayable is largely dominated by the seeable. In contemporary public discourse, only what can be seen has a chance to be known and sayable. In many cases, averting one’s gaze is therefore equivalent to depriving oneself of the ability to know. As far as I can see, media theorist Götz Großklaus put forward a similar argument when he outlined his theory of the “apriori of the medial” (Großklaus 2004, 40). For Großklaus, modern media societies are characterized by an all-­ embracing need to be seen. This need––which is accompanied by another necessity, namely the need to satisfy a public will to see—results from the circumstance that “only the media system alone, which functions on the basis of a principle of inclusion and exclusion, decides about public visibility and invisibility” (ibid., 53). Everyone who wants to be “included” into the medial system therefore faces two challenges: The first challenge is to actually get access to the medial system in the first place; the second challenge refers to the necessity to assert oneself within this system by attracting the attention of as many people as possible. When I speak of a Will to See in this context, I do so in order to highlight that in contemporary public discourse there are always certain pictorial expectations and pictorial needs at play (see Warnke 2005). These expectations and needs are raised and encountered in larger communities of spectators, and they determine the production, circulation, and reception of images to a considerable degree. In all this, the fundamental freedom and power of the beholder marks an essential target. It is this freedom that needs to be addressed in order to gain public visibility.

580 

M. HALAWA-SARHOLZ

Another instructive way to grasp the importance of the freedom of the beholder is provided by art history. In fact, there are numerous cases where this freedom has been explicitly identified as the most important target point of the art of painting. Take Leonardo da Vinci, for instance. According to him (Vinci 1990, 142f.), an accomplished painter always seeks to create a work of art that is able to “enthrall” the beholder to an extent that makes him “lose his freedom”, The beholder is supposed to be brought into a state of perception that makes it impossible for him to turn the gaze away from the painting. For Leonardo, this goal can be achieved by confronting the beholder with an absolutely harmonious work of art. To create such a work, he states, the painter (unlike the poet, who can only represent things “part after part”) needs to sum up the “Godly proportions of all parts” simultaneously (ibid., 142f.). In other words: The beholder is to be captivated or paralyzed by means of an aesthetics which, if applied correctly, doesn’t leave any room for resistance (for another interpretation of this idea, see Bredekamp 2018, 3–6). The beholder is unable to make use of what Sartre would call his “pure freedom”. Instead of determining the painting’s possibility of “being”, the beholder is determined by the object of his perception. Leonardo was not the only painter with a particular focus on the fundamental freedom of the beholder. In fact, an often-cited remark from art historian Michael Fried sums up pretty well an essential leitmotif of countless painters, photographers, illustrators, and others, who seek to delight, inspire, and fascinate us with their individual works: “a painting […] had first to attract […] the beholder, then to arrest […] and finally to enthrall […] the beholder, that is, a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move” (Fried 1988, 92). This remark, I should add, originally referred to the art of painting in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France; the motto expressed in these words, however, can easily be transferred to our present-day media society. This explains why my discussion of the beholder’s fundamental freedom and the Will to See shouldn’t be taken as a mere metaphor. The beholder is much more than just the addressee or recipient of the image; quite literally, the beholder is the ontological source of the image. On the one hand, this means that the beholder is endowed with a high potential of power, namely the power of “giving birth” to the full ontological existence of the image (let me repeat Boehm’s important statement on the ontology of the image again: “only the seen picture has in truth become entirely a picture”). On the other hand, though, the beholder is also a fairly vulnerable entity. As we have seen with Großklaus, Leonardo, and Fried, the beholder can be made or even forced to see, and thus relinquish his original freedom to the image. This applies both to the beholder on the local, individual sphere (Leonardo, Fried) and to larger communities of beholders within the public sphere (Großklaus). In the latter respect, one aspect strikes me as quite important: Even if it is practically impossible to deny that images have nowadays become an inescapable “measure of things”, a tool that both shapes and influences our idea of reality, it should

  THE BEHOLDER’S FREEDOM: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE “WILL TO SEE” 

581

always be kept in mind that this matter of fact is by no means the result of a “natural inclination” toward visual media. It is often said that the visual has always been privileged in Western thought. Although it can hardly be questioned that the human eye has often been praised as the “noblest of all senses” (see Jonas 1962), it is equally true that vision and visuality have always been met with profound skepticism as well (see Jay 1994). The idea that the power of images simply reflects a “natural tendency” toward the visual is therefore unconvincing. The power of images cannot be separated from a community of beholders whose adoption of an all-embracing Will to See goes back to a complex set of historically, politically, and socially shaped discursive practices. Instead of clinging to an iconocentric perspective that seeks to grasp the ahistorical, genuine essence of iconicity as such, modern iconology should therefore try to describe and analyze the discursive formations that lay the ground for the Will to See in contemporary culture. Such an approach would help us understand how the modern Will to See could emerge. To do so, we need to draw not only on the historical and theoretical insights of art history and philosophically inspired image studies but also on the intellectual histories (i.e., discourses) of particular image beliefs and iconic practices. Only then are we able to grasp the extent to which our present era may be legitimately designated as a “visual era”, as well as the extent to which “our” visual era differs from previous visually dominated eras. Unfortunately, there is not enough space in this chapter for an in-depth account of the conditions of possibility of the modern Will to See. What can be offered here, however, is a striking example of how dramatically our present era is dominated by a Will to See in which the sayable is dominated by the seeable. As will become clear in the next paragraph, this example is less concerned with the analysis of the particular content of a set of images. Rather, it is interested in the circumstances that made the public perception of these images possible in the first place.

4  Abu Ghraib and the Will to See On April 28, 2004, CBS broadcasted a series of torture photographs taken in an Iraqi prison called “Abu Ghraib”. These photographs documented a large variety of situations in which the Iraqi inmates of this prison were systematically humiliated, dehumanized, and abused by a group of U.S. soldiers. One of the most well-known photos depicts the so-called hooded man, an Iraqi detainee whose face was covered with a black bag (Fig. 1). Dressed in a black cape and standing on a small, apparently instable box, the man’s outstretched hands appear to be wired to an electric apparatus (reports say that the man was threatened to be electrocuted if he falls or steps off from the box). Pictures like this were taken from soldiers who were officially sent to the Middle East to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people (at least that’s what the White House never got tired of assuring before the US Army set out to “free” the country from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship). What the Abu Ghraib pictures

582 

M. HALAWA-SARHOLZ

Fig. 1  The “hooded man” standing on the box with wires attached to his left and right hand. A photo from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, 2003. U.S. Government copyright (in public domain)

revealed, though, was the exact opposite—cruel occupiers literally trampling on the values of freedom and democracy as well as on the most basic guidelines of the Geneva Conventions. The publication of the Abu Ghraib pictures shed some light on a number of facts. The first—probably most obvious—fact is that the US Army took the protection of the dignity and human rights of its prisoners of war anything but seriously. Unsurprisingly, then, “Abu Ghraib” soon came to stand for a total loss of America’s moral integrity not only in its fight for democracy but also in its global “war on terror”. Another fact points to the pleasure and joy the perpetrators obviously felt when they humiliated, abused, and tortured their Iraqi inmates. Smiling directly at the camera and showing the thumbs up on numerous pictures, the US soldiers clearly enjoyed the degrading visual display of their inmates. Moreover, Stephen F. Eisenman (2007, 29–30) was undoubtedly right when he argued that both the particular torture procedures and the

  THE BEHOLDER’S FREEDOM: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE “WILL TO SEE” 

583

deliberate production of highly denigrating images reveal a decidedly imperialistic view on Islamic culture, a culture clearly regarded as inferior by the producers of the Abu Ghraib photographs. Eisenman also rightly highlighted the extent to which the Iraqi detainees were systematically degraded and reified as “mere objects”. According to him, the Abu Ghraib pictures can be interpreted as “the expression of the complete alienation of master and slave” (ibid., 34). The torturers did not recognize the Iraqi inmates as fellow human beings or as real “partners” of social interaction. Instead, they exposed them to the pure arbitrariness of a kind of violence that didn’t just take place on a physical level but also proceeded on a decidedly visual level. In Abu Ghraib, the gaze of the perpetrators was just as violent as the physical abuse of the helpless inmates (see also Mitchell 2011, Halawa 2008, Halawa-Sarholz 2018). Another fact about Abu Ghraib is as follows: The photographs were definitely not taken “in passing” or incidentally. Their creation was by no means just some kind of foolery by the American prison guards (see Albrecht 2007, 47). On the contrary, the photographs were an essential factor within the whole torture process, and they were deliberately used to arouse considerable feelings of shame, humiliation, and helplessness. As Gourevitch and Morris (2008, 112–113) point out, the deliberate production of shame was not only ensured with the help of the camera. It was also ensured by means of other procedures of deliberate visual shaming. For example, female prison guards were used as a kind of “humiliation enhancer” in that male Muslim prisoners were forced to strip naked in front of them. From the military’s point of view, measures likes this were expected to significantly increase the feeling of powerlessness and induce a feeling of shameful emasculation. With Slavoj Žižek, we can therefore conclude the photographic recording of the prisoner’s dehumanizing denigration had been a vital element of the systematic “psychological humiliation” (Žižek 2004) of the Abu Ghraib prisoners. In addition to all aspects mentioned so far, there is another important—and less apparent—fact that turns the case of Abu Ghraib into an almost uncanny scandal: The unacceptable conditions in Abu Ghraib were already known about a year before CBS’s broadcasting of the torture photographs in April 2004. As early as June 2003, Amnesty International approached various leading media institutions with highly detailed and credible reports about the constant and systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war. However, these reports did not include any photographic evidence. According to Horst Müller (2004, 11) who analyzed the media coverage on Abu Ghraib before and after the release of the torture pictures with his Journalism students, this “lack” of evidence led to a collective ignorance of highly scandalous incidents: “For almost a year, hardly anyone was interested in the well-founded written statements of the victims. But everyone lunged on the pictures of the torturers—immediately”. What is scandalous about the Abu Ghraib images is not only the fact that they bear witness to horrible atrocities. Most scandalous is the fact that an incident that undoubtedly must become part of public discourse only became sayable beyond a highly limited, local sphere as soon as images were available. It

584 

M. HALAWA-SARHOLZ

is for this reason why to me the images of Abu Ghraib do not only stand for the radical disrespect of fundamental human rights. They also stand for an excessive Will to See that only grants sayability to what is seeable. Hence, Abu Ghraib can be seen as a symptom of a shift in the relationship between the sayable and the seeable: In our contemporary public discourse, sayability is increasingly restricted to what is visually accessible. This observation is obviously reminiscent of what Martin Heidegger outlined in his classic “The Age of the World Picture”. Not only do we form our ideas of the world on the basis of visual representations; the world itself is “conceived and grasped as picture” (Heidegger 1977, 129). Thus, pictures are not just a way of worldmaking (Goodman 1978), they are also a vehicle for the “objectifying of whatever is” (Heidegger 1977, 127). Or as Heidegger has put it: “Only that which becomes object in this way is—is considered to be in being” (ibid.). From this perspective, the power of images is indeed intertwined with fundamental ontological matters. However, this particular power is not related to the ontology of the image itself; rather, we are confronted with the ontological power of a Will to See characterized by a growing imbalance in the dialectics between the sayable and the seeable. Of course, our highly bureaucratized modern society is still largely based on various practices of writing. The seeable does not dominate each and every aspect of contemporary culture. At the same time, though, it can hardly be denied that what is granted access to the realm of the sayable owes this privilege primarily to the seeable. This brings us back to the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion as outlined by Großklaus in his theory of the media apriori, an aspect I will dwell upon in the final section of this chapter.

5  The Iconic Turn and the Problem of Inclusion and Exclusion One might think that my discussion of the Will to See amounts to an unreserved affirmation of one of the most tenacious beliefs in current iconology, namely the idea that the iconic turn is first and foremost defined by a growing “extension” (Boehm 2007, 13) of visual media in contemporary culture. Even though it is not my intention to reject this belief entirely, I believe that a quantitative focus on the much-maligned “flood of images” falls short of recognizing an effect I find to be most characteristic of the visual era of our time: the exclusion of facts and circumstances from the realm of the sayable based on the absence of corresponding visual documents. On the one hand, it is a plain fact that “for us today […] it is a matter of course that the entire surface of the world can become a picture: any section of it, no matter how small. Everything visible can also be a picture” (ibid., 11). On the other hand, though, it is equally true that even if practically everything has the potential of becoming a picture, a vast amount of events worthy or even mandatory of being visually accessible is not granted the privilege of pictorial visibility and, hence, public sayability. The fact

  THE BEHOLDER’S FREEDOM: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE “WILL TO SEE” 

585

that the case of Abu Ghraib could only turn into a public scandal after the press got hold of visual evidence provides a striking example of this asymmetrical dialectics between the sayable and the seeable. Of course, the case of Abu Ghraib  is a quite  extreme  example; yet it wouldn’t take long to list further instances where the sayable is dominated by the seeable. To avoid misunderstandings: I am not trying to condemn the scope and extent of the modern Will to See per se. Nonetheless, it is important to address the problems and dangers that either can come along, or actually do come along, with this Will especially with regard to the public sphere of democratic media systems. It goes without saying that the necessity of the study of images is mainly due to a massive transgression and extension of visual media in politics, science, entertainment, and many other social branches. At the same time, it is by no means less apparent that this transgression and extension often implies equally massive effects of exclusion. Yes, the world can become a picture “even down to its atoms” (ibid., 13). Fact is, though, that many things remain invisible—and therefore unsaid—despite their enormous relevance for public discourse. Visibility, it seems, has become one of the most important resources within the public sphere. Indeed, one could say the economy of attention as outlined by Georg Franck (2020) basically amounts to an iconocentric economy of visibility. Against this background, I believe, one of the most important tasks of contemporary iconology is to critically analyze the conditions that made such an economy possible. However, it should do so without falling back to a Platonic rejection of iconicity altogether. The growing influence of visual media is often explained with reference to technological innovations. What should be mentioned in addition to this is that the development of such innovations is often accompanied by a Will to See. Images have not become an indispensable aspect of modern society because they are intrinsically more reliable tools of representation than other media; they attained such a status because a community of beholders sees something in them that makes them want to see, something that makes them believe that visual representations are more exact, trustworthy, and accurate than other sources of information. With Leonardo, we have learned that the freedom of the beholder can be weakened or paralyzed by means of a confrontation with a picture whose aesthetics is absolutely harmonious. The case is quite different nowadays. Today, the Will to See is not primarily nourished by harmonious beauty; rather, it is driven by the belief that visual representations enable us to make reference to realities that could never be grasped without them. Visual representations not only create pictorial realities, they constitute entire micro or macro realities. At least since Galileo’s use of the telescope, the Will to Know, which is so characteristic of mankind, has coupled with an all-­ embracing Will to See (see Blumenberg 2002). Twenty years before Gottfried Boehm’s proclamation of the iconic turn, Polish semiotician Mieczysław Wallis described the age of mass media as an era characterized by a “hunger” for “visual iconic signs” (Wallis 1975, 22). Although this hunger is being nourished constantly, it seems that it never

586 

M. HALAWA-SARHOLZ

comes to a state of saturation. Not only does it lead to an almost endless desire for images. It also redefines the limits of sayability within the public spheres of (supposedly) democratic, enlightened, and rational societies. Technological progress has undoubtedly brought about highly innovative ways of image production. But it also paved the way for the establishment of a discourse in which the primacy of the seeable over the sayable led to a factual exclusion of events that are worthy or mandatory of being articulated. Moreover, this development was accompanied by a profound erosion of the fundamental freedom of the beholder who has to see in order to know. In an economy of visibility, it is practically impossible to ignore or neglect the primacy of the seeable. To say it again: It is not my aim to unanimously denounce the existence of the Will to See. The overall objective of this chapter is to remind current iconology of the fundamental importance of the beholder’s freedom. It is precisely this peculiar freedom that countless visual representations appeal to in their struggle for attention and their quest for “full” pictorial existence. Nowhere is this freedom more apparent than in the deliberate withdrawal of the image-constituting gaze. Art historians like Horst Bredekamp or Charlotte Klonk drew attention to this significant fact when they demanded to deliberately not pay attention to “snuff movies”, whose sole purpose is to kill a person in order to “turn death into an image” (Bredekamp 2004; see also Klonk 2017, 231). From a Sartrean point of view, the act of looking at an image is always accompanied by a certain form of complicity and responsibility—at least as long as the praxis of looking is conducted on a free basis. In this respect, my plea for the beholder’s freedom ultimately seeks to emphasize the fundamental ethical dimension of iconicity, a dimension notoriously overlooked in those highly iconocentric theories of the image that regard the beholder as an obstacle to the theoretical exploration of iconicity’s “genuine essence”.

References Albrecht, Clemens. 2007. “Wörter lügen manchmal, Bilder immer. Wissenschaft nach der Wende zum Bild”. In:  Mit Bildern lügen. Ed. by Wolf-Andreas Liebert and Thomas Metten. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag. Boehm, Gottfried. 2007. Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 2002. “Das Fernrohr und die Ohnmacht der Wahrheit”. In: Galileo Galilei. Sidereus Nuncius. Nachricht von neuen Sternen. Ed. and with an introduction by Hans Blumenberg. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Bredekamp, Horst. 2004. “Wir sind befremdete Komplizen”. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 27, 2004. Bredekamp, Horst. 2018. Image Acts. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency. Trans., ed., and adapted by Elizabeth Clegg. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Eisenman, Stephen F. 2007. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books.

  THE BEHOLDER’S FREEDOM: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE “WILL TO SEE” 

587

Franck, Georg. 2020. Vanity Fairs: Another View of the Economy of Attention. Berlin: Springer. Fried, Michael. 1988. Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Gourevitch, Philip; Morris, Erol. 2008. Standard Operating Procedure. A War Story. New York: Picador. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Großklaus, Götz. 2004. Medien-Bilder. Inszenierung der Sichtbarkeit. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Halawa, Mark A. 2008. “Betroffene Sichtbarkeiten. Abu Ghraib und die Gewalt des Blicks”. Mauerschau, 2: 7–24 (https://tinyurl.com/vgl3kjw). Halawa-Sarholz, Mark. 2018. “Prekäre Sichtbarkeit und skopische Gewalt. Überlegungen zu Ethik und Ethos der Bildpraxis im Ausgang von Lambert Wiesing und Judith Butler”. In: Bildmacht—Machtbild. Deutungsmacht des Bildes: Wie Bilder glauben machen. Ed. by Philipp Stoellger and Martina Kumlehn. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Age of the World Picture”. In Questions Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. and intro. by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial. Jay, Martin. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Jonas, Hans. 1962. “Homo pictor and the differentia of man”. Social Research, 29 (2): 201–220. Klonk, Charlotte. 2017. Terror. Wenn Bilder zu Waffen warden. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1986. Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2011. Cloning Terror. The War of Images. 9/11 to the Present. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Müller, Horst. 2004. “Brauchen wir Bilder, um zu weinen?” In: Folter frei: Abu Ghraib in den Medien. Ed. by Horst Müller. Mittweida: HVM-Hochschulverlag Mittweida. Plato. 2013. Republic, Volume II: Books 6–10. Ed. and trans. by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1988. “What Is Literature?” And Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vinci, Leonardo da. 1990. Sämtliche Gemälde und die Schriften zur Malerei. Trans. by Marianne Schneider, ed. by André Chastel. München: Schirmer/Mosel. Wallis, Mieczysław. 1975. Arts and Signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Warnke, Martin. 2005. Bildwirklichkeiten. Göttingen: Wallstein. Wiesing, Lambert. 2014. The Philosophy of Perception. Phenomenology and Image Theory. Trans. by Nancy Ann Roth. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Žižek, Slavoj, 2004. “Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture”. London Review of Books, June 3, 2004.

Surveillance and Manipulation Versus Networking and Sharing Elio Ugenti

1   Image, Visibility, Surveillance: A Brief Introduction For some time now, image has no longer been a predominantly visual issue. What I mean by this is that, in today’s society, an image no longer merely “behaves” like a visual object put before a spectator, or rather, an observer (Crary 1990): instead, it is an object that boasts a vitality that continually readapts its function within a media ecosystem that is increasingly complex and diverse. Today, perhaps more than at any other time in history, images are objects to be used. Particularly on social networks, images have been made the object of a series of social and communicative practices that pervade our daily lives and force us to reconsider the issue of “visibility”—understood as the relationship between a person who observes and a person who is observed—if we hope to understand the particular dynamics that are triggered when images come into play (in vastly different forms and through different media). Take, for example, how a common, entertaining practice such as the selfie—which has radically redefined the rules of visibility as regards self-representation—has become a key element in a series of promotional strategies that “exploit” the urge to create and share such images, an urge felt by an untold number of people (“selfie points”, now found in cultural venues, places of entertainment, and retail outlets, are an obvious example). Thus, in my view, the study of images in this day and age means analyzing their function at the height of a media-ization process that is affecting the

E. Ugenti (*) Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_36

589

590 

E. UGENTI

social aspect of individuals in Western society (Van Dijck 2013), a process that has been underway for two centuries now, that is, since the technological evolution of devices such as the telephone and telegraph (Kern 2003) began to fall in line with the needs of individuals, allowing the emergence of cultural practices that established a kind of symbiotic relationship between a device’s technological dimension and its pragmatic dimension. As José Van Dijck writes: “As a medium coevolves with its quotidian user’s tactics, it contributes to shaping people’s everyday life, while at the same time this mediated sociality becomes part of society’s institutional fabric” (ibid., 5–6). Van Dijck refers to the concept of “tactics” (as opposed to “strategies”) in order to describe these practices. As is well known, this term echoes the writings of Michel De Certeau (2011) so as to call into question (if not thoroughly undermine) the disciplinary rigidity of dispositifs and the ideological effects that they produce (Foucault 1995; Althusser 2014; Baudry 1976), taking its cue from the conviction that any media-based practice is always spawned by a form of negotiation between a device’s structure and the action of the subject who acts within it (Casetti 2015). If we apply this statement to the issue of visibility, it can cause a short-circuit in Foucault’s reflection on the dispositif, particularly when it is applied to disciplinary surveillance practices (Foucault 1995). After all, Michel Foucault often stated that the connection between a dispositif’s action and the position of a subject is inextricably linked to the issue of control, and therefore to that of surveillance (cf. Agamben 2009). For Foucault, dispositifs have a strategic function that implies “a manipulation of relations of force”, both in order to “orient them in a certain direction, to block them or to fix and utilise them”. Foucault ends by saying that the dispositif always comes into play when relations of power and relations of knowledge come into contact (Foucault 1995, 299–300). Thus, an “anti-disciplinary” practice is one that tends to call into question the process of subjection triggered by a dispositif, what Agamben calls an act of “profanation” (Agamben 2007, 2009). It is clear, well known, and exhaustively debated in academic circles via the comparison of a number of different disciplines that the “issue of surveillance” is certainly not limited to the presence of technological devices for recording the surroundings where we spend our daily lives. Surveillance is a decidedly vaster concept that concerns the relationship between body, space, and power (Flynn and Mackay 2018, 2019a; Özier et al. 2019; Han 2017; Rodotà 2014; Bauman and Lyon 2013), and we will try to investigate it in these terms, while however continuing to focus on it in relation to the issue of visibility and, above all, the issue of image (of its uses and the processes that transform its function). As clearly stated by Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay in their introduction to the book Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Surveillance is not only found in the lens of the camera and within a technological artifact, but can also emerge from within the very spaces housing bodies—from urban, to suburban, domestic to institutional—spaces actively enforce the watchful gaze of surveillance. (Flynn and Mackay 2019b, 2)

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

591

In the observations that follow, these spaces will be defined as and when, so as to establish the “conditions of visibility” that are created each time on a case-­ by-­case basis. Initially, our observations will focus on case studies that force us to tackle the presence of “physical spaces”, where the central aspect that emerges is the presence of “recording devices” that carry out a controlling function. We will then move on to analyze the new relationship that has formed between space and image so as to reflect on the way they essentially merge, something we must consider when analyzing the surveillance work carried out by drones, which is no longer merely the production of images to monitor space, but the use of images in order to directly affect that space and the forms of life that are found there (Chamayou 2015; Parks and Kaplan 2017; Kaplan 2018). This leads, finally, to a rethinking of the action of surveillance in the Internet’s virtual space, particularly in social media, today’s extreme manifestation of an evolution toward the social dimension of space (Koskela 2003) that exists regardless of the presence of a physical space of interaction. Our analysis will lead us back to the issue of practices of subjection, bringing us to ask whether our discarding of the notion of “subject” means that we really have progressed past disciplinary and surveillance action, whether we therefore find ourselves faced with truly anti-disciplinary practices or whether what we are dealing with forms of control that readapt user tactics as part of new and more complex disciplinary strategies.

2   Visual Dialectics: Seeing and Being Seen In order to present the first of the mechanisms listed above, it may prove useful to refer to a scene from Brian De Palma’s film Redacted (2007). As we all know, this film is set in a U.S. checkpoint in Samarra and tells the story of a group of American soldiers involved in military operations in Iraq who become guilty of raping a young Iraqi woman and killing her and her family. The scene worth focusing our attention on is the one where we first discover that some of these soldiers intend to rape the girl. The action takes place in the middle of a poker game filmed by one of the soldiers, Salazar, who is shooting a war documentary in order to gain admission to film school. The camera shakes, and the unsteady movement is obviously that of a hand-­ held camera. The soldiers look at the camera and talk to Salazar (Fig. 1) who answers as he continues to record the scene. All of a sudden, two of the soldiers sitting at the table decide to share their criminal plan with the others. They hint that Salazar should put the camera down. Seeing Salazar hesitate, one of them gets annoyed, stands up, and leans toward the camera in an attempt to grab it, ending up hitting it with his hand, causing it to shake. Next, Salazar places the camera on a wooden surface next to him, pretending to have turned it off, but in actual fact he has left it on and continues to videotape what happens without warning the other members of the group. From this moment on, the shaking movements of the camera that accompanied the scene from the start cease, and the following three minutes are recorded in a continuous fixed shot (Fig. 2).

592 

E. UGENTI

Fig. 1  Brian De Palma, Redacted, 2007, screen capture (fair use)

Fig. 2  Brian De Palma, Redacted, 2007, screen capture (fair use)

Now the characters don’t know they are being filmed, they no longer interact with the recording device and they discuss their criminal plan as if they were no longer observed, until the scene is cut. The interesting aspect of the sequence described above, as far as the issues we are analyzing here are concerned, regards the changes De Palma makes to the regime of visibility. He moves on from a mechanism based on the awareness and reciprocal relationship between the person who films (or watches) and the person who is filmed (or watched) to an asymmetrical relationship where

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

593

the person watched is unaware of being observed. The visual strategy used by De Palma in this sequence only slightly precedes his repeated use in the film of a number of shots that simulate the action of surveillance cameras in several scenes: cameras that are placed at different points inside the US army base. The condition of visibility, whose set-up until that moment is entrusted (in the main, though not entirely) to footage recorded by Salazar, and based on the reciprocal relationship between the subject and object of the camera’s view, changes from this moment on, and the imbalance we referred to earlier increasingly dominates the film’s visual structure: in the shots mentioned above, which can be ascribed to what are surveillance cameras to all intents and purposes; in the images recorded by Salazar using a helmet-mounted camera during the rape and murder of the Iraqi girl; and in other images recorded by other surveillance cameras positioned in the officers’ rooms while they interrogate the soldiers responsible for this war crime. We are therefore justified in saying that, from that moment on, the surveillance regime forcefully shapes the visual structure of the movie, alongside other images produced and utilized using a number of different visual devices simulated by De Palma in his film, categorized as “fake found footage film” marked by the alternation between these two different forms of visual dialectics that constantly realign the “seeing—being seen” relationship. If we base ourselves on Ruggero Eugeni’s observations regarding how first-­ person shots objectivize in contemporary cinema, it’s fair to say that in the scene analyzed above, we fluidly move from a bi-directional relationship between the “body sensor” shown in the film and the diegetic world around it to a mono-directional relationship where the camera acts automatically and autonomously (Eugeni 2013, 2015). Eugeni directly links this state of visibility to surveillance devices, to the point where he defines this type of take as a “panoptic first person shot”. The way surveillance devices are used to emphasize the film’s spectacle and narrative aspects almost makes Redacted a pioneering film, followed over the years by a host of productions—not all of which have been American—that demonstrate a heightened interest in these technologies, particularly after the 9/11 attacks and the proliferation of international conflicts that fall under the umbrella term “war on terror”. Nevertheless, although contemporary war movies have proved to be a laboratory of visual experimentation as far as this aspect is concerned, the presence of surveillance technologies in films is not relegated to this particular cinematic genre. Take, for example, Stopover in Dubai (Chris Marker, 2011), a found footage film which takes advantage of the images recorded by a series of surveillance cameras scattered throughout Dubai airport, the city’s streets, and the halls of a hotel, offering the viewer an extremely detailed visual account of a Mossad operation set up to eliminate a terrorist suspect; or take 87 Ore (Costanza Quatriglio, 2015), a documentary that denounces the violent treatment of patients perpetrated by members of staff at an Italian psychiatric hospital, a film in which the director uses the images recorded by the surveillance

594 

E. UGENTI

cameras located inside the patients’ rooms; not to mention mainstream productions, such as Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015) or Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass, 2016), to name a few. Today’s cinema presents surveillance and labels it a “necessary frontier of the post-media universe” (Zagarrio 2018, 24), while it ends up clearly influencing these films not only on a thematic level but, above all, on an aesthetic level, as argued by Sebastien Lefait: Surveillance films shows that the trivialization of CCTV influences both social behaviour and filmaking: as surveillance becomes a social inducted lifestyle it simultaneously impacts the aesthetics of film. (Lefait 2013, 44)

For many film-makers, the act of reflecting on the relationship between visibility and space that arises with the use of surveillance devices means focusing on a central aspect of contemporary visual culture and on the influence of a particular scopic regime that modifies the way individuals behave in daily life. And this is true as much for cinema in the strict sense as for contemporary television series (Rives-East 2019). We should ask, however, what kind of visibility can emerge from different surveillance strategies. We could start from Michel Foucault and his famous and brusque statement at the conclusion of his description of Bentham’s Panopticon: “Visibility is a trap” (Foucault 1995, 301). And regarding the condition of an individual within a Benthamian apparatus, Foucault writes: “He is seen but he does not see” (ibid., 302). The issue of visibility is therefore central to the relationship between the surveillor and the surveilled. The state of being seen without seeing is what creates the condition of subjection as illustrated by the French philosopher. The structure of the Panopticon is well known: a ring with a tower at the center, a tower featuring windows that face the inner side of the ring. The ring, in turn, is divided into cells with two windows: one that looks out toward the tower and one that looks toward the exterior, allowing light to enter each cell and cross it from one end to the other. A single guard placed inside the tower can observe the shadow of every single prisoner, each one locked in a cell. Foucault observes that the dungeon approach is turned on its head: the prisoner is not hidden away in a dark cell, but rather hyper-exposed thanks to the light and the prison’s structure. This results in the Panopticon’s essential effect: To induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action. (Ibid., 302–303)

In his observations on the Panopticon, Foucault reviews the issue of discipline and dispositif (which had already been tackled by Louis Althusser) from an optical and architectural point of view, embracing the issue of visibility in the terms illustrated above. In his book on Foucault, Deleuze (1988) highlights this aspect, emphasizing how the relationship between the organization of power and that of knowledge can also, though not solely, be structured using

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

595

a particular arrangement of the visible. Thus Deleuze places the conditions of visibility on the same footing as the conditions of “enunciability”, so as to highlight the basic continuity between the organization of the enunciable and the organization of the visible. Bentham’s apparatus is therefore not based on the amount of attention paid by a person responsible for surveillance, but rather on the perfect creation of a set. The issue of visibility exists regardless of the actual presence of an observer and focuses instead on that possibility. Something similar happens today when we walk into public places that feature a screen showing a close-up of a guard sitting in a control room, from where (we presume) he can monitor the images recorded by cameras placed in various different locations. We will never know if we are actually the object of his gaze at that particular moment in time; in the end, we won’t even know if his image, constantly broadcast on that screen, is in real time. Thus, we don’t know if that person can actually see us, but we can sense that he may be watching us. What is certain is that our condition of visibility is something we cannot escape, and it is something that, at that moment, inevitably conditions the way we behave: “a real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation” (Foucault 1995, 304). As an example, in many parts of the London Underground you’ll find a sign saying “See it. Say it. Sorted” (Fig. 3). This isn’t merely an invitation to report ambiguous or potentially dangerous situations. The visibility of the sign itself is designed to be a deterrent against future crimes. The sign clearly demonstrates

Fig. 3  N.  Chadwick, Warren Street Underground Station, photograph, 2018. Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (in public domain)

596 

E. UGENTI

the possibility that there may be a surveillance dispositif—made up of the thousands of eyes that could be watching us—that could capture our presence. If we go back to the example taken from De Palma’s film and the objectivization within it of a mono-directional relationship between the diegetic device and the characters, we can clarify an extremely important aspect. What could seem to be an application of the Benthamian principle using visual reproduction technology is—in actual fact—its overturning. The characters’ state of visibility is based on their lack of awareness, even though their subjugation is mediated by the strict rule of being seen without seeing, as in the Panopticon described by Foucault. We could venture a hypothesis, saying that the former type of surveillance (inspired by Bentham) fosters a situation of control, while the latter type can be used to report an action. The former stops a bad thing from happening, the latter allows us to witness it as it occurs. Or again, in the former, the possible presence of someone’s gaze stops an event from happening, while, in the latter, the actual presence of someone’s gaze guarantees the visibility of that same event. In a film like Costanza Quatriglio’s previously mentioned 87 Ore, the dialectic relationship between these two methods of surveillance becomes clear. Quatriglio’s method of directing becomes, to all intents and purposes, a political act that revolutionizes the original purpose of the images chosen for the film. This Italian director changes the purpose of the images originally recorded to “control” inmates and uses them to denounce their maltreatment. In this case, the act of directing is a taking and a returning that restores the value of these images as a “common good”, in keeping with the rationale so clearly illustrated by Georges Didi-Huberman when analyzing the work of Harun Farocki (Didi-Huberman 2010), another filmmaker who dedicated several of his films to the subject of the presence of surveillance devices in our society (cf. De Rosa 2014). The issue of visibility is therefore tackled along the axis that links a body (whether biological or mechanical) as it observes and a body that is observed, starting with the process that forms a “gaze”—which is what is really at stake in Foucault’s thought—through the action of a dispositif (the theoretical—and not strictly technical—concept that allows Foucault to establish the essential characteristics of that particular surveilling gaze). Foucault’s observations on the relationship between viewing dispositifs and subjectivizing processes has inspired many scholars of visual culture, as shown by Michele Cometa, among others: Foucault is one of the founding fathers of today’s “visual culture”, both because he is responsible for some of the fundamental concepts of this field of knowledge—including that of the “gaze”—and because, with the evolution of Foucauldian philology, we have analysed more and more in depth the relationship that the author himself had with images, with visuality and with the figurative arts as a whole. After all, it is obvious to everyone that today’s “visual culture” owes strategic concepts on every level of its academic statute to Foucault. (Cometa 2012, 287)

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

597

One of the strategic concepts that Cometa identifies is, of course, the investigation of viewing dispositifs (among which the Panopticon plays a leading role thanks to the “architectural and social implications” that Cometa, like others, highlights) (ibid.), along with the notion of a scopic regime that has always been central to theories regarding the concept of “gaze” that have influenced the evolution of visual culture studies (Crary 1990; Jay 1993). The link between visibility and the control of space, and the separation of the two concepts “seeing—being seen,” are after all notions (and pragmatic strategies) that still provide us with ways of understanding practices, such as those of the military, which we will analyze more in depth in the next section. Once again, such practices contribute to a qualitative transformation of images in contemporary visual culture and force us to no longer consider them as merely visual objects (Purgar 2019) or merely a space of visual control, but rather as a space of action.

3   Images at War: Dronic Vision and New Warfare Settings It is well known that Paul Virilio published his book War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception in the early 1990s during the First Gulf War, which broke out when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. In this book, a great deal of importance is attributed to the issue of verticality as a form of strategic mediation designed to control territory and the action that takes place there (Virilio 2009). The book aims to analyze—and this is a fundamental element of Virilio’s thought—the relationship between war and viewing technologies. Indeed, this French philosopher attempts to retrace how this relationship evolved over the course of the twentieth century: from the outbreak of the First World War—which inaugurated the use of planes in combat, both for bombardment and photographic reconnaissance—to the above-mentioned war in Iraq in the early 1990s, the first truly “televised war”, which was so heavily mediatized that—according to Jean Baudrillard’s famous assertion (1995)—it did not take place (cf. Hammond 2007). For Virilio, the First World War was the first step toward the process he describes as the derealization of military engagement. The viewfinders of film cameras fitted to reconnaissance planes increasingly became “an indirect sighting device complementing those attached to the weapons of mass destruction” and warfare became an industrial issue where “the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts” (Virilio 2009, 1). In his book, Virilio repeatedly analyzes the evolutionary process that helped turn weapons into instruments of perception—as well as of destruction—highlighting how the very rhythm of this process partly depended on military needs that—on a strategic level—demanded attention as and when they emerged, and partly depended from the development of viewing technologies. That is why, for example, it was only from the Vietnam War that deferred

598 

E. UGENTI

images—typical of cinema and photography and dominant up until then— were flanked by real-time broadcasting using a series of devices that radically redefined the timescale of images and their ontological rules. Just take, for example, the increasingly systematic use of infrared images that, to all intents and purposes, redefine the relationship between iconic production and the condition of visibility: images are no longer a re-production of the visible, instead they are the production of visible objects in invisible conditions. As Virilio observed, with the Vietnam War, objects and bodies lost their central importance compared to what he described as their “physiological traces,” which were monitored and recorded by new instruments of perception that identify bodies, thanks to their temperature and nature. This is undoubtedly one of the aspects that most strongly link Virilio’s observations to modern-­ day wars, particularly because they launch a process that increasingly distances the images produced during armed conflict from what we could define as a truly representational regime. Yet again, the “issue of image” then becomes decisive when considering new forms of control and surveillance of space and bodies in war zones. The latter is a concept that is increasingly unable to represent the concept of true “battlefields”, as they were considered up until the latter part of the twentieth century, and is increasingly linked to the concept of controlling everyday spaces. The constant monitoring of large swathes of the planet alongside the act of profiling the data that is recorded and compared on a daily basis are parts of a globalized strategy of control, “legitimized” by the need to preempt—or avoid—military conflict on a vast scale. In a way, it is Richard Grusin’s (2010) concept of “premediation” taken to its logical extreme. What we are dealing with is the doctrine of the “manhunt”, which is the basis of a new type of warfare that has been adopted ever more frequently since the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001 (take the U.S. Army’s killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani using a drone). What we are faced with here is a new model of warfare that has attracted the attention of many scholars, including Grégoire Chamayou who extensively analyzed it in his book Drone Theory: The contemporary doctrine of hunting warfare breaks with the model of conventional warfare based on concepts of fronts and opposed battle lines facing up to each other. […] The primary task is no longer to immobilize the enemy but to identify and locate it. This implies all the labor of detection. The modern art of tracking is based on an intensive use of new technologies, combining aerial video surveillance, the interception of signals, and cartographic tracking. (Chamayou 2015, 33–34)

The control of space must therefore take on a new form, and the production of images, which is the basis of that control, must meet the needs of a new concept of military conflict. Such new images are, as I mentioned earlier, increasingly asked to go beyond the mere re-production of what appears before the

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

599

camera so as to trace the invisible, as well as increase the level of interaction between vision and action as much as possible, to the point where they become inextricably linked if not entirely indistinguishable. The surveillance images produced by drones seem to clearly demonstrate this shift from a “visual model” to a “capture model” (Agre 1994; Zetter 2019), given that vision no longer merely concerns a state of privilege and subjugation between the watcher and the watched (in keeping with the Benthamian model that establishes a close connection between visibility and information), but in the end can be traced back to the extraction and processing of data that we can term “enactionable” in real time and space (the televisual dimension to which Virilio referred, taken to its logical extreme). The images produced by new military devices are the result of a long process of distancing from the photographic regime. In fitting these new surveillance devices to drones, we effectively reconnect the following elements: the potential offered by the aerial control of space (verticality); the profiling of data, starting with the recording of biological traces; and actions planned remotely using simulations and analyses carried out in real time on the images produced, where a view of the present and a forecast of the future seem to co-exist. These images are, in this way, marked by the intrinsic mutual permeation of a real and a virtual dimension, and this is what Krešimir Purgar defined as iconic simultaneity to describe the paradoxical condition in which “the otherness of the image in the age of screen culture is necessarily recognized in the […] untypical temporal continuum between presentation and representation” (Purgar 2019, 59). This aspect clearly emerges in a film such as Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015) which, step-by-step, tells the story of joint military action by the U.K. and the U.S.A. against a terrorist cell in Nairobi. A team of military experts based in a command center tries to understand the possible impact of a bomb launched from a drone flying over the house where suspected terrorists are hiding (Fig. 4), what collateral damage could be done by a military act of this kind compared to that of a traditional land raid, as well as—and this is the interesting part—a comparison between such collateral damage (in terms of civilians killed) and the damage caused by a possible future terrorist attack carried out by the members of the commando should they choose not to attack in order to avoid endangering the civilians near the building targeted by the drone. In this sense, the entire military operation depicted by the film becomes an act of premediation designed to render the inevitable military action necessary legitimate. Eye in the Sky therefore demonstrates the process of producing (and not merely reproducing) a space that can be analyzed in detail using extremely complex algorithms. An image’s “calculability” is much more important than its more traditional visibility. As regards this aspect, we totally agree with what was recently asserted by Luca Malavasi and Anna Costantini, who—when discussing drones—say that their work can be termed nothing short of a rewriting of space, carried out by

600 

E. UGENTI

Fig. 4  Gavin Hood, Eye in the Sky, 2015, screen capture (fair use)

devices that “base their work on a linguistic remediation between being and action, ontology and practice” as well as “constantly archiving and translating the world’s visible surface, based on a particular technology, enunciative stance and language” (Malavasi and Costantini 2016, 90). Some sophisticated surveying instruments fitted to drones allow us to capture the heat released by objects and bodies on the ground. The images created and transmitted to a control center are the products of a digital reworking of these thermal surveys carried out by drones. The information gathered in this way is processed by highly sophisticated software and presented as rasterized images that correlate the quality of pixels with the thermal levels detected (Parks 2014). The identification of targets and their visual presentation therefore becomes an issue of “heat detection” that allows their identification. As Lisa Parks explains in one of her many analyses of the use of drones both in military and civilian spheres: In low-light conditions, human bodies are not only easier to see in IR imagery, but also easier to track and target. Within this radiographic episteme, visual surveillance practices are extended beyond epidermalization, as infrared imagery can be used to isolate suspects according to the energy emitted by their bodies. (Parks 2014, 144–145)

This way of working de facto leads to the disappearance of a border between the visible and invisible, as the reworking of these images is no longer based on the possibility of “seeing something or someone” but rather on the possibility of detecting an object’s heat and movement. Given these considerations, Parks suggests that the use of drones has led to the existence of a “targeted class” consisting of people who mainly live in areas where terrorist groups could be operating (this is particularly obvious in countries such as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan). This “targeted class” is not only exposed to the risk of surveillance but also to the risk

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

601

of falling victim to aerial attacks conducted using drones (cf. Parks 2016). The targeted class that Parks identifies therefore consists of a group of people who are continuously subjected to “vertical mediation” and exposed to the risk that it entails. It is for this very reason that, when defining the concept of “vertical mediation”, Lisa Parks specifies that when she uses the term “mediation” she is indicating, in this case, a process that doesn’t merely aim to produce a media object that interacts with a potential or real observer. Mediation here—echoing the observations of Sarah Kember and Johanna Zylinska—is a “vital process” (Kember and Zylinska 2012), that is, a process featuring experiential consequences that come into direct contact with the daily lives of all those involved. We therefore find ourselves faced with a new way of seeing (and producing images) that is inextricably linked to a new way of acting, as demonstrated in a number of contemporary films that range from the above-mentioned Eye in the Sky to Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008), Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014), London Has Fallen (Babak Najafi, 2016), and Angel Has Fallen (Ric Roman Waugh, 2019), just to name a few. Drones therefore become an essential part of today’s war movies, but the technological transformation of armed conflict that began in the 1990s has also influenced experimental cinema and has proven to be, for example, an important element in the work of Harun Farocki, who devoted a number of seminal films and video installations to this issue, such as Eye/Machine (2000), War at a Distance (2003), and Serious Game I–IV (2009–2010). During one of his last interviews as recalled by Thomas Elsaesser, Harun Farocki stated “the era of reproduction seems to be over, and the era of construction of a new world seems to be on the horizon—no, it’s already here!” (Elsaesser 2017). Farocki was obviously reflecting upon a series of contemporary images based on mathematical models that completely overhaul the idea of representation or at the very least question it radically. He refers to the concept of ideal-type representation, thus stressing the idea that such images are more of an interpretation of reality than its accurate reproduction.

4  Liquid Surveillance: Visibility as Capacity of Disclosure We stressed in the section above how Lisa Parks’s idea of “targeted class” is closely linked to the real risk of military action faced by civilians in particular parts of the world. Having clarified this fundamental aspect, we can however assert that there is a vaster network of control that does not necessarily use vertical or horizontal forms of mediation and significantly extends its sphere of influence by penetrating every aspect of environments that can no longer be called “physical spaces”, but instead are formed by our daily interaction with digital media. Such mechanisms define what could be called, if not a true “targeted class”, a “tracked” class which may include (and de facto does include) each and every one of us.

602 

E. UGENTI

As mentioned in the introductory section of this chapter, we need to identify the different spaces of surveillance in which the daily lives of today’s individuals take place. The final step in our investigation will involve analyzing the definition of a new social space—that of social media—where what Zygmunt Bauman called liquid surveillance takes place. We will aim to link the sociological and mediological issues that underlie this phenomenon to a number of image production practices that are typical of today’s visual culture. We are therefore interested in remaining focused on the two issues that have underpinned the observations made here: that of visibility and that of image. As noted by Nathaniel Zetter (2019), since the rise of computation, digital media has contributed to reorganizing the spaces in which daily life takes place, accomplishing a spatial redefinition that no longer allows us to draw a hard border between mediated and unmediated zones of interaction. What results— not only metaphorically but materially as well—is a “convergence between architecture and digitality” (ibid., 235). In actual fact, this phenomenon is subject to the action of two forces that are only apparently in conflict, but that instead cooperate to create an extremely complex interaction between bodies, media, and the spaces of daily life. On the one hand, we actually find ourselves faced with the dominating presence of media within urban and domestic spaces (i.e., we are faced with a media-ization of the environments in which we live); on the other hand, we are constantly dealing with screens (those of computers, smartphones, and tablets) that act like environments with which we have established a kind of relationship that can no longer be termed merely visual. Neil Postman’s concept of a media ecology, developed as far back as the 1970s, allows us to consider the media ecosystem—far more now than at that time—a habitat in which a significant part of modern man’s daily life takes place. Negotiating these media spaces inevitably leads to the traceability of the movements made there, a traceability that is clearly facilitated by the circulation of information through a global network that connects vast swathes of the planet. Taking his cue from the peculiarities of today’s media conditions, Richard Grusin recently revisited the observations of Gilles Deleuze regarding the concept of a “society of control” in order to highlight how well this concept allows us to identify a number of strategies now operating on a global scale in this early part of the twenty-first century. What Grusin glimpses—through the filter of Deleuze’s approach—is the increasingly strong link between governmentality and mediality. Grusin writes: In glossing governmentality in terms of control Deleuze enables us to see that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in the current regime of securitization, governmentality and mediality work hand-in-hand. If governmentality is the way in which biopolitical power controls and manages (and also makes possible particular forms of) “this complex of men and things”, including people, bodies, cultural and economic practices, natural events, and so on, then in a society of control mediality necessarily participates in this project through a diverse network of forms and practices. (Grusin 2010, 76)

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

603

While Foucault termed the individual imprisoned in a Benthamian dispositif “an object of information” that, as such, is never “a subject in communication” (Foucault 1995, 200), when it comes to liquid surveillance—thanks to that “con-fusion” between governmentality and mediality as described by Grusin— we can detect an overturning of this statement and hold that an individual becomes an object of information precisely because he or she is a subject in communication. What we are dealing with here is a form of communication that is also—and sometimes principally—visual and audio-visual, that is, based on the sharing of personal photos and videos. It is a form of sharing that becomes an integral part of what we can define the daily process of self-narration, if not of self-­ mediation. Social networks are increasingly becoming a “no-man’s land” that isn’t necessarily perceived as a public space by the user, but rather as an extension of a space that he or she continues to consider private. The possibility of selecting privacy settings on Facebook, choosing to share images only with one’s own circle of friends, gives us the impression of acting within a space that—though vast—remains nevertheless controllable and limited. In other cases, however, the invasion of a space that can be clearly perceived as public is more obvious. This is the case when it comes to sharing images on Twitter and, above all, on Instagram, where the use of hashtags is indicative of a conscious (or at least voluntary) decision to entirely lose control of a shared image, well beyond one’s own circle of followers. Many of the pictures and videos shared every day on social media—either as posts or “stories”—in practice record an experience underway, which considerably strengthens the construction of a “media-self” that comes into play in the interaction with other users who “move” and interact in a common environment. What’s more, these are situated experiences that go well beyond the visual and textual representation of the event underway thanks to background information (metadata) that locates our activity. Such information is also voluntarily provided by the user: geolocation is a choice that says something more about our experience. What’s at stake is what Dutch scholar José Van Dijck (2013) calls the capacity of disclosure, that is, the user’s wish to provide information about him or herself, which creates a directly proportional relationship with the “success” gained online, which can be quantified in terms of socialization (the number of friends, likes, comments and how many of our posts are shared). It’s a process that isn’t only triggered when we share a photo or a post where we present a moment in our day; it is also involved when we share an image or video of public interest (a scene from a film or a videoclip of a song we particularly like), which act like pieces of a narrative that supports this process of self-mediation or of constructing a media identity for ourselves. This is how an individual becomes a subject in communication, and these mechanisms can help us revisit aspects of Foucauldian thought regarding the disciplinary action of a dispositif, thanks to the observations of the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han who describes and analyzes the shift from

604 

E. UGENTI

biopolitics to psychopolitics (Han 2017). When analyzing the shift from “sovereign power” to “disciplinary power”, Foucault stresses how the latter differs from the former because it is a power of life. The disciplinary power upon which capitalist thought is based aims to reiterate the exploitation of an individual who must, due to this very factor, remain alive. Han highlights the continued existence in the disciplinary power of what he calls “a negativity of training and drills”, which is directly linked to the idea of “levying and conscription”. As Han puts it, disciplinary power is “normative power. It subjects the subject to a set of rules—norms, commandments and prohibitions—and eliminates deviations and anomalies” (ibid., 30). In the Foucauldian concept of the dispositif, the subject is created thanks to the disciplinary action of the dispositif itself. Such a model perfectly explains the production mechanisms linked to the capitalist system, however it is considerably less suited—according to Han—to a neoliberal system, based on what he defines as an integrated technological monopoly of the self: [The technology of power under the neoliberal regime] does not lay hold of individuals directly. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized—and then interpreted as freedom. (Ibid., 28)

It is thanks to this “freedom” that, according to Byung-Chul Han, the subject is tricked into perceiving him or herself as a project, a term that emphasizes the process of self-construction, undermining (and almost nullifying) the subjugating work of the dispositif. But what are the implications of this process? And why, in Byung-Chul Han’s thought, is the shift from subject to project considered a mere illusion? The reason lies in the characteristics of the neoliberal political and economic system, in which—on a vast scale—the relational rules that link an exploiting individual to an exploited individual are rearranged, creating a new space of action for the subject where he or she will feel free to act without constraints and in which it is his or her freedom that is, in actual fact, exploited (and monetized). In social media, the freedom to narrate oneself more often than not ends up encouraging us to declare our tastes, interests, our movements in space, and a range of other information. The media practices adopted by the user—and the entertainment value that ends up including them (creating a sense of pleasure and gratification that derives from the heightened level of socialization upon which social media, as such, are founded)—are the foundations of the system that Han describes: Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty—emotion, play and communication—comes to be exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Allo-exploitation yields scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited are returns maximized. (Ibid., 10)

When it comes to the Internet and social networks, Han describes the formation of a digital panopticon that feeds on voluntary self-exposure and self-­ denuding. Such concepts are not a world away from Van Dijck’s capacity of

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

605

disclosure. Han believes that a “dictatorship of transparency” is created that leads to a de-interiorization of the subject, created—you could say—through a process of self-mediation that aims to remodel particular aspects of the private self in order to create a public narrative that must seem appealing and shareable. Once again, we find the previously mentioned idea of a capture model that replaces a visual model at the heart of these mechanisms. We can trace these mechanisms back to a form of entertainment or, rather, the triggering of a leisure activity that is no longer based in a specific place (a place of play) other than that of daily life, but sanctions instead an overlapping—or integration—of the two. The performance enacted by users in today’s media ecosystem therefore includes all the practices that encourage a certain type of “playful socialization”, which acts as the basis for how social media work, and which partly seems to alter the relationship between the mediation practices that underlie it and the implications that derive from it on an ideological, political, and economic level.

5  Can a Choice Be a Trap? A Few Final Remarks We started with the Foucauldian idea encapsulated by the phrase “visibility is a trap”. We now find ourselves able to assert that “visibility is a choice”. Perhaps we could go even further than that and—based on the workings of the neoliberal dispositif discussed in the light of Byung-Chul Han’s observations—make an even more precise assertion: choice is a trap! However, if the choice itself becomes one of the most oppressive of traps, we must ask ourselves on what basis did we make that choice and what kind of relationship it forms with the kind of visibility that was, when all is said and done, the trap originally identified by Foucault. On closer inspection, the choice is a “choice of visibility” (perhaps just another term for the capacity of disclosure mentioned earlier). Yet if the choice (of visibility) is such, then why should I choose to ensnare myself? When discussing her idea of emotional capitalism in an interview with Geert Lovink, Eva Illouz adopts an anti-deterministic approach to analysis, detecting in these new forms of self-exposure a strong link with a series of practices that concern the social context and the action of individuals in the real-life spaces they occupy on a daily basis: We should not blame technology for the loss of private life. The pornofication of culture and the political-economic push for increased transparency of private life have been on the rise for decades, and the Internet has only institutionalized these trends. (Illouz in Lovink 2011)

In addition to the trap of visibility—which persists, as we saw in the first and second sections, evolving and transforming the ontological rules of images— we are therefore faced with a new one: the trap of self-realization (Lovink

606 

E. UGENTI

2011), whose operation is reiterated through processes of self-mediation that are exploited by the neoliberal system illustrated by Han. The point therefore does not lie in the choice of visibility but rather in the systematic construction of a need for visibility. The next step forward in research on this issue could be to investigate in depth the cultural process that led to this need, so as to trace the origin that triggered these mechanisms around which new forms of surveillance develop.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Profanations. New York: Zone Books. Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agre, Philip E. 1994. “Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy”.  The Information Society, 10 (2): 101–127. Althusser, Louis. 2014. On The Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. New York: Verso. Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1976. L’effet cinema. Paris: Éditions Albatros. Bauman, Zygmunt and Lyon, David. 2013. Liquid Surveillance: A conversation. Cambridge (UK): Polity Press. Casetti, Francesco. 2015. The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press. Chamayou, Gregoire. 2015. A Theory of the Drone. New York: The New Press. Cometa, Michele. 2012. La scrittura delle immagini. Letteratura e cultura visuale. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. De Certeau, Michel. 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Rosa, Miriam. 2014. “Poetics and Politics of the Trace. Notes on Surveillance Practices Through Harun Farocki’s Work”. Necsus. European Journal of Media Studies, 1 (3): 129-149. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2010. Remontages du temps subi. L’oeil de l’histoire 2. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2017. “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals”. Animation, 12 (3): 214–229. Eugeni, Ruggero. 2013. “Il first person shot come forma simbolica. I dispositivi della soggettività nel panorama postcinematografico”. Reti, saperi, linguaggi, 4 (2): 19–23. Eugeni, Ruggero. 2015. La condizione postmediale. Brescia: La Scuola. Flynn, Susan and Mackay, Antonia (eds.). 2018. Spaces of Surveillance. State and Selves. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Flynn, Susan and Mackay, Antonia (eds.) 2019a. Surveillance, Architecture and Control. Discourses on Spatial Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Flynn, Susan and Mackay, Antonia (eds.). 2019b. Introduction.  In:  Id.  (eds.), Surveillance, Architecture and Control. Discourses on Spatial Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION VERSUS NETWORKING AND SHARING 

607

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New  York: Vintage Book Edition. Grusin, Richard. 2010. Premediation. Affect and Mediality After 9/11. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammond, Philip. 2007. Media, War and Postmodernity. London and New  York: Routledge. Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. Psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London and New York: Verso. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kaplan, Caren. 2018. Aerial Aftermaths. Wartime from Above. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kember, Sarah and Zylinska, Joanna. 2012. Life After New Media. Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kern, Stephen. 2003. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koskela, Hille. 2003. “Cam-Era. The Contemporary Urban Panopticon”. Surveillance and Society, n. 1. Lefait, Sébastien. 2013. Surveillance on Screen. Monitoring Contemporary Film and Television Programs. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Lovink, Geert. 2011. Networks Without a Cause. A Critique to Social Media. Cambridge (UK) and Malden: Polity Press. Malavasi, Luca and Costantini, Anna. 2016. “Come in cielo così in terra: dispositivi, mappe, produzione artistica”. Cinergie, 5 (10): 90–101. Parks, Lisa. 2014. “Drones, Infrared Images, and Body Heat”. International Journal of Communication, 8: 2518–2521. Parks, Lisa. 2016. “Drones, Vertical Mediation and Targeted Class”. Feminist Studies, 42 (1): 227–235. Parks, Lisa and Kaplan, Caren (eds.). 2017. Life in the Age of Drone Warfare. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Purgar, Krešimir. 2019. Pictorial Appearing: Image Theory After Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript. Rives-East, Darcie. 2019. Surveillance and Terror in Post-9/11 British and American Television. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rodotà, Stefano. 2014. Il mondo nella rete. Quali diritti, quali vincoli. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Özier, Tansel; Bakhsi, Sambit and Alhajj, Reda (eds.). 2019. Social Networks and Surveillance for Society. Berlin: Springer. Van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Virilio, Paul. 2009. War and Cinema: The Logistic of Perception. London and New York: Verso. Zagarrio, Vito. 2018. “Oltre i corpi del cinema. Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi del film”. In: La cultura visuale del ventunesimo Secolo. Cinema, teatro e new media. Ed. by Andrea Rabbito. Milano: Meltemi. Zetter, Nathaniel. 2019. “In the Drone Space: Surveillance, Spatial Processing, and the Videogame as Architectural Problem”. In: Surveillance, Architecture and Control. Discourses on Spatial Culture. Ed. by  Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay.  London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mobile Images Gaby David

Mobile images are the building blocks of visual collective constructions of reality. They can be considered as the visual intersection of everyday life and popular culture, taken, viewed and/or shared through mobile devices. Understanding what characterizes mobile images relates to grasping Mobile Cultures as a whole (Cf. Martin and Von Pape 2012; Caron and Caronia 2007; Goggin 2008). It also refers to Mobile Communication Studies (aka Mobile Studies) as a discipline, to Visual Culture, and to the wider field of Image Studies. Moreover, if we follow a “medium is the message” attitude (McLuhan, 2008 first published in 1964), then it could be deduced that all the acts of taking, making, sending, receiving, posting, and the like of images with and by a mobile is precisely what makes those images mobile images. But, “[m]obile snapshots are mainly embedded in the present and develop their meaning as such”, say Martin and Von Pape (2012, 9). In other words, their meanings change us and change with us. Not only the world changes social media but also social media can change different worlds. Complementarily, I also follow Bourdieu (1965) when he supports that the power of photography is “extrinsic to photography”, goes beyond photography itself, and “communicates within a system of values” (ibid.). Mobile images, together with the apps that allow their creation and circulation, are the crucial part of what Hjorth and Pink called a “social lubricant” (2014). It is therefore in a counterpoint dialogue between the aforementioned research that this entry aims to develop the understanding of mobile images: neither in an aesthetic nor in an artistic point of view, but rather by historicizing and explaining some of the social and visual cultural implications mobile

G. David (*) University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_37

609

610 

G. DAVID

images can have. Additionally, the term “mobile images” can also refer to the movement of images from one device to another, both in place and in space, and from one temporality to another. These entire interpretations help grasp the manifold smartphone images as mobile images.

1   What Is a Mobile Image? The term mobile images should be understood as still or moving images (photos and videos) produced by, shared through, and obtained by assemblages of humans, mobile devices, mobile apps, telecommunication service providers, and/or internet platforms. Moreover, other types of filming, achieved through remote-controlled devices or wearables such as cameras with connectivity, GoPro (Fig. 1), live-streaming apps, drones (Fig. 2), and more. Mobile images are often edited using capabilities embedded in the mobile devices themselves, but sometimes using desktop computers too. Enabled by all the aforementioned capabilities, mobile images can be shared intimately (through private messaging methods) and/or posted and published more overtly online in what

Fig. 1  Souradeep Rakshit, photograph taken with GoPro camera, 2018. Photo by unsplash.com (in public domain)

  MOBILE IMAGES 

611

Fig. 2  Anders Jacobsen, Taipei City, 2020, photograph taken with drone camera. Photo by unsplash.com (in public domain)

constitutes the nuanced porosity between public and private, semi-public and semi-private (Lee 2005). When considering mobile image cultural legitimation, by extension the techno-social validations that condition cultural attitudes toward mobile vernacular visual practices, it is important to study the practices that characterize the production, sharing, and circulation of mobile images, especially because mobile communication visual habits that have developed in connection with those practices have particular characteristics. These practices, for instance, can be geolocalized, get transformed into memes, get anchored by hashtags, be emoji stickered, or even gif animation based (Gray 2015). Examples of them can range from everyday life scenes with kids, pets, or food, to holidays and/or selfies. An important part of mobile image exchange can also happen in sexting and intimately related images. The exchanges can be one-to-many, one-to-one, many-to-one, and many-to-many. Furthermore, all the above-mentioned mobile communication manners can be mixed, creating new types of conversational audiovisual connected modes, and thus different practices and uses. Another strong parameter taken into account with mobile images is temporality. Sometimes people want to share what happens in their lives to family and friends who are not physically together in real time, swinging between synchronic or asynchronic communication (Frohlich et al. 2002), or engaging in ephemeral communication (Murray 2008), as happens in the Snapchat application. Mobile images are networked and are programmed for broad audiences and likeability (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008). The documentary film Generation Like, Frontline-PBS, 2014, is a thorough example of how social media has

612 

G. DAVID

changed the way children and teenagers connect and enact identity. The phenomenon of online identity sharing, building, and making meaning became known as the “influencers’ boom”, It reflected the ways the Millennial Generation, the one portrayed in Generation Like became at the same time the followers and the opinion makers, by sharing what they thought was cool, they began influencing and generating fresher ways of consuming and selling out content. Many among this generation openly acknowledged their needs to be validated, liked, and followed. True-life and empowerment plays a good role too (Lee 2005), and because mobile images are emotional and also functional, social, and individual (Kindberg et al. 2005). They help create and maintain social relationships, construct individual/group memory, self-presentation, and self-expression (van House et al. 2005). Mobile images trigger and help maintain conversations (Koskinen 2007), and as can be seen through the boom of sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, it all seems as if sharing, posting, and publishing them has become the central part in itself, and image become a phatic sign. Today, there are plenty of platforms, and all images can be worth sharing regardless of their beauty or style (Ito and Okabe 2003), now currently known as “instagrammable”, the term used to describe “a picture that is worth posting/sharing in Instagram” (Urban Dictionary). But, it should be recalled that mobile image interpretation, production, and distribution are usually compared with other forms of photography and communication (Rantavuo 2008). Avoiding visual essentialism, I refer to visuality as something that includes sound, tactility, and other sensibilities (Traue et  al. 2019). It is needless to underscore that within mobile image exchanges, textual modalities play an enormous part, and that all their elements, gif, emojis, SMS, image, and the like should be understood as a part of a dispersed ecosystem building a multilayered mobile image. Archiving or sending them to their relatives, identifying, representing or, even branding them are just some of the ways image practices might impact people. Moreover, studying what amateurs do with their images are aspects, which indicate very clearly that one cannot separate production from distribution, circulation, and reception. Cultural anthropologist Richard Chalfen (1987, 119) claims that to understand how we manage these images, we must focus on what we do with them. Today, it is not new that mobile usage penetration has spread massively, worldwide, impacting not only communications but also all that is related to visuality and visual social practices. Over time the increase of mobile photos and mobile footage production has slowly but gradually been legitimated by the cultural and creative industries, and by traditional and social media in an ongoing process (David 2015) that still continues into the present day. Consequently, the global economy is not the same since mobiles phones became mainstream and ubiquitous, in both developed and developing countries. And then, due to the smartphone’s price decrease, the quantity of mobile  equipment used  in the cultural and telecommunication industries  in more traditional  communication  channels has  also skyrocketed.

  MOBILE IMAGES 

613

Its accessibility, standardization, and normalization have also influenced the creation, circulation, and exchange of moving images. Mobile images can be exchanged using mobile apps, for example, the ten-year-old WhatsApp (Baulch et al. 2020), where mobile everyday visual practices continue to influence, and be influenced by, social structures, institutions, and norms, and also by family, friends, and individuals themselves, those who often deal with a co-­construction of their most intimate selves.

2   Five Main Characteristics of Mobile Images Portability: if you carry a mobile phone you also carry all the images that are in it. It is like carrying many family/friends/holiday albums. Adaptability: mobiles can film, record, and show images in most types of weather and space conditions. All they require is to have sufficient battery, yet, they can still continue working with an external battery too.

5.

3   Contextualization and Mobile History The first-generation camphone or camera phones (2000–2007) allowed users to take images with them but were rarely connected to the internet. Then, in 2007–2008 came the cameraphones that can connect to the web through Wi-Fi, 3G, and later 4G and 5G, which are currently called smartphones. Since smartphones have become mainstream and normalized, there is no longer much need to differentiate them from camera phones. Nowadays the term “mobile” is used interchangeably to refer to both. Because, as long as you have 3G/4G/5G, or just a Wi-Fi connection, all types of images can be viewed on a mobile phone. The mobile is sometimes referred to, and also known, as the fourth screen (Miller 2014). Cinema is considered the first screen, television as the second, the third one being the computer, and the fourth one the mobile. Personal videos, the news, real-time streaming, family videos, GPS, the bitcoin stock exchange market, national and international television, ephemeral Snapchat images, Netflix, YouTube, porn, gaming apps, indeed, all can now be watched using the same device/medium, almost at any time of the day and/or night, and in most parts of the world.

614 

G. DAVID

In the early 2000s, the developments in the telephony, computing, and digital industries had reached a point where they could enable the evolution of a hybrid device: a cellular telephone with a point-and-shoot embedded camera. Phillipe Kahn created the first camera phone solution to share pictures instantly on public networks. While his wife was in labor, on June 11, 1997, and in order to send images of his newborn baby, he assembled a camera to a cellphone with wires, hacking together a Motorola StarTAC flip phone, a Casio QV digital camera that took 320 by 240  pixel images, and a Toshiba 430CDT laptop computer. When he took the picture with the camera, the system automatically dialed up his Web server and uploaded the picture to it at 1200 baud. The server sent email alerts to a list of friends and family, who could then log on and view the very first camera phone photo (Tekla 2017). In 2016 Time Magazine included Kahn’s first camera phone photo in their list of the 100 most influential photos of all time, considering it the very first instant photo shared. Yet, it was the J-SH04, also known as the J-Phone, which was the first commercially available cellphone to have an integrated CCD sensor and the Sha-Mail (Picture-Mail) infrastructure. Released only in Japan in November 2000, the first commercial camera phone appeared on the market, featuring a rudimentary built-in 0.1-megapixel camera. One year later, online sites such as the BBC News were relaying the news and asking: “Is it a phone? Is it a camera?” (BBC News, U.K, Sci/Tech site as of 2001 n.d.). The development and adoption of the cellphone was linked to many other technical improvements. For instance, a crucial pioneering factor that enabled cellphones to be carried around in pockets and purses (i.e., to be truly portable) depended on a particular technological advance: batteries, which had become smaller and more powerful (Agar 2004, 10). This factor also influenced posterior camera phone and smartphone design. “In 2004 roughly 200 million digital cameras were sold in mobile phones” and “Nokia became the largest digital camera manufacturer in the world, selling approximately 60–70 million camera phones”. Camera phones were pushing cheap digital cameras out of the market (Koskinen 2007, 3), and quickly the phrase “[t]he best camera is the one that is with you”, coined by the award-winning photographer Chase Jarvis became reality (2009). Nokia contributed strongly in the creation of the mobile as an object of desire (Goggin 2006, 42) and in 2008, the company proclaimed they had already sold more camera phones than Kodak had sold film-based simple cameras, becoming the biggest manufacturer of any kind of camera. Even if technically feasible and already more common in Asia, the use of the camera phone as a camera device between 2000 and 2006 was not yet a worldwide practice. This was almost certainly because of its aforementioned high costs, but also because it was depicted in the mass media (and thus perceived) as a cool geeky gadget, almost especially conceived either for the well off or for business people (Rantavuo 2008, 13, 75). Smartphones caused a photography boom (Richter 2017) and according to InfoTrends’ estimations, 85% of all pictures taken in 2017 year were captured

  MOBILE IMAGES 

615

on smartphones. The adoption of the smartphone was connected with the rise of emerging markets, especially China, India, and Eastern Europe, which were experiencing strong growth in exports of digital SLR cameras. It was also linked to the more global recession of 2007–2008 that impacted the Japanese and American photography market as well. November 2007 marked Apple’s launch of the first iPhone. With a large variety of handsets and a diverse range of apps that enabled geolocalization, taking photographs, and much more, the iPhone quickly became known as the Swiss knife of portable technology. This mobile was more like a small computer that embedded all these features in one single device. Gradually, less expensive and more convenient ways to mobile recording applications soon followed (Lasén 2010), transforming the bustling social networking sites and online platforms. Most of the user-generated mobile images that were being uploaded needed platforms where to be hosted, in what later became the places where most of these mobile images were going to be shared: Sina Weibo, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. In the early 2010s and until the massive boom both of the smartphone and the broadband flat fee penetration, the most portable, smallest, and easiest way to take photos was to do it with cellphones containing embedded cameras, earning the name camphone or camera phone. Subsequently, with its possibility to connect online, they started to be called smartphones. Between 2007 and 2010, most of the cellphones available in developed countries’ markets started to include point-and-shoot embedded cameras. Some of them had the technical possibility of being connected to the web, but rarely were: bundled offers were not yet possible. The mobile web—the possibility of having access to the World Wide Web from hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones connected to a mobile network—was still expensive and image sharing was done either through computers, mainly through emails, or through photo-sharing sites such as Picasa or Flickr. According to The Economist, in 2010, the worldwide number of camera phones totaled more than a billion US dollars and sales of separate cameras (not connected ones) began to decline even more. This change came hand in hand with the improvement of mobile web browsers and sites and the release year of the iPad, which came with several applications, including Safari, Mail, Photos, Video, iPod, iTunes, and so on. Because bigger and thus easier for some people to manipulate, many users started to take photos with tablets. With a new market alternative, the option of connected, portable, and image-recording devices continued to grow.

4  The Public Mobile Image-Sharing Boom Besides the existing Facebook social network site monster (its membership opened to anyone in September 2006), mobile image-sharing apps began to appear and create new markets. Instagram, launched on December 16, 2010, caused a sea change in terms of mobile image sharing. The user-friendliness of the platform and its filters and hashtags usage, all made it quickly one of the most used image-sharing apps. Other kinds of platforms followed, Vine in

616 

G. DAVID

2012 (the app is nevertheless no longer existent). Snapchat was also launched to the public in 2012 and then a totally new innovative way of sharing mobile images began: a more ephemeral one. In Snapchat images are supposed to be viewed with a maximum of 10 seconds per image and then (unless saved) disappear from the reel. Today through peer-centered validation, communities of practice (like the Instagram support group), and the networked use of mobile images, the Snapchat and TikTok dynamic encourage ephemeral and transient mobile-sharing practices. These apps (Messenger, Snapchat, Instagram) are but just three of the most well-known mobile image-sharing platforms; however, the legitimacy of mobile images as a cultural worldwide phenomenon required many sociotechnical adaptation processes. The social legitimation and delegitimization of these mobile images, while still being negotiated, is sometimes even a self-­ contradictory cultural process. For instance, in the last decade, some specific historical media moments (Saddam Hussein’s full inedited execution, the Arab Spring anti-government protests (Fig. 3), uprisings and armed rebellions, etc.) confirmed that images made with camera phones, whether photographs or videos, in spite of their low quality, could end up being published as hard news. Hard news usually refers to fast-paced, up-to-the-minute news that is reported immediately as breaking news (David 2010). Mobile apps enabled the rise of new figures: citizen journalists, mobile photographers, more mobile journalism (aka mojo), and more mobile content creators in genres like mobile

Fig. 3  Hamada Elrasam, anti-coup protesters in Nasr City, Cairo, photograph taken Oct. 11, 2013. Voice of America (in public domain)

  MOBILE IMAGES 

617

storytelling, micro-movies, micro-formats, and snack content. According to the Pew report of September 2012, pictures and videos had become the “key social currencies” online, with 46% of users at the adult age posting content in the form of pictures and videos made by themselves, aka the creators, and 41% of people who take these same types of content online and repost them on other online image-sharing platforms, aka the curators (Rainie et al. 2012). As time passed by, mobile images became routine, less singular, more blended into the visual culture ecosystem. Mobile images gained global adoption and were therefore slowly able to offer greater visual contributions to news items. The mobile becomes the “camera-stylo” or “camera pen”, a metaphoric concept, coined by Alexandre Astruc way back in 1948, who had envisioned the progression of cinema through a camera pen: something that would enable and help to liberate the cinema to regular users and not only filmmakers. As these mobile visual practices have been validated by time, by established institutions and by cultural industries (David 2015), it seems that we finally experienced what Astruc dreamt of: the fact that most people would be able to use a so-called camera pen. From being rare, to even becoming a compulsive practice, mobile images are in today’s people’s habits (ibid). Mobile images can materialize relationships in more ludic, incomplete, and ambiguous ways, where often, especially in youth Snapchat and VSCO practices (Visual Supply Company is a photography mobile app for IOS and Android) and nurture image exchange (ibid.), where imperfect, open messages sometimes demand even more conversation and affective implicitness. Furthermore, “technologies are socially shaped along with their meanings, functions, and domains and use”, explains Jonathan Sterne (2003), “[t]hus, they cannot come into existence simply to fill a pre-existing role, since the role itself is co-created with the technology by its makers and users” (ibid., 373). Often, sharing mobile images demonstrates wanting to share a lived experience or just a phatic sign. “Phatic visual exchanges confirm that communication is, in fact, taking place (e.g., eye contact, nods, idle chat) and reaffirm connectedness” (Vetere et al. 2005) and refers to conversational phrases that are employed to establish social contact and to express sociability rather than specific meaning. However, even though practices differ from user to user, and with the mobile internet and smartphone penetration, it is high time to reflect beyond this conversational, connected, or even Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) apps’ ecology mobile practice; mobiles are more frequently perceived and used as computers rather than as telephones. Therefore, others think about mobiles in terms of phatic technologies. “A phatic technology is a technology that serves to establish, develop and maintain human relationships […] where the essence of communication is relationship building not information exchanging” (Wang et  al. 2011). Besides, mobile images fortify social ties, and establish and maintain the chance of communication. When more private, images are shared mainly through closed channels, such as mobile messaging apps, or through SMS/MMSs, and work more as signs that wink, represent, and denote other messages or objects than those

618 

G. DAVID

that the image portrays, even as an a priori implicit sign of empathy. Their function leans more toward performativity than representation. Mobile images have a lot of implicit levels and innuendos, maybe even more than SMS textual dialogues, and thus need a greater degree of meta-level implied communication and pre and post dialogues. Other authors have remarked that mobile media are technologies of intimacy (Lasén 2010), technologies of expressivity (Allard and Blondeau 2007), and a technology of affection. Considering mobile images as part of affect capitalism, consumer culture, commodification of the self, and the like, Sassatelli’s reflections are useful when she expresses: “In consumer culture, the value of an object or a service is expressed through its use, which is culturally constructed and cannot be isolated from its social context” (quoted by Wagner 2011, 209). Since interaction is key with mobile images, Wagner’s observation applies immediately. As mentioned, mobile images allow conversations and self-expression but have huge impacts in marketing campaigns, advertisement, intelligent social media listening, and monitoring. Visual platforms are geared to monetization; what is more, as soon the user has a specific number of followers they can secretly transform their Instagram account into a business account. This will enable them to see their own analytics, and in this way be encouraged to take steps toward monetization. Gómez Cruz and Meyer (2012) defend the idea that the iPhone has ushered in the fifth phase in photography: one representing the mobile culture, able to engage very diverse populations, from different classes, each with a unique social meaning: professional and amateur photographers, the media, software companies, social networks, and general users. The mobile image turn has enabled new developments in narrative and non-narrative discoveries, in documentary, experimental, and abstract filmmaking. Mobile images circulate both in private and public spheres, such as personal in messaging, WhatsApp, Instagram, and social networks, but can also be seen in festivals such as the Mobile Innovation Network and Association, MINA, already in its tenth successful edition, or in what used to be The Pocket Film Festival in Paris, France. Likewise, the cultural impacts and social consequences this topic has, has been crucial not only for Image Studies but also for Mobile Communications, Media Studies, Internet Studies, Visual Sociology, Mobile Studies, App Studies, New Media, Film Festival Studies, Film Studies, Cinema, Photography, Digital Culture, and Cultural Studies. However, the user’s role cannot only be restricted to a romantic idea of democratization of mobile image production. A response to the ecological impact of all these handsets and their components, and a critical reflection on what mobiles and mobile images can materialize is much needed. Therefore, it is urgent to think and teach about, firstly, the politics of Coltan mining and extraction in African countries. Secondly, it is urgent to think what is done to the vast underground server farms where data is stored and mined. Thirdly, it is urgent to think where and how batteries are recycled. When mobile ecologies become a consideration in massive mobile imaging creation and consumption,

  MOBILE IMAGES 

619

it is essential to reflect on sustainable smartphones, on banning child labor related to production, on cheaper and newer ways of cooperative filmmaking/ image-making, but most of all, in teaching that mobile images are not just banal images, they are the visible tip of an iceberg of a huge industry that needs more research and regulation.

5   Conclusion This entry describes mobile images with a sociological mobile culture-as-­ everyday-­life in its individual and collective human dimensions approach, connecting them to broader mobile social vernacular practices and technological ecosystems. Having the social implications of mobile images in mind is to understand that people make meaning out of them and this might even mean connecting to mobile images as a very particular and intimate part of their lives. Indeed, many cultural explorations, for instance, those on selfies, are a reflexive way to touch upon mobile image practices and their affective and emotional meanings (Cambre and Lavrence 2019). Mobile images relate intrinsically to mobile photography and video exchanges, and are also inherently related to all the apps and mobile technologies that constitute mobile culture. How people use and perceive images, technologies, and all the related affordances change as well. The innovation under analysis usually changes during the analysis and therefore cannot be studied as if it were the same innovation (Von Pape 2006). In 2020, most smartphones are by default manufactured with interwoven and sometimes overlapping ecosystems: an embedded camera, Wi-Fi, and broadband technologies, which are continually being developed and thus many visual apps such as the deep fake swap Chinese app, Zao, continue to flourish (2019). The existence of mobile images in larger image ecologies has had incredible consequences and very important implications for the broader field of image studies, mainly in what relates to vernacular image production and share. Its impacts have been major in marketing, branding, influencers, and so forth. People’s mobile images shape and are shaped by new experiences. It is through these embodied perspectives, those new forms of connectivity, sociabilities, meaning-making, and mobile ecologies that mobile images mirror how vastly users see, represent, and care about their worlds. It is in this entire dispositif of interrelated practices, and technological and economic environment, that the ease of mobile-image circulation has become not only standard and normalized but one of, if not, the most important visual popular phenomena of the last decade.

References Agar, Jon. 2004. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Icon Books. Allard, Laurence (dir.) & Blondeau, Olivier (collab.). 2007. “2.0? Culture numérique, Cultures Expressives”. MédiaMorphoses, no. 21.

620 

G. DAVID

Astruc, Alexandre. 1948, March 30. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-­ Stylo”. Originally published in L’Écran française as an article entitled Du Stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo. Baulch, E., Matamoros-Fernández, A., and Johns, A. (2020). “Introduction: Ten Years of WhatsApp: The Role of Chat Apps in the Formation and Mobilization of Online Publics”. First Monday, 25 (12). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10412/8319 BBC News. n.d. U.K, Sci/Tech site as of 2001, Retrieved July 2015. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1550622.stm Bourdieu, Pierre (ed). 1965. Boltanski L.; Castel, R., and Chamboredon, J. C. Un Art Moyen, essay sur les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Cambre, M.  Carolina and Lavrence, Christine. 2019. “How Else Would You Take a Photo? #SelfieAmbivalence”. Cultural Sociology, 13 (4): 503–524. Caron, A.  H. and Caronia, L. 2007. Moving Cultures, Mobile Communication in Everyday Life. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Chalfen, Richard. 1987. Snapshot Versions of life. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. David, Gaby. 2010. “Camera Phone Images, Videos and Live Streaming: A Contemporary Visual Trend”. Visual Studies, 25 (1): 89–98. David, Gaby. 2015. Processes of Legitimation: 10 Years of Mobile Images (2005–2015) (Doctoral dissertation). https://www.academia.edu/19902592/Processes_of_ Legitimation_10_Years_of_Mobile_Images_-­_PhD_Dissertation_2015 Frohlich, D., Kuchinsky, A., Pering, C., Don, A., & Ariss, S. (2002). Requirements for Photoware, en ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Nov. 16–20, 2002, ACM Press, pp.  166–175. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/239426621_Ariss_S_Requirements_for_photoware Goggin, Gerard. 2006. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Goggin, Gerard. 2008. Mobile Phone Cultures. London: Routledge. Gómez Cruz, Edgar & Meyer, E. T. 2012. “Creation and Control in the Photographic Process: iPhones and the Emerging Fifth Moment of Photography”. Photographies, 5 (2): 203–221. Gray, K. 2015, May 29. Emoj(il)literacy: Toward a Grammar of Pictographs. Presentation Given at the Technoloteracies In(terv)entions Symposium, Technoloteracies Session. Hjorth, Larissa and Pink, Sara. 2014. “New Visualities and the Digital Wayfarer: Reconceptualizing Camera Phone Photography and Locative Media”. Mobile Media & Communication, 2 (1): 40–57. Ito, Mimi, & Okabe, Daisuke. 2003. “Camera Phones Changing the Definition of Picture-Worthy”. Japan Media Review. http://www.dourish.com/classes/ ics234cw04/ito3.pdf Jarvis, Chase. 2009. The Best Camera is the One That’s With You: IPhone Photography. New Riders. Kindberg, T.; Spasojevic M.; Fleck, R., and Sellen, A. 2005. “I Saw This and Thought of You: Some Social Uses of Camera Phones”. In: Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), Portland, Oregon, April 2–7, 2005. New York: ACM Press, 1545–1548. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/ download?doi=10.1.1.94.8354&rep=rep1&type=pdf Koskinen, Ilpo. 2007. Mobile Multimedia in Action. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

  MOBILE IMAGES 

621

Lasén, Amparo. 2010. “Mobile Media and Affectivity: Some Thoughts about the Notion of Affective Bandwidth”. In: Mobile Media and the Change of Everyday Life. Ed. by Höflich, Joachim R.; Kircher, Georg F.; Linke, Christine, and Schlote, Isabel. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Lee, Dong-Hoo. 2005. “Women’s Creation of Cameraphone Culture”. Fibreculture Journal, no. 6: Mobility. http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-­038-­womens-­ creation-­of-­camera-­phone-­culture/ Martin, Corinne and Von Pape, Tilo (eds.). 2012. Images in Mobile Communication: New Content, New Uses, New Perspectives. Wiesbaden: VS-Verl. McLuhan, Marshall. 2008 [1964]. Understanding media: The extensions of man. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, James. 2014. “The Fourth Screen: Mediatization and the Smartphone”. Mobile Media & Communication, 2 (2): 209–226. Murray, Susan. 2008. “Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics”. Journal of Visual Culture, 7 (2): 147–163. Rainie, Lee; Brenner, Joanna, and Purcell, Kristen. 2012. “Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online”. Pew Internet & American Life Project. https://john.do/wp-­ content/uploads/2013/04/PIP_OnlineLifeinPictures.pdf Rantavuo, Heli. 2008. Connecting Photos: A Qualitative Study of Cameraphone Photo Use (Doctoral dissertation). Helsinki: Taideteollinen korkeakoulu. Publication Series of the University of Art and Design, A; N°. 88, Helsinki, Finland. https://shop. aalto.fi/media/filer_public/fb/0c/fb0c947f-­d28c-­410a-­90f7-­66f5c4b5a705/ rantavuo.pdf Richter, Felix. 2017, August 31. “Smartphones Cause Photography Boom”. Digital Photography. https://www.statista.com/chart/10913/ number-­of-­photos-­taken-­worldwide/ Rubinstein, Daniel and Sluis, Katrina. 2008. “A Life More Photographic”. Photographies, 1 (1): 9–28. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. “Bourdieu Technique and Technology”. Cultural Studies, 17 (3–4): 367–389. Tekla, S. Perry. 2017, June 11. IEEE Spectrum, Happy Birthday, Camera Phone! Your Papa Is Very Proud of You. https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-­from-­the-­valley/ consumer-­e lectronics/audiovideo/happy-­b irthday-­c amera-­p hone-­y our-­p apa­is-­very-­proud-­of-­you Traue, Boris; Blanc, Mathias, and Cambre, M. Carolina. 2019. “Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social With the Image”. Qualitative Inquiry, 25 (4): 327–337. Van House, Nancy; Davis, Marc; Ames, Morgan; Finn, Megan, and Viswanathan, Vijay. 2005. The Uses of Personal Networked Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and Sharing. Ed. by Gerrit Van Der Veer & Carolyn Gale. CHI 05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems CHI 05. Vetere, Frank; Howard, Steve, and Gibbs, Martin R. 2005. “Phatic Technologies: Sustaining Sociability through Ubiquitous Computing” (workshop paper); Ubiquitous Society Workshop, ACM CHI 2005. Portland, OR. Von Pape, Thilo. 2006. “Diffusion et appropriation du téléphone portable par les adolescents, évolution des usages et enjeux sociaux”. In: Enjeux et usages des Tic: reliance sociale et insertion professionnelle. Université Libre de Bruxelles.

622 

G. DAVID

Wagner, Karin. 2011. “Moblogging, Remediation and The New Vernacular”. Photographies, 4 (2): 209–228. Wang, Victoria; Tucker, V.  John, and Rihll, Tracey E. 2011. “On Phatic Technologies for Creating and Maintaining Human Relationships”. Technology in Society, 33: 44–51. https://www.academia.edu/2005463/ On_phatic_technologies_for_creating_and_maintaining_human_relationships

PART IV

Related Disciplines

Phenomenology of the Image Harri Mäcklin

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience as they appear in first-person perspective. Etymologically, the term derives from the Greek words phainesthai, “to appear”, and logos, “study”, thus meaning literally “the study of appearances”. Though the term has been in use since the eighteenth century, its current meaning was developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) at the beginning of the twentieth century. It quickly established itself as one of the most influential philosophical movements of the century and grew in several directions in the hands of Husserl’s followers, such as Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) among many others. Though the exact method and scope of phenomenology remains debated to this day, all its proponents share a common devotion to immediate, lived experience as the starting point of philosophical thinking. Phenomenology seeks to describe the life of consciousness that usually remains hidden beneath our experiences. The phenomenologist aims at breaking with our usual immersion into our daily lives—or the so-called natural attitude—and uncovering the essential structures of consciousness. This is done through a methodological device Husserl calls phenomenological reduction, where the phenomenologist “brackets” inessential and contingent elements until reaching the invariable structures of the experience, or, in Husserlian terms, its eidetic structure. The operative notion of Husserlian phenomenology

H. Mäcklin (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_38

625

626 

H. MÄCKLIN

is intentionality, which denotes the directionality that characterizes acts of consciousness, that is, the fact that mental acts are directed toward something. Husserlian phenomenology studies how different modes of intentionality give rise to the whole fulcrum of human experience in all its richness. In this context, images pose a special challenge to the phenomenologist. Images differ from other perceptual objects in that they point beyond themselves in a way that guides consciousness beyond the physical thing itself. Looking at an image involves a perception of a physical thing, but what we see in the thing is not physically there. As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes, we do not so much look at images as we look with or according to them (1993b, 126). This peculiar relationship with images is what Husserl calls image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein). But what kind of intentional acts are involved in the perception of images? Are there intentional acts that are common to all instances of image consciousness? And furthermore, how does image consciousness differ from related acts, such as imagining or remembering?

1   Setting Up the Scene: Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink Husserl develops his own phenomenology of image consciousness in several manuscripts from 1898 to 1925, now collected in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). The single most important source is Husserl’s lecture course “Phantasy and Image Consciousness” held in Göttingen during the winter semester 1904–05. Husserl’s aim in his analyses is to unearth the experiential structures that are common to all images, be they paintings, photos, sculptures, and so on. Though he acknowledges that images are cultural objects, his interest lies in the essential conditions of image consciousness that apply regardless of the cultural content of the image. Husserl’s theory of image consciousness takes off from the observation that when dealing with images we are in fact dealing with three interrelated objects. First, an image is a physical thing (physisches Ding), a piece of canvas with pigment on it, an imprinted paper, and so on. The physical thing is what Husserl also calls the “image-substrate” (Bildsubstrat) or the “instigator” (Erreger) of the image, as it provides the physical foundation of the image (2005, 135, 587). Secondly, in so far as this physical thing represents something else, it is also an image object (Bildobjekt). Thirdly, the image object guides consciousness beyond itself to the object it represents, which Husserl calls the image subject (Bildsujet). So, to take Husserl’s own example, a photo of a child is, first, a physical thing in that it is a piece of photographic paper; second, it is an image object in that it is an image of a child; and, third, it has the child as its image subject (2005, 20–22). Using this threefold distinction, Husserl sets out to describe the intentional act involved in image consciousness. The peculiar thing about images is that they guide consciousness beyond themselves to that which they represent. This

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

627

separates them from ordinary perception, where the appearing object and the intentional object coincide. When looking at an image, the primary intentional object is not the physical thing—the piece of paper or canvas before my eyes— but the image it brings about. In Husserl’s words, the image object “triumphs” over the physical thing (ibid., 50). However, in doing so, consciousness does not totally pass over the physical thing but rather remains latently aware of it; otherwise the experience of the image would turn into a sensory illusion. What happens, then, is that the physical thing, which serves as the necessary foundation of the image, recedes into the background as the image draws our consciousness toward the image subject. According to Husserl, the image subject is the primary intentional object of image consciousness, even though what appears to us is the image object (ibid., 20, 22). The image object acts as a “window”, which guides the gaze beyond the physical thing to that which the image represents (ibid., 50). This act is what Husserl calls “seeing-in” (Husserl uses various terms such as Hineinsehen, Hineinschauen, and Hineinblicken). In contrast to Richard Wollheim’s twofold theory of seeing-in which distinguishes two aspects in representational seeing—the perception of the physical thing and perception of the representational content—Husserl’s theory is threefold. Firstly, there is the perception of the physical thing; secondly, I see the image in the thing; and, thirdly, I see the subject in the image. In actual experience, however, I don’t actively go through these stages, but rather my consciousness glides over the physical thing and the image object toward the image subject without me having to make any effort. Husserl emphasizes the involuntary character of image consciousness by pointing out that it requires a special effort to push aside the image object and see the image as a mere physical thing (ibid., 583). One central feature of image consciousness has to do with its peculiar doxic modality, that is, the belief related to the existence of the intentional object. When I look at an ordinary object, for example, a book lying on my desk, my perception entails a belief that the book is actually there. This is not straightforwardly the case with images. When I look at the photo of the child, I do not take it that the child is physically there in front of me, even though she appears to me with “the full force and intensity of perception” (Husserl 2005, 62). Though in some sense the image object is present to me “in the flesh” (leibhafte Wirklichkeit), this presence still lacks the corporeality of a real object (ibid., 605–607). This is why Husserl claims that image consciousness entails a neutrality modification (Neutralitätsmodifikation), by which he means that the intended image is only taken “as if” (als ob) it were actually present (2014, § 111). The image object is given to consciousness as a mere “figment” (Fiktum) that “hovers before us perceptually” but lacks actual existence (Husserl 2005, 607). This means “not only that [the image object] has no existence outside my consciousness, but also that it has no existence inside my consciousness: it has no existence at all” (ibid., 23). This is why Husserl classifies image consciousness as a non-positing representation (nichtsetzende Vergegenwärtigung), as the actuality of the image object is not posited in the intentional act (2014,

628 

H. MÄCKLIN

216–217). Image consciousness is not a case of sensory illusion, where the perceived thing is taken to be actually there when the opposite is the case; rather, the appearance of the image object is a mere “phantom” (Phantom) that announces its own fictitiousness (Husserl 2005, 581–586, 645). This peculiar givenness of images is sustained by what Husserl calls “consciousness of conflict” (Widerstreitsbewusstsein) (ibid., 55). Firstly, there is a conflict between the reality of the physical image and the image object. Both have the same perceptual content, but we cannot see the image simultaneously as an image and as a physical thing. Yet, when my awareness is directed to the image object, its physical substrate is still latently present in my experience—for example, when I see a bronze statue, my latent awareness of the materiality of the statue prevents me from believing I’m seeing a real person (ibid., 180). In other words, the conflict between the reality of the physical image-thing and the unreality of the image object sustains my awareness of the image as an image, not as a real thing. Secondly, there is a conflict between the image world and the physical world. The image qua physical thing exists in physical time and space, whereas the image qua image object opens onto another, ideal time-­ space. The image is not intended as belonging to the world that surrounds it; for example, when viewing a landscape painting, I do not perceive this landscape as existing in the space of the gallery where I’m viewing it. Thus the image object does not form a unity with its physical surroundings (ibid., 49–51, 486). However, even when consciousness is directed toward the image world, the surrounding world is still latently present, but not through a “primary act of meaning” (ibid., 49). Thirdly, there is a conflict between the image object and the image subject. The image object must bear a resemblance to its subject, but it cannot be identical with the subject, for we would no longer perceive the image as an image but as the actual subject (ibid., 155). Thus, for example, the child in the photograph is gray, flat, and far smaller than a real human, but these are not taken as being characteristics of the real child but of the image object (ibid., 155–156, 171–172). The presence of these conflicts is constitutive of image consciousness and separate the cognition of images from sensory illusions. Husserl places image consciousness within a larger category of representation (Vergegenwärtigung) together with other modes of indirect intuition, such as remembering and imagining. In all these acts the intended object is not given directly in the manner of regular perception. However, these acts must also be distinguished from each other. Image consciousness differs from imagining and remembering in that the latter have no physical images mediating the intentional act. Furthermore, image consciousness and imagining differ from remembering in that they entail the neutrality modification, which renders them an “as if” character. They are both non-positing representations, whereas remembrance posits its object as something that actually exists or has existed. Furthermore, images differ from phantasms and memories in that, due to their dependence on the physical substrate, they are stable and intersubjectively available.

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

629

Husserl’s work on image consciousness was continued by his assistant Eugen Fink (1905–1975), who develops a short theory of images in his inaugural dissertation Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (1930). Like Husserl, Fink’s interest in images has to be situated within a larger preoccupation with representational acts—such as remembrance, phantasy, anticipation, and dreaming—where the givenness of the intentional object is mediated by imagination as the object is not actually present. A central claim of Fink’s dissertation is that imagination is not some minor capacity of human consciousness, something we use only when daydreaming or engaging in creative activities, but rather a fundamental element in conscious experience. This is because the temporal unity of our stream of consciousness is sustained by a variety of imaginative acts, such as remembrance and anticipation. The capacity for image consciousness is only one manifestation of imagination’s role in human cognition. Fink himself characterizes these acts as involving a relationship to “unreality” (Unwirklichkeit) in the sense that the meaning of the imagined intentional object is bound up with its non-actuality. He describes image consciousness as a “medial act” (medialer Akt) in which the physical image-thing (paper, canvas, etc.) opens onto an “image world” (Bildwelt) like a window (Fink 1930, 305–308). In this act the physical image-thing does not completely disappear but is instead present in the mode of “transparency” (Durchsichtigkeit), which guides the intentional act beyond the physical thing toward the image world it carries; we literally “overlook” the physical thing (ibid., 305, 307). The image world is not part of the physical, actual world but a heterogeneous space-time of its own, which Fink characterizes as being an unreality (ibid., 305). There is a subtle difference between Husserl’s and Fink’s views on image consciousness which stems from their different understandings of the neutrality modification at work in image consciousness. With Husserl, as Fink claims, the neutrality modification concerns the way the intentional act is carried out (Vollzugsneutralität), whereas for him it relates to the content of the act (Gehaltsneutralität) (ibid., 300–303). To understand this difference, it is important to distinguish the intentional object (the what of the act, or noema) from the way it is intended (the how of the act, or noesis). In Fink’s interpretation, Husserl conceives of image consciousness as a special modification of perception, where the intentional object is perceived in the mode of “as if”. Fink himself, in contrast, understands image consciousness as a relationship with a peculiar sort of object, whose noematic content includes the object’s non-being. Thus, in Fink’s view, image consciousness does not consist of two acts (perception and neutralization) as in Husserl but of a single act whose intentional correlate is an unreality that is mediated by a “transparent” physical image.

630 

H. MÄCKLIN

2  Image as an Aesthetic Object: Roman Ingarden Another significant contribution to the intentional analysis of image consciousness can be found in the work of the Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden. His work rests on Husserlian foundations, though he severely criticizes Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism. Ingarden is best known as a literary theorist, but much of what he says about literary works applies, mutatis mutandis, to artworks in general. He also devotes much attention to the phenomenology of images in his book Ontology of the Work of Art (1962). It is noteworthy that Ingarden concentrates on artistic images, especially paintings, and gives little attention to non-artistic images. The general thrust of his aesthetics is to resist any reductive approach to aesthetic phenomena, be it an “objectivist” focus on the objective characteristics of artworks or a “subjectivist” focus on aesthetic experiences. Ingarden’s aim is to show that both sides have to be taken into account as constitutive factors of aesthetic phenomena. The fundamental starting point of Ingarden’s aesthetics is the distinction between an artwork and an aesthetic object. The former refers to objects, such as paintings, sculptures, and books, which have an autonomous existence without needing anyone to experience them; the latter, in contrast, refers to the artwork as experienced. The aesthetic object is constituted by the intentional acts of the perceiver when encountering the artwork, and thus the aesthetic object has a heteronomous and perceiver-dependent existence. It is Ingarden’s fundamental claim that the aesthetic object cannot be reduced to the artwork. The artwork is merely a schematic formation, which offers the basic framework that guides the intentional acts of the perceiver but also contains numerous “places of indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) that the perceiver needs to fulfill (cf. Ingarden 1973, §§ 8, 38; Ingarden 1989, 225–226). For example, a painting leaves undetermined what the back of the presented chair looks like, what happens before and after the presented moment, or what the depicted persons might be thinking. The viewer’s task is to fill in these blanks, or, in Ingarden’s terminology, to concretize (konkretisieren) the artwork for it to turn into an aesthetic object. Since the places of indeterminacy can be filled in multiple ways, there are multiple possible concretizations of the same artwork—in other words, the same artwork can afford multiple different aesthetic objects (Ingarden 1973, §§ 62–63; in the case of images, see Ingarden 1989, 225–228). This also applies to image consciousness, as it involves the perceiver’s participation in the constitution of the image. The image is “a purely intentional object sui generis” that lacks objective, mind-independent existence (Ingarden 1989, 200). However, the aesthetic object is not totally relative because it is also founded on and determined by the objective structure of the artwork (ibid., 230). Ingarden’s discussion of images in the Ontology is limited to paintings. In Ingarden’s terminology, the image is to the painting what the aesthetic object is to the artwork: the image is what is constituted by the intentional acts of the viewer when perceiving a painting (ibid., 137–138). The painting has

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

631

numerous properties that cannot be attributed to the image—chemical, physical, tactile, olfactory, and so on—that bear no direct meaning to the image, even if the image is dependent on the properties of its physical foundation. Furthermore, the painting is a physical thing that occupies real space, and we are able to view it from various perspectives, whereas the image presented by the painting is given only from one fixed point of view or “aspect” (Ansicht): I cannot view the back of a presented object by looking at the back of the painting. On the other hand, the image has properties that do not belong to the painting. For example, the objects presented by the image do not reside in the pigments of the painting; they are instead intentional formations constituted in the consciousness of the viewer through the perception of these pigments (ibid., 197–202). Ingarden distinguishes two main categories of images: presentational (darstellende) and non-presentational (nichtdarstellende). An image is non-­ presentational, that is, abstract, when it consists of color patches without presentational function, whereas in presentational images these patches have the function of presenting something (an object, a person, an event, etc.). In Ingarden’s view, an essential feature of all images, be they abstract or presentational, is that their visual elements must form an aesthetically valuable unity, that is, a Gestalt (ibid., 212–214). With abstract images, attention is directed to the pure interplay of color qualities and shapes, which gives rise to an experience of aesthetic value. The apprehension of a presentational image is similarly founded upon the perception of the visual Gestalt, but it has further elements added to it. Much of Ingarden’s description is devoted to analyzing the stratified structure of presentational images, by which he means the various layers of properties that make up the image as a presentation of something. Presentational images fall into different types depending on their stratified structure—“pure” images that simply present something, portraits that depict something that actually exists, images that illustrate stories, and so on. Ingarden identifies four layers of strata at work in presentational images. The first stratum concerns the presented object that comes to appearance in the image: a presentational image has to be an image of something. The second stratum is the reconstructed aspect of the image, that is, the particular point of view from which the presented object is given in the image. Ingarden is careful to point out that both strata are not properties of the painting but intentional formations of the viewer engaged in looking at the painting. The painter’s fundamental challenge is to choose how to “reconstruct” the presented object and its aspect in an aesthetically valent way so that mere flecks of paint not only guide the viewer to constitute these intentional formations but also to appreciate their aesthetic value. According to Ingarden, these two strata—a presented object and its aspect— are the minimal requirements of all presentational images (ibid., 155). There are two further strata that pertain to certain types of presentational images. The third stratum concerns the depicting function images sometimes have when they represent real objects or events, as in the case of portraits (ibid., 151). The

632 

H. MÄCKLIN

fourth stratum concerns images that have a literary theme that positions the image within a larger context of a story, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98); these images point to events occurring before and after the presented moment, even if these moments are not presented by the image as such (ibid., 143–150). While some moments of the image’s strata are purely structural and aesthetically neutral, some moments have aesthetically positive or negative valence. These moments constitute the aesthetic value that Ingarden considers to be an integral element in aesthetic experience. These moments can be found from every stratum of the image, and together they make up what Ingarden calls its qualitative structure. In the case of paintings, one can locate aesthetically valuable moments, for example, in the intensity of the colors, their juxtapositions, the form of the presented object, the overall composition of the image, and so on. When looking at an image, we can find it lyrical, dynamic, banal, monotonous, uneven, and so on. These aesthetically valuable moments can either reinforce or play against each other, creating “higher order” aesthetic qualities, such as harmony, beauty, or ugliness. What is important here is that Ingarden sees this evaluative dimension as being built into the very act of constituting the aesthetic object and not as a contingent secondary act following some prior, non-evaluative act (ibid., 162–167).

3  The Temporality of the Image: Mikel Dufrenne Inspired by Husserl and Ingarden, the French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne (1910–1995) develops one of the most original and elaborate descriptions of aesthetic experience in his masterpiece The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953). Dufrenne’s interest is in the experience of art in general, and specific questions related to images have only a marginal role in the work. Dufrenne’s most sustained discussion of images is part of a larger endeavor to identify the general structures that all artworks share regardless of their type. In order to discover such generalities, Dufrenne needs to overcome the traditional distinction between the temporal arts (e.g., music and literature) and the spatial arts (e.g., painting and sculpture): the former is said to exist solely in time and lack spatial extension, whereas the latter exist solely in space and lack temporal succession. Dufrenne aims at undermining this distinction by showing that music has a spatial dimension and that paintings unfold in a temporal process. I will bypass music and go straight to Dufrenne’s discussion on paintings. It is clear that as an artwork a painting is fixed in a frozen instant. However, Dufrenne is careful to point out that the intentional acts of the viewer introduce a temporal dimension to the unfolding of the painting qua aesthetic object. The pictorial space is endowed with trajectories of meaning that guide the viewer’s gaze. As the viewer explores the painting, the aesthetic object is transformed as new meanings are added to it. The viewer’s consciousness mobilizes what is congealed in the painting, and, enlivened by the act of looking, the painting “blossoms” before the viewer’s eyes (Dufrenne 1973, 282).

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

633

According to Dufrenne, the painting qua aesthetic object displays a sort of movement, which is not a physical movement in space but “only a psychical movement toward a plenitude of meaning” (ibid., 296). This movement, like any movement, unfolds as a temporal process; however, the movement of the painting is not measured by objective time but by the internal temporality of the viewer’s consciousness. In Dufrenne’s view, the separation of temporal and spatial arts disregards the fact that all arts, regardless of their structure, involve this “movement toward signification” as the aesthetic object unfolds through the intentional acts of the viewer; in other words, the constitution of the aesthetic object is a temporal process even if the artwork itself is frozen in time (ibid., 275–282).

4  Image and Truth: Martin Heidegger As mentioned in the beginning, Husserl’s followers have developed phenomenology in several directions that deviate from Husserl’s own conception of the discipline. One of the most significant post-Husserlian branches is existential phenomenology, whose origins can be located in the writings of Husserl’s student and successor Martin Heidegger. In contrast to Husserlian phenomenology, which conceives itself as an epistemological endeavor, existential phenomenologists aim to uncover the ontological structures of human being-­ in-­the-world. Art and images form a significant theme in existential phenomenology, as they are often seen as functioning analogously to phenomenological reduction; they disclose existential structures that remain hidden beneath the hustle and bustle of everyday life, making us see the world and ourselves differently. Here we do not find a similar interest in the general structures of image consciousness as we do with Husserl, but in the power of art, especially paintings, to change the way we understand reality and our place in it. Heidegger himself does not have a specific philosophy of images, but images do play an important exemplary role in his philosophy of art. In his most important meditation on art, the lecture series “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36, published in 1950), Heidegger argues that art is not a matter of mere representation of a pre-existing reality but a place of disclosure, where the structures of meaning that sustain reality are brought to appearance. One of Heidegger’s examples is a painting of shoes by Vincent van Gogh (it is not known precisely which painting Heidegger meant). In everyday life, shoes are simple equipment that we wear without reflecting on them, and thus they disappear in their own usability. When presented in Van Gogh’s painting, Heidegger argues, the shoes—which he takes to belong to a peasant woman— do not disappear but come to the fore, illuminating the whole world (Welt) in which their meaning is embedded: they bring forth the hardships and occasional joys of rural life, the heavy toil in the fields, and the restful Sundays when they are left unused. In addition, the shoes in the painting do not hide their own materiality but rather make it protrude, disclosing the earth (Erde) upon which they and the peasant’s world is grounded—the worn leather of the

634 

H. MÄCKLIN

shoes, the fertile soil of the field, the unpredictable sky. The painting works as an opening up of the peasant’s world and the earth on which it stands; it shows how the shoes connect the peasant to her environment and sustain her life (Heidegger 1971, 32–34). Similarly, in several lectures and seminars held during the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger claims that Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor Young Hare (1502) is not just a realistically rendered representation of the hare’s outward appearance but a disclosure of the hare’s essence, its living animality. It is not an image of the universal idea of hare-ness but of the very being of this particular hare. Though the image presents nothing but the hare, its lively rendition summons the animal’s “hare-world” (Hasenwelt), fraught with danger and governed by the search for food (cf. Heidegger 2005, 92–108). The “work” in artwork should be taken more as a verb than a noun: the artwork works. In Heidegger’s terminology, art is the “truth of beings setting itself to work” (sich-ins-Werk-setzen der Wahrheit des Seienden) (1971, 35). Heidegger understands truth in the Greek sense of ale t̄ heia, “unconcealedness,” as the coming-into-presence of beings out of le t̄ he, “concealedness” or “oblivion”. It is important to note, however, that an artwork is not a total disclosure but a place of struggle between emergence and withdrawal: it brings something into appearance but also hints at a surplus that evades articulation. The world denotes the dimension of appearing and intelligibility, whereas the earth is the dimension of self-seclusion and materiality upon which the world rests. This strife between the world and the earth reflects the ontological structure of “the Open” (das Offen), where human existence takes place, and by disclosing this structure art serves as an event of truth. With this interpretation, Heidegger sets himself squarely against what he envisions to be the modern tradition of Western aesthetics. Heidegger argues that modern aesthetics, starting from the eighteenth century, views artworks as mere sources of detached aesthetic enjoyment and thus separates art from the lifeworld of the people engaged with it. Heidegger counts this shift, along with secularization and the domination of the scientific-technological worldview, as an essential feature of modernity (1977, 116–117). This “aesthetic” conception of art is, in Heidegger’s view, in stark contrast to the pre-modern relationship with art, where art was an integral part of communal and historical self-understanding. For example, a Greek temple embodied what it was to be Greek. In the modern era, art is valued in terms of the aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) it affords, not in terms of its historical significance (Heidegger 1979, 83–84). This shift trivializes art, and, as Heidegger writes, “perhaps experience is the element in which art dies” (1971, 77). Heidegger agrees with G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) famous dictum that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past”, by which Hegel means that in the modern era art no longer has the significance it had in preceding eras (Hegel 1975, 11). However, Heidegger contends that Hegel’s verdict has not been ultimately decided, as there still remains the possibility of restoring art’s role as a medium of historical and communal self-understanding (1971,

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

635

78). Heidegger’s meditations on images have to be read in the context of this endeavor.

5  Painting and Phenomenology: Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and Jean-Luc Marion The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty also gives art, especially modern paintings, significant attention throughout his oeuvre. The central theme of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is the embodied and perceptual nature of human consciousness. We are not bodiless entities gazing at the world from a detached Archimedean point but bodies in the midst of a material world. In the preface of his major work Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-­ Ponty argues that both phenomenology and art aim to articulate the birth of meaning in the primordial contact of embodied consciousness and the world: “Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—through the same kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state” (2012, lxxxv). A painter is as dedicated to studying the conditions of perception as is a phenomenologist. For example, Merleau-Ponty argues in his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945) that the paintings of Paul Cézanne capture the world in the process of its becoming-visible, its surging-­ forth in and through perception. The titular “doubt” that permeates Cézanne’s career is born of his awareness that capturing the nascent world in paint is an endless task that no single painting can fulfill—much like phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty contends, will never be able to fully bring to language the pre-­ reflective life of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Eye and Mind” (1960) is his most sustained articulation of the nature of painting. Through evocative discussions of painters like Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Paul Klee, Merleau-Ponty argues that modern painting, better than science and philosophy, manages to return “to the ‘there is’, […] to the site, the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our life and for our bodies […]” (1993b, 122). In the act of painting, painters lend their bodies to the spectacle of the visible in order to render it on the canvas. There is a system of exchanges between the body of the painter and the world, so that the seer and the seen merge into one another—or, in the words of Cézanne, “the landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty 1993a, 67). The painter returns to a primordial layer of experience, where the perceiver and the perceived are still in the process of organization within the elemental “flesh of the world” (chair du monde) that unites and intertwines them. A painting is an expression of this experience; it does not merely re-present something already visible but catches it as it wells up into visibility. That is why paintings offer us something more than what we usually see; they elevate the visible “to the second power” (Merleau-Ponty 1993b, 126) and reveal a dimension of existence that works in the background

636 

H. MÄCKLIN

of embodied being-in-the-world but usually remains hidden and unthought. It is precisely because this dimension can be better accessed through the painter’s vision than through scientific thinking that Merleau-Ponty holds paintings to be so essential to phenomenology. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) is also interested in paintings due to their importance to phenomenology. The central aim of Marion’s phenomenological project is to show that both Husserl and Heidegger fail to bring phenomenology to the level of pure givenness (donation) of phenomena, as they circumscribe phenomenality within the horizon of objectivity (Husserl) or the disclosure of being (Heidegger). To show this, Marion needs to demonstrate that there are phenomena whose faithful description points beyond the limits of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. In The Crossing of the Visible (1991) and Being Given (1997), Marion takes paintings—or “authentic” paintings, to be exact—as being privileged examples of such phenomena, and therefore the examination of paintings offers “one possible route to a consideration of phenomenality in general” (2004, ix; cf. also 2002a, § 4). In other words, Marion holds paintings as instrumental in the project of redefining the scope of phenomenology itself. Much like Merleau-Ponty, Marion claims that the painter does not merely render something visible but catches the visible as it surges up into visibility. This endows the painting with an “over-visibility” (sur-visibilité) that exceeds the ontic visibility of the painted surface (Marion 2002a, 47). Due to its exceptional visibility, a painting cannot be looked at as an object or a being. To encounter it authentically is to see it as pure appearing that exceeds any horizon the gaze might impose upon it. Marion distinguishes “seeing” (voir) from “looking” (regarder): the former denotes openness to the givenness of the visible, whereas the latter is a mode of seeing where the visible is taken hold of and “guarded” (garder) by the viewer’s gaze (2002b, 56–57). The painting cannot be mastered or circumscribed by looking at it. On the contrary, the painting imposes itself upon the viewer and “brings the gaze to life, not the other way around” (Marion 2004, 42). The painting’s intuitive givenness exceeds what consciousness can take in, stirring in us “a pure desire to see otherwise” (ibid., 33), to open ourselves to the unconditional and autonomous self-giving of the painting. Due to their excessiveness and unmanageability, Marion places authentic paintings in the category of saturated phenomena (phénomènes saturés), whose mode of givenness he claims Husserl and Heidegger failed to acknowledge. Authentic paintings are paradigmatic examples of idols, whose visibility saturates the intuitive capacities of the viewer’s gaze. On rare occasions, the painting can even turn into an icon and invert the gaze, so that it is not so much the viewer looking at the painting but the painting looking at the viewer—much like the face of another person, Marion’s paradigmatic example of icons (2004, 33; cf. also Marion 2002b, chapter 5). Be they idols or icons, paintings exceed the horizons of objectivity and being, pointing toward a new region of phenomenality.

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

637

6  The Ethics of Images: Emmanuel Levinas The last thinker to be discussed here is the Lithuanian-born French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, who is best known as a philosopher of alterity and ethics. In general, phenomenologists have either held neutral or positive views on the value of art (and images), but in this regard Levinas offers a notable exception. In the essay “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), Levinas makes the startling conclusion that the enjoyment we draw from artworks is inherently unethical. Levinas opposes the phenomenology of world-disclosure proposed by Heidegger’s phenomenology of art. In Levinas’s view, art goes precisely in the opposite direction: instead of integrating the represented objects more firmly within the world by disclosing the networks of meaning that sustain them, artworks pluck these objects from the world and unravel our living relationship with them (1989, 132). Artworks do not present us with the objects themselves but only their sensuous surface; an image substitutes a being with its shadow. The things represented in an image are frozen in an endless instant that does not partake in the temporal flow of the world (ibid., 137–141). Thus Levinas writes in Existence and Existents (1947): “A painting, a statue, a book are objects of our world, but through them the things represented are extracted from our world” (2001, 46). The image, as Levinas says, is “exotic”— a stranger that does not belong to the fabric of my world. Instead of world-­ disclosure, images perform world-obscuring. This exoticism turns images into abodes of escapism. Immersion into images frees viewers momentarily from the heavy chains that bind them to the world. There is, surely, enjoyment to be drawn from forgetting the worries of the world and losing oneself in an image. But herein also lies the unethical aspect of aesthetic experience. In a world filled with poverty, violence, and inequality, art offers an escape in the face of the other’s suffering. Instead of helping the starving and the homeless, we turn our backs and immerse ourselves in artistic enjoyment. Art and images enable us to evade the infinite ethical responsibility that Levinas claims constitutes the very heart of our being. Thus, Levinas concludes: “There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (1989, 142).

References Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973 [1953]. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. by Edward S. Casey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Fink, Eugen. 1930. “Vergegenwärtigung und Bild”. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 11: 239–310. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975 [1986]. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. I. Trans. by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Originally published as Werke 13: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

638 

H. MÄCKLIN

Heidegger, Martin. 1971 [1950]. “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In:  Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. by Albert Hofstadter, 17–86. New York: Harper & Row. Originally published as “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”, in: Holzwege. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1977 [1950]. “The Age of the World Picture”. In: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row. Originally published as “Die Zeit des Weltbildes”, in: Holzwege. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1979. Nietzsche, vol. I: The Will to Power as Art. Trans. by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1979; rpt. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991. Originally published as Nietzsche, Erster Band.  Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske. Heidegger, Martin. 2005. Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen: Wintersemester 1936/37. Ed. by Ulrich von Bülow. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft. Husserl, Edmund. 2005 [1980]. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Trans. by John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Originally published as Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Husserliana XXIII. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 2014 [1976]. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Originally published as Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erster Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Husserliana III.1.  The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Ingarden, Roman. 1973 [1931]. The Literary Work of Art. Trans. by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as Das literarische Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Ingarden, Roman. 1989 [1962]. Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, The Picture, The Architectural Work, The Film. Trans. by Raymond Meyer with John T.  Goldthwait. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Originally published as Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk–Bild–Architektur– Film. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989 [1948]. “Reality and Its Shadow”. In: The Levinas Reader. Ed. by Séan Hand, trans. by Alphonso Lingis. Oxford: Blackwell. Originally published as “La réalité et son ombre”, in: Les Temps Modernes. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2001 [1947]. Existence and Existents. Trans. by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Originally published as De l’existence à l’existant. Paris: Fontaine. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002a [1997]. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Originally published as Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation.  Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002b [2001]. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New  York: Fordham University Press. Originally published as De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

  PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE 

639

Marion, Jean-Luc. 2004 [1991]. Crossings of the Visible. Trans. by James K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Originally published as La croisée du visible. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993a [1948]. “Cézanne’s Doubt”. In:  The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed.  by Galen A.  Johnson, trans. by Michael B.  Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as “Le doute de Cézanne”, in: Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993b [1964]. “Eye and Mind”. In:  The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed. by Galen A.  Johnson, trans. by Michael B.  Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as L’oeil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.

Visual Semiotics Angela Mengoni

1   Semiotics of Language vs. Semiotics of Images The field of visual semiotics focuses on the generation of meaning through images and calls for the exploration of its specific mechanisms. While the theory of language developed over the course of the twentieth century had explored and defined the operations of meaning production in verbal language, semiotics as a general science of signs—not merely linguistic ones—assumed the task of exploring, among other languages, visual language as a semiotic object. Semioticians took their cue from structuralist approaches to linguistics and from the fundamental contributions by Ferdinand de Saussure who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, investigated the functioning of verbal language as a semiotic system. Thus, the semiotics of images was confronted, in its early days, with the question of whether images could be considered a “language” entailing a comparably systematic nature (Calabrese 1985a, 111–151). Two main issues distinguish the debate in this early phase. In the first place, the semiotic reflection addressed the question of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, that is, the apparently fundamental difference between linguistic sign and image. If the former—as Saussure indicated—is based on an arbitrary relationship between signifier and meaning, that is, without any naturally motivated link between the word and its meaning (so much so that each language resolves this association in a different way), the image has been commonly considered to be based on a similarity or analogy with what it represents. A semiotic reflection on visual objects thus first engaged with the problem of the principle of similarity, or likeness. In the perspective of a “critique of iconism,” assuming

A. Mengoni (*) IUAV University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_39

641

642 

A. MENGONI

likeness as a defining trait of the iconic sign entailed an insurmountable separation between the image and verbal language and contributed to the disregard for the commonality of certain levels of meaning. Against this artificial opposition, however, it was pointed out that the similarity between the image and what it represented, far from being a motivated relationship, was itself codified, since cultural codes governed by conventions intervene in the process of recognition of images which, albeit to different degrees, always operate a selection of relevant traits with respect to what they refer to (Eco 1968, 107–130; Metz 1970; Casetti 1972). The comparison between verbal language and images also raised a second question, namely as to whether the finite number of combinable units that characterizes the functioning of natural languages is also conceivable for visual signs. This was a crucial question for the nascent field of research, since the very possibility of defining the image as a semiotic object seemed to depend on its answer. This question dominated the field for several years, so much so that the debate was actually stuck on this point: as regards the semiotics of painting, for instance, it has been pointed out that “the question concerning the double articulation of pictorial ‘language’ largely contributed to slowing down the development of studies in this field” (Calabrese 1985a, 144). The initial phase of the debate largely focused on very general and linguistically oriented questions: Is it possible to talk about painting as a sign system? And is the category of sign relevant for a system, such as painting, which cannot be reduced to a code? Or, how can we consider the perceptive elements and forms on which we base our relationship with the work of art and the image? Can they be qualified as units, or do they stand outside or apart from the linguistic operation that declares them? The question of the minimum units concerns the property of double articulation, which is exclusive to verbal language: a first level of signs with semantic meaning, such as words, and a second level of minimum units, a finite inventory of phonemes that combine with each other according to rules, in order to form the other level. The semiotics of the image was therefore faced with the foundational understanding that every language, in order to be defined as such, had to provide for minimum units that are combined at other levels in further units with meaning. Thus, even for the field of artistic expression, a way of functioning was sought that would justify the hypothesis of art as a system of signs, endowed with an inventory of minimal elements which, thanks to some kind of rules for their combination, articulate a further level of greater complex and properly semantic elements. Already in the early 1970s this hypothesis was declared unsuccessful in a famous text by Émile Benveniste (1969), since none of the plastic arts reproduced this model by providing a finite inventory of combinable units. On the contrary, according to Benveniste, language, thanks to these qualities, acts as the interpreter of all other systems, both linguistic and not, to provide interpretation to every semiotic manifestation including itself, while “no semiology of sound, color or image can be formulated or expressed in sounds, color or images” (16). However, despite its apparently logocentric statements, the text also opened up a new theoretical perspective on the work of art and the image. Benveniste introduced the idea

  VISUAL SEMIOTICS 

643

that the absence of a system of minimum units and universal rules of combination, in fact, makes it possible to recognize that “the signifying relationships of any artistic language are to be found within the compositions that make us aware of it”, so that “the artist creates his own semiotics” (ibid.).

2   Semiotics of the Arts: Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch Art, far from being a language that provides universal laws for all production of meaning, is, so Benveniste, “always a particular work”. Furthermore, although such a work is not subject to grammatical or syntactic rules that impose to “eliminate contradictions”, in it the artist freely establishes oppositions and values, thus outlining a system of relationships that will have local value. Although this perspective is not further elaborated, it already outlines the path for a semiotics of the visual text that focuses precisely on the internal articulation of each image, detecting the relationships that constitute its local system. The developing debate on the project of a semiotics of the arts and image had thus made clear that the visual text as a semiotic system was irreducible to a corpus of rules which would preside over the combination of units in finite number and homogeneous type, and that it rather consisted in “an articulation which will borrow its pertinence from a distinction between the levels of analysis” (Damisch 1977, 7) thus requiring to be investigated in those terms. Louis Marin pointed to that development already in his 1968 text on “Elements for a pictorial semiology,” where, after declaring, in his turn, the uselessness of the linguistic conception of “unity” for non-linguistic substances like the works of art, he stated, by quoting Algirdas Greimas, that “it is on the level of the structures and not at the level of the single elements that one has to look for significant unities. These latter—be they called signs, constitutive unities or monemes—are all but primary in the frame of a research on signification. Language is not a system of signs, but an assemblage of structures of signification, whose economy needs to be clarified” (Marin 1971, 39); comparably, says Marin, the tableau is not the assemblage, the combination or the combinatory of meaningless elements that would then become significant at a certain level of complexity by way of some mysterious operation. From the beginning, the elements of the sense brought out by the analyses have sense because they cannot be grasped outside of their meaningful articulation. (ibid.)

The step of overcoming the paradigm of the sign system and its minimal unities and moving toward a semiotics of the text, that is, a semiotics of the inner articulation of the image, is a crucial step. Once the temptation of the borrowing of—or subordination to—linguistic models of sense production had been cleared away, the semiotics of the arts and painting began to develop as an autonomous field of investigation, by turning to the exploration of the strategies of sense making in images, and to its articulation and theorization.

644 

A. MENGONI

Hubert Damisch (1973, 1977) and Louis Marin (1971) were among the first to discuss the specificity of a semiotics of the arts (especially in painting). Both considered it with respect to its relationship with Panofskian iconology and to the issues raised by Benveniste. The comparison with iconography was crucial not only to assess its validity but also to establish the novelty and originality of a semiotic investigation of the objects of visual culture. As a matter of fact, iconography seemed to have contributed a part of the analytical work dealing with semiotic issues, even if somehow too empirically, as Damisch remarked. The moment one undertakes to establish the repertory of motives, symbols, and themes and then reinsert them in scenes and “histories” (as Alberti would put it), iconography seems to deal with analysis of a semiotic kind, concerning meaning, signs, and narrative structures (Damisch 1973). Yet semiotics, in so far as its object is the “life of signs” and the functioning of signifying systems, does not aim so much at stating “what the images represents” by identifying and naming them, that is, at “declaring their meaning”, as at illuminating the mechanisms of the signifying process “of which the work of art is, at the same time, the locus and the possible outcome” (ibid., 19). The iconographical perspective, wherever it concerns the recognition of figures, motives, or more complex conventional meanings (e.g., the figure of a naked woman with her head wreathed in clouds as “beauty”), always finds the interpretation of the sense of the image on the possibility to identify and, in the end, name its elements, thus leading to a confusion between “meaning and verbal denotation”. Even if it cannot be reduced to mere nomenclature, the iconographical interpretation systematically implies a reference to a knowledge external to the image, thus paradoxically maintaining the centrality of the logocentric model it claimed to denounce. On one side, one can recognize a house, a table, or a horse in a visual configuration is a figurative application “in which each pictorial element corresponds to a linguistic term” (ibid., 21) and, on the other side, when faced with the difficult readability of the work of art, a textual reference will often provide a “key” which allows the image to be interpreted, and thus to reduce its resistance to knowledge. In a semiotic perspective, it is a very partial idea indeed to identify meaning with the “signified” and naming in images, while reducing the plastic qualities of the signifier to vague notions of treatment and connotations of “style”. This is precisely the point where semiotics will carve out its task, its legitimacy, and its specificity. As a matter of fact, at the time when visual semiotics emerged, the research on images—be it iconographical or art historical— still obeyed a conception of signifying which led to a radical distinction between a dimension referring to the figurative and representational elements (a dimension that, paradoxically enough, was often called “semiotic”), and “that aspect of the image which belongs to the order of perception” (ibid., 24). It is precisely this latter dimension that will be at the core of the genuinely original contribution of a semiotics of the image: its task in the following years will be not only to overcome the obliteration of the actual substance of expressions of the work of art (and of images in general) but to acknowledge its fully semiotic productivity, its participation in the production of sense. Thus, the “Eight theses for (or against) a semiology of painting”, the renowned paper

  VISUAL SEMIOTICS 

645

presented by Damisch (1977) at the first congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 1974, stands as a seminal text, since it advocates the overcoming of the linguistic notion of sign when the work of art is at stake. When a viewer beholds a tableau, a fresco, or any work of art, he/she deals with a certain number of traits and discrete elements which are not finite in numbers nor of the same order or level, they are, in fact, not only representational figures and motifs but also tracings, touches, and imprints of the work production, as well as codified elements such as letters, inscriptions ciphers, signatures. Nevertheless, all of these features articulate relationships which are “at play, prior to any reading, prior to any interpretation, within the ensemble ‘painting’ or ‘tableau’” (ibid, 4). Even if those perceptual elements cannot rigorously be defined as “units” of a preexisting system in the linguistic sense, the tableau—and the work of art in general—can “produce these units, designate them, display them” by its own devices and artifices. More importantly, those features do not borrow from the linguistic order (the image does not need verbal language in order to display and organize its proper units or elements), nor even from the iconic order intended in a mimetic way, but rather directly from what was designated as “the plastic, visual order”. It is in the definition of the sign, or rather in the overcoming of its merely linguistic definition and in the opening up to the idea of textual relationships, that the possibility of founding a semiotics of the image with its proper object is at stake. According to Damisch, in fact, the object of the semiotics of painting is different from the object of iconography, insofar as it fully acknowledges what iconography does not take into account, that is, the painting, considered in its perceivable substance and in its genuinely visual articulation. This is a decisive turn, insofar as the “components of the iconic substance as such”, like “the form of support, its frame, the properties of the ground as a field, the relations of scale and of orientation, of positioning, of spacing […] points, lines, surfaces, blots etc.” play a major role in the mode of signifying of the image (ibid, 6). Not even ten years after the decisive remarks by Benveniste, an early semiotics of the image made way for a “radical displacement in the order of significance”, by acknowledging that the visual substance, prior to any representational aim, is not confined to a limited moment in the history of the arts (the so-­called nonfigurative, abstraction, etc.) nor is it submitted to the representational purpose, but that it is a fully semiotically productive dimension always active in any visual object, thus definitely overcoming a “semiological discourse” which, at the time, conceived of images basically as vehicle for “messages” (Barthes 1964). This was a major step, especially when one considers how iconology remained largely incapable of rendering account of the sensible substance of painting and of the work of art, if not in terms of style, yet without acknowledging its autonomous contribution to signification. In this respect, some authors in the field of art history and theory had overtly championed a semiotic approach to the work of art, with special reference to the status of the “non-­ mimetic elements” of the image (Schapiro 1969, 1973). Elements such as “the image-substance of inked or painted lines and spots” as well as the frame, the ground, the positioning in the image-field, and so on, all those devices and

646 

A. MENGONI

material qualities—both in their ancient and modern variants—“affect the meaning [of the images] and in particular their expressive sense”, and “convey peculiarities of outlook and feeling as well as subtle meanings” (Schapiro 1969, 18). This contribution to the production of sense takes place in relation to, but independent of, the mimetic/figurative/representational level of the image and its acknowledgment was identified by all the authors mentioned thus far as the specific and distinguishing aim of visual semiotics.

3  Toward a Visual Semiotics: Algirdas Julien Greimas Yet, the ineludible and specific task of the semiotic paradigm consists in the exploration of the different levels and modes of generation of sense by the image and, moreover, in the concurrent elaboration of the analytic procedures to grasp such an articulation. That will be the core of the research in visual semiotics in the following decades and that effort will find a decisive systematization under the impulse of Algirdas Julien Greimas. Already in 1977, Greimas wrote a first version of a seminal text in which he formulated the proposals emerged from the research group Atelier de sémiotique visuelle in Paris and entitled—if we translate literally from French—“Figurative semiotics and plastic semiotics” (1984). Although inseparable from the elaboration of the general model of meaning generation, that Greimas had been developing from the mid-1960s onward (the so-called generative semiotics), this important methodological article maintains a certain autonomy. It served as a first attempt to explore the logics of meaning production in visual texts and to systematize a methodology of analysis, with both aspects being intertwined in the semiotic approach. The double title already announces its main contribution to visual semiotics: the theorization of two modalities of generation of sense immanent to images, since the word semiotics precisely refers to a union between a plan of expression and a plan of content, generating meaning. The visual substance— so Greimas—can organize itself in “object-signs” that give rise to a figurative semiotics, yet at the same time maintain its capacity to generate sense through a non-figurative logic of the sensible. It is not only a question of grasping the perceivable dimension of the image as separate from the figurative reading (the vibration of a color or the qualities of the pictorial material had, moreover, always been grasped by the iconological reading, which brings them back to the problem of style), but rather to recognize its productivity and to systematize it. What Greimas calls a plastic semiotics is not strictly limited to an aesthetic intensification of the figurative scene; on the contrary, it contributes to the emergence of complex horizons of meaning where the figurative scene can be enriched, subverted, and doubled by the plastic discourse. Accounting for this production of meaning, however, also requires clarifying the conditions and mechanisms of its operations in the image and, consequently, offering a theoretical and methodological systematization of it. Greimas actually elaborates a model for the mechanisms and the operations of sense generation in the visual text. He defines them in relation to a general theory of meaning, but without neglecting the specificity of the image:

  VISUAL SEMIOTICS 

647

narrative structures or semantic categories, for instance, are at work in images as well as in non-visual texts (like in literary texts, for instance), yet the visual substance plays a crucial role in the sense of the image, that is fully acknowledged and explored by plastic semiotics. As far as a figurative semiotics is concerned, the first important contribution regards the already mentioned classic problem of the iconic sign resembling a referent. The idea that resemblance, in the iconic relationship, is a matter of the signifier, that is to say that the qualities of the image alone allow to recognize in it a similar object of the world, is deconstructed and re-articulated. Such resemblance between image and “world” is rather based on the intervention of a cultural grid that allows for an identification of visual figures as representing the objects of the world: If we suppose that we can then recognize such and such a plant or animal, the meanings “vegetable kingdom” or “animal kingdom” are part of the human reading of the world, and not of the world itself. It is this grid through which we read which causes the world to signify for us and it does so by allowing us to identify figures as objects, to classify them and link them together. (Greimas 1984, 632)

When we recognize a mass of painting as the representation of a table, a tree or any other object, that grid is associating that pictorial substance we perceive with a meaning we culturally possess; if our cultural grid does not provide for such a meaning, we will definitely perceive those forms, yet they won’t become an “object-sign”, that is, what we call a figure. Thus, resemblance does not take place between the image as a significant and the natural world; on the contrary: “If there is a resemblance, it is at the level of the signified—that is, at the level of the reading grid that is common to both the world and the planar artifacts. But then it would no longer make sense to speak of iconicity” and it will be more proper to talk about a figurative semiotics. This gesture shifts the question of the resemblance of images to the world, from the plane of the qualities of the signifier to that of a semantic mediation, subjected to cultural relativism. This applies not only to the figurative reading of images but also to the perception of reality itself, as endowed with meaning: figurative meanings are thus part of “the human reading of the world and not of the world itself”. In other words, Greimas offers here a solution to the problem of the “referent”, that is, of the reference of the image to the extra-textual world. The reality that the icon would be similar to, in fact, is already organized as semiotic. The relationship of reference thus is not between the image and the “things” out there, but between the image and what he calls the “natural world”, a reality which is itself mediated by cultural patterns. The problem of the relationship between image and referent is thus redefined as a specific type of semiosis, that is, the union between an expression and a content, between the visual forms we perceive and the meanings encompassed by our “reading grid”. This figurative semiotics transforms groups of visual features of varying density into “figurative formants”, recognizable figures that will have a more or less intense “reality effect” according to the density of their visual traits.

648 

A. MENGONI

Nevertheless, this is only one way of generating sense by images and certainly not the only one, hence the insufficiency of a figurative reading of images, which is the main claim of visual semiotics, as well as other fields of recent visual theories. The polemic with the iconological method obviously concerns the fact of reducing the entire interpretation of the image to this type of semiosis, since the qualities of the signifier would thus be taken into account only insofar as the visual elements have a correspondent at the level of content of natural languages. Yet, since a figurative dimension—one that can be assimilated to the iconological motifs and narratives—is common to both images and verbal texts, it cannot exhaust the potentialities of the production of meaning in visual texts.

4   “A Plastic Semiotics”: Materiality of the Image Signifier On the basis of these premises, the crucial role of another type of meaning production is affirmed; a plastic semiotics is defined as “a second language elaborated from the figurative dimension of a first language”, where the term “second” has no temporal or hierarchical implications, but indicates an otherness with respect to a primary figurative reading of the image (Greimas and Courtés 1986: “Plastique, sémiotique” ad vocem). Plastic semiotics thus arises “from the desire to account for the materiality of the signifier of images”, but it consists, more generally, in “an exploration of the semiotic modes of existence of the ‘logics of the sensible’, to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s expression” (ibid.): a logic present in the planar image, as well as in the volumes, plays of light, moving elements characterizing the entire “world of visual qualities”, Plastic semiotics gives account of the way in which the form of the visual signifier is capable of generating a sense that is not limited to its lexicalization and that can prove to be particularly rich and complex. The choice of the expression plastic “semiotics”, rather than, for instance, plastic “level” testifies, moreover, to this genuine production of meaning and marks a departure from the purposes of the formalist tradition in art theory (Lancioni 2012). The position of a window in the well-known Annunciation by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, for instance, rather than being a “descriptive, contextual and environmental element”, participates in the sophisticated theological sense of the fresco thanks to its position; its plastic, topological qualities are in no way limited to a formal role; they enable the figure of the window to gain a further sense and to participate in the relationship between spiritual and material, invisible and visible in the story of the incarnation (Calabrese 2008, 41–56). Semiotics does not provide an accidental and unsystematic survey of the plastic qualities of images, but intends to identify and describe their articulation and consistency (hence the word logic). The question then arises, how to study and theorize the modalities of this articulation? And, moreover, how to account for it, through a process of description that is necessarily verbal? In this respect, semiotics has remained faithful to the attempt to construct a model of the

  VISUAL SEMIOTICS 

649

articulations of sense generation, the operations of which are reciprocally defined and grasped by a common metalanguage: Persuaded that these objects have a common language that they use in order to “speak” to us, but also-and especially-persuaded that we can construct a language that will allow us to “speak” about them, the semiotician seeks to establish an area of investigation wherein to inquire into the how and why of their presence. (Greimas 1984, 636)

Hence, visual semiotics postulates that an image is a signifying object and that, as such, it implies the existence of a semiotic system, a set of relations and categories that preside over its generation of sense. Yet, it clarifies that, albeit existent, such a system—unlike the linguistic one—is unknown in advance and that it can only be grasped through an examination of the actual processes it has generated, that is, only through the analysis of visual texts in their specificity. This point also helps clarify why semiotics does not result in the reductionism of the singular objects to a universal model, since the knowledge of particular objects alone can lead to knowledge of the system which underlies them, which always maintains a local status. As a consequence, the meta-­ categories and terms elaborated by Greimassian visual semiotics—plastic categories, formants, plastic contrasts, and so on—while universal in their status, are always the result of the heuristic confrontation with the visual texts in their uttermost specificity. By this means, the analysis of paradigmatic visual objects leads, for instance, to the systematization of a first set of plastic categories and other operations; it was, for example, by approaching the solitary figure of a nude by the photographer Edouard Boubat, that the role of the “plastic contrast” molded/flat emerged (Floch 1985). That contrast certainly belonged to the local system of that specific picture, yet the definition of plastic contrast— the syntagmatic co-presence in the image of two terms of a plastic category— belongs to a general model for sense generation in the visual objects. Any image can thus disclose the different ways by which it generates its complex sense. Its figurative meaning can lead to a highly intuitive and almost natural segmentation of the image in “figurative formants”, parts of the image that are easily identified and named by words, through the intervention of the cultural “reading grid”. Given this, Greimas asks himself whether, alongside that figurative segmentation of the painted surface, or of any other visual text, we might not be able to detect “another segmentation of the signifier which would allow us to recognize the existence of strictly plastic units which ultimately are carriers of significations unknown to us” (1984, 637). A resonance of color, for instance, or a specific topological disposition could subvert or redefine the figurative sense and, for instance, that could draw a plastic (and semantic) relationship between seemingly separated characters or elements, or it could oppose others apparently close or narratively related. That is why visual analysis needs to sound out the “area of investigation” mentioned above for a so-called plastic semiotics. Among the means of this exploration, Greimas identifies some categories capable of grasping the plastic articulation of a visual text; far from any

650 

A. MENGONI

taxonomic fixity, such categories do not obey a closed inventory, but are the theoretical formulation of the contrasts and syntactic relations present in the image, in its topological device, in its chromatisms and textures, and in its forms, contours, and limits. Eidetic categories involve an “isolating and discriminatory” function that would be the characteristic of any element capable of tracing forms in the image. Chromatic categories rather account for the “individuating and integrating” function responsible for the filled surfaces, areas, and stains, which would be the characteristic of color, and also, more generally, of texture, or material. Then there are topological categories, such as high/low, central/peripheral, which account for the spatial relationships between elements. Far from being merely binary oppositions, the plastic categories ultimately allow the recognition of contrasts, differences, echoes, and relations that constitute the inner articulation of the image in its simultaneity. By this means, Greimassian semiotics explores the image as a signifying system where these recurrences of the similar and the different, of the same and the other, constitute a veritable texture covering the constructed surface. Because they are recognizable in the form of anticipating tensions and isotopies, they predispose one to globalizing reading. (Ibid., 643)

These recurrences thereby overcome the misunderstanding about minimal units of meaning, since it is that texture of relationship and not the segmentation in minimal elements that allows to explore the sense of the image. In the example above, Piero’s window participates in the complex theological sense of the scene thanks to the set of relationships it is part of, and the segmentation of the fresco in formants or plastic units is functional to the acknowledgment of that texture, and not of independent units.

5  The “Semiotic Turn” and After This change of perspective characterizes contemporary visual semiotics and, more generally, a “semiotic turn” that considers impossible and unfruitful “to decompose language into minimal semiotic units, and then recompose it and attribute meaning to the text of which they are a part”. Such a perspective rather acknowledges how “we can invest in particular universes of sense in which we can trace specific semiotic organizations, specific functioning of meanings, without making the pretension of reconstructing definitively valid generalizations” (Fabbri 2008, 63). The principle of immanence is the condition for this type of approach: faced with a visual object, the semiotician postulates the existence of a system that is immanent to the text, that is, not defined a priori or from the outside, but that can be known only through textual manifestation; yet, through such an analytic approach, a model for the generation of sense in the image also emerges that can be systematized through theoretical tools such as plastic categories, figurative and plastic formants, semi-symbolic associations, and so on.

  VISUAL SEMIOTICS 

651

Plastic semiotics thus organizes the image differently from the way that a figurative reading cuts out sign-objects by giving them names: the image reopens, in relation to its figurative texture, toward other visual organizations, which produce sense in a different way and which Greimas calls plastic formants: they “are called upon to serve as pretexts for the investment of other significations. This authorizes us to speak of a plastic language and to close in on its specificity” (ibid., 641). A language—and it is now clear that the word is to be taken in its semiotic and not merely linguistic sense—capable of reinvesting, regenerating, redefining, subverting the figurative meaning. This is a major contribution of visual semiotics to image studies, since it fully acknowledges the semiotic productivity of the logics of the sensible, which cannot be exhausted by a figurative reading: only the intertwining activity of the figurative and the plastic dimensions trigger the extremely complex and articulated sense an image can produce. Such a contribution anticipates and resonates with a crucial focus in the realm of image theory and, in particular, with the so-­ called Iconic Turn; nonetheless, it is not rare to find this semiotic approach confined to a marginal role, while still associating visual semiotics with the need “to attach names to pictorial forms” and, paradoxically, with a relegation of all which concern the visual substance to the status of “subsemiotic mark” (Elkins 1995, 830–831; for a response see: Bal 1996). Along with the foundational methodological text by Greimas, semioticians developed, in the following years and up to now, a relevant corpus of analytical works in a semiotic perspective, highlighting the role of a genuinely visual semiotic productivity and its efficacy in a wide typology of visual texts: photography, drawing, painting, installations, architecture, cinema, and, more widely, visual culture including design, advertisement, urban configurations (among the major readers: Calabrese 1980a, 1980b; Corrain 1999, 2004; Corrain and Valenti 1991; Hénault and Beyaert 2004; Leone 2014). A significant part of these works focus precisely on the role of plastic articulations and how they can convey specific semantic universes (Thürlemann 1982; Floch 1985, 1986, 1995; Calabrese 1985b; Fabbri 2020), sometimes highlighting the role played by visual contrasts and polarities in the creation of “mythological” universes of meaning, something called semi-­ symbolic relations (e.g., the exploitations of light and shadow in a film, or of topological areas in a painting; see: Thürlemann 1982; Floch 1985; Calabrese 1999). Visual elements also played a significant role in the emergence of a so-­ called tensive semiotics, which elaborated new analytical tools in order to explore the modulations of the sensible events, their intensities and distributions (Fontanille 1995). Another major step forward in understanding the semiotic of the image was undoubtedly the theorization of the observer and its status. In a semiotic perspective, the relationship between the viewer and the visual text, be it a work of art or any other visual culture object, concerns the wider problematic of visual enunciation. This latter concept, borrowed from the theory of language, encompasses the whole problematic of the articulation between the instance of enunciation, that is, the time—space—subject of textual production, and the

652 

A. MENGONI

image itself; in other words, the question of the viewer (rather called enunciatee to avoid any confusion with an empirical observer) concerns the visual strategies through which a painting, photography, film, installation, spatial structure envisage specific regimes of address to the space/time of the spectator, as well as specific strategies of his/her implication or exclusion from the visual world, also as far as the sphere of pathos and efficacy is concerned. The topic has been widely explored in the semiotics of painting, by retracing the genealogy of the dispositive of the tableau, as well as the specific forms of visual address to the spectator in the history of the arts (Stoichita 1993; Careri 1995; Corrain 1996, Arasse 1999); it was also a crucial subject for the semiotics of film, one of the main fields of its theoretical elaboration (Casetti 1986; Metz 1991) and, in general, it lead to major conceptualization of the status of subjectivity in the visual arts (Fontanille 1989). Among the major contributions concerning visual enunciation and its theoretical apparatus, the articulation representation/presentation explored by Louis Marin should be mentioned. Marin posited that any representational image— thus oriented toward a transparent representation of a world—always has a presentative status as well, that is, it “presents itself while representing something”, and it is precisely in the interplay between transparency and opacity that the image is able to regain its material status, a critique of transparency and an address to the viewer (Marin 1994). The black background of a Vanitas by Philippe de Champaigne, for instance, is not only the backdrop for the figures of a skull or a clepsydra, it is also the blackness of painting itself, the manifestation of the material support presenting painting itself, while the painting is representing a scene (252–268). With regard to the relationship to other traditions in image studies, visual semiotics significantly reconfigures the models of historicity and the establishing of a historically based corpus of works as conceived by art history, striving for a better and more consistent definition of the connection between history and theory. Leaning on its structuralist premises, the semiotic approach conceives the work of art as a “theoretical object” (Damisch 1992; Calabrese 1985b), that is to say a historically situated object, that is nevertheless also the occurrence of a paradigm, of a theoretical stake. Those elements of a structural nature allow the weaving together of a network of relations other than those dictated by the philological sources, or by the thematic evidence of the motifs: they provide the theoretical pivots around which an intertextual weaving takes place, building up new series that do not rely on a merely chronological succession, or thematic consistency. The figure of the cloud in the history of painting, for instance, besides being an iconographical motif, happens to be the place of a confrontation between the perspectival space and its crisis, a marker of transcendence in the painted world; therefore, the cloud as semiotic object is precisely the place where one can trace the transformation of such a theoretical pivot along the history of art and beyond, in the whole field of visual culture (Damisch 1972, 1992). The corpus built around such a pivot is not a chronological series based on “influence” or “sources”, but rather a theory, where the Greek etymology meaning “procession” hints to the way in which the

  VISUAL SEMIOTICS 

653

paradigmatic relations immanent to objects—theory in the synchronic sense of the term—cut new connections out of the diachrony of historical time, calling for the link with other texts (not necessarily art historical) and other times (not necessarily philologically legitimized). Such relations are not the fruit of contextual legitimacy, but are inscribed in the object and activated by it. Visual semiotics thus paves the way for the elucidation of an inherent correlation between history and theory in the realms of art history and visual culture.

References Arasse, Daniel. 1999. L’annonciation italienne. Une histoire de perspective. Paris: Hazan. Bal, Mieke. 1996. “Semiotic Elements in Academic Practices”. Critical Inquiry, 22 (3): 573–589. Barthes, Roland. 1964 [1977]. “Rhétorique de l’image”. Communication, 4: 41–42. Eng. trans: “Rhetoric of the image”. In: Image Music—Text. Ed. by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Benveniste, Émile. 1969 [1981]. “Sémiologie de la langue”. Semiotica, I.1: 1–12; I.2: 127–135. Eng. trans: “The semiology of language”. Semiotica, 37 (1), Supplement: 5–24 Calabrese, Omar. 1980a. Semiotica della pittura. Milano: Il Saggiatore. Calabrese, Omar. 1980b. “Semiotiche visive”. Versus: Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 25. Calabrese, Omar. 1985a. Il linguaggio dell’arte. Milano: Bompiani. Calabrese, Omar. 1985b. La macchina della pittura. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Calabrese, Omar. 1999. Lezioni di semisimbolico. Come la semiotica analizza le opere d’arte. Siena: Protagon. Calabrese, Omar. 2008 [2010]. Come si legge un’opera d’arte. Milano: Mondadori. Careri, Giovanni. 1995. Flights of Love. The Art of Devotion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Casetti, Francesco. 1972. “Discussione sull’iconismo”. Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, 3: 43–47. Casetti, Francesco. 1986 [1998]. Dentro lo sguardo: il film e il suo spettatore. Milano: Bompiani. Eng. trans: Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Corrain, Lucia. 1996. Semiotica dell’invisibile. Il quadro a lume di notte. Bologna: Esculapio. Corrain, Lucia (ed.). 1999. Leggere l’opera d’arte II. Dal figurativo all’astratto. Bologna: Esculapio. Corrain, Lucia (ed.). 2004. Semiotiche della pittura. I classici. Le ricerche. Roma: Meltemi. Corrain, Lucia, and Valenti, Mario (eds). 1991. Leggere l’opera d’arte. Dal figurativo all’astratto. Bologna: Esculapio. Damisch, Hubert. 1972 [2002]. Théorie du /nuage/. Pour une nouvelle histoire de l’art. Paris: Seuil. Eng. trans. A Theory of /Cloud/. Toward a History of Painting. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Damisch, Hubert. 1973 [1975]. “Semiotics and Iconography”. The Times Literary Supplement, October 12, 1973. Reprinted in: The Tell-tale Sign, a Survey of Semiotics. Lisse: The P. de Ridder Press. Damisch, Hubert. 1977 [1979]. “Huit thèses pour (ou contre) une sémiologie de la peinture”. Macula, 2: 17–25. Eng. trans. “Eight Theses For (or Against?) A Semiology of Painting”. Enclitic, 3 (I): 1–15.

654 

A. MENGONI

Damisch, Hubert. 1992 [1996]. Le jugement de Pâris. Iconologie analytique 1. Paris: Flammarion. Eng. trans. The Judgment of Paris.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Eco, Umberto. 1968. La struttura assente. Introduzione alla ricerca semiologica. Milano: Bompiani. Elkins, James. 1995. “Marks, traces, ‘traits’, contours, ‘orli’ and ‘splendores’: nonsemiotic elements in pictures”. Critical Inquiry, 21 (4): 822–860. Fabbri, Paolo. 2008. Le Tournant sémiotique. Paris: Lavoisier. Fabbri, Paolo. 2020. Vedere ad arte. Milano: Mimesis. Floch, Jean-Marie. 1985. Petites Mythologies de l’œil et de l’esprit. Pour une sémiotique plastique. Paris and Amsterdam: Hades éditions and Benjamins Publishing. Floch, Jean-Marie. 1986. Les formes de l’empreinte. Brandt, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Stieglitz, Strand. Périgueux: Fanlac. Floch, Jean-Marie. 1995 [2000]. Identités visuelles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Eng. trans: Visual Identities. London and New York: Continuum. Fontanille, Jacques. 1989. Les espace subjectifs. Introduction à la sémiotique de l’observateur. Paris: Hachette. Fontanille, Jacques. 1995. Sémiotique du visible. Des mondes de lumière. Paris: PUF. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1984 [1989]. “Sémiotique figurative et sémiotique plastique”. Actes sémiotiques. Documents VI (60): 3–24. Eng. trans. “Figurative Semiotics and the Semiotics of the Plastic Arts”. New Literary History, 20 (3): 627–649. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Courtés, Joseph (eds.). 1986. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, Tome 2. Paris: Hachette. Hénault, Anne and Beyaert, Anne (eds.). 2004. Ateliers de sémiotique visuelle. Paris: PUF. Lancioni, Tarcisio. 2012. Il senso e la forma. Semiotica e teoria dell’immagine. Firenze: Usher. Leone, Massimo (ed.). 2014. Immagini efficaci / Efficacious Images. Roma: Aracne. Marin, Louis. 1971. Études sémiologiques. Écritures, peintures. Paris: Klincksieck. Marin, Louis. 1994 [2001]. De la représentation. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard. Eng. trans: On representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Metz, Christian. 1970. “Au-delà de l’analogie, l’image”. Communications, 15, L’analyse des images: 1–10. Metz, Christian. 1991. L’Énonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film. Paris: Klincksieck. Schapiro, Meyer. 1969. “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs”. Semiotica, (I) 3: 223–242. Schapiro, Meyer. 1973 Words, Script and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language. New York: Georges Braziller. Stoichita, Victor. 1993 [2015]. L’instauration du tableau. Paris: Klincksieck. Eng. trans. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Turnhout: Brepols. Thürlemann, Felix. 1982. Paul Klee: analyse sémiotique de trois peintures. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme.

Literary Iconology: Tropes and Typologies Liliane Louvel

In Vermeer’s painting kept in the Dublin Art Gallery, Young Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid (1670), a young woman is sitting in front of the spectator bowed over a table covered by a heavy red carpet. She is holding a quill with which she is writing on what we guess is a white sheet of paper firmly held in place. Standing in the background, a woman wearing a green dress and a blue apron, the servant who has just brought in the note, is looking out of the window. With her distant gaze and her mouth open, she does not seem to belong to the painting’s world but to the world outside, or rather to the vision of the outside world—so completely absorbed is she in her inner reverie. I propose to construe this painting as an allegory of concentration and daydreaming, for it shows—split up between two characters—creative activity at work. The mistress is writing the letter, perhaps under the mute dictation of the dreaming servant, or conversely she is inspiring the servant her sweet reverie. Behind the two women, hanging on the wall in the background, a painting-within-a painting, stages female characters standing around a woman carrying a child. The painting has been identified as the Rescuing of Moses by Sir Peter Lely. Vermeer’s painting is redolent with tension: tension between inside and outside, between the visible and the invisible. It suggests that the window in the painting alludes to the Albertian painting as a window. In Young Woman Writing a Letter, the text is not visible, image takes precedence. But the painting suggests a story—I call it the “infinite dialogue”—and what I propose after Foucault’s “infinite relation” (1990) between the painting and the letter, word and image, inspiration and creation, here finds one of its finest representations with soft subdued colors inducing some kind of silent

L. Louvel (*) University of Poitiers, Poitiers, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_40

655

656 

L. LOUVEL

reverie. On top of this, the painting shows the various modes including a work of art within another one, here a painting within a painting which is also what the inclusion of one work of art, an image, included or transposed in another one, a literary text, exemplifies.

1   Many Instances: Contemporary Works Nowadays, more and more numerous contemporary poems or novels deal with images-in-texts, be they actually reproduced in books or the objects of descriptions. Once you start noticing them, you cannot help feeling submerged and surprised you did not notice them before. The publication of works offering numerous “‘démontages’ of pictures” “re-mounted” in fiction works, turn them into albums with a powerful visual appeal. Recently, this has gained even more momentum with the advent of “graphic novels” which, little by little, in particular but not confined only to North American and European publications, have grown in popularity. Such innovative books have even been the subjects of PhD Dissertations, in particular dealing with books such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, F. C. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan and also Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children. Other illustrated books such as Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever offering in-text pictures of Dutch painting or Barbara Hodgson’s incredible The Sensualist, dealing with the art of anatomy, followed course after W.G. Sebald’s novels and his montages of words and images. British and American novels play with texts, their texture, the printing characters, the layout, as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves so often reminiscent of liturgical books in Hebrew complete with their commentaries inscribed on the pages. Not only are these books playful, but they also aim at foregrounding the medium, that is, calling the reader’s attention to the fact that this is a textual fabric including visual elements and that the reader must keep on opening his/her eyes, remaining active, following tracks and not becarried away by a too-easy-to-read text.

2  Note on Representation Just a quick reminder of the issue of defining image and its relation to epistemology. The concept of representation may be illustrated by Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors: it means representing the whole by its part, like an ambassador representing his/her country. It also may be illustrated by the theater metaphor when actors give a show or a representation substituting for their characters, being and not being them—hence Diderot’s paradox of the comedian advising distance and analysis. Representation is also linked to the different species of images: mental, optical, perceptive, verbal, artistic, as defined by Mitchell in Iconology (1986) and prolonged in Picture Theory (1994). In the same way the power of images, the role of figures as figuring the real, and the

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

657

attempt at reproducing the world, mimesis and phenomenological experience combine and interact. It is also accepted that the work of art does not describe the world but signifies the manner it is perceived and how it conceives it. This is what Wendy Steiner hints at when she writes, “The work of art does not signify reality, but the process of perceiving and conceiving of it” (1982, 181). First and foremost, it is self-reflexive like a glittering medium in-between its appearance and disappearance. Therefore, I will quickly reopen the ut pictura poesis debate and then I will try to offer practical ways of differentiating the ways of introducing image in text and the various “nuances” of this pictorial textual inscription by dint of the descriptive. An attempt at proposing a clear helpful methodology and typology should result from these attempts at classification. To start on the right foot, it seems useful to recall a few basic principles.

3   Literature and Image in Text The kind of poetic reverie triggered by the irruption of image in text—be it of a painterly nature or an etching, a photograph, a tapestry—and the pleasure of contemplating in one’s mind’s eye the evocation of colors, shapes, lighting and writing with light comes from texts which have chosen to engage with image in what I call “an infinite dialogue”: a phrase I coin after Michel Foucault’s rapport infini, the “infinite relationship” he evokes when gazing at Velásquez’s Las Meninas (1990, 25). How does transposition work? Thanks to what tools? For Gisbert Kranz, quoted by Clüver (1989), the relations between poem and its visual model could be seen as working along the following line she borrows from Kranz: “Transposition, Suppletion, Assoziation, Interpretation, Provokation, Spiel, [und] Konkretisation” (Kranz 1981). Clüver gives the example of eight twentieth-century poems on Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus. The abundance of discourse revolving around the same work testifies to its manifold modalities and variations, as is the case with Las Meninas, “read” by Foucault, Stoichita and Searle—not to mention Picasso’s forty eight variations on the subject. The critic’s or the philosopher’s discourse is another (non-literary) way of achieving transposition also resulting in a fiction about painting. All these modes, of course, are variations on “the art of describing” (Alpers 1983). “Transposing” image into word may be one way of expressing what this relationship is about. To evoke the process, the following terms are commonly used: translation, illustration, equivalence, transmutation, transfusion, commerce, dialogue and conversion. The conversion of one currency into another one renders commercial transactions possible, but this is more delicate when the “conversion” takes place between one medium or one art and another. And there lies the whole point: that of the relation between language, discourse and the visual, between the readable and the visible. For Claus Clüver, “to transpose a painting into a verbal text is to reconstitute its meaning by creating a sign that draws on the codes and conventions of a literary (and not

658 

L. LOUVEL

merely a linguistic) system equivalent to the pictorial system operative in the painting” (1989, 61). There will always be “a rest”, the commission due to be paid, testifying to the near impossibility of the term-to-term transaction or transposition—but only the near impossibility, and this stands as a challenge to literary addicts. What we may term “a rest” is the part left to imagination dangling in-between word and image, the part of fantasy which endlessly shapes the text caught up in the “infinite relation”. And Foucault himself does insist on the irreducibility of word and image and the inherent challenge this entails: But the relation of language to painting is an infinite one […] However hard one may try to say what one sees, what one sees never fully inhabits what one says. But if one wants to maintain open the relation between language and the visible, if one wants to speak not against but from their incompatibility, so as to stay as close as possible one to the other, then one must erase the nouns and stay in the infinity of the task. It is perhaps thanks to the medium of this grey anonymous language, which is always finicky and repetitive because it is too wide that painting, little by little, will be able to gleam and glitter. (Foucault 1990, 25)

If, on the one hand, the irreducibility, the incompatibility and the dissemblance between the two media are acknowledged by critics, still, on the other hand, the relentless presence of image in literary texts cannot be ignored (Cheeke 2008). The transmuting process reflects what Philippe Hamon once called “the diehard ut pictura poesis”. But beyond acknowledging the resistance of image transposed into text, one has to go back to the poetic tradition this phenomenon belongs to and consider the persistence of the poet to try and engage with image and art practicing “intersemiotic transposition” and “intermedial practices” a long time before the phrases and theoretical systems were coined or thought of. So we have to reopen the ut pictura poesis debate (Horace’s formula “poetry is like painting” often construed as “painting is like poetry” [Louvel 1998, 2011] thus ennobling painting) and the age-old rivalry between “the sister arts”, as well as da Vinci’s paragone when agon opposes the two paired arts. The Renaissance context was that of the rivalry between mechanical arts and liberal ones when da Vinci was claiming access to the liberal arts status for his own art and the recognition attached to it. La pittura è cosa mentale, as he famously enunciated. We also have to bear in mind that writing and drawing have a common origin inscribed in the Greek word graphein, in accordance with the origin of tracing a line as Jean-Luc Nancy recalls (2013). The stroke was the result of the primeval tracing gesture dipped in black, white or red matter (charcoal earth) on cave walls. And which came first? Writing or drawing, historians keep asking (Christin 2002). Are the answers on the wonderful scenes in prehistoric caves? Drawing retains something of the touch of the hand trying to transmit whatever signals the mind sends and yet: if la pittura è cosa mentale, a drawing which

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

659

invisibly lies beneath the coloring pigments is a fortiori cosa mentale, in its own right. Tracks and traces, as drawing and bearing witness, will also be proofs of a human passage. These reflections led to a theoretical approach of the phenomenon starting with classical Greece. Before examining the antique discussion and Hellenistic heritage (Webb 2009), one last point must be open to discussion. Numerous questions are raised by the “infinite relation” or dialogue between word and image, when image engenders a text or when as a textual inclusion it interrupts narration provoking a “freeze” image in cinema parlance. One of the ways to define those “inseparable totalities” is to use Alain Montandon’s—in the wake of Michael Nerlich—notion of iconotexts instances of which may be found as far as in the combinations of poetry and visual art in André Breton’s œuvre as well as in Juan Miró’s paintings. For painters also indulged in using words in/as images, something which Sigmar Polke achieved in Gegen die zwei Supermachte (“Against the Two Superpowers”) from 1976, or the Art and Language Group with Shouting Men from 1975. The term iconotext itself in its very form illustrates the attempt at fusing together word and image, mimicking an oxymoron, although there is no opposition or contrary meaning here and no fusion, of course. For both are two irreducible objects, one must insist on it, combined to make up a completely new and original hybrid object. As for myself, I prefer using the “text/image” alliance which underscores the equal status of the two arts and their oscillation figured by the fragile oblique slash in-between. This term also enhances the synesthesia, an ambiguous in-between poetic figure, playing on the role of the senses and perception in this instance. Like in chemistry parlance, none of the elements is stable, yet the phenomenon is all there contained in this oscillating movement from one to the other and the refusal of any kind of fixed resolution as figured by the oblique slash, which is a much more creative, dynamic and stimulating operation.

4   Ut pictura poesis: “poetry is like painting” Image has kept haunting literature since Antiquity and the Renaissance; one remembers the illustrated Poliphile’s dream in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili published in 1499, translated into French by Jean Martin in 1546. Then the examples became more and more numerous, some famous seventeenth-century ones being the Galleries of Illustrious women. So it is a fact that poetry and painting’s collaboration or “encounter”, to quote David Kennedy, runs deep. But before, Homer was already celebrated by Lucian and Petrach as “the first painter of ancient memories” (Rensselaer 1991, 7-8). His famous description of Achilles’s shield setting the ultimate paradigm of classical ekphrasis. The origin of the parallel between painting and poetry is theoretically grounded in two seminal texts: Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. Both suggested stimulating analogies without attempting to propose a system. In his Poetics, Aristotle traces a parallel between the structure of the painted

660 

L. LOUVEL

work and that of tragedy, that is, a story, a plot: “Thus the principle and, if one may say so, the soul of tragedy, is story; the characters come second (actually roughly in the same way as painting: if a painter used even the most beautiful matters at random it would not be as charming as a well-drawn black and white picture” ([335 av.] 2011). So we may infer that a plot starts as a silhouette, a drawing, a pattern. Let it be remembered that it is our great loss that no painted works dating back to ancient Greece have survived excepted the wonderful frescoes discovered in Philip of Macedonia’s tomb at Vergina in Northern Greece. A fac simile of these have been painted on the walls of the corridor leading to the tomb. But the frescoes themselves have been duly protected in particular from tourists’ breaths. And they strike one for their close resemblance with Italian Renaissance painting, something Georges Didi-Huberman also pointed out when studying women’s fluid robes in Ghirlandaio’s or Botticelli’s paintings (2015). This is not the case of early Roman painting, testimonies of which still prevail. In his Ars Poetica (65-8 BCE), Horace does draw parallels twice between painters and poets. And in the famous 361–365 verses, he definitely establishes their concordance, a word I favor for it suggests concord (irenic stance) and not warfare (agonistic position): Ut pictura poesis. Erit quae, si propius stes, Te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes; Haec amat obscurum, volet haec sub luce videri, lucidis argutum quae non formidat acumen; Haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit.

Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over (quoting from English translation). Horace’s ut pictura poesis formula was currently mis-applied when wrongly quoted as “painting is like poetry”. But when properly used, the formula (“poetry like painting”) entailed that poetry worked like painting and that pictorial techniques could be “appropriated” by literature through the medium of language in more ways than one. Let it not be forgotten that enargeai and poetry were first and foremost oral in classical Greece. The Ancient heritage of orality still is at the root of “putting vividly under the eyes”, which is the definition of enargeai and two of its rhetoric manifestations: hypotyposis and ekphrasis. The other ancient source of eloquence for us, that is, the Roman one, provides a telling example of the link between the oral and rhetoric. This was the case for Cicero and the orators’ art as well as its necessary counterpart: silence. The well-known anecdote of the

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

661

unveiling of Phryne standing naked in front of the Senate to prove her innocence shows how language can turn short in front of vision to tell the truth (Vouilloux 2002). A fact often neglected by critics but of tantamount importance for reception theory and the parallel with painting is that in his Ars poetica Horace insisted on “seeing close” or “seeing from afar” a work of art and on “seeing it in full light” or “preferring darkness” (Horace in Lee n. 15).. So doing Horace was giving pride of place to the viewer’s role and to his or her pleasure when gazing at paintings. And this tradition relentlessly produced masterpieces of what can be called “mixed” or sometimes “hybrid” texts. Analyzing the workings of image-in-text to propose a “poetics of the iconotext” pertaining to the domain of rhetoric, it seems possible to take into account the polyptotes of the word figure: figural, figurative and figuration. These kinds of declensions seem to be working as many instruments of knowledge related to the arts of language when linked to the visual. Thus, the status of the descriptive is an ambiguous one hovering between discourse and history, and it will coincide with the structural and then the postmodern questioning of History, thought of as a discursive construct. It is easy to pick this up in the fictions by Julian Barnes for instance, such as A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters or Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh or to go European, Vincenzo Consolo’s, Retablo and Arturo Perez Reverte’s Old Masters, among others. Another way of summoning image from inside a text addresses the issue of description, a way of giving presence to an image when it does not physically figure in a book.

5   Modes of Inserting Image in Text: A Typology Image may find a place in a text in a variety of ways and means. Invention is part and parcel of creation. I will offer a quick glance at a possible typology of the ways of introducing image in text. I will borrow from Genette’s own typology elaborated in Palimpseste (2002) when he evokes “quotation”. I will then propose to adopt such phenomena as transtextuality, which is a form of textual transcendance, to instill it with pictorial parlance and speak of textual transpictoriality, when image is present in one way or another in a text. Of course, we have to bear in mind that this term should be broadened to intermedial-related analogous phenomena when the medium is not restricted to picture. So that we could address them as transmedial, paramedial, arch-­medial, and so on, phenomena (Rippl 2015). We have to make do with our language and bend it according to the complex task of working on the frontier between arts. I prefer the terms of arts or media as in intermediality to semiotic system as I am convinced that painting cannot be reduced to semiosis or sign systems. So I will use the term transpictoriality (or trans-mediality, see Rippl 2015) when two media, two arts, their overall characteristics, their modes and genres come into contact, one is transposed into another one. Interpictoriality will designate the operation when image is physically present in a text as a kind of explicit quotation or under the guise of plagiarism, or allusion, even as a kind

662 

L. LOUVEL

of discreet allusive hypopictoriality (see below). Parapictoriality will cover the realm of image standing on the “outskirts”—as it were—of a text when it is part of its “entourage”, that is, its paratext (the title, preface, chapter titles, notes, covers included in the same volume) and so it stands in a parapictorial relationship with the text. Metapictoriality will designate the fact that one media is commenting upon the other, that is, when image bears on a text or vice versa. Lastly, we have to add to hyperpictoriality, when text or image A transforms or imitates text or image B, the particular notion of hypopictoriality, for in the iconotext there will always be a text A (the hypertext) grafted onto an image A (the hypo-icon). Be it clearly evoked or not it is consubstantial to the text without commenting it. Hypopictoriality in a way works like the return of the repressed element which surfaces under the text line. As for archpictoriality (the overhanging mode of classifying genres and modes of painting), it differs from architextuality which according to Genette is only noticeable thanks to a titular mentioning. Bernd Herzogenrath proposed a term archintermediality for the works set against the backdrop of their medial networks, their cultural field, and so on (see Herzogenrath, 2012). In the iconotext the relations between the various painterly genres are usually explicitly identified. This differs from architextuality, for the image referred to in a text is quoted and described by a narrator who ascribes it to a category: for instance, it will be easy to find examples of pictorial genericity referring to portrait, still life, historical painting, conversation piece, vanity, trompe-l’œil, (usually in French), anamorphosis, and so on All the palimpsestic types suggested above will contain the transversal/cross category which unites them in their manifest immanence and not in a movement toward pictorial transcendence. Mnemopictoriality or allusive interpictoriality, that is the memory of a painting transposed into a text, will be the most elusive kind of interpictoriality, the most subjective hence the most difficult to pinpoint. It draws on the reader’s own museum or reservoir of ideas and thus is perfectly subjective. Let it be noted that intermedial transposition may take up more or less textual space as in Ghosts, by John Banville, where numerous references to Watteau’s paintings are made, or in To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf as we shall see. It may structure the whole text as in The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Dorian an Imitation, its contemporary counterpart by Will Self, involving a double transposition from book to book, from medium to medium, a series of screens as an installation replacing the famous picture. Other examples of the use and quotations of images might include Girl with a Pearl Earring with its diluting of the eponymous picture by Vermeer, Tulip Fever with its insertion of vignettes borrowed from Dutch painting or W. G. Sebald’s own collages of all kinds of images (postcards, pictures, photographs, tickets and bills) included in the very matter of his own text. Invention and creativity know no limits, and this is the beauty of it. To help read a pictorial text it may be useful to complement the above typology by a “typology of the pictorial”, drawing a kind of gradient or scale relative

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

663

to the various degrees of saturation by image a text may contain. Thus, we will encounter a variety of pictorial modulations such as the tableau-effect, the pictorial scene, hypotyposis, tableaux vivants, the aesthetic arrangement, the pictorial description and last but not least, ekphrasis. Of course, this will be a mere approach of the question and one may find more details in my Poetics of the iconotext (Louvel 2011). All this is to try and fence off the critics’ temptation to rather too quickly assimilate a text and an image (a painting, a photograph, a work of art, etc.) relying on his or her own feeling or memory. This leads to unfounded rapprochements and has no critical value excepted that it is a personal feeling. For instance, one may find a link between one of Malamud’s short stories and one of Chagall’s paintings without anything in the text proving this was on the writer’s mind or his actual intention. This only rests on the assumption that both writer and painter, being of Eastern European Jewish origins, shared the same visual idea of a Shtetl.

6   Modalities of the Descriptive So the reader must be wary of any easy pictorial reference which would be hastily associated to a text, thanks to personal whim. Not all descriptions or hypotyposes can be deemed endowed with a pictorial quality. Being reminded of a particular painting is no guarantee that this is justified, for my contention is that one has to pick up the particular modalities of the pictorial in a text under scrutiny. For an image or a painting already is a work of art situated at one removed from its model, whereas in a text it is once more duplicated or doubled thus standing twice removed from its origin. This is the realm of ekphrasis—be the work of art real or notional. Some descriptions have “pictorial qualities” without explicitly citing a particular work of art or its reference: then one has to try and identify linguistic “markers” to recognize and ground prove that we are reading an oblique or indirect iconotextual phenomenon. The various framing effects, the choice of printing fonts, the pictorial lexis, the topoï pertaining to painting, “manners” or styles, as if springing up from the text, may constitute as many symptoms of the pictorial “unconscious” of the text, all elements essential to a sound reading of it. But, once again, one has to be careful and back from any attempt at artificially superimposing an image onto a text which would not stand in an organic or functional relation to it. It is only in the presence of several markers and their cross referencing that one reasonably may declare such hypotyposis or description as “pictorial”. Borrowing from the painter’s art may also help us better read a text. For instance, taking into account anamorphosis, optical effects, trompe-l’œil (like in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg’s Variations), may also help to define what a literary anamorphosis or trompe-l’œil is. This is what I explored at length in The Pictorial Third (Louvel 2018). Mirrors, miniatures, reflections, tapestries, geography maps and other optical avatars of painterly image are there as many optical variants of the pictorial-in-text. They are all part of the ongoing game

664 

L. LOUVEL

and interplay between poetry and painting. For contemporary artists also offer instances of poetry as painting, painting as poetry, in the usual hand-in-hand alliance (and not fight) between the “sister arts”.

7  Pictorial Modulations: A Typology A text may be deemed more or less pictorial according to the presence of the “pictorial markers” I mentioned above. The term refers to linguistic parlance. The “markers” may be overt or covert, but they must be either significantly numerous in the text or confirmed by the writer’s intention contained in his/ her own letters or critical essays. Pictorial markers may borrow from technical lexis (referring to color, perspective, line, shapes, etc.); they may refer to pictorial genres (portrait, still life, etc.) and/or use framing effects such as embedding typographical devices like clearly delineated paragraphs and quotation marks. Linguistic markers like deictics “this is what one saw”, “picture the scene”, like the -ING form which in English marks the suspension of action, are also reliable indicators. The use of focalization and viewing operators inscribe the text in vision and the scopic. Thus, the text seems to be suggesting an image in the way Edward Said expressed his relationship in terms of the desire of writing for image: “Writing cannot represent the visible, but it can desire and, in a manner of speaking move towards the visible without actually achieving the unambiguous directnes of an object seen before one’s eyes” (Said 1983). This movement of the readable toward the visible seems all the more tempting as to me it seems close to what I call the “pictorial third”, that is, the suspended image hovering in one’s mind in-between the text one is currently reading and the image it purports to describe or suggest (Louvel 2018). I will offer a typology of the ways a text may refer to or suggest an image, seeing it as a kind of gradient moving on, like in biology, an axis running from the unsaturated or less-saturated diluted solution to a saturated and even a supersaturated one. First, the tableau-effect, or painting effect, irrupts in a text producing an impression of déjà vu, but the saturation is incomplete and the impression fugitive. No actual reference is provided. It is the most diluted form (or less saturated) of the inscription of the pictorial in text but still potent enough to deserve mentioning. For instance, in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, the river boating enjoyed by Chad and Madame de Vionnet as described by James immediately evokes one of the Impressionists’ favorite subjects (James 1903). Time seems suspended, verbs of action disappear, and the characters seem frozen in a pose which is also a characteristic of another kind of description I will call “picturesque”. The picturesque scene or “view” recalls its origins as a painterly genre: the vedutta, and it directly refers to painting for the word “picturesque” refers to what is susceptible of being painted, what resembles a picture or what suggests a painted scene. It often relates to street scenes, gardens and parks—and the English nation has a long history of picturesque gardens—big houses, sublime

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

665

places such as mountains and seaside views, preferably stormy ones like in Turner’s paintings, or more peacefully, city markets as in Henry James’s Confidence. In the following example, taken from Portraits of places the name of Venice evokes quite a picturesque scene for the author: I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city—a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall. […] A girl is passing over the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel’s back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her look charming: you see her against the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place: it sinks even in the opaque water. (James [1884], 16)

Of note is the visual saturation of the sentence in which seeing is immediately put to the fore and which focuses on shapes and colors as I underlined. And then one revisits one’s own mental museum and imagines the Venitian scene à la Canaletto, Bellotto or Guardi. A thing both Viola Hopkins (1968) and Marianna Torgovnick (1985) also analyzed. In Greek, hypotyposis signifies “model, original, painting”; it comes from the words referring to drawing, painting. It first designated any stimulating description following the notion of energeia. It paints things in such an energetic and vivid manner that a scene, an image or a painting seems to be taking place under one’s own eyes. The illusion is almost complete. It is often introduced by a deictic, such as “Picture the scene” that Graham Swift repeatedly uses in his novel Ever After, for instance. Still, hypotyposis does not directly refer to painting. The pictorial effect once more depends on the reader’s competence, as was the case for the “tableau effect” or the “picturesque view”. But hypotyposis is inscribed on the saturation axis in a not that far from ekphrasis notch. The difference lies in the fact that ekphrasis slowly became more specialized and devoted to the description of works of art, at least in Angloamerican critique. And so ekphrasis is much more saturated with the pictorial than hypotyposis and stands at the end of the gradient as the ultimate supersaturated instance of the pictorial in text. Half way between the two and one more degree of pictorial saturation over hypotyposis stands the tableau vivant. Tableaux were very popular in the nineteenth century both in Great Britain and in France. The characters used to be arranged in vivid attitudes (sometimes a bit over dramatic or melodramatic) so as to embody a historical scene or a famous painting. The Pre-Raphelites influenced some of the aesthetics of the scenes composed and photographed by Oscar Rejlander, like The Two Ways of life (1827) and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Lancelot and Guinevere 1873. In The House of Mirth, the novel by Edith Wharton, the heroine, Lily Bart, models herself on Reynolds’s Portrait of Mrs Lloyd and outshines the portrait, thus holding the audience in thrall. The tableaux vivants clearly narrativize description combining description and plot, even going beyond the famous “pregnant moment” of the kairos or “the frozen verbal tableau” Rhoda Flaxman (1983) identifies. As for the aesthetic or artistic arrangement, it belongs to the inner world of the text as it is located in the eye and the intention of a particular character.

666 

L. LOUVEL

One of the paradigmatic instances of it could be found in “Bliss”, one of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, when Bertha artfully arranges a fruit dish on a table and delights in admiring it. “There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones” (Mansfield 1953, 122); the description goes on in this way once more underlining colors, shapes and lightning effects. The aesthetic arrangement is on the side of the focalizer much more than in the “pictorial description” which clearly focusses on the object even if the subject’s eye may still be very much engaged in the text. What I called the pictorial description is the kind of description which displays the highest saturated degree of pictorialism in text just before ekphrasis on our gradient ekphrasis being an acknowledged description of a work of art. Quite a number of pictorial and metapictorial markers we have previously identified may be found in a pictorial description. But they do not all necessarily figure. I found an instance of it in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’s famous bœuf en daube passage which migrates from one type of lesser saturated pictorial text to a more saturated one. What the narrator declares as “Rose’s arrangement”—Rose being the servant—slowly evolves from “an aesthetic arrangement” to a “pictorial description” as painting itself emerges from the text conjured up by the lexis, allusions and references to art history. Mrs Ramsay is absorbed in the contemplation of the fruit bowl sitting at the center of the table when all of a sudden it is illuminated by the light of a candlestick bearing eight candles: Now eight candles were stood down the table and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-­ lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. This brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb up hills, she thought and go down into valleys and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel there and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them. (Woolf [1927] 1966, 112)

This passage is “framed” by the sudden lighting effect and closes on Mrs Ramsay’s own gaze when it unites with Augustus’s. The pictorial vocabulary, the fruit dish all of sudden being turned into a microcosm in which one can wander, the mnemonic reference to two mythological paintings, a Neptune’s Banquet and a Bacchus probably after the one painted by Caravaggio—famous for its violent chiaroscuro effects—turn the description into a pictorial one, a

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

667

veritable feast for the eye originating in an “aesthetic arrangement”. And the reader is faced with one of the topoi of the genre, a “still life with fruit dish”, particularly favored in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, re-interpreted in the eighteenth century and then by Cézanne and cubism, whose famous apples Woolf discovered under the guidance of Roger Fry. We can trace a parallel with K. Mansfield’s short story “Bliss” which was previously quoted: same colors, same subject—a woman lost in contemplation, the importance of the gaze, but all has been re-interpreted in woolfian manner and “some picture” clearly referred to. One can imagine one could even distinguish between subgenres of “pictorial description” such as the art of vignettes, idylls (etymologically “small painting”), still lives, portraits, sea views, all-over painting, mythological or bucolic scenes, battle fields, historical fresco, and so on. Lastly, ekphrasis represents the highest degree of text pictorialization and supersaturation. It is a well-documented trope (Hagstrum 1958; Hollander 1988; Heffernan 1993). And Murray Krieger’s own Ekphrasis (Krieger 1992) has clearly reopened the debate around the notion. A prestigious literary exercise in the classical age, it culminated with the paradigmatic example of the famous description of Achilles’s shield by Homer. Following the various scenes sculpted on the round shield, Homer was, at the same time, describing the War raging in Troy. Ekphrasis as a way of staging ut pictura poesis thus also stages its own modus operandi. Achilles’s shield, to ward off impending death, is an apotropaic figure which also constitutes an emblem of art acting as a detour against fate. Krieger argued it was an instance of art at second remove, being the (verbal) representation of a (sculpted) representation. It is a non-natural object representing another non-natural object itself representing an object in the world (which actually did not exist). Ekphrasis as poetic principle displays the poetic nature of a poem. It is a synthesis similar to Simonides’s own axiom: pictura loquens, poesis tacens, “painting is a silent poem, poetry a verbal painting” ensuing that poetry gives a voice to painting. For Roland Barthes, ekphrasis was a brilliant rhetorical piece with its own agenda, an autonomous “detachable” piece (Barthes 1982). Which is one of the characteristics of a “pictorial description” when it is framed by and contained in the autonomy of a paragraph. Let it be noted that if hypotyposis seems to instill some element of time and action into the descriptive apparatus, the tableau-vivant, the picturesque scene, the aesthetic arrangement, the pictorial description and ekphrasis seem to slow down the tempo of the narrative, that is, its “story time”, whereas its “text time” keeps on unrolling. Let it be noted too that hypotyposis, as a hybrid mode in between narration and description, is a kind of hinge point between the various types enumerated above. For in my gradient, to the left as it were of hypotyposis (the tableau-effect, the picturesque view) it is up to the reader’s (or the critic) eye to devise the pictorial-in-text, whereas to the right (the aesthetic arrangement, the pictorial description, etc.) the pictorial is encoded in the text by a character-focalizer or narrator, and thus, the assertion of the text’s pictoriality is well-founded.

668 

L. LOUVEL

Of course, this taxonomy must not be envisaged as a rigid system; texts are labile and work as fluxes, and so one text may move on from an aesthetic arrangement effect to a tableau and then on to a pictorial description. This is the case in Woolf’s scene analyzed above and in H. James’s The Portrait of a Lady when Isabel Archer watched by Rosier, is framed by the doorway she is going through, metamorphosed into her own portrait by the young man’s fancy: “The years had touched her only to enrich her; […] Now at all events, framed in the gilded doorway, she struck the young man as the picture of a gracious lady” (James [1881] 1995, 309). And the frame is suitably gilded. Both the novel title and the scene merge in Rosier’s fond gaze. The domination of language, its “imperialism” as it has been termed (Gilman 1989) and the hierarchy between the arts seen in terms of gender by Lessing himself show well enough how the image and more widely the visual have been held under the power of the word. Language put to task in literature has, among other things, appropriated the visual. Simonides’s famous saying pictura loquens, poesis tacens, (late sixth century BCE) well enough exemplifies that the dominating viewpoint is that of language. And my point will be that transgression, that is, resisting the age-old now well-established rules of poetry as time and painting as space, may/must be an operative mode, to ground a theory of the word/image relationship in another kind. I rather like to envisage the word-image relationship as a transgressive form of resistance to any form of age-old domination. The overall presence of image nowadays, thanks to the digital and screens at our fingertips, might well be the opening of a new era in which another kind of resistance might emerge to control the fascination of digitally produced marketable products. We both need words and images to be held in a cooperative infinite relationship and dialogue, far from any kind of rivalry.

References Aristotle. Poétique [335 BCE.] 2011. VI, 50a. Trans. by Roselyne  Dupont-Roc et Jean Lallot. Paris: Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1982. “L’effet de réel”. Littérature et réalité. Paris: Seuil. Cheeke, Stephen. 2008. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Christin, Anne-Marie (ed.). 2002. A History of Writing, from Hieroglyph to Multimedia. Trans. by Andrew Dalby. Paris: Flammarion. Clüver, Klaus. 1989. “Intersemiotic Transposition”. Poetics Today, 10 (1): 55-90 (themed issue “Art and Literature”. Ed. by Wendy Steiner). Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2015. Ninfa Fluida, Essai sur le drapé-désir. Paris: Arts et artistes Gallimard. Flaxman, Rhoda. 1983. Victorian Word-Painting and Narration. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990 [1966]. Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. Gilman, Ernest B. 1989. “Interart Studies and the Imperialism of Language”. Poetics Today, 10:1 (themed issue “Art and Literature”. Ed. by Wendy Steiner). 

  LITERARY ICONOLOGY: TROPES AND TYPOLOGIES 

669

Hagstrum, Jean. 1958. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Heffernan, James A. W. 1993. Museum of Words the Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hollander, John. 1988. “The Poetics of Ekphrasis”. Word and Image, 4: 209-219. Hopkins, Viola. 1968. “Visual Devices and Parallels in James”. In: Henry James. Ed. by Tony Tanner. London: Palgrave. James, Henry. [1881] 1995. The Portrait of a Lady. New York and London: Norton Critical Edition. James, Henry. 1884. Portraits of Places. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co. James, Henry. 1903 [2009]. The Ambassadors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kranz, Giebert. 1981. “Das Bildgedicht: Theorie, Lexikon, Bibliographie”. Literatur und Leben, N. S. 23. 2 vols. Köln: Böhlau. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis, The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Louvel, Liliane. 1998. L’oeil du texte: texte et image dans la littérature de langue anglaise. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext. Intro. by Karen Jacobs; trans. by Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate. Louvel, Liliane. 2018. The Pictorial Third. An Essay Into Intermedial Criticism. London and New York: Routledge. Mansfield, Katherine. 1953. “Bliss”. Selected Stories.  Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1986. Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. The Pleasure in Drawing. Fordham: Fordham University Press. Rippl, Gabriele. 2015. A Handbook of Intermediality, Literature-image-Sound-Music. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Saïd, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steiner, Wendy. 1982. The Colors of Rhetoric. Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Torgovnick, Marianna. 1985. The Visual Arts, Pictorialism and the Novel. James, Lawrence and Woolf. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vouilloux, Bernard. 2002. Le tableau vivant, Phryné, l’orateur et le peintre. Paris: Flammarion. Webb, Ruth. 2009. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Farnham: Ashgate. Woolf, Virginia. [1927] 1966. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

French Theory: Poststructuralism and Deconstruction Iris Laner

Images can be looked at, they can be felt, they can make an impression and they can be experienced; images, however, can also be deciphered; they can communicate a relatively distinct meaning, since they refer to something that goes beyond their immediate material being. Accordingly, images can be considered as signs, that is, encoded entities that unfold a meaning in the very moment of being decoded. Poststructuralist and deconstructionist approaches in image studies take images to be signs, broadly conceived. As signs, images form part in discourses. Other than in a merely semiotic perspective, the significative character of images relates to different levels: the level of intersubjective and collective forms of the production of meaning, the level of contextuality, the level of more or less dominant governing forces within various contexts (power), the level of circulability across contexts and herein of breaking with a so-called “original” context. Poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories consider images as entities that are open to elicit different meanings with regard to different contexts of reception. The very context in which they are (originally) received does not determine their meaning, though. Rather, images are taken to be differential signs that can circulate, being exposed to variable historical, cultural, political,

This article was written as part of the research project “Aesthetic Practice and the Critical Faculty” (T 835) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). I. Laner (*) University Mozarteum Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_41

671

672 

I. LANER

and other settings, but at the same time resistant to being fully absorbed by them. As two related schools of thought, poststructuralism and deconstruction share basic convictions regarding the contextuality, power relatedness, historical, cultural, and political exposure of signification processes. Taken together, they are sometimes referred to as French Theory. Both adhere to the idea that the production of meaning is not based upon the realization of a given, underlying signified that becomes present in the course of reception by means of the appearance of the signifier that refers to it one-dimensionally. Rather, they draw on structuralist theories in underlining the differential grounding of all signification processes; namely, in the structuralist picture, a system of difference provides the foundation for signification for each sign to attain its meaning only by the very relation to what it is not, that is, the other signs. This implies that there is no positive, pre-given meaning that belongs to a sign exclusively. Restricted to itself, it has no meaning. Rather, the sign is dependent on the entirety of the system in order to acquire its position as signifying. While structuralism describes systems of difference, such as the linguistic system, as self-sufficient and closed, poststructuralism and deconstruction dismantle these systems as unstable, highlighting their spatial (synchronic) and temporal (diachronic) contextuality as well as the power-knowledge nexus shaping their readability. The indecisiveness of signification systems stems from their potential breaking with an “original” context, being read in other contexts, exposed to historical, cultural and political change and shaped by power relations. They are regarded as not autarkic and isolated from an outside; rather, they are considered as forming part in a more encompassing movement where systems emerge in mutual dependence on, attraction and distraction from each other. Therefore, criticizing the idea of closed, self-sufficient entities and binary relationships in general is central to poststructuralism and deconstruction. Dualistic orders of contraposition like interior versus exterior, presence versus absence, form versus content, truth versus fiction, origin versus descendant, health versus disease, and so on, are rejected in order to give way to a thinking of dynamic interaction, change and becoming instead of being. In the French spirit of the later 1960s, poststructuralism and deconstruction find their ideational basis. Although some of the pioneers challenge their placement in these movements, they are nonetheless important sources of inspiration for the future generations. A range of influential publications within the span of only two years lays ground for rethinking discursive orders, the production of (historical) meaning, signification systems, literature, writing, and, ultimately, the epistemological, phenomenal, cultural, political, power-related, and ethical dimension of images. In 1966 Michel Foucault publishes The Order of Things, to claim that discursive constellations producing meaning respond to historical changes, emerging within the respective hegemonic system of cultural and political power. In 1967, Roland Barthes acknowledges The Death of the Author, to infer that texts have to be regarded as floating entities of meaning production freed from the authority of the author’s intentions. Also in 1967,

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

673

Jacques Derrida confronts the intellectual world with three books that underline the necessity of dismissing the idea that the operations of linguistic signification are based on speaking rather than writing. Derrida promotes a reflection upon the written sign as the foundation for a fresh, anti-metaphysical understanding of signification. The main target of early poststructuralist and deconstructionist studies is the linguistic sign. Derrida focuses on writing in order to criticize the metaphysical thinking of self-presence as well as the reduction of the differential system to synchronic operations and the self-sufficient functionality of structuralist accounts. Barthes deals with literature in order to highlight that the meaning of a text amounts to more than what the author conceives as such. Under the notion of discourse, Foucault seems to deal with a more specific kind of linguistic signification. However, discourse turns out to be the concept describing a general, power-laden system of meaning production that is likely to operate based on language. Authors inspired by poststructuralism and deconstruction like Rosalind Krauss, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, Gayatri C. Spivak, Louis Marin, Laura Mulvey or Kaja Silverman have explicitly focused on different fields of image studies, such as art, photography or film. Before turning to the specific contributions of the respective thinkers to images studies, I want to give a general idea of what kind of impulses poststructuralism and deconstruction provide for dealing with and (re-)thinking the image. With regard to pictorial signs and images, poststructuralism and deconstruction hint at the need to question the emergence of pictorial meaning based on a simple relatedness of picture and depicted (ontological and epistemological levels), scrutinize the representation of a formerly present, depicted element in the picture (ontological level), thematize the discourse (including the historical, cultural, political context and the power relations) that shapes the ways an image is perceived and read (phenomenological and epistemological levels), reflect upon the circulability of images and the emergence of alternative pictorial meaning in non-original contexts (phenomenological, epistemological and ethical levels), problematize the traditional epistemological foundation of image reception by bracketing the juxtaposition of reality and fiction (epistemological and ethical levels).

1   Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist Pioneers 1.1   Michel Foucault Although Michel Foucault refused to accept being considered a poststructuralist, he can be regarded as one of the pioneers of the movement nonetheless. Since it is not the place here to elaborate on the complex issue of the

674 

I. LANER

development and categorization of schools of thought, I will leave this topic to those focusing on the history of ideas. For the sake of systematization, I will stick to a broadly shared understanding of Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida as pioneers of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thinking, being aware of the many differences and disparities of their accounts. As these partly substantial disparities are normally not dealt with in the context of image studies, I refer to them only at this point. Foucault is known for his analyses of discourses and power relations. He investigates antique, medieval, and modern conceptions of sexuality, madness, discipline, and so on, in order to unravel dominant discursive constellations, but also hinting at neglected, hidden dimensions of knowledge and meaning. Foucault’s analyses focus on language in the first place. In multiple works (Foucault 2002, 2003, 2004), he highlights not only how language exercises power but also how language itself is structured by political, cultural, and social forces. Consequently, language and power have to be conceived as mutually dependent. Although there is a strong emphasis on language, it can be claimed that the same goes for the image. In The Order of Things (1966) Foucault comments on Diego Velázquez’s famous painting Las Meninas, claiming that it exhibits an epistemological as well as phenomenological change in the production of meaning that is characteristic of Classical modern thinking. It indicates the rupture of a pre-Classical conception of likeness, which considers signification as non-representational (Foucault 2002). Generally, Foucault argues that in the era of representation—beginning in the seventeenth century—language seizes to operate on multiple levels of signification, being confined to an abstract operation of a signifier referencing a signified content that can be analyzed afterward (ibid., 49). Velázquez’s painting—a condensed and complex picture portraying the Spanish royal family and the painter painting the royal offspring while being watched by the royal couple—shows traces of Classical representation. However, it not only displays a representational element but also reflects the logic of representation. In the eyes of Foucault, Las Meninas can be regarded as a portrayal of Classical representation. It refers to the apparatus (dispositif) of signification that is characteristic of modernity. Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas suggests that images, regarded as signification systems shaped by a distinct power-knowledge nexus, respond to a dominant order of visualization. Through his studies he underlines that there is a discourse that—to a certain extent—controls meaning production. The dominance of the discourse is not conclusive, though. This is because the apparatus characteristic of an epoch is neither self-sufficient nor necessary in a causal sense. Since an apparatus is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid” (Foucault 1980, 194), it internalizes a field of immense tension that can easily break apart. Furthermore, the apparatus emerges in a dynamic interaction with alternative discourses, rebellious institutions, and renegade ideas. Therefore,

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

675

besides the normalized tendencies of meaning production, there are also instances that can subvert, pervert or undermine the dominant discourse. They can establish a “counter-discourse” (ibid., 48), pointing toward the fluidity, the relativity, and the limitation of hegemonic systems of power. The dynamics of counter-­movements are also at the heart of Foucault’s reflections on heterotopia. Heterotopia is a notion introduced to describe spaces that are located at the edge of the normal world, being blocked off or even excluded while forming an essential part of it. Such “counter sites” (Foucault 1986, 24) allow for the emergence of non-hegemonic discourses, different forms of knowledge, alternative practices and meanings. With regard to image studies, the idea of heterotopia is of interest, since it allows us to consider contexts of image production and also image reception as corresponding not only to the normalized, homotopical order but also to the alternative order of counter sites. Furthermore, heterotopia as a concept itself has to do with the image; namely, as Foucault underlines, it can be best understood by reference to the mirror, which displays a special kind of image. Very much as utopia, heterotopia can be considered as reflecting objects, thus opening up a dynamic play of presence and absence. Even more than utopia, heterotopia installs an actual space for reflection, a living image one might say, where the conditions, limitations, and constraints of its corresponding homotopia become negotiable. Not only on the level of image production but also on the level of reception, there are ways of subverting, perverting or undermining a one-dimensional relatedness of signifier and signified. Against a “rational discourse”, which is identified as modernity’s realization of the power-knowledge nexus, it is possible to “look […] to the region where ‘things’ and ‘words’ have not yet been separated, and where—at the most fundamental level of language—seeing and saying are still one” (Foucault 2003, xii). Again, Foucault refers to language in the first place. Still, his methodological reflections upon dealing with words and (written) documents can also be applied to the field of image reception. Since an image, like a word, can be regarded as a sign whose meaning circles around a dynamic between signifier and signified, it is open for communicating more than the original intention of the image-maker. Images, like words, can be considered “as events and functional segments gradually corning together to form a system” (ibid. xix). A poststructuralist discourse-analytical approach to images in connection with Foucault would then not focus on extracting a signified originally intended by an image-maker. Rather, it would analyze the image in living relation to other images, words and documents, asking for a power-knowledge nexus that it might affirm or contradict. 1.2   Roland Barthes Like Foucault, Roland Barthes takes interest in the living context of signs, analyzing their determining conditions as well as their eventful character. Other than Foucault, he does not primarily focus on the question of historical genesis. Rather, he investigates recent developments in (primarily Western) culture and

676 

I. LANER

society. Nevertheless, he comes to similar conclusions: he also underlines that signification systems have to be treated as culturally and socially constituted, responding to historical change: “[S]igns are gestures, attitudes, expressions, colours or effects, endowed with certain meanings by virtue of the practice of a certain society: the link between signifier and signified remains if not unmotivated, at least entirely historical” (Barthes 1977, 27). By underlining the historical link between signifier and signified, Barthes claims that there is no given or necessarily steady meaning of signs. Instead, signs are open to produce meaning differently with regard to various contexts. These contexts are shaped by distinct epistemological, economic, ideological or ethical interests. Barthes’ poststructuralist endeavor can be seen in the effort to eye the historicity and the epistemological as well as ethical normativity of signification systems, thematizing the “institutional activity” (ibid., 31) taking part in their constitution. Since it is this very activity that one needs to be aware of for understanding signification processes, it is necessary to dismiss the idea of an author whose intentions are communicated by ways of the signs they bring forward. In the very moment of leaving a remaining trace, the author sets a sign free to be received in different contexts, each being shaped by distinct interests. If the author is not anymore present and capable of stressing the meaning they intended, a controlling, sovereign subject gets lost and the sign is set free. Barthes infers that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (ibid. 142). The declaration of the death of the author, spelled out as the death of the subject and of identity, is a central argument in both poststructuralist and deconstructionist thinking. It is an important motive when it comes to the reception not only of written documents but also of images understood as remaining traces left by an image-maker. More than Foucault and Derrida, Barthes takes an explicit interest in the image, highlighting the signification processes and the meaning that can be regarded as characteristic of images. In general, he claims that images bear a denotative, that is, immediate, non-coded, non-normative, pre-ideological, layer of meaning that can interfere with certain connotative, that is, representational, coding, normative, ideological functions they fulfill in different contexts. Speaking of “the denoted image” (ibid. 42) or the “punctum” (Barthes 1981, 42), he searches for concepts useful for investigating a level of meaning in images that is not entirely historically, culturally and socially determined. Since Barthes wants to uncover its originality, he is not only interested in the relatedness but also the differences between image and text. The image is understood as a condensed signification system expanding over multiple layers of meaning, both regarding its production and regarding its reception. They all take part in constituting the “‘language’ of the image” (Barthes 1977, 46). The image is thus read in an indecisive act that oscillates between decoding its symbolic content and responding to a more immediate, non-coded expression, which it brings about. As regards the latter, Barthes struggles to find concepts,

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

677

that is, words, for describing a phenomenon that escapes description. Referred to as “obtuse meaning” (ibid. 56), he hints at a level of meaning production in images that disturbs all forms of criticism, since it conflicts with the language that speaks about phenomena. With regard to such a layer of meaning, we can agree that it is there, but we do not find words to describe it. The well-known punctum touches a similar point, delineating the expressive, captivating, denotative character of an image that is clearly distinguished from the content it refers to. In opposition to the “studium” which outlines the level of cultural, historical, socially relevant meaning, the punctum interrupts the process of reading, of decoding and of understanding (Barthes 1981, 25). Accordingly, the image can be regarded as a sign that can be read and at the same time resists reading in opening up another—affective, sensual, overwhelming, and disturbing—dimension of meaning. 1.3   Jacques Derrida In the same year as Barthes publishes The Death of the Author (Barthes 1977), Jacques Derrida brings forward three books: Speech and Phenomena (also translated as Voice and Phenomenon), (Derrida 1973) Of Grammatology, (Derrida 1997) and Writing and Difference (Derrida 2005). These publications lay the foundation for an in-depth deconstructionist engagement with signification systems, especially with linguistic signs. Although in this early stage of his work Derrida almost exclusively refers to language, these texts provide the basis for rethinking the image in a deconstructionist way as well. Generally speaking, the deconstructionist endeavor is very much motivated by the need to question a “metaphysics of presence” (Derrida 1973, 10). In exclusively focusing on the “here and now”, Derrida criticizes a dominant branch in the Western theory of ideas not to take time and “temporalization” (Derrida 1982, 8), as he calls it, seriously. If being is understood by focusing on its present state, separating it from other beings, previous and coming forms as well as constitutive differential relations are ignored. In such a picture, being is extracted, cut out and reduced in spatial as well as in a temporal sense. The absent, in terms of what is not here and now, is implicitly regarded as the other which does not form part in constituting the self. Derrida is convinced that a thinking based upon binary oppositions like presence versus absence, self versus other is misleading and reductionist. Therefore, he claims that it is important to start off philosophical reflections with questioning such dualisms. He regards presence as infiltrated by absence, the self as haunted by the other. With regard to signification systems, this means that he considers linguistic signs not by focusing on speech, but rather on writing. Writing, for Derrida, exhibits the complex entanglements of presence and absence: a written sign is the trace of an act of engraving that happened sometime in the past. Its distinct being is dependent on its differing from other signs. In order to produce meaning it has to be read at a certain point in time. However, it can also be read by others at other times, possibly eliciting a

678 

I. LANER

different meaning. A written sign can circulate across different contexts, relativizing or even unsettling an original context of meaning. It is only afterward that one can conceive what a sign has meant. Here and now, the sign is split, constitutively out of itself, being related to what it is not (yet), in a spatial as well as in a temporal sense. The permanent movement of differing from itself is described by introducing the term différance: “We provisionally give the name différance to this sameness which is not identical: by the silent writing of its a, it has the desired advantage of referring to differing, both as spacing/temporalizing and as the movement that structures every dissociation” (Derrida 1973, 129-30). Derrida here refers to differing on a spatial and on a temporal level. Later, he introduces the term iterability to further clarify the temporal dimension of differing that has been put in second place by structuralism. Iterability, which refers to a movement of repetition that brings across change, underlines the relatedness of sign, meaning, context and time. Derrida points out that every sign has to be repeatable and, thus, open to being exposed to various contexts in order to be readable: “In order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, in altering its identity and singularity, divides the seal” (Derrida 1982, 328-9). To repeat something here refers to an act not of bringing something formerly given back; rather, the repeated is constituted through acts of repetition as subject to change. There is no content or substance to be found before the play of repetition starts. According to Derrida, two acts of repetition cannot be identical; therefore, the repeated can never stay true to itself, being constitutively related to the actual occurrence of repetition. A sign and its meaning is nothing beyond its being in time. As a consequence, becoming in terms of being repeated forms a constitutive part of every sign and of every being in general. Identity is not given, but produced within a never-ending play of change through repetition. Therefore, it cannot be regarded as closed at a certain moment in time. Only afterward, the identity of something can be attributed with regard to a specific moment of time. Derrida’s critical understanding of sign resonates with the replacing of the French term “signe” with “marque”. This replacement indicates the need to stress the remaining and resistant character of the sign. Marque thus refers to a resting, repeatable and identifiable sign which enters a process of alteration while leaving something behind. What is left behind will have been the identity of meaning—a meaning that is only graspable from a subsequent perspective. The notions of iterability and marque are useful for rethinking not only the linguistic sign but also the image in a deconstructionist way. To regard images as marques that are constituted in acts of iteration means that the iconic (Boehm) or pictorial (Mitchell) difference constituting an image’s meaning is not conclusive. Rather, such a difference eventfully articulates itself within changing contexts. Neither the original context of image production, nor the author’s intention, nor an expert reading can determine what an image means. Still these contexts do make a difference. In accordance with Foucault, Derrida’s

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

679

notion of the archive is illuminating in this respect. Images are never standing for themselves; they are often, if not always, archived. Museums, catalogues, libraries, collections, exhibitions, social media, blogs, and so on, are means to archive images. With Derrida (in this respect he is very close to Foucault, although focusing not on the historical but on a structural presentation) it can be underlined that the archiving of images is an event that intrudes the archived, thus changing it: “Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives” (Derrida 1996, 18). The archive is considered as “at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional” (ibid., 7). Derrida’s deconstructionist account therefore allows for problematizing the conditions of the emergence of meaning of images. The comparably rare deliberations Derrida has on images explicitly underline this possibility. In his reflections on photography (Derrida 2001, 2010a, 2010b) Derrida questions the transparency attributed to the photographic image, underlining that their significative, that is, referential, character is more complex than it is sometimes believed. In his more general elaborations on modern aesthetics (Derrida 1987), he takes interest in a topic that is central for image studies: the frame. The act of framing is regarded as an act of delimitation, of defining a line between inside and outside, corresponding to an exercise of power. The act of framing opens up the image to the outside of the image and herein questions an order of juxtapositions. Derrida searches for the “insistent atopics of the parergon: neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work” (ibid., 9). Following this idea, a deconstructionist approach must focus on the problematic juxtapositions in Classical concepts of image: inside versus outside, framed versus unframed, picture versus depicted, maker versus spectator, subjectivity versus objectivity and transparence versus obscurity. Especially when it comes to the dualism of presence and absence in images, Derrida unravels their contraposition not only in his reflections on photography but also with regard to fine arts more generally (Derrida 1993).

2   Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist Approaches in Image Studies The reflections of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thinkers like Foucault, Barthes and Derrida have inspired a number of authors in the field of image studies. Especially for approaches with a feminist, post-colonial and critical interest, they provide a fruitful basis for a number of highly ambitious approaches. In the following, I will refer to some exemplary subject areas of image studies that have been shaped by French Theory in order to give an idea of the survival of Foucauldian, Barthesian and Derridean thought.

680 

I. LANER

2.1  Art As one of the most bustling art critics and theorists in the US, Rosalind Krauss develops a fully fledged approach that draws on poststructuralist and deconstructionist ideas. Abandoning the modern idea of aesthetic autonomy, she takes interest in the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, trying to develop a theory that is useful for describing postmodernism (Krauss 1985, 2000). While Modern Art is obsessed with the idea of extracting the proper nature of the medium it works with, Postmodern Art is looking for an alternative self-­ description after having dismissed the notion of the proper, the pure and the whole. The criticism of modernity brought forward in this context shows a range of poststructuralist and deconstructionist motives: a focus on differentiality, contextuality and institutional critique, the thematization of economic conditions of art production, the questioning of an inherited dualistic thinking which is expressed in juxtapositions such as original versus copy, presence versus absence and proper versus improper. Krauss does not only refer to poststructuralist and deconstructionist ideas in order to develop a theory of Postmodern Art; moreover, she underlines the influence of Derrida’s “poststructuralism” on intellectual debates about avant-garde art. Here the critique of aesthetic autonomy, the questioning of the proper with regard to form as well as to content, and the rejection of a division of exterior and interior are crucial elements (Krauss 2000, 32-3). Another approach to art, which is also inspired by poststructuralist and deconstructionist ideas, but with notably different consequences, is put forward by Louis Marin. Marin takes interest in issues as different as representation and perspective in medieval painting (Marin 2002), the exercise of power through and by images (Marin 1988) or textures of the visible in Modern Art. His analyses of works by Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio or Paul Klee focus on the individual expressivity of canonized pieces of art. Like Foucault, Marin’s studies walk the line between historical contextualization and the break with this very context. More than his contemporaries, the art historian, critic, semiotician and philosopher, Marin elaborates on motives of discontinuity in images. Here, he calls for an alternative reading of art, an approach that differs from traditional, canonic art history or criticism. Here his approach is close to Barthes’ or Derrida’s interest in the “other”, which brackets, contradicts or undermines the canon, appearing in images. For Marin, it is key to underline the expressivity of images that cannot be reduced to a function of representation. Images are as much presenting as they are representing and therefore, they can never be limited to expressing a specific historical meaning. By considering the different elements thematized in the accounts of Krauss and Marin, the various lines of thought proceeding from poststructuralism and deconstruction with regard to art are perceptible: on the one hand, there are approaches which are very sympathetic to Foucault in contextualizing and historicizing images, while hinting at the limits of contextualization and historization, stressing possible changes of paradigms, heterotopical elements and

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

681

hidden knowledge. On the other hand, there is an understanding which is maybe closer to Barthes and Derrida in the endeavor to de-contextualize, even de-historicize images to a certain extent by stressing their power to break with a determined, canonized meaning. 2.2   Cinema and Film Besides art, French Theory has shaped image studies with respect to some media more than to others: film studies and the theory of photography are two fields notably affected. Within feminist image studies, for instance, there is a great influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction especially when it comes to an engagement with cinema and film. Feminist film studies, like film studies in general, also show a strong interest in psychoanalytical theory, focusing on the writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Lacan is also considered a poststructuralist thinker, since his psychoanalytical account builds upon the idea that the psyche can only be analyzed with the help of signification systems, language more specifically. Like Foucault, Barthes and Derrida Lacan takes signification systems to be open to change and alteration, yet with another emphasis. For him, as a psychoanalyst, it is crucial to be aware of the psychic forces operating in language and signification more generally. Psychoanalysis provides a crucial background for the pioneers as well, especially for Derrida who is an engaged reader of Sigmund Freud, but also of his contemporary Jacques Lacan. Feminist thinking in general deals with the inequality of men and women in society and, herein, the question of power and control. Laura Mulvey, one of the central figures in feminist film studies, builds upon a view that is inspired by psychoanalytical theory, but that shows Foucauldian motives in regard to language as both determining and being determined by power. According to her, the power of language, which is understood as a patriarchal element of control, limits the scope of visual pleasure in cinema. Mulvey (1985) analyzes Classical Hollywood films in order to show that patriarchal power regulates image production and reception. Hollywood movies reproduce the problematic constellation of an active, controlling, gazing male subject and a passive, controlled, envisioned female object. While focusing on the audible elements of cinema and thematizing the female voice, Kaja Silverman follows a similar track; by stressing her psychoanalytic interest, she examines in how far “classic cinema has the potential to reactivate the trauma of symbolic castration within the viewer, and that it puts sexual difference in place as a partial defense against that trauma” (Silverman 1988, 1). Following the works of Mulvey and Silverman, poststructuralist and deconstructionist elements in feminist film studies can be seen in need of unraveling structures of power and oppression in image production as well as image reception.

682 

I. LANER

2.3  Photography Silverman not only takes interest in cinema and film, she also enters into the world of photographic images. She considers photographs as analogies, oscillating between similarity and difference. Again, one can find poststructuralist and deconstructionist motives such as the rejection of dualistic thinking here, since Silverman underlines the dynamics of photographic images to resist a classification as either perfectly copying or distorting their referent (Silverman 2015, 11-12). Developing her thesis about the photographic image as an analogue, she draws, amongst others—such as Walter Benjamin—on Barthes specifically. This is not surprising, since for Barthes photography produces images that are of immense interest for poststructuralist analyses. Therefore, he is the central source of inspiration for a theory of photography that draws on poststructuralism and deconstruction. For Barthes, photographic images provide a distinct ontological structure: they are “tautological” (Barthes 1981, 5), meaning that the photograph points to the event photographed—the photographic referent—by way of substituting it. In this context, photographs can be regarded as indexical signs. According to Charles S. Peirce, in contrast to the icon and the symbol, the index does not produce meaning by resemblance or convention. Rather, every index signifies on the basis of a physical or existential relation with its referent. The photographic image is considered to be an indexical sign, since it does not establish meaning on the basis of resemblance but on the basis of a physical connection to the object photographed (Cf. Peirce 1998, 281ff.). Krauss takes up Peirce’s definition, noting that indices bear a “physical relationship to their referents” (Krauss 1985, 198). Accordingly, they refer, but they are not necessarily like their referents. The lack of similarity can come along with a lack of meaning. Krauss therefore considers the index as a sign without code, cut out of a worldly context of established meanings: “Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface […] [and thus] bears an indexical relationship to its object. Its separation from true icons is felt through the absoluteness of this physical genesis, one that seem to short-circuit or disallow those processes of schematization or symbolic intervention that operate within the graphic representation of most paintings” (ibid, 203). Like Silverman, Krauss refers to Barthes and his definition of photography as a “message without code” (Barthes 1977, 44). The distinct character of photographs can be seen in their lack of eliciting a decodable meaning. Accordingly, the kind of meaning they produce is different. The photo points to something that has been there. However, it can only be referred to as it appears in the photograph. Therefore, the photographic referent substitutes the object photographed and, consequently, overlays it. Barthes notes that there is no referent outside of the photo, but that the referent is established through and inside the photo: “I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself; is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as a medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?)” (Barthes 1981, 45).

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

683

Derrida takes up this idea of Barthes when he reflects upon photography and death (Derrida 2001, 2010b). For him, photography cannot be considered a medium of mere reproduction. This is because the photographic image spans over the moment of image production and the event of image reception: “[R]ecording an image would become inseparable from producing an image and would therefore lose the reference to an external and unique referent” (Derrida 2010a, 5). Derrida speaks of an “acti/passivity” (ibid., 12), characteristic for photography, herein underlining the deconstructionist approach. 2.4   Ethics and Politics of the Image Judith Butler also relates to photography in order to elaborate on the ethical consequences of a poststructuralist and deconstructivist approach to images. In her book Frames of War (Butler 2009), she considers the failure of attributing a specific meaning to images by preventing their circulation in other contexts than the one intended for distribution. In a critical reading of Susan Sontag’s theory of photography, Butler underlines that photographic images do not have “narrative coherence” (ibid., 67). Once they break with the political, ideological, cultural or social context that provides them with a specific meaning by adding captions or stories that help to understand them, the interpretational void becomes evident. Photographic images are framed. The frame indicates an act of extraction that makes it possible to insert the image into various settings. Every setting of image production and image reception is shaped by historical, political, cultural and social norms. In acts of image reception, the inside and the outside of frames often become inseparable. Accordingly, when we look at photographic images, we do not understand what is represented in the image, that is, the referent; rather, we understand the norming socio-political commentary about what is considered right or wrong. Hence, photographic images fulfill a moralizing function in our society. Butler stresses that we become educated through images insofar as we believe in the norms that are put in the picture. For Butler, there is not only this negative effect of a norming moralism communicated via images though. She claims that it is crucial to learn to regard not only the image, but apprehend the frames as a consequence of the insight that they are framed. For an ethical rapport with images, we need to develop a critical attitude that builds upon core poststructuralist and deconstructionist insights. Butler’s analyses do not only hint at the ethical but also at the political implications of image production and reception. In her understanding, ethics and politics of images are closely related. The political theorist Chantal Mouffe also takes interest in the way images influence our view of the world. For her, however, it is not so much the danger of emotional involvement and affection that must be problematized. Rather, she is convinced that images have a fruitful, but often neglected political potential, especially because they move us emotionally, they affect us and they inspire our imagination. Following Antonio Gramsci, Mouffe (2013) claims with regard to images that we do not only

684 

I. LANER

respond to those desires shaped by the norms of image production or distribution. Namely, images can also bring along new, more critical desires which are crucial for a kind of political revolution that does not stem from the mere intellectual conviction that something has to be changed, but at the same time from an emotional insight. She stresses that “common sense can be transformed through counter-hegemonic interventions, and this is where cultural and artistic practices can play a decisive role” (ibid., 90). Imagination is also an issue Gayatri C. Spivak underlines when she thinks about the role of images in our society. According to her, images, and the strengthening of our capacity of imagination more generally, can “teach the subject to play” (Spivak 2007, 10). Playing means to walk the line between the factual and the non-factual, exploring the limits of what is, in terms of considering what could be. Images and imagination can open up new horizons that serve to question our given understanding of the world, our norms and our conceptions of right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and so on. They can confront the other and, herein, negotiate the relationship of self and other on a very fundamental level.

References Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text. London: Fontana. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New  York: Hill and Wang. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind. The Self Portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2010a. Copy, Archive, Signature. A Conversation on Photography. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2010b. Athens, Still Remains. The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme. New York: Fordham University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces”. Diacritics, 16 (1): 22–27. Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge.

  FRENCH THEORY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION 

685

Foucault, Michel. 2004. The Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. Marin, Louis. 1988. Portrait of the King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marin, Louis. 2002. On Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics. Thinking The World Politically. London: Verso. Mulvey, Laura. 1985 [1975]. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen, 16 (3): 6–18. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. Collected Papers. 2. Elements of Logic. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 2015. The Miracle of Analogy. The History of Photography, Part I. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2007. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Anglo-American Theory: Representation and Visual Activism Andrea Pru ̊chová Hru ̊zová

When reading about images and visual culture, one frequently encounters the term representation. Often, this situation results in a confusion because it forces us to ask about a relationship between image and representation and between visual culture and representation: What is a representation and how does it differ from an image? What is the role of representation in the field of visual culture? This chapter tries to answer these simple (at the first sight), however very complex (when examined closely) questions by inviting a reader into a realm of visual culture where theoretical writing on images gets more politically engaged and critically addresses and reflects on social issues. It refers to a group of authors whose theoretical work has been inseparably connected with their work as political activists and prominent figures of public education. In the first part, a wider cultural context, in which the notion of representation emerged, is established. Then the text provides an insight into how the authors Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, John Berger and Nicholas Mirzoeff have approached the issue of representation in their unique ways, and yet with a common goal: to show us that visual culture is both a powerful tool through which ruling powers of modern society can control the people and a platform based on which the people can control the leading structures. In the end, we discuss some of the protest movements emerging lately in the fields of visual arts and political culture. We use them as examples of visual activism that is seen as a practical implementation of the presented theoretical accounts into the contemporary public life.

A. P. Hrůzová (*) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_42

687

688 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

1   Representation, Politics and Visuality Just a short look at the word representation allows us to see it as compounding of two parts: a prefix re meaning a repetition and a central presentation referring to a subject or an object that emerges in the moment of “now”. A final equation deriving from this simple account then says that the representation means a staging a subject or an object that existed in a previous situation (then-now) in front of us (our present-now). It also means that what we are experiencing is not a direct phenomenon existing here and now only for us, but that we are facing to a situation of mediation. What I see is a construction built in a specific situation. It is a constellation of various factors of where and when I am, who I am, with whom I am, how I am and how are those I am with. W. J. T. Mitchell therefore argues that “[Visual culture] aspires to explain not merely the ‘social construction of the visual field’, but the visual construction of the social field” (Mitchell 2015, 9). The term representation, however, also bears a one different meaning. It refers to the public political sphere where people choose candidates, who later represent their beliefs, opinion and wishes for a public good in ruling infrastructures on various levels, from local politics to the parliament. The context of using the word representation is in this case more pragmatic, but a principle remains the same: me as a subject cannot be present every time when public matters are discussed, and therefore, I act through my public representative, who functions as a kind of performative agent. This chapter aims to connect these two ways of understanding the term representation. We see it as (1) a mediated appearance of a subject or an object and (2) a performative political agent. It is not difficult to think about the representation in this way in the field of visual culture. Just a short test of our imagination verifies it: think about who/which groups and topics are visible, less visible or even invisible in the public life and media? The list immediately conjures up (e.g., celebrities, care takers and homeless people). Of course, the answer will very much differ if a university professor, a sport manager, an art student and a warehouseman are asked; however, that also tells us a lot about the issue of representation—these people see the world differently. They have their own filter consisting of a specific family, social, political and educational background, which create the lenses through which they decode the world. Various groups of people and various set of topics are differently visible to them. So if we understand representation as a mediated political performative agent, the issue of visuality lies in the center of our discussion. The simple example of how people coming from different social spheres see the world differently also points out a main characteristic of the visuality that should be constantly stressed out. It is produced by a prevailing social and political system. It is not a naturally given fact that some groups of people like migrants, refugees, religious or ethnic minorities stay underrepresented, misrepresented or invisible in the mainstream media and public discussions. The visuality is an outcome of activity of social powers, which co-create a core of the system in which we live and which can decide about how the reality looks

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

689

like to us. The representations are then the key tools for producing any picture of the world. As summarized by Nicholas Mirzoeff: “visualizing is the production of visuality (that seeks) to present authority as self-evident” (2011, 3).

2  Envisioning the World of Responsible Representations The issue of visuality became the very prominent topic in the first decades of the second half of the twentieth century. Retrospectively, we call this period of the late 1960s and the early 1970s the era of “cultural wars”. Actually, there were not waged any military wars revolving around a physical violence as we know them, but certain groups of people were fighting on a symbolical level for a new political infrastructure of the society. In the lead of these symbolical wars, there were standing anti-war, Afro-American, feminist, New Left and LGBTQI groups. Even though the Civil Right Movement, which resulted from activities of these groups, was a very diverse platform and had its important specifics within individual communities as well as it got different forms in the United States and in Europe, its main agenda can be subsumed under one common slogan: we want to build a pacifistic and inclusive society. The one in which the minorities and marginalized communities like women, Afro-Americans and LGBTQI members become publicly visible, are represented in a proper way and—as an outcome of this change—are less ostracized. Retrospectively, it should not be a surprise to us that such a socially active era happened in this specific time period. At that time, a complicated war reconstruction had been finished and a great migration movement started due to a fall of many powerful colonial regimes. Simultaneously, a new political-­ geographical map of the world with a strict line between the West and the East was drawn. The eastern part of Europe got swallowed by the totalitarian Soviet Union, while the western regions continued developing a democratic culture, which boomed into a strong philosophical movement of structuralism and post-structuralism. The rise of new media played an important role too. In the United States, “(b)y early 1960s, television was an undeniable catalyst in the momentum of the nonviolent civil right movement” (Watson 2008, 39). A wider spread of television into average households, pubs and bars brought with it a very spectacular content mix. On the one hand, there was an intense influx of violent pictures of war cruelties happening in Vietnam as well as a coverage of the death of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and President Kennedy. On the other hand, there were television characters of successful African-Americans and strong female figures occurring on screen (e.g., I Spy, 1965; Mission Impossible, 1966 or Julia, 1968). In order to understand better how crucial the term representation was for these groups, a definition of representation as proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell can be found helpful. Mitchell directly links the representation with the ethics. He

690 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

describes the representation in a following way: “(W)e thought about representation […] as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships […] (which is) the relay mechanism in exchanges of power, value and publicity” (Mitchell 1994, 420). He coins the term responsible representation in order to emphasize how powerful tool of communication the representation is in our society. The responsible representation does not provide only a transparent descriptive depiction of a subject, an object or a situation, but it bears the awareness of its impact on a viewer, on her political, social and moral values and beliefs. And since we know that the representation is not a self-immanent subject that would exist by itself, but it is a mediated agent, those whose are supposed to raise this awareness are creators, editors and professional interpreters of the visual content. The various groups involved in cultural wars were creating the responsible representations in order to become visible through them. By doing so, they were not reflecting only on their own position, but they were calling for the need of a larger transformation of society.

3  The Birth of the Modern Order and Its Visibility Nevertheless, the decade of cultural wars represents one of many outcomes of a much longer and complex process of the modernization of society, which can be traced back at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The modern society, which had been built upon the growing trends of industrialization, urbanization and global interconnectivity, required a new system of organization and control. Based on this new infrastructure, the highest possible level of production driven by the idea of a never-ending progress should have been achieved. In order to describe the modern society, the metaphor of a machine is frequently used. It pregnantly visualizes a man, who had been turned into being a part of a larger mechanism (a society) and to whom a specific role (an occupation) and a social position (a class) had been assigned. The system of modern science, which was born at the same time, employs the principles of categorization and hierarchy in the similar way. That is why the modern infrastructure of society, possessed by organization and control, seeks for means, which would allow it to keep a set order of things and to protect it from any kind of deviation. The visibility becomes to be one of the most effective tools for achieving this goal. A direct link between the visibility and the modern social order has been explored in depth by the work of Michel Foucault, whose writing—with no surprise—emerged in the decade of cultural wars. Foucault focuses on one of the most basic elements of our communication, the sight, and presents it to us as a complex mean through which the power in modern society is executed. It depicts it as an important part of a dispositif (Deleuze 1988; Foucault 1977), a set of practices and techniques, which control a proper implementation of a man into the machine of the social system. Paradoxically, the sight works as a crucial vehicle of the power execution due to its invisibility. We consider to be a natural fact that we see some subjects, objects, and situations around us that

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

691

we prefer to have a visual encounter with certain people, meanwhile we avoid looking at others, or that we are aesthetically pleased or disgust by some objects. These tendencies and preferences, Foucault argues, are not given by nature, but are socially constructed by and within a complex system of various institutions like family, school, law, morality or art (Deleuze 1986). These institutions shape our vision of the world and teach us the importance and the value of people, objects, events, and places. This is how the power effects us from above. However, it is us who make those minor decisions who, what and how to look at in our everyday lives. That is how the power effects us from below, when we internalize the external institutional power. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), the interpreters of Foucault’s body of work, call this process to be simultaneously happening “self-creation and the auto-colonisation”. An interesting example of how the sight and the institution cooperate in order to produce the representations of control offers a historical research by Tony Bennett on the birth of the museum (1995). The book of the same name was published just two years after the another famous title on the topic of museum got released—Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruins (1993). In the later one, the author demonstrates from a position of an art historian how not only museums but the whole canon of art history function as vehicles for maintaining a set hierarchy of objects and events in the history of culture. Bennett, who finds a great inspiration in Foucault’s work (as Crimp does too), takes this idea even further and calls the museum to be the “institution comprising the exhibitionary complex” (Bennett 1988, 74). Drawing on a historical case of the first global exhibition, the Great Exhibition, that took place in London in 1851, Bennett presents the museum as a specific and in a way “insidious” type of institution, which use the sight differently from Foucault’s famous examples of the prison or the hospital. In them, the Subject gets separated from the public sphere, so the society is protected from any kind of violation. The museum works on the opposite principle. It opens the Subject toward the public sphere when it presents to her how the public life and the history looks like through the format of exhibition. “(It has) the power to command and arrange things and bodies for public display (…, which are) interiorising its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self-­ regulation” (Bennett 1995, 63). As the chapter shows later, the order of objects and historical narratives, which are built around them, present nowadays one of the crucial issues which visual activist projects discuss (Fig. 1).

4  The Complex of Visuality The complex interconnection between the sight and the power also represents a central point of the more recent body of work of Nicholas Mirzoeff, the author whose deriving point lies in a combination of visual and decolonial studies. Likewise Foucault, Mirzoeff traces an origin of the contemporary social power structures back to the nineteenth century. However, in the center of his interest, there are the issues of colonialism and slavery standing, emerging

692 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

Fig. 1  Joseph Paxton, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, Crystal Pallace, 1851; British Library, London (in public domain)

in the epoch of imperialism. Through discussing these two power structures of control, which almost invisibly intervene in everyday life, Mirzoeff (2011) shows visuality as an extensive field through which the authority delivers its control. He coins the term complex of visuality in order to emphasize the extent of this sphere, which—beside a physical space—affects also our imagination, social organization and mental condition. He makes obvious that representations are not only performative political agents mediating the physical world around us, but that they actively mediate very important abstract notions like nation, labor or wellbeing of man. Mirzoeff describes three basic operations based on which the modern authority establishes and further controls a set order of things that is presented to us as reality. As the first step, the process of classification is coming in order to divide the society into individual classes and groups (in the same way the modern science classify races, animals or flora). The process of separation follows in order to make sure that the classified units will not be able to communicate and collaborate (this is also how the current phenomenon of “social bubbles” works). This way, the authority prevents the people from creating a larger social movements questioning its power. As the last step, the process of aesthetization is happening, evoking a feeling that the division of

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

693

society, the visibility and the invisibility of individual classes, groups and ways of life are naturally given facts. On a historical timeline, the author marks an evolution of three specific complexes of visuality. The first one, the “plantation complex”, emerges in the system of slavery. The sight presents an explicit tool of power within this social constellation. There exists a specific set of rules, how, when and at whom a slave and a master can look at. In this case, the power of authority is executed on a concrete physical space and secured by a specific law. The “imperial complex” as the second one expands beyond the physical realm and pursues to control the whole culture. It actively applies a vocabulary of a newly established discipline of anthropology, when it speaks about a distinction between so-called primitive and sophisticated societies. The primitive ones are then meant to be elevated by a violent implementation of the modern organization, and so an unequal relationship between the Colony and the Metropole is established. The most recent complex of visuality represents the “military-industrial complex” in which the physical sight has been substituted by a remote control. That is delivered by technology that has gradually become a part of our lives. In this complex, any place in the world is perceived as a potential threat for disrupting the social order, and therefore, a permanent observation must be secured. To address this situation of preventive never-ending technological control, Mirzoeff uses the term “post-panopticon visuality”. Through it, he directly refers to Foucault’s famous example of a visual control executed by a guard in a surveillance system of the prison (Foucault 1975), which, in contrast to contemporary ways of control, has its physical limits given by a building.

5  Seeing in Multiplicity, Thinking Diasporic A valuable contribution, which employs a personal lived experience into a discussion about how the authority shapes the culture as well as the lives of individuals through representations, offers the body of work by Stuart Hall. The issue of colonialism and thoughts of the New Left, which Hall actively explored, have significantly formed the ideology of cultural wars. In his writing, Hall effectively uses his own unique experience of being a boy growing up in colonized Jamaica, who as a young man received an excellent education in England, where he later reached a great recognition as a university professor and a public speaker, whose lifelong civic engagement in anti-nuclear, human right and pacifistic movements cannot be separated from his academic research. A base of Hall’s thinking lies in the constructivist philosophy and sociology. He sees the world around us as a social construct given by the authority in power, just as this chapter argues. The representation is then, by no surprise, a crucial concept to him because of its ability to seemingly transparently mediate the image of the world constructed by the ruling power. Hall defines the representation as having “the power to represent someone or something in a certain way” (1997, 249). The “certain way”, according to the author, comes

694 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

as a product of the authority, which directs and controls symbolic practices and operations through which we appropriate the culture around us and an overall mental system through which we think and see. Nevertheless, Hall does not find our world and society to exist as fixed meanings. Just on the contrary, he strongly believes in a possibility of the transformation of society and sees the society as an always-changing phenomenon. Through changing the meaning of symbolic operations, the meaning of individual representations is turned and the transformation happens. As a great example of this ongoing process of transformation of culture, Hall uses the issue of identity. In order to explain how the identity and the transformation are linked, he employs the term positioning: “[…] I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, […] but a constantly shifting process of positioning” (2017, 16). By the term Hall is able to demonstrate a variability and the dynamics of our lived experience, and therefore also of the culture that surrounds us. That is why he strongly emphasizes the importance of understanding to the identity and the culture from the point of view of multiplicity. There is not one set identity, which resides within us, and there is not only one culture to appropriate and learn. In order to show how the aspect of multiplicity works, Hall refers to the existence of the vernacular and the official culture, which existed in the colonized Jamaica side by side. As a specific example of how they interacted, a strategy of “creolisation” is mentioned. It involves the symbolic operations, through which a set of representations bearing an official meaning delivered by the authority is modified and understood only within a community as if the language were doubled. This also clarifies why a diaspora as a social unit as well as a metaphor for how our lives are lived is so important to Hall: “The diasporic is the moment of the double inscription, of creolisation and multiple belongings” (2017, 144). The diasporic makes visible members, values, beliefs, and stories of other-than-official cultures. It enables us avoiding of living in the state of social totality. As a crucial argument, through which the imperial authority supports its dominance over the colonized cultures, resides in calling these cultures less intellectually complex. The sight, again, plays an important role in this failed suggestion. It substitutes the color of the skin, as an easily visible physical sign, for a social code. As a result, one is assigned her intellectual quality based on her skin tone. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) describe this substitution as a “system of equivalence”. In this case, a physical representation is imbued with xenophobic meaning. This example brings us quickly back to the importance of the sight as emphasized by Foucault. If such a wrongly set system of equivalence is established by the power and then effectively reproduced within the institutions like education, science and law, the xenophobic, homophobic, and other socially exclusive tendencies can easily become deeply rooted in our everyday communication.

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

695

6  Authoritative Images of the Spectacle The ways in which the power shapes our identity and culture through representations can be also described and interpreted through an institution, whose main goal is the visibility in public space—the advertisement. The publicity shares with the colonial power one important feature. It produces a doubled image of ourselves. Sociologist and human right activist W. E. B. DuBois calls such a state of mind “double consciousness” (1903). He refers to a situation, when one is experiencing her own unique identity; meanwhile, there exists an outer pressure to appropriate a different image created by the authority. In this way, Stuart Hall describes his years of being a student in Jamaica, who is wearing the British school uniform and knows more facts about the history of Great Britain than about the island that he actually inhabits. The effect of doubled representation that is not examined from the post-­ colonial perspective, but is analyzed through the medium of advertisement, discusses the writing of John Berger, a cultural critic and a political activist. Berger’s most famous title, Ways of Seeing (1972), includes two essays, which directly explore this issue. The final article of the book offers a direct insight into how the advertisement operates. Its key principle derives from the importance of sight as a mean of judgment (as we can also observe in the xenophobic system of equivalence). We are aware of the fact that our physical signs bear connotations, which then direct a way how we interact with each other. We realize that others are delivering the judgment on us, because we are doing so in relation to them. We are the judges as well as those who are judged. That is why Berger concludes that “publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others” (1972, 132). The advertisement teaches us to perceive ourselves as objects which are constantly observed and criticized. It promotes a self-representation on the main principle of communication. In order to become successful in society, we have to let others experience the feeling of envy. In a moment, when others are feeling the desire to become us, we are supposed to experience the happiness. The publicity images therefore perform as agents mediating us the images of those who had already become desirable/successful. They are “manufacturing glamour” (1972, 131) that can be easily achieved by buying a promoted product. The doubled representation is observed by Berger in yet another seminal essay of the book. In the third chapter, he reflects on ways in which women have been represented in course of the history of art. According to the author, the sight as a tool of power is executed by a man due to a historical dominance of male authors and art collectors in this field. This sad reality however mirrors a larger systematic inequality, which women have historically faced. Berger describes this power of a male gaze in following words: “(S)he (woman) is almost continually accompanied of her own image of herself. […] (There is) the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as woman” (46). The woman therefore

696 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

Fig. 2  Arvida Byström, Self-portrait, from the series Virtual Normality, 2017. Photograph: courtesy of the author

experiences a doubled representation as a confrontation of how she sees herself and how she is seen by men (Fig. 2). In its time, the essay immediately became a very important impulse for a feminist interpretation of the visual culture as delivered, for example, by Linda Nochlin (1971) in the field of classical art history or by Laura Mulvey (1975) in the area of film studies and initiated an examination of the issue of female gaze articulated by Griselda Pollock (1988). A strong cultural critique that complexly connects both problems reflected by Berger, the advertisement and the issue of self-valorization, is conducted by Tiqquin (1999), the French collective of thinkers. It uses the notion of “Young-­ Girl” as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980/1987) for whom the figure of the Young-Girl bears a revolutionary potential to rebel against the society, and therefore, it presents a positive element. In Tiqquin’s view, the Young-Girl plays a different role. It is used as the metaphor demonstrating how a capitalist society, where exists a constant push on consumption of commodities, produces the world of spectacle into which we integrate through consuming. The publicity images, which dominate the spectacle as defined by Guy Debord (1967/1994), teach us to apply the other’s judgment on our everyday decision making. According to Tiqquin, they do so too effectively within the capitalist-driven economy, that the perception of our inner Self, our own image, disappears. We fully appropriate the version of the Self given to us by the authority that there is no identity to be doubled. The doubled representation changes into a pure mediation of the Self. “The Young-Girl

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

697

appears as the culminating point of this anthropomorphoses of Capital. […] (This) process requires that every person permanently self-­valorise” (2012, 18). That is why Tiqquin employs the figure of the Young-­Girl as the general metaphor, which does not refer only to women of certain age, but it is aimed to demonstrate how the contemporary capitalist system turns all of us into being the Young-Girl. The collective traces the birth of the Young-Girl back into the era of industrialization in the nineteenth century, as other authors do in this chapter when reflecting on the rise of the modern authority. That is why they firstly call this figure the “Industrial Young-Girl”. In order to capture the more recent social development, they come up with the idea of the “Organic Young-Girl”. In it, they critically reflect on the contemporary interest of (at least) some parts of society in the topics of ecology and sustainability, which have lately become very powerful commercial and political themes that can be (and they are) easily turned into a plain rhetoric and a new spectrum of spectacular representations. According to Tiqquin, the consumption as a key self-identifying activity of the Industrial Young-Girl has now been substituted by the conservation, which presents a main mode of organization of the Organic Young-Girl. This way again, the originally revolutionary potential of the Young-Girl is fading away.

7   Making Difference through and in Visual Culture As this chapter wants to demonstrate, the visual culture is a dynamic and ever-­ changing field on which more or less visible battles about the identity of individuals, communities, cultures, and societies are fought and the representation functions as a main vehicle of these conflicts. As the body of work of Stuart Hall reminds us, the culture and the identity are naturally flexible phenomena and the representation is a dominant mean in the process of negotiating the meanings in culture. The representations serve as both, the bricks building a reality given and presented to us by the authority as a fixed one as well as the triggers of a larger social transformation. The group of authors presented in this chapter are very well aware of this double-edge nature of representation. Moreover, they have actively explored it not only on a theoretical but also on a practical level by becoming active in important political and human right movements. From this perspective, their work meet the criteria of the responsible representation on the highest level. They denaturalize the constructed reality in order to emancipate our ways of seeing while they expand on an ethical aspect of their work by personal engagement and public education. This emancipation of vision and imagination, when the artificial power structures are being exposed and new, unexpected or overlooked realities emerge, allows us to encounter the countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011). The countervisuality does not bring up an opposite arrangement of things, which would present a new order of the world. Instead of providing us with another (even though different) totality, it expands our field of vision by showing us the existence of different groups of people, their ways of living and the sets of

698 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

problems they are facing. “Countervisuality proper”, Mirzoeff argues, “is the claim for the right to look” (2011,  24). It enables us to escape our social bubble and meet various realities as suggested in Hall’s terms diasporic and multiplicity. Therefore, if we reflect on the work of the presented authors, we can conclude that the goal to offer an experience of countervisuality to public is what they deeply have in common. Without a doubt, we can accept the claims that Foucault’s examination of the history of sexuality has significantly amplified the voice of the LGBTQI movement, that Hall’s perspective of multiplicity applied on cultures and identity has largely promoted an intercultural global dialogue, and that Berger’s criticism of a patriarchal and spectacular infrastructure of the visual culture has brought a light on an overlooked and stereo-typified reality of being a woman in modern society. Nevertheless, the society, in which we live nowadays, has greatly changed since the era of cultural wars and these authors. It would be an enormous task to list all elements of this change, so among many others we can name at least the strengthening of global political organizations, the acceleration of digitization and virtualization of our communication and the rise of new media. If thinking about the representation, then the crucial aspect of the latest development lies in the emergence of social media. The images, which they allow to circulate, meet very well the definition of representation from the beginning of this chapter. They mediate the reality which surrounds us, and, at the same time, they function as political agents. Nevertheless, the important change here is that the authors of these representations are us. They have become our avatars, and even though we process these representations based on what a pre-programmed digital platforms allow us to do (e.g., how to crop an image, what kind of filter to apply), we can make visible hidden realities, communities, thoughts and events through them.

8  Emergence of the Performative Appearance A complex analysis of such a mobilizing effect that social media can have on the larger field of visual culture is provided by Nicholas Mirzoeff in his latest book The Appearance of Black Lives Matter (2017). Mirzoeff, who himself acts as an activist and has been involved in the movements Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Decolonise This Place, examines a specific period of time between July 23, 2014, when two members of the African-American community, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, were killed by the police in the USA and January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump Jr. has taken over the presidential office. The book points out on a systematical invisibility of marginalized groups and communities in society, which is deeply linked with a racial and gender hierarchy established by the authority. To communicate this idea clearly, Mirzoeff coins the term appearance. Through it, he suggests that systematically repressed groups of people experience the “regulated appearance”. They find themselves in a situation, when their presence in society and ways how they are re-presented within it have been strongly limited by the authority.

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

699

Black Lives Matter then serves as an example of the protest movement, which is able to oppose the set limits and to create so-called temporary spaces of appearance through social media, “[…] where a crack in the society of control becomes visible […] and people act as if they were free, as if what happens there happens everywhere, now and in the future” (2017, 51). The fluid and temporary character of the spaces of appearance should lead us to understanding the appearance as a performative event: “It (the appearance) does not represent, it performs” (ibid.). This way, it is in contrast to the representation, which acts as a permanent fixed event that is produced in order to last, even though it will be eventually changed. The appearance pops up and provides us with an autonomous view into another reality as created by those who are living it. The performativity of appearance is seen as having two forms: it is kinetic as it arises from a physical interaction in the lived space, and it is potential as it comprises a visual documentation produced by participants themselves. The spaces of appearance question the fixed exclusive power of representation by referring to “here and now” situation, and they offer a visible and practical prove, that our society can be transformed into a more equal one. In case of Black Lives Matter movement, the sight again plays the important role. According to Mirzoeff, the temporal spaces of appearance created by this movement derive from the practice of “persistent looking, meaning a refusal to look away from what is kept out of sight, off stage, and out of view” (2017, 109). We can think of other recent protest movements, which are able to produce such a spaces of appearance and actively use social media to perform their vision of a more free society like Decolonise This Place and Extinction Rebellion, to name at least two of them. Nowadays, there are other prominent visual activist projects beside Decolonise This Place and Extinction Rebellion, for example P. A. I. N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), the movement initiated by an artist Nan Goldin dealing with the issue of a drug overuse or the global initiative Fridays for Future started by Greta Thunberg. However, we should not forget about the less-known, and yet important local opposition protest organizations, which a reader can be familiar with from her region. The international movement Decolonise This Place actively intervenes into the field of museums and galleries and requires a re-articulation of narratives through which marginalized communities, their representatives, objects and histories are represented. It also calls for a larger representation of these groups in collections and public exhibitions, where they are frequently missing. It asks for a change in how the histories of these communities have been told in public projects, which often exclude a voice of the community members while emphasizing the Western and outsider’s point of view. Echoing the ideas of the presented authors, we can summarize that Decolonise This Place demands from museums and galleries to leave the order of the visible world set by the nineteenth century in order to fight prejudices, stereotypes and inequalities deeply rooted in these modern institutions. The other movement, Extinction Rebellion aims to make visible a largely overlooked or played down ecological problems (e.g., the global warming or the emission of CO2), which

700 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

Fig. 3  Extinction Rebellion Switzerland, Flight Strike, September 2019. Photography of the performance: courtesy of the author

affect our society on a global scale. Its participants are spread literally around the world and organize themselves in form of local units, which coordinate and present their activities through social media. They employ a performative strategy of communication when they stage so-called die-in situation in public space. Often, on frequented places like transportation nodes or on symbolic places like federal offices, there are participants lying down on the floor acting as if they were dead in order to highlight what kind of future scenario we can expect if local representatives, national governments and international political organizations do not get involved in a direct ecological action (Fig. 3).

9   Visual Activism The conducted analysis of the notion of representation as well as the references to active civic life related to the past and the contemporary visual culture should help us understand why the field of visual culture studies has been nowadays perceived less as a strict theoretical discipline, but more of a space of engagement, where academics actively meet with media professionals, amateur image creators and in general, with the public. In the age of the globalized world, which is connected through social media, we cannot play a role of exclusive interpreters of images, when we are also the active producers. In our research

  ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY: REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL ACTIVISM 

701

work, at universities, in everyday communication, we employ more than ever the tools which we critically examine. As suggested by the notion of appearance, these images can bring “(t)he freedom, (because) people make themselves visible to each other” (Mirzoeff 2017, 119). From this new situation emerges a practice of visual activism as an opportunity to radically change a perspective toward the power structures embedded in the realm of visual culture (Mirzoeff 2016). The visual activist projects teach us how to act collectively and how to organize ourselves systematically in the field of visual culture that for a long time had been formed by chosen individuals (authors, collectors, and interpreters). They serve as examples of how an action can be achieved through images nowadays: it is documented, shared online, and so it can function as a catalyst for further steps. This way, the visual activism is providing us with a hope that we are able to spread the information in a way how we had envisioned and shaped it and that the freedom to re-present ourselves transparently and responsibly can be reached.

References Bennet, Tony. 1995. The Birth of Museum. London and New York: Routledge. Bennett, Tony. 1988. “The Exhibitionary Complex”. New Formations, 4: 73–102. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: The Penguin Books. Crimp, Douglas. 1993. On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Debord, Guy. 1994 [1967]. The Society of the Spectacle. New York. Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988 [1986]. Foucault. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1987 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Du Bois, W.  E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1980]. “The Confession of Flesh”. In: Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Vintage: New York. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (2nd Edition). London: SAGE. Hall, Stuart. 2017. Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Durham: Duke University Press. Laclau, Ernest and Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look. Durham: Duke University Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2016. How to See the World. London: The Penguin Books. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2017. “The Appearance of Black Lives Matter”. NAME Publications. https://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-­appearance-­of-­black-­lives-­matter/ Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2015. Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen, 16 (3): 6–18.

702 

A. P. HRŮZOVÁ

Nochlin, Linda. 1971. “Why There Have Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTNews, January: 22–39, 67–71. Pollock, Griselda. 1988. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge. Tiqquin. 2012 [1999]. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Watson, Mary Ann. 2008. Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience of the 20th century. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

German Theory: Bildwissenschaft and the Iconic Turn Žarko Paić

1   Disciplinary Frameworks in the Study of Images Two major streams dealing with images today—Visual Studies and Bildwissenschaft—consider the notion of image and its meaning not only in regard to contemporary art, media or visual representation in general but, more importantly, have in mind two major oppositions: language and image on the one hand, science and culture on the other. This difference relates to the dispute between the so-called continental and analytical philosophy: while the former deals with historical-synthetic analyzes of thought, starting with paradigmatic philosophers from antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern age, and contemporary times, the latter seeks to explore the essence of the problem and the logical-analytical networks of relations between concepts, categories and statements. It is no coincidence that precisely the analytical direction in philosophy is characteristic of Anglo-American culture and therefore of the plural epistemology of visual studies, while the theoretical approaches of Bildwissenschaft can be fully understood only within the German tradition of separation between the natural and the spiritual sciences (Geisteswissenschften). To fully grasp this aporia we need to understand the schism of philosophy that occurred in the twentieth century concerning images, while it may be helpful to mention that similar contradictions make the difference between conceptual and post-conceptual art too. The former refers to the analytical tradition of understanding language as a form of life discernible in late Wittgenstein (language games), and the latter from Heidegger’s notion of an event (Ereignis)

Ž. Paić (*) University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_43

703

704 

Ž. PAIĆ

moving in different directions to the questions of life, world, body, and technology (cf. Mersch 2002; Paić 2019). In principle, an image can no longer be understood “ontologically”, but only taking into account the destruction and deconstruction of the meanings attributed to it beyond language. This emancipatory turn is best viewed as the difference between the concept of universal image science and particular studies that approach images “from the bottom”, “pragmatically” or “contextually” (cf. Boehm 2007; Sachs-Hombach 2006). From a theological standpoint, art has been conceptualized as an act in the glory of God. What is to the ancient Greeks a world understood as cosmos, in the Christian Middle Ages becomes mundus, that is, a created world or a work made by God; the man itself was created in God’s image and semblance. That is also evident in the ways how the concept of the image was understood. While the Greek eikon is the immediate, living and present in the image, whether it is a statue of God (the Apollo or the image of the Heracles), the Christian concept of creation is creatio ex nihilo. Image as an icon or Bild denotes a sign for the representation of the divine in the image as its resemblance—mimesis and repraesentatio (Bauch in Boehm 1994, 278–280). Image ontology, therefore, cannot be sustained in an age marked by the emergence of a digital image for the simple reason that, in the very concept of the image, the focus cannot be on similarity and imitation of the existing reality, but on the frame of reference of the “world” as a much broader horizon of meaning. When such a “world” no longer appears as the work of God or the effect of nature (natura naturans and natura naturata), but as a techno-scientific construction of the virtual worlds, the reason for any “image ontology” disappears. The ontology, as metaphysics, cannot be sustained in the technological world of immersive and produced images because they no longer imitate, represent nor mean anything fixed and established. With the emergence of digital images, the difference between art and science has become obsolete: in Kant’s terms, the artistic experience has been explained as purposefulness without purpose and it has the feature of a metaphysical experience of pleasure in what the image reveals, opening the world in its meaningfulness. So, epistemic images are always in function of something located outside the picture. They are “servants” of knowledge. That is the reason why they do not have meaning in themselves. By contrast, mimetic pictures have a secret to themselves. Following this specific divide, here we will restraint ourselves to two main ideas, or orientational axes, of Bildwissenschaft: delineating the distinction between image science and image theory in the works of the founders of these concepts—Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, and Klaus Sachs-Hombach;

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

705

The demand for a universal and systematic image science is an interdisciplinary project of not only bringing together the various theoretical orientations— sometimes offensively disparate, as in Boehm who builds on both hermeneutics and phenomenology—but also respecting the results of analytical philosophy, especially that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is a difference in this regard between Boehm and Belting, or Sachs-Hombach and Horst Bredekamp, who do not see the possibility of a “foundation” of image science in the way that was possible in modern metaphysics from Kant to Hegel. Universal science must either be systematically and methodologically rigorous, as Edmund Husserl has well shown, or it must be “softened” by incorporating into its framework of knowledge and research all the older disciplines that now deal with images. What is the impact of the theoretical position of Bildwissenschaft given the numerous achievements of the very important authors gathered around this orientation in understanding the humanities, concept of the image, and the way of dissemination of visuality in general? The German language is no longer the fundamental language of theory in the context of networked societies and digital culture. In this respect, it should be evident that within the very realm of understanding the paradigm shift from language to image, reception in the sense of what Hans Belting calls the extended term of an image in its anthropological meaning presupposes a transition from the speculative to the pragmatic dimension of the research area. Concerning Visual (Culture) Studies, it seems that the epistemological position of Bildwissenschaft nevertheless enters much deeper into the relationship between metaphysics on the one hand and cybernetics as a meta-theory of the information age on the other. In outlining some of the recent theoretical interpretations, here we will first take into consideration basic theses of these disciplines and their importance in creating a universal image science as seen from “outside” by two authors pertaining to a  tradition different from German—Keith Moxey and Jason Gaiger. We will then present a kind of self-understanding of the entire Bildwissenschaft by analyzing one remarkable Handbook dedicated to that issue, edited by philosophers Stephan Günzel and Dieter Mersch. Finally, we will briefly outline the thesis by major proponents of image science in German-speaking area. In his analysis, Keith Moxey starts by distinguishing between two principal approaches claiming that Anglo-American visual studies uses the notion of representation often associated with an ideological construct in the field of visuality, while the German interpretive matrix observes an image based on its “presence” (Moxey 2008, 132–133). It appears that it is Moxey’s intention to bring a kind of agreement between these two orientations when he states the following: Attending to the presence of the object, being sensitive to its “aura”, respects the immediacy of its location in space and time. Interpretations that capture the specificity of such encounters betray their “situatedness”; they reveal the unique quality of the particular process of understanding. While writing that recognizes the

706 

Ž. PAIĆ

ontological power of the object often conceals the subject position from which meaning is constructed, the texts themselves suggest the ideological “ ­ supplements” that haunt them. The anachronism of the phenomenological gesture, the attempt to allow a historical object to escape time by giving it contemporary significance, depends on chronology for its meaning. An appreciation of the “exterior” of the visual object, its protean interventions in the life of culture, its vitality as a representation, need not be regarded as an alternative to attempts to come to terms with its “interior”, its capacity to affect us, its aesthetic and poetic appeal, its status as a presentation. Both approaches, I argue, add power and complexity to our current understanding of the visual. (Moxey 2008, 133)

For Moxey, the question of the historical-artistic relation to the complex configuration of contemporary images in the context of visual culture arises in the mode of theoretical consideration of the Bildwissenschaft. It is therefore decisive for him to see how, in the case of two representatives of this “German” orientation, Hans Belting and Horst Bredekamp, new horizons are opened up to the problem, which includes both philosophical and art-historical insights. In separating the “aura” of art pictures and the cognitive quality of scientific diagrams, as Bredekamp analyzes it, we get the impetus to understand an object that is not only aesthetically pleasing but takes on other criteria for theoretical elaboration. With all this in mind, Moxey points to the decisive role that image as an object plays in changing the paradigm of scientific understanding of reality (Moxey 2008, 139–140). Undoubtedly, Moxey portrayed the formal and conceptual differences within visual studies, image science and art history in a new order of meaning. In doing so, the impact he has recognized in the German frame of understanding the image as a “new presence” denotes the turning point when various “subdisciplines” start to deal at a much greater extent with visual representations. Without insight into the complementarity of approaches, despite the obvious differences, it is not possible to comprehend the multifarious concept of the image. On the other hand, Jason Gaiger states that “the emergence of Bildwissenschaft (image science) as a new interdisciplinary formation that is intended to encompass all images calls for an analysis of the grounds on which the claim to universality can be upheld” (Gaiger 2010, 208). He argues that—despite focusing on particular subjects and interests—an image carries the characteristics of universality, so it comes as no surprise that within image science one of the most powerful concepts is still a traditional idea of totality. Instead of reflecting on the singularity of images and their environments of meaning, here we encounter an attempt to create a new universality differently. All this is evident in the conceptual differences between advocates of the interdisciplinary idea of linking pre-existing disciplines and newer approaches that seek to open up the possibilities of theory or philosophy of the image. But what Gaiger particularly emphasizes in his interpretation boils down to the issue of the status of art history within the discussion of the essence and meaning of images for modernity. It dwells on the thesis of the philosopher Lambert Wiesing, who argues that

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

707

leading concepts from the nineteenth century established disciplines such as art history are not descriptive but introduce aspects of the a priori foundation of visual representation. Gaiger goes on to show that distinguishing what is integral or synthetic for Bildwissenschaft does not mean that what is particular must be regarded as derivative in terms such as style (Gaiger 2010, 225–226). He states that “cross-disciplinary research into scientific imagery and visualization techniques […] is still relatively uncharted territory and it seems likely that this new subject domain will provide fertile ground for philosophical insights that have wider relevance” (Gaiger 2010, 227). The ensuing question is not whether image science is theoretically pervasive enough in grasping the meanings of images, but rather how widely this strategy may actually be applied in order to encompass the most diverse technical structures of visualization of the media landscape. In other terms, how not to disregard all those images that do not carry unquestionable artistic value? In their interdisciplinary handbook, Stephan Günzel and Dieter Mersch seek to demonstrate how innovative it is today to think of picture/image as an assembly that connects different disciplines. However, interdisciplinarity cannot be a mere accumulation of disparate analyzes of a very loosely connected discourse on pictoriality, but rather a clearly articulated “method, object, and topic” of articulation (Günzel and Mersch 2014, VII). What follows is that the specific activity of Bildwissenschaft can be deduced from either new meanings of the old terms or new terms altogether. These are, first of all, aura, symbol, medium, iconic difference, diagrammatics and so on. But, to be able to understand the whole range of newly established topics, it must be borne in mind that the perspective of the contemporary consumer of visual culture has changed, primarily thanks to technology of digital culture. Finally, Bildwissenschaft is characterized by questioning fundamental philosophical orientations such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, semiotics, and poststructuralism in an attempt to purify the pictorial phenomenon from the overhead of any metaphysical background that has influenced our “scopic regimes”. Therefore, to speak of the impact of Bildwissenchaft is to navigate, in particular, a circle of thematic frameworks and the construction of complex concepts that capture both old and new phenomena in a theoretical approach to image. Without insight into the fundamental irreducibility of what is meant by the notion of scientific rigor, that is, without the stubbornness of disciplinary dogmatics, no credible opinion is able to connect the aesthetic categories of high art with the pragmatics and meaning of artificial intelligence.

2  Toward a Universal Image Science? The narrative of the radically changed status of the image in art and visual culture of the twentieth century was set by the German art historian Gottfried Boehm in his essay “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder”. He believes we are entering the time of the absolute presence of images in the contemporary world (Boehm 1994, 11–38). Advancement of a new meta-theory of the image as a new image

708 

Ž. PAIĆ

science for Boehm lies in the philosophical critique of language from Austin to Rorty. Philosophical researches of denotative and performative functions of language have opened up possibilities for a new interpretation of images. From this point of view, the new status can no longer be deducted from the logical and linguistic structures of the meaning of what is depicted in the picture. Speech performance and visual performance are not in any cause-effect relationship. In Boehm iconic turn is determined as a phenomenon taking place (but not necessarily discernible) since the late nineteenth century. In analogy with the linguistic turn of analytic philosophy of language, the return of images in the sense of their own “logic”—which has not yet built up its meta-theory or general epistemology for the reign of iconological-hermeneutical methods in the history of the art of twentieth century—requires a deep analysis and understanding of the changed status, function, and sense of the picture. The project of the iconic turn generated from Gottfried Boehm’s image analysis and several German theoreticians of contemporary art, philosophy, media, and communication studies. Related approaches developed almost simultaneously within the so-called visual studies or visual culture studies in the United States, particularly in early W.J.T. Mitchell’s writings (Mitchell 1994, 2005) in which he challenged the iconological method of Erwin Panofsky. With his concept of critical iconology, Mitchell has radically posed the demand for changing the paradigm of image-language relations (Mitchell 1986). According to him, the pictorial turn is not only a conceptual turn within a traditional iconology explaining the status and meaning of artistic images but rather a turn to the study of the visual culture of the contemporary world from the position of the philosophy of language. Instead of the logical and linguistic-­ analytical foundations of understanding the image as a symbolic transfer of ideas, forms and contents, pictorial turn radicalizes viewing, looking and gazing (among other concepts) as a visual event that is irreducible to logos. In postmodern times, society has been replaced by culture. The postmodern or cultural turn in the society corresponds to the pictorial or iconic turn discernible in visual culture at the end of the twentieth century. Instead of the visual structure of society, we are now faced with the visual construction of culture. Culture-as-image has replaced the paradigm of culture-as-text. How then one must encompass the meaning of iconic turn? Impossibility of language as a performance-in-the-world indicates the inscrutability of the image as the carrier of transcendental knowledge, such as the image of crucified Christ on Mantegna’s canvas. An image does not bring some sublime, spiritual dimension of what it depicts: on the contrary, an image has its meaning in the world’s “worldhood” as an abyss of Being and Time. Hence, the true image cannot belong to the mysticism of a secret puzzle that is to be understood by iconological descriptions of what is depicted in the picture. In analogy to “visual speech” in art and visual studies after “the end of the history of art” from the horizon of hermeneutics and iconology, the term “visual language” is rightly used in the analysis of the world of art as a “visual text” (Mirzoeff 1998).

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

709

The iconic turn can only be understood as the strategy of liberating the image from its historically overcoming sense. The language of metaphysics, however, denotes the historically established system of reinforced metaphors, speaking in Nietzsche’s parables. For Boehm, the quest for Wittgenstein’s theory of language as a grammar of intersubjective communication represents a fertile starting point. The problem is that such a short historical-philosophical takeover of ideas, as Boehm’s approach, shows that it is not clear why Wittgenstein’s theory of language would be decisive for the way of understanding art and pictures. Contextuality of truth in the given environment of the communicative rules of the speaker does not reach exactly what Boehm rightly points out. And that is modern philosophy, which from Kant tries to find in art its new brawling foundation. Is it possible with Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn reach out to understanding, for example, the famous Paul Klee’s image Angelus Novus? Iconic turn denotes, therefore, a way of reflecting on the image as a retrospective history of the emergence of the world in the way of the primordial habitation of creatures that are irreplaceable with things, objects and practical values. The iconic turn, as the programmatic orientation of Bildwissenschaft, should, therefore, be understood as an attempt to give back to images something they never actually had. The turn means and suggests the return to the zero point. Likewise, the phenomenological call “To the things themselves!”, together with the programmatic text of Gottfried Boehm, can subsume the entire intention of the project of iconic turn. The need for a new disciplinary practice, which unlike traditional art history would study the history of images in extenso, and not just those specifically claimed, emerges paradoxically from the conviction that “the end of art history” already happened. But when another German scholar, Hans Belting, published an article with such an apocalyptic title in 1983, it was not yet entirely comprehensible where this idea had been directed, at least not until the second edition of his book, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte. Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren, of 2002, where he clarified the consequences of such a radical standpoint. The transition from the history of art as a humanistic discipline in the studies of art (Kunstwissenschaft) and then in the image science (Bildwissenschaft) meant a farewell to the historical-artistic concept of the image as a model of representation of reality (Belting 2002). Unlike Boehm’s effort, we will see that Belting’s image anthropology (Bild-Anthropologie) explicitly marks a reversal in the way we make use of art history, not only by deconstructing the image in history but also by deconstructing the notion of history in or through images (Belting 2001). By the same token, Belting took the stance that new image science cannot be an auxiliary discipline of art history. Image science must radically change cognitive and research perspective of pictures and art in general. Unlike Boehm, who interprets an image as a medium of perception and reflection, Belting foresees its new meaning in a kind of anthropologically oriented image science. But the basic difference is that Boehm conceptualizes images through their predominantly formal aspects of artistic expression in historical trajectory to

710 

Ž. PAIĆ

the contemporary media-driven world, while Belting is based on an expanded concept of image. For him, there is a picture of the phenomena which, as the unity of content and media, directly reflect the twofold, spiritual and bodily nature of man (Belting 2001, 11). Before we point out more precisely how and why anthropology is introduced in image analysis and what constitutes an essence of the image as a reflection of the two-sided nature of man, it might be worth drawing attention to the crucial idea that stands in the very center of Belting’s anthropology. His criticism of the Eurocentrism was carried out in such a way that an (art) image could no longer restrict itself to the historical-artistic space and time of Western civilization. Consequently, the field of research cannot be restricted to European ethnology and art history alone, but should take into consideration the world-­ historical treasury of different cultures and civilizations. The term art, therefore, must not be limited to the concept of high art, but cover everything that producers and users of various objects, events and actions consider to be artistically or aesthetically relevant. Such a neutral and even “profane” definition of art stems from the avant-garde idea of a revolutionary change of the world by means of art. Belting reconstructs the fundamental ideas and essence of the avant-garde art which during the twentieth century changed how people conceive their world. Historical development could no longer be shown in a continuing, uninterrupted line. At this critical moment, breaking up with the historical utopias and the modern idea of progress, it is necessary to turn to a different notion of art altogether. Not just regarding what is happening in the world of contemporary art today, but also through a kind of revision and deconstruction of the entire history of art. The concept of image science marks the first step in the direction of renouncing faith in the lawful, regular and meaningful course of history in which art history builds its system. Belting’s Kunstwissenschaft as Bildwissenschaft follows the avant-garde ideas about overcoming the differences between art and life. What then constitutes the subject of the anthropology of images as a prerequisite for the general and systematic image science? Belting unambiguously says, The double meaning of inner and outer images cannot be separated from the notion of the image and thus reveals this anthropological foundation. “Image” is more than a mere product of perception. It is the result of personal and collective symbolization. Everything that comes with a view or comes to an inner eye can be marked in a picture or an image. Therefore, the notion of an image, if taken seriously, can only be an anthropological concept. We live with the images and understand the world in the images. (Belting 2001, 11)

The anthropological concept of the images starts with the radical process of overcoming the historical notion of the image in Western civilization. Instead of the dualism of the physical (pictorial) and spiritual substance of art at a particular historical time—from mythical, religious, modern to contemporary

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

711

age—there is an attempt to transcend this duality. Belting uses anthropology mark outside the notion of philosophical anthropology by Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner. In both versions, the man is placed in the world either on terms of organic life or as an eccentric being that understands the human historical world by speech, language and imagery. Belting’s anthropology of images attempts to oppose one kind of reduction of the concept of the image to the other, instead of having them both as historically defined in the modern concept of the image of man as a subject. The first type of reduction to which Belting rightly opposes denotes the definition of the image in the era of science and technology as information. It is therefore justified to use the philosophical concept of deconstruction from Derrida’s criticism of logocentrism of Western metaphysics. Namely, in one place of his essay published in the Iconic Turn: Die Neue Macht der Bilder titled “True Images and False Bodies”, Belting claims that the loss of references in the new media world can only be properly explained by “deconstruction that happened to the concept of body and the concept of images” (Belting in Maar and Burda 2005, 355). It might be self-evident that images in the information age are reduced to information. New knowledge about new phenomena is generated by visual information. Almost every new event in the material world is pictorially presented like new information. The reason why Belting does not consider this image of Being as information sufficient to understand the world in which a picture precedes speech and language as a systematically articulated text lies in the ideological reductionism of contemporary imagery. It is the result of contemporary information technology and the scientific design of reality, a sort of deception or “categorical fraud” (Belting in Maar and Burda 2005, 356). In other words, the protest will be directed against the biological and positivistic notion of the human as a mere set of information that is slightly different from mouse or frog. Images are reduced to a visual and body to a genetic information. What Belting has argued in the theory of images as information is that the anthropology of images was a symbolic observation act with complex socio-cultural mechanisms of experiencing, viewing, understanding and acting (communication aspect). Though he does not explicitly points this out, his anthropology of images is shifting toward some kind of visual communication practice of the image. But the problem emerges in a certain way how anthropologically performed images might be based on the duality of the body and the remainder of the metaphysical tradition that is named by the spiritual assemblage of man. Symbolic image mediation that cannot be technical information requires a different notion of the body and a different notion of the “spiritual”. How can this be properly understood? Certainly not just by the dialectical operation of the shift of the thesis and antithesis in the synthesis that occurs in the totality of causes and consequences. That body is not devoid of spiritual dimensions, as the spirit must have its place and seat in the physical organization of man. The body, neither can be reduced to the organic composition of the physical and the physiological, nor can be explained just as a

712 

Ž. PAIĆ

biological set of information or a rational set of speech and language. The solution offered by Belting in his anthropology of images takes a different trait— that of the incarnation of the image through media. It then may seem paradoxical that Belting made the following proposition: “In the anthropological view, man does not appear as the owner/master of his images, but—something quite different—as a place of images that inhabit his body; he has been extradited to created pictures even when he tries to master them over and over again” (Belting 2001, 14). Incorporation, of course, cannot be understood as a theological concept of the incarnation or representation of Christ in a mystical relation of the body and the image. Incorporation (Verkörperung) takes place in the media. It is about translating other images into an understandable horizon of observations within the community of users of images. The question of image status goes well beyond the boundaries of the existing academic disciplines of the history of art, philosophy, semiotics, and so on. The anthropology of images should be understood as the history of mankind in images in different historical epochs, media and cultures. With the idea of the body as a place of the image, the processes of symbolization in a special way become anthropologically reduced (Bachmann-Medick 2006, 341). Despite many ways of social and cultural relations to the body as a place of imaging, it is obvious that the image is being placed in the social context of the creation of a body that a particular image carries and stores, preserves and transforms into a new horizon of meaning. If art as a complex historical sequence of epochal events of divine, secular and human in the form of images was until the crisis of representation in the early 1970s of the twentieth century a coherent system of thought about the supernatural character of ideas such as beauty, sublime, and truth, then it declares the end of that system by way of another type of reduction. Art entered the aesthetic world of new media and lost its “aura”, as Walter Benjamin interpreted. But with the iconic turn—either in the interpretation of Boehm or Belting—it becomes evident that instead of the “supernatural” aura of art, we are now witnessing an attempt to replace the image that has already disappeared together with the end of the historical world. Images embodied by the media go beyond the historical epochs; liberated of the rule of the logos, the image has not only taken the place of the body in which man no longer governs himself as an entity, but is completely obliterated by the immanent logic of meaning. Belting’s notion of the image is primarily conditioned by an understanding that, like many proponents of visual studies, radically abandons the discourse of art history. The picture is not just an “art picture”; the sciences (in plural) are not merely interconnected sets of disciplines as they were at work in the golden age of romanticism and historicism. Instead, Belting’s viewpoint is that the soil on which art history has flourished must be abandoned and that the sciences of art can no longer be based on a metaphysical “picture of the world”.

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

713

Within the horizon of the iconic turn, new image science represents a dominant theoretical paradigm that comes out of a philosophical theory after poststructuralism and semiotics. Klaus Sachs-Hombach, the philosopher and theoretician of visual media, first systematically articulated a general theory of image or Bildwissenschaft as a collection of various contemporary theories and discourses about the image. As an editor of the book programmatically entitled Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden, he started from the need for a new interdisciplinary science that would have as its object the all-­encompassing visual sense of the world (Sachs-Hombach 2005). The image is for Sachs-­ Hombach related to perceptual signs. The main prerequisite of their durability, artificiality, symbolic, and other features is primarily that they are a communication medium. The image must be understood asking the following question: What is signifying and pointing to nothing else in the material and formal aspect? Sachs-Hombach sees a picture in a semiotic aspect based on visual communication or “visual perception” (Sachs-Hombach 2006, 95). The term “communication” is not, however, limited to social and cultural communication between users of a particular group of images in time. Communication should be understood universally. It denotes the way of expressing messages, signs and understanding of signs in both real and virtual community. We have seen that Belting’s anthropology of images as a general science of images already develops an implicit possibility of transition toward the concept of image as a communication media. However, since Belting is opposed to limiting picture to a mere information, he wants to preserve the image of its necessary step in the medium/purpose type of interaction in contemporary visual culture. The embodiment of the image in the media on the one side and the duality of images and bodies on the other is a major collision in the tradition of German Bildwissenschaft. Communication processes in the context of human relations have different means of mediation. If they are called “media” neutral, then they already refer to a new relationship between people’s mediation based on the visual processing of information. The media is for Sachs-Hombach, first of all, the physical bearer of a sign. So, space cannot be reduced to technological, economic or institutional framework of media in social systems. The differentiation of the media between those related to the human body and those independent of it complements the formal analysis of communication in general. And here we find the link to Belting’s concept of the body and image as a media that is embodied in a man beyond its role as a subject or an image owner/master. For Sachs-Hombach, fixed forms of communication that are independent of the body are images and movies. They are communicated through a specific language of abstract symbols. Common mimics, in turn, form the communication temporarily associated with the body as a gesture and non-verbal communication (Sachs-Hombach 2006, 96 and 97).

714 

Ž. PAIĆ

3   “Philosophy of Image”: On the Trace of Post-­hermeneutics and Post-phenomenology Dieter Mersch based his concept of the image on what is “happening” (quodittas), not on what “is” in terms of the mimetic appearance of similarity between the original and the copy (quiddittas). To do this, it was necessary to open the space for medial experience within the aesthetic way of thought with which philosophy and the arts operate in an era of technological corporeality (Mersch 2002). Introducing the dispute of the image (Bilderstreit) and the issue of the media—since it denotes a key point in the emergence of image science concerning categories of iconicity—he concluded that to understand the image it is necessary to resort to post-hermeneutics (Mersch 2010). The reason for this is the changed relationship between the meaning of the mediation of images between “Being” and “thinking”: the mediality of consciousness leads to a distinction between the image as information and the image as the event of the cognitive-receptive possibilities of consciousness. In this viewpoint, the “philosophy of the image” requires the questioning of boundary areas not only of hermeneutics but also of semiotics and phenomenology. What does this tell us about the problem of the constitution of a new subject area opened up by image science? Undoubtedly, we cannot say that this is merely a change of paradigm from language to image, but also a necessity to think what the changes in contemporary aesthetics implied. Instead of the work with which modern aesthetics thought of as the unity of place and time and considered the image in the final instance as an adjunct or sublimation of reality as an artistic knowledge of the world, we encounter a shift in the very “essence” of aesthetics by introducing the concept of the event (Ereignis). What happens to the world in the horizon of its media and technological production has the feature of something that is no longer a pictorial appearance, but a visualization of the world that has become, as Heidegger put it in his famous treatise, the “age of the world picture”. Dieter Mersch points out three important directions of the movement of contemporary art and its images: destruction, not in the sense of Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism concerning existing values, but in the meaning of Heidegger’s in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) adds to his view of the destruction of a traditional ontology—the finding of a “new tradition” linking the true sense of art with that which is still in the upcoming; the constitution of art is related only to art, which means that the painting, for instance, does not deal anymore with anything other than itself and its “world” of self-referencing and self-creation, and that is also true concerning the language as text; the paradox of what is attacked as outdated and inadequate to the concept of the  “new” in the technical part of the experiment with life becomes a shocking and provocative aesthetic effect as an event of metaart itself (Mersch 2002, 188–200).

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

715

What is the meaning of this radical turn from language to picture as a physical performance in its destructive, self-referential and paradoxical way? As we can see in advance, art becomes the conceptual field of constructing meaning from pragmatic knowledge of art as a process of creation. In the event, the image is triggered, and the body stems with the medium of its “imitation” and “representation” of what it did not exist in the reality—the world in its primordial openness in the horizon of the “meaning”. The semiotics was based on the idea of the circular motion of endless signs, and it created the illusion of a closed culture system as a perfect text without history. But a sign that creates its reality can no longer be a cultural provisional character, and its environment is even more fragile. Hence, the fundamental concept of contemporary art becomes necessarily that what comes from the streams of information and the conditions of visual communication—interactivity. One of the convincing critical responses to this question has been inspired by Lambert Wiesing, a contemporary German philosopher, theoretician of image and visuality. Unlike any semiotic-communication image model as a closed circle of meaning in which images refer to images as signposts of signs, he attempts to save the phenomenological approach to the image. If the picture shows something, it does not mean that it creates a sort of intersubjective relations in which there is still reference to something realistic concerning the image, the observer, and the surplus of the imaginary. The question to be asked takes the feature of a completely new artificial presence in the field of media-­ constructed reality. The artificial presence of the image means that the observer is placed in a situation of understanding the iconic difference between living or real presence and non-living or artificial presence (Wiesing 2005, 35–36). So, it is important to warn against discursive perception—image and language being the remnants of the iconological tradition of interpretation of sense images in art history. In a non-living space-time immersion of pictures in virtual reality, the observer lies in a situation that necessarily encompasses the previously mentioned dual character. At the same time, he/she is free from the excess of previously accepted knowledge of the image of the picture which he/ she sees as intertextual and meta-textual creation of media images. But on the other hand, his/her vision might be mediated by the awareness of the changed reality in which the present is represented to the observer. The picture thus appears in its material aspect as an intentional subject. But the experience of monitoring such artificially generated images, such as a computer interface, significantly changes the meaning of the phenomenological concept of intentionality. If all the pictures were intentionally determined by observation, it should not be controversial. The problem is, however, how to distinguish when “only” the image is generated by artificial reality from the subject’s personal view actually altered by the artificially generated images. This is what Paul Klee has once faced in modern art when he saw objects being painted, but not objects as such (pictures). We must keep in mind this changing of the position of the observer. That is radicalized by Baudrillard in his critique of contemporary art (Baudrillard 2005, 108).

716 

Ž. PAIĆ

How Wiesing understands the task of the Bildwissenschaft within the philosophy of the image? First of all, he advocates a strict distinction between Bildwissenschaft (image science) and Bildtheorie (image theory), and explains the difference as follows: Bildwissenschaft is concerned in every case with concrete things. The subject of investigation is real objects: how they come to be made, the psychological effects they produce, the medium-specific conditions of their production, the meaning of their contents, their social significance, their historical context, and numerous other empirical aspects. It is precisely this fundamentally empirical orientation that in German distinguishes Bildwissenschaft from Bildtheorie, just as in English “Image Science” can be distinguished from “Picture Theory”. The difference can be accentuated by observing that although Bildwissenschaft is concerned with all images, it is not, like Bildtheorie, concerned with the question of what is an image. (Wiesing 2008, iv)

Does this kind of critique reduce the project of image science? If it is left to be a continuation of the scientific disciplines that study images, which is certainly semiotics and anthropology apart from the history of art, this raises the question of whether the intention of the iconic turn—as conceived by Boehm, Belting, Bredekamp and consequently Sachs-Hombach—has been reduced to the empirical one, that is, disciplines interested in the practice of visuality and visual literacy. So, “image philosophy” must in one way or the other be a kind of leading force of image theory, because it is impossible to ask the question of what an image is and how it occurs by way of its sheer appearance. Since Wiesing has taken the standpoint of refocusing on Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry, it comes as no surprise that semiotic understanding of image theory with the concepts of signs, signifier and signified will not be able to grasp the fullness with which the image appears and shows itself as a visual object/event. Images are therefore not mere signs of something but are in a contingent context or assemblage of meaning. With keeping this in mind, it seems obvious that image theory cannot fall under the auspices of Bildwissenschaft for the simple reason that the experience of “pictorial appearing” cannot be categorically subsumed into any scientific system. If the image denotes an “artificial presence”, then its essence lies in what makes it possible to appear and what results from the possibilities of its appearing. An image (Bild) therefore is not a Being and does not relate to a single object of experience, but a “complex intentionality” of events and meanings in space and time (Purgar 2019, 172–176).

4  Concluding Remarks An analysis of the fundamental ideas on which image science was established as a meta-theory of visuality using what was a discourse of iconic turn in the 1990s leads us to a conclusion that the original intention was to create a new

  GERMAN THEORY: BILDWISSENSCHAFT AND THE ICONIC TURN 

717

and universal discipline. Its mission was to give art history and all relevant fields of image research in art and culture a new theoretical justification on the backdrop of digital technologies of the present. But from the initial “enthusiasm” in regard to considering the world as an image, the path leads through the complex overlappings and differences between image science and image theory, as Lambert Wiesing has put it in his image philosophy. Besides, there is a problem of defining areas that are no longer just moving away from the usual divide “art versus life” but are virtually eliminating it, for instance, digital photography and interactive experiences. Life as such in the technology of its spheres becomes an event of visual communication, for which the rules that once worked with historical-artistic themes and approaches no longer apply. Overall, with the image science in the light of its re-conceptualization, an open field of possibilities of thinking of the image today emerges beyond the traditional metaphysical categories such as mimesis, representation, appearance and form. To ask about the “essence” of the image and the “essence” of science in the age of the posthuman means to ask about the meaning of the existence of the Human in a desire to reach the realm of “artificial presence” as a perpetuated illusion of our living on the edge of the worlds—the one belonging to nature and another one immersing in the technosphere.

References Bachmann-Medick, Doris. 2006. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in Kulturwissenschaft. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. New York: Berg. Belting, Hans. 2001. Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. München: Wilhelm Fink. Belting, Hans. 2002. Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach Zehn Jahren, 2nd ed. München: C. H. Beck. Belting, Hans. 2005. “Echte Bilder und fälsche Körper – Irrtümer über die Zukunft des Menschen”. In: Iconic Turn: Die Neue Macht der Bilder. Ed. by Christa Maar and Hubert Burda. Köln: DuMont. Boehm, Gottfried (ed.). 1994. Was ist ein Bild? München: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 2007. Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Gaiger, Jason. 2010. “The Idea of a Universal Bildwissenschaft”. In: The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture. Ed. by Ondrej Dadejik and Jakub Stejskal. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Günzel, Stephan and Mersch, Dieter. 2014. Bild: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Mersch, Dieter. 2002. Ereignis and Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Mersch, Dieter. 2010. “Posthermeneutik”. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Oldenbourg: Akademie Verlag. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.). 1998. The Visual Culture Reader. London and New  York: Routledge.

718 

Ž. PAIĆ

Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1986. Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 2005.  What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Moxey, Keith. 2008. “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn”. Journal of Visual Culture, 7 (2): 131–146. Paić, Žarko. 2019. Technosphere. Vols. I–V [in Croatian]. Zagreb: Sandorf and Mizantrop. Purgar, Krešimir. 2019. Pictorial Appearing. Image Theory After Representation. Bielefeld: Transcript. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.). 2005. Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2006. Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Wiesing, Lambert. 2005. Artifizielle Präsenz. Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.

The Image and Neuroaesthetics Matthew Rampley

In 1865 the French physician and anatomist Pierre Paul Broca published a paper “On the Seat of the Speech Faculty” (Broca 1865). It was a report on several years of research he had undertaken on patients with various speech defects (aphasia), based on post-mortem analysis of their brains. Broca observed that the patients all exhibited damage to the same area of the brain, a region of the frontal lobe of the brain’s left hemisphere (the details are not important here). Patients with similar damage to the corresponding area on the right side of the brain suffered no problems with speech, leading Broca to conclude that this region, now referred to as Broca’s area, was where the faculty of speech was located. Broca’s insights revolutionized the study of language, but they also represented a significant advance in brain science. The idea that different areas of the brain could be associated with various human intellectual capacities had already been proposed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but this “science”, phrenology, had been completely discredited by the 1850s. Broca’s work provided the attempt to establish the links between the physical brain and human mental activities with a scientific grounding, based on experimental procedure and use of corroborating medical evidence. It has since become commonplace to locate a variety of cognitive functions, using different techniques. Often driven by the treatment of various impairments, from those of language to those of vision and motorsensory control, such clinical work has led to the construction of a complex and detailed map of

M. Rampley (*) Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_44

719

720 

M. RAMPLEY

brain functions. The field of neuroscience has, in recent years, drawn the attention of researchers in the humanities. In particular, there has been great interest in the possibility that the cognitive capacities exercised in the production and consumption of, for example, literature, art, music, can likewise be traced back to specific areas and aspects of the brain. More specifically, it has been suggested that identifying the neurological seat of various forms of human cognition can help explain the nature of our engagement with different cultural forms. Theories of the image have been no less involved in this phenomenon; Erich Kandel has used the Vienna Secession as the starting-point for a wide-­ ranging examination of the neurological basis of aesthetic response (Kandel 2012), while John Onians has even written an entire history of European art and architecture on the basis of neuroscientific ideas (Onians 2016). At first sight this might seem unexceptional; unless one holds to a dualistic theory of mind and the body, it is clear that mental activity occurs in the brain. Neuroscientific studies of cultural practices also hold the promise of bridging the recurrent divide between the arts and the natural sciences, leading to meaningful discussion between researchers in otherwise disparate fields. Yet like all new paradigms of inquiry, it raises many questions, too. Before examining the latter, however, it is necessary to explore some of the basic ideas involved in what one might term the “neurohumanities.” Consequently, this chapter provides, first, a sketch of some of the more common neuroscientific ideas and claims, and then considers the questions and debates they have prompted, before, finally, considering perhaps the key question: what sort of a dialogue do they enable between the “two cultures” that C.  P. Snow (Snow 1998) so famously decried?

1   Neuroaesthetics and Neurohumanities There has been an enormously rich seam of research into a vast array of visual impairments and the correlations that can be drawn with clearly identifiable damage in various areas of the brain. Examples might include prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize faces); cerebral achromotopsia (color blindness due to brain damage); associative visual agnosia (the inability to connect a visual percept with its associated semantic content, that is, the ability to recognize something but not to name it); visual-spatial dysgnosia (the inability to orient oneself visually in space). Such inquiry has thrown considerable light on the understanding of the brain. Given that a powerful tradition of image research has grappled with images as embodiments of different modes of seeing and visual perception, this is a field with considerable potential for further work. This relates not merely to the historic examples of art historians such as Alois Riegl (Riegl 1901), Heinrich Wölfflin (Wölfflin 1932), and Ernst Gombrich (Gombrich 1960, 1978) but also to contemporary thinkers such as Whitney Davis (Davis 2011), whose theory of visual culture has brought renewed theoretical vigor to the history of seeing and its relation to the image. One might mention, here, too, bodies such as the International Association of Empirical

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

721

Aesthetics, which has sought to continue to legacy of the experimental psychology of Gustav Fechner, with significant shared interests with neuroscience (the Association has also published a journal, Empirical Studies of the Arts, since 1983). Yet despite its potential, neuroscientific examination of vision and images, a now rapidly growing area of research, has mostly been pursued by those in the scientific community; the limited interest on the part of art historians and scholars of visual culture will be considered later. The first major work to pursue this issue was Inner Vision (1999) by the neurobiologist Semir Zeki (Zeki 1999). Zeki examined the ways that works of art mobilize certain aspects of seeing, such as the perception of color, lines, and shapes; the recognition of represented objects (including faces and human figures); or even the ability to impose some kind of cognitive consistency on the visual world. Zeki also explored the ways that works of art evoke the sense of beauty, through their ability either to stimulate the visual system (and hence the brain) through unexpected and unusual images and juxtapositions or to satisfy the brain’s desire for visual “constancy”, by the creation of one or more varieties of visual order. Others have analyzed ways in which neuroscientific findings can be applied to architecture. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Mallgrave 2009), for example, an established scholar of the history of architecture, drew on Zeki, exploring parallels between the aesthetics of architectural space and neuroscientific research. The Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History (CReA) at the University of Vienna has undertaken research into viewing habits, tracking the eye movements of spectators of specific artworks (Rosenberg and Klein 2015). A further project (Brinkmann et al. 2018) explores the visual and affective responses to such basic compositional elements as lines and shapes by “measuring” aesthetic responses of viewers to specific paintings. The work of Zeki, Mallgrave, CReA, and other comparable examples touch on a range of distinct issues, but the research tends to focus on variations of a single theme: aesthetic response and its neurological basis. In other words, what are the neural correlates of the experience of the beauty? Concern with this question has underpinned the emergence of “neuroaesthetics” as a specific field of enquiry (Lauring 2014; Huston et  al. 2015; Chatterjee 2015; Starr 2015; Skov and Vartanian 2017). Certain recurring approaches and themes can be discerned. First, as a self-declared scientific practice, experimental methods are prominent. Above all this consists of brain scanning technologies, mostly, though not exclusively, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), that enable researchers to observe the neural activity of subjects when asked to undertake a number of tasks relating to the observation of works of art and other kinds of image. The precise conditions vary; subjects may be shown successions of either contrasting or complementary images, for different lengths of time, at different intervals. In some cases, experimental subjects may be asked to adopt an “aesthetic attitude”, that is, suspend all instrumental or rational judgments and focus solely on formal features. In others, they may also be asked to describe their responses to artworks, including indicating

722 

M. RAMPLEY

preferences from a choice of several different images, or being asked to rate images on various different qualitative scales. These experimental procedures yield data, in the form of cerebral maps based on fMRI scans, which show correlations between aesthetic responses and activity in various areas of the brain. Cross-referenced questionnaires and other feedback from subjects are also employed to trace recurring patterns that might underpin generalized statements about aesthetic response. To cite one instance: experimental work by Anjan Chatterjee, one of the foremost representatives of neuroaesthetics, indicates that “When we consider emotions, we find that the pleasure evoked by viewing beautiful art activates the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior insula, the anterior cingulate, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. These are the same brain structures that good food, sex, and money engage” (Chatterjee 2015, 140). Many other studies yield other similar kinds of data, in which aesthetic experiences can be associated with specific areas of the brain and, hence, their relationship to other kinds of cognitive processes elaborated on. The consequences of Chatterjee’s empirical observations are clear: the capacity for aesthetic pleasure is one of a cluster of experiences of pleasure that take place in the same part of the brain, hence, the aesthetic sense is not so easily disentangled from other kinds of experience. This also explains why beauty is a source of such satisfaction: it activates a wider array of mechanisms in the brain associated with rewards and pleasure. In a similar vein, Zaidel and Nadal (2011) have suggested that neural scans indicate aesthetic and moral judgment occurs in similar areas of the brain, which may explain how the two become so easily intertwined—a commonplace in philosophical literature on the subject. On the other hand, the difficulty of adopting the “aesthetic attitude” and of suspending everyday instrumental rationality is due to the fact that, as one prominent advocate of neuroscientific approaches has stated, “Pragmatic reception is utilitarian and predicated on the identification of people, objects, or events that help resolve needs and address challenges. This applies both to everyday events and to pictorial representations of them […] cognition is given automatic priority over sensation or perception so people process features that assist in achieving the goal of object identification […] stimulus identification is given priority over sensory or perceptual experience, thereby producing a cognitive bias” (Cupchik 2016, 157). In other words, we are “hard wired” to think in terms of means-end rationality, and this explains why adopting the aesthetic attitude is so difficult, for it involves undoing some of the basic neural operations of human cognition. In its best, most imaginative forms, neuroaesthetics thus not only locates where in the brain various cognitive processes and subjective experiences are taking place but also explores the implications of its findings. When it comes to art, for example, it may provide the reason why some images and works of art are so difficult for many viewers; they strain the neurological limitations of visual perception and cognition. This may be the case for certain kinds of modernist art, which thematize representational ambiguity or those that tax the

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

723

very ability of the brain to process sense perception. This might cast light on what Rosalind Krauss has referred to as the aesthetic of blinding. Referring to paintings such as Henri Matisse’s Spanish Still Life (1910–1911) and Seville Still Life (1911) she argues (Krauss 2004, 101): “[they] are difficult to behold—that is, the viewer cannot gaze at their pullulating arabesques and color flashes for very long […] these paintings appear to spin before the eye: nothing there ever seems to come to rest”. Krauss’s focus here is purely on the ways in which the combination of the chromaticism and “all-over” ornamental design disrupts the ability of the viewer’s gaze to settle. But one might even find counterparts in conventional figurative works of art, such as large-scale European history paintings of the previous century, or the muqarnas (ornamented vaulting) of Islamic architecture. Advocates of neuroaesthetics can claim that their findings provide an additional level of analysis corroborating the speculations of contemporary art theory. In many cases, exponents of neuroaesthetics (Zaidel 2012) also consider the possible evolutionary processes that can account for human cognition. Terrence Deacon (Deacon 1997, 2006), for example, author of some of the most rigorous and far-reaching such accounts, has explored the co-evolution of the brain and language as part of a wider inquiry into human cognitive development. His conclusion is that the human brain has, uniquely, evolved a form of symbolic processing that accounts for why humans alone are capable of not only language but also other cultural practices, including the making of representational images. Yet while such accounts seek to embed understanding of the vision and the image in far-reaching and ambitious context, they also run the danger of leading to circular explanation. The example below, representative of a wider tendency, illustrates the type of problem: But what is it that makes simple ideas and solutions (those with fewest premises, fewest steps to the solution, and fewest exceptions for a given level of complexity of a problem) particularly aesthetically pleasing, so much so that physicists may use this as a guide to their thinking? It is suggested that the human brain has become adapted to find simple solutions (perhaps to complex problems) aesthetically pleasing and elegant because they are more likely to be correct. (Rolls 2014, 300)

Aside from the questionable nature of the assertion that simple solutions are more usually the correct ones, this conclusion runs into circularity since it amounts to saying little more than that humans find certain qualities pleasing because they have evolved to do so. This may be the case, but it lacks explanatory force and indicates, perhaps, the point at which neurological and interrelated evolutionary accounts leave one requiring more.

724 

M. RAMPLEY

2  A Scientific Enterprise? One of the reasons neuroaesthetics has been pursued is that it supposedly holds the promise of scientific rigor in place of the speculative theorizing of traditional aesthetics. By using empirical, verifiable, methods, research in neuroaesthetics can thus generate more reliable “data”. The appeal of this is certainly understandable, but closer examination of its methodological premises suggests that it runs into its own not inconsiderable problems. These can be identified in, for example, the reliance on fMRI and other imaging technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT). Since their invention in the 1990s, these have transformed the study of the brain, and greatly enhanced medical understanding of human neurological functioning; it is now known, for example, that even basic mental acts do not take place in single areas, but that several different areas of the brain are involved at once. While discrete areas of the brain are still identified and mapped, for heuristic purposes, these do not correlate neatly with the neural network mobilized in any particular cognitive act. Yet despite the revolution that such technologies have effected, neuroscientists are still cautious as to the amount of information brain scanning of this kind can actually tell us, especially when it comes to individual experiences and thoughts. Contrary to general assumptions, fMRI, the most commonly used scanning technique, does not measure neural activity, but rather the flow of blood as a proxy for neural activity. Specifically, it measures blood flow to the brain based on the different magnetic properties of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. When neurons “fire”, they metabolize oxygen, which then has to be replenished by the inflow to the brain of fresh (oxygenated) blood (Buxton 2013). The blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) signal thus helps the observer to infer neural activity but not to measure it directly. In addition, because it is an indirect measure, there is a delay between the neural activity and the measurable signal of up to 6 seconds (Aguirre et al. 1998). Adjustments can be made to compensate for this in the design of experiments and in the interpretation of data but limits to the accuracy of fMRI scans also have to be recognized. Currently, the highest resolution scan can narrow down the detectable blood flow in the brain to an area of only 1 mm3. This is a crude measure; 1 mm3 contains more than 1,000,000 neurons, and the technology thus lacks the precision to be able to identify exactly which neurons are being activated at any one time (Chouinard et  al. 2009, 272). And although there have been dramatic improvements in recent years, this is still a significant limitation (Turner 2016). There are further issues with the accuracy of MRI scans, too, for neurological research (Logothetis 2001) has indicated that measurable BOLD signals are not necessarily proportional to the level of increased (or decreased) neural activity. Measurable blood flow increases in proportion to the level of brain activity, but only up to a certain point; beyond this, additional neuronal

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

725

operations are not matched by higher blood flows. Hence, fMRI scans may well not capture further changes, even though there may still be neural activity (Heeger and Ress 2002). Experimental research suggests that a large part of the BOLD signal captures the effects not of neurons but of astrocytes. The latter are important non-­neural brain cells that play a crucial part in, among others, supplying neurons with nutrients and regulating the transmission of electronic impulses in the brain and assist its physical structuring, but they are nevertheless separate from neurons themselves (Schummers et al. 2008). It has also been suggested (Singh 2012) that fMRI scans do not even capture all relevant neural activity. They measure responses to external visual, auditory, or other stimuli, but it is necessary also to take into account brain activity in response to such stimuli from other intracortical activity that may be unrelated, or only indirectly related, to the stimulus response. Finally, experiments suggest that fMRI scans register not only changes related to stimulus response but also those related to the anticipation of carrying out tasks, specifically, “a novel anticipatory brain mechanism” that plays “the role of preparing the cortex for anticipated tasks by bringing additional arterial blood in time for task onsets” (Sirotin and Das 2009). Aside from the issue of resolution, therefore, there may be a question as to whether the fMRI scan is capturing mental events themselves (however, they might be defined, which is not straightforward), or some other non-­ specified additional activity. No doubt, technological advances will address many of these shortcomings; indeed there already exist alternative, more accurate, techniques, but they are invasive and therefore cannot be used on human subjects. Moreover, given the vast differences between human brains and those of even our closest relatives, the apes, experimental data is of limited use for neuroaesthetics. Yet even though technical procedures may be enhanced in the future, a basic question remains as to how one can be sure one is measuring an aesthetic experience in the subject. This raises the issue as to what is meant by “aesthetic experience”. Most exponents of neuroaesthetic research have offered definitions of “aesthetic experience”, and there is a general consensus in the field as to the meaning of the term: it is usually equated with the experience of beauty and, more specifically, with a definition that owes much to the formalist tradition since Kant. In other words, it is based on one or more variations on the idea of the free play of the imagination, the suspension of instrumental reason, and the attention to purely formal features of a work of art. This is not, in itself, controversial, even though some might be critical of such a definition. Readers of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), for example, might wish to emphasize the extent to which such judgments are already immersed in considerations of social value and possession of cultural capital, while others might argue that this is a highly Eurocentric conception that has come under increasing scrutiny in an era now highly sensitized to global cultural differences. Such criticisms are not necessarily decisive, since it can be argued that they merely highlight the need to take into account the ways in which aesthetic

726 

M. RAMPLEY

experience is framed. Yet nor are they so easily dismissed, either, for they indicate the importance of considering in close detail what is actually being monitored in neuroaesthetic experiments. For numerous alternative definitions of “aesthetic experience” can be advanced, involving a host of other emotions, involving awe, desire, pity, fear, indignation, and so forth. Thus when participants in neuroaesthetic experiments are asked to adopt an aesthetic attitude toward certain stimuli while their brain activity is being monitored, a common procedure in much neuroaesthetic work (e.g., Cupchik et  al. 2009), major caveats have to be applied to the interpretation of the results. For experiments of this kind treat the meaning of aesthetic experience as settled, when what is actually being measured is the idea of an aesthetic experience as defined by a specific philosophical tradition. This, in itself is not problematic as long as it is also acknowledged that it cannot then be turned into a universal neurological theory, since alternative kinds of aesthetic experience are possible. Indeed, aside from the issue of sociological or culturological framing, many would object that this does not represent any kind of aesthetic experience, since, as neuroaesthetic research itself indicates, aesthetic judgments are intermeshed with other kinds of emotion and judgment. Claims that neuroaesthetics offers a new scientifically rigorous form of inquiry are thus open to question given both the limitations of the technology and the imprecise and underanalyzed use of the central term: aesthetic experience. In addition, as one recent critic has commented (Schott 2015), it is difficult to imagine that the experimental conditions of lying in an fMRI scanner have much to do with the circumstances in which most of us have an aesthetic experience, which is often spontaneous and dependent on institutional contexts. Indeed, some of the fiercest criticisms have been articulated by scholars within the neuroscientific community (Tallis 2016) and not only by humanities and social science researchers anxious about the potential erosion of their disciplinary foundations. Exponents of neuroaesthetics are not oblivious to these and other problems. An important overview of the field written by some of its leading figures in 2016 (Pearce et al. 2016) acknowledged that the meaning of the term “aesthetic experience” is a matter of philosophical debate. However, they note, it is not an exceptional case; neurologists frequently study mental phenomena that are both phenomenologically elusive and poorly defined. Even the variability of the meaning of the term “emotion” has not prevented productive and meaningful research into the function and physiology of emotions. They also counter that while some experiments can hardly be said to reproduce real-world situations, other more recent work has been much more sensitive to context, monitoring the responses of concert goers or of visitors in museums. What is less obvious, however, is whether they have succeeded in arriving at convincing answers to some of these concerns, including the fact that neuroaesthetics seldom distinguishes between aesthetic and other kinds of pleasure. Clearly, further critical refinement and reflection is needed, assessing both the methodological assumptions and the broader conceptual frames.

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

727

3  The Value of Neuroaesthetics Bevil R. Conway and Alexander Rehding, a neuroscientist and a musicologist at Harvard University, have concluded (Conway and Rehding 2013, 4): “Insofar as beauty is a product of the brain, correlations between brain activity and experiences of beauty must exist”. Yet as they note, the question remains as to what neuroaesthetics adds beyond confirming what anyone, barring diehard dualists, would already have assumed. This observation can be broadened out into a more general question, especially as practitioners in the field focus on art as a privileged object of analysis. Specifically: what new insights does neuroaesthetics bring to the understanding of our engagement with images and works of art? Pearce et al. (2016, 273) attempt to spell out the gains achieved by neuroaesthetics, arguing that it helps psychologists: (a) to understand how cognitive processes are related to underlying neural mechanisms, (b) to study cognitive or affective processes (or aspects of those processes such as their temporal course) that are not accompanied by overt behavioral responses, (c) to determine whether two tasks rely on common or different mechanisms, and (d) to constrain cognitive theories and models.

As such, they state, neuroaesthetics is a parallel enterprise to psycholinguistics, which also examines the neural mechanisms at work when different linguistic functions and operations are taking place. This appears to be an eminently reasonable argument, but the examples they cite of specific pieces of research may make the more skeptical reader demur. These include the finding that, for example, “facial attractiveness is processed even when people do not explicitly attend or overtly respond to it”, that “aesthetic judgments involve two distinct stages: an early impression formation and a subsequent evaluative categorization”, or that “beliefs about the authenticity or authorship of artworks have an impact on how rewarding the artworks are perceived to be” (Pearce et al. 2016, 274). The validity of these and similar conclusions is not the point at issue. Rather, the difficulty many may have with these and other comparable examples of neuroaesthetic research is that they are trivially true, or that they merely confirm what has long been posited by philosophers or art historians. It therefore remains to be determined what kind of a discipline neuroaesthetics is, and who the audience is for its research. Suspicion that it brings few new insights to existing research on aesthetic experience, that it fails to generate new ideas that might challenge or modify widely held opinions, or theoretical and historical orthodoxies, may account for the fact that neuroaesthetics has primarily been a matter of interest for neuroscientists and not for image theorists or art historians. Indeed, neuroaesthetics appears to take on a very specific function that sets it odds with the values of researchers in the arts and the social sciences: legitimization of qualitative judgments about aesthetic experience due to an adherence to a certain

728 

M. RAMPLEY

ideology of scientific method and truth. The influence of the latter is evident in two assertions: One of the major insights that emerge [sic] is that the valuation of art, music, and other cultural objects, such as money, relies on the same neural mechanisms that mediate reward derived from food or drink, thus contributing to the notion of a “common currency” for choice. The conceptual apparatus of cognitive neuroscience permits a fruitful reanalysis of the debate about what kinds of pleasure are aesthetic and what distinguishes aesthetic pleasure from other sorts (Pearce et  al. 2016, 274). What seems to be evident here are examples of reverse inference, in other words, the idea that since certain kinds of experiences are correlated with specific patterns of neural activity, the latter will act not merely as indices but also as predictors of the former. To put it bluntly: an fMRI scan can tell a subject if they are having an aesthetic or some other kind of experience. Reliance on reverse inference is a widely criticized issue, not only in neuroaesthetics but in neuroscience in general. It has had its defenders (Machery 2014; Gylmour and Hanson 2016), although the models advanced as defensible approaches have shown a caution not evident in much neuroaesthetic writing. At the least, it has to be recognized as a problematic issue that cannot be disregarded, especially as it stumbles into the philosophical question of the relation between first-­ person and third-person perspectives. One can infer certain subjective experiences on the basis of external observation, but the correctness of the inferences will be confirmed by the human subject in question, not the scanning equipment. A shortcoming of much neuroaesthetic research is that, absorbed primarily in technical and procedural matters, it does not address this basic question. Such skirting around theoretical problems is even more apparent when it comes to the use of neuroscientific methods to explore not simply aesthetic questions but those to do with art. As noted earlier, art occupies a privileged position within neuroaesthetics, as an object that triggers a particularly rich set of neurological responses. Architecture, for example, is held to stimulate neural networks associated with motor activity, while it has long been claimed that artists consciously exploit optical effects to manipulate the visual-perceptual systems of viewers, that they are, as it were “applied neuroscientists” (Cavanagh 2005; Coburn et al. 2017). As with formalist theories of art, from Clive Bell’s concept of significant form onward (Bell 1914), the weakness of this claim is that it relies on identifying a restricted range of artworks and then treating them, metonymically, as representative of art as a whole. While formalist analysis has enjoyed renewed interest (Zangwill 2001, 2007), this has not extended to using it as the basis for a definition of art in the manner practiced by neuroaesthetics.

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

729

The weaknesses of neuroscientific approaches to art (as opposed to aesthetic experience) become evident when it comes to the examination of historical works of art. We have no access to the brains of artists of the past or to those of their viewers, but this has not stopped authors (Onians 2016) speculating about the neurological processes underpinning historic art practices. Some have posited generalized theories of the neurological effects of art and of artistic creativity. Chatterjee and Vartanian (2016, 185), for example, argue that “paintings reflect perceptual shortcuts used by the brain. Specifically, artists intentionally incorporate features that activate these shortcuts to facilitate desired perceptual and emotional effects in viewers […] artists at the turn of the twentieth century homed in on different attributes of our visual brain. For example, fauvists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain focused on color, cubists such as Pablo Picasso, George Braque, and Juan Gris focused on form, and Calder focused on visual motion. Some artists make use of perceptual mechanisms, such as the peak-shift principle. This principle emerged from Tinbergen’s observations of seagull chicks pecking for food from their mothers on a red spot near the tip of their mothers’ beaks”. Yet even if this explanation, which typifies much neuroaesthetic thinking, is convincing as an account of the effects of certain modernist works, its bypassing of basic historical questions limits its explanatory capacity. The nature of the problem is encapsulated in a point made by Todd Cronan on the role of aesthetic experience in art historical interpretation. Critiquing Rosalind Krauss’s focus on aesthetic effects in the paintings of Matisse and others, he argues that unless it is to be treated merely as a visual “stimulus”, the sensory (and hence neural) experience occasioned by a work of art is only “qualified” if connected to the work’s meaning: “That’s the difference between an affect that belongs to you (disqualified) and an intended effect—yours, it is happening to you, but an experience the artist could have meant you to have” (Cronan 2015). Krauss, on the other hand, collapses the meaning of the work into its effect on her as a viewer, and this is exactly the same problem with neuroaesthetic accounts that focus on the neurological effects of works of art. These may well offer compelling descriptions of the works in question, but for the dazzling visual impact of Matisse’s paintings (or indeed of any other historic image) to be significant as a historical interpretation, it has to be anchored in the web of intentions and possible meanings available when they were executed. The criticism is applicable to neuroaesthetics too: it lacks the conceptual resources on its own to determine whether the experiences described are relevant and pertinent, or whether they are the anachronistic responses of a purely contemporary viewer.

4  Concluding Remarks Neuroaesthetics has undoubtedly expanded the range of neuroscientific inquiry and opened up new ways of thinking about the experience of literature, music, art, and the image in general. Yet whether its insights have had or can have a

730 

M. RAMPLEY

transformative effect on understanding art remains an open question. For it to be able to lay claim to the latter, one might anticipate, for example, that neurological data might lead to a rethinking of the scope and nature of aesthetic experience. Yet in most cases, its results mostly confirm what are already well-­ rehearsed ideas about aesthetic judgment. In other words, it creates an additional layer of observation, but not one of much consequence for the kinds of questions that concern philosophical aesthetics. As an example of the kind of limitations neuroaesthetics still encounters, we might ask, for example, how the clinical observation that aesthetic and other kinds of pleasure appear to mobilize the same networks in the brain relates to the Kantian distinction (Kant 2000, 94–96) between judgments of beauty and those of the agreeable? Does it render it invalid? Hardly, since it is not about the distinction between pleasure and non-pleasure, but about the difference between different kinds of pleasure. Apart from the fact that neurological scanning lacks the resolution to be completely sure that, at the level of individual neurons, these are not two different processes, it would, in any case appear to be irrelevant since it bears on a separate issue. This raises a more general difficulty, namely, the fact that neuroaesthetics seems ill-equipped to deal with the kinds of questions that are of interest to aestheticians and theorists of the image. Even if aesthetic and moral judgments draw on the same neural “resources”, for example, this probably says little about the relation between the moral and aesthetic qualities of a work of art. This is especially the case given that there are very different kinds of moral reasoning. Similarly, if the answer to the well-worn debate as to why we knowingly respond emotionally to fictional representations as if they were depictions of real events was that they take place in the same part of the brain, one would feel entitled to find the explanation unsatisfactory. For aesthetics is intimately involved in analyzing the first-person perspective, whereas neuroaesthetics aims at precisely the opposite: establishing observable, third-person data. Yet by adopting the “view from nowhere”, to borrow Thomas Nagel’s phrase (Nagel 1986), it may be that knowledge of what is most important about aesthetic experience and about what motivates our inquiry into it is precisely that which is forfeited.

References Aguirre, Geoffrey K.; Zarahn E. and D’Esposito, Mark. 1998. “The variability of human BOLD hemodynamic responses”. NeuroImage, 8: 360–369. Bell, Clive. 1914. Art. London: Frederick. A. Stokes. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brinkmann, Hannah; Boddy,  Jane; Immelmann,  Beatrice; Specker,  Eva; Pelowski,  Matthew; Leder,  Helmut, and Rosenberg,  Raphael. 2018. “Ferocious Colours and Peaceful Lines Describing and Measuring Aesthetic Effects”. Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 65: 7–26.

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

731

Broca, Pierre Paul. 1865. “Sur le siege de la Faculté du langage articulé”. Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 6: 377–393. Buxton, Richard. 2013. “The Physics of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)”. Reports on Progress in Physics 76 (9): 096601. Cavanagh, Patrick. 2005. “The Artist as Neuroscientist”. Nature, 434 (7031): 301–307. Chatterjee, Anjan. 2015. The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Anjan and Vartanian, Oshin. 2016. “Neuroscience of Aesthetics”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1369: 172–194. Chouinard, Brea; Boliek, Carol, and Cummine, Jacqueline. 2009. “How to Interpret and Critique Neuroimaging Research: A Tutorial on Use of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Clinical Populations”. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 25: 269–289. Coburn, Alex; Vartanian, Oshin, and Chatterjee, Anjan. 2017. “Buildings, Beauty and the Brain: A Neuroscience of Architectural Experience”. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 29 (9): 1521–1531. Conway, Bevil R. and Rehding, Alexander. 2013. “Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty”. PLoS Biology, 11 (3): e1001504 Cronan, Todd. 2015. “Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism”. nonsite # 16. Cupchik, Gerald C. 2016. The Aesthetics of Emotion: Up the Down Staircase of the Mind-­ Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cupchik, Gerald C.; Vartanian, Oshin; Crawley, Adrian, and Mikulis, David J. 2009. “Viewing artworks: Contributions of cognitive control and perceptual facilitation to aesthetic experience”. Brain and Cognition, 70: 84–91. Davis, Whitney. 2011. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deacon, Terrence. 1978. The Sense of Order. Oxford: Phaidon. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton. Deacon, Terrence. 2006. “The Aesthetic Faculty”. In:  The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. by Mark Turner. New York: Oxford University Press. Gombrich, Ernst. 1960. Art and Illusion. Oxford: Phaidon Gylmour, Clark and Catherine Hanson. 2016. “Reverse Inference in Neuropsychology”. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 67 (4): 1139–1153. Heeger David J., and Ress, David. 2002. “What Does fMRI Tell Us about Neuronal Activity?” Nature Review of Neuroscience, 3 (2): 142–151. Huston, Joseph; Nadal, Marcos; Agnati, Luigi, and Cela Conde, Camilo José (eds.). 2015. Art, Aesthetics and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kandel, Eric. 2012. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and the Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 2004. “1910”. In: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson.

732 

M. RAMPLEY

Lauring, Jon O. (ed.). 2014. An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics: The Neuroscientific Approach to Artistic Experience, Artistic Creativity and Arts Appreciation. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Logothetis, Nikos. 2001. “Neurophysiological Investigation of the Basis of the fMRI Signal”. Nature, 412: 150–157. Machery, Eduard. 2014. “In Defence of Reverse Inference”. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65 (2): 251–267. Mallgrave, Harry Francis. 2009. The Architect’s Brain. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Onians, John. 2016. European Art: A Neuroarthistory. London: Yale University Press. Pearce, Marcus T.; Zaidel, Dahlia W.; Vartanian, Oshin; Skov, Martin; Leder, Helmut; Chatterjee,  Anjan, and Nadal,  Marcos. 2016. “Neuroaesthetics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience”. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11 (2): 265–279. Riegl, Alois. 1901. Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-­ Ungarn im Zusammenhange mit der Gesamtentwicklung der Bildenden Künste bei den Mittelmeervölkern. Vienna: K. K. Staatsdruckerei. Rolls, Edmund. 2014. “Neuroculture: art, aesthetics and the brain”. Rendiconti Lincei – Matematica e Applicazioni, 25 (3): 300. Rosenberg, Raphael and Christophe Klein. 2015. “The Moving Eye of the Beholder: Eye Tracking and the Perception of Paintings”. In:  Art, Aesthetics and the Brain, edited by Joseph Huston, Marcos Nadal, Luigi Agnati and Camilo José Cela Conde. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schott, G.  D. 2015. “Neuroaesthetics: Exploring Beauty and the Brain”. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 138: 2451–2454. Schummers, James Hongbo Yu and Mriganka, Sur. 2008. “Tuned Responses of Astrocytes and their Influence on Hemodynamic Signals in the Visual Cortex”. Science, 320: 1638–1643. Singh, Krish D. 2012. “Which ‘Neural Activity’ Do You Mean? fMRI, MEG, Oscillations and Neurotransmitters”. NeuroImage, 62 (2): 1121–1130. Sirotin, Yevgeniy and Das, Aniruddha. 2009. “Anticipatory Haemodynamic Signals in Sensory Cortex Not Predicted by Local Neuronal Activity”. Nature, 457: 475–479. Skov, Martin and Oshin, Vartanian. 2017. Neuroaesthetics. London: Routledge, 2nd edition. Snow, C.  P. 1998. The Two Cultures. Ed. and intro. by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starr, G.  Gabrielle. 2015. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Tallis, Raymond, 2016. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. London: Acumen. Turner, Robert. 2016. “Uses, Misuses, New Uses and Fundamental Limitations of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Cognitive Science”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371: 20150349. Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1932. The Principles of Art History. Trans. by M.  D. Hottinger. New York: G. Bell and Sons. Zaidel, Dahlia. 2012. “Neuroscience, Biology and Brain Evolution in Art”. In:  The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology.  Ed. by Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  THE IMAGE AND NEUROAESTHETICS 

733

Zaidel, Dahlia and Marcos Nadal. 2011. “Brain Intersections of Aesthetics and Morals: Perspectives from Biology, Neuroscience and Evolution”. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 54 (3): 267–280. Zangwill, Nick. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zangwill, Nick. 2007. Aesthetic Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zeki, Semir. 1999. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Visual Sociology Carolina Cambre

The history of visual sociology is intimately entwined with the evolution of sociology and has dispersed and episodic trajectories across various geographies and historical periods. In this chapter, I will present visual sociology not as a subfield of sociology but rather as a para-field, and trace some of the historical routes and roots contributing to the ongoing emergence of its post-­disciplinary features. Addressing how and in what context the topic emerged will primarily focus on critical moments and thinkers whose contributions nourish the field in important ways but have sometimes been overlooked. To do visual sociology justice, this depiction must be considered a piece in a vastly larger ecology of schools of visual sociology intercontinentally and historically with diverging perspectives that merit being addressed in a more extensive work. The specific aims of this chapter are to present critical points of traction that attend specifically to the questions of how this post-discipline matters for the study of images; what particular set of problems are raised; what consequences visual sociology has had that matter for image studies; and generally what visual sociology offers for understanding images. Readers will not be surprised to find shared approaches, thinkers, and theoretical perspectives with other topic areas.

1   Some Routes and Roots In 1986, Current Sociology published a special “Trend Report” edited by Leonard M. Henny on Visual Sociology that presented the state of the art in the USA.  It included a visual photographic essay, reflections on visual sociology, and empirical case studies and reflected a central concern with C. Cambre (*) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_45

735

736 

C. CAMBRE

photography characterizing visual sociology at the time. Like others tracing the US roots of the field in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Curry and Clarke 1977; Harper 1988; Grady 1991; Becker 1995; and later Strangleman 2008), Henny (1986) recalls the seminal collection Jon Wagner edited in 1979, Images of Information, and more specifically Clarice Stasz’s “The Early History of Visual Sociology” and “Visual Sociology” by Derrall Cheatwood with Stasz. Using archival research Stasz (1979) finds that “if you pull a turn-of-the-century volume of the American Journal of Sociology off the shelf, blow off the dust, and open it up, you will find something virtually unseen in sociology journals of recent decades—photographs” (121). Stasz reported “244 photographs as illustrations and evidence” (ibid.) in the journal (1896–1916) and suggested that early twentieth-century sociology’s distancing from images was due to narrow ideas of what being “scientific” meant, and that “taking photographs was identified with (the often female) social reformers who were seen to taint the purity of the discipline” (Guggenheim 2015, 347). She makes it known that the editor Albion Small argued for a focus on statistics, something many understood as legitimating a gradual marginalization of researchers using visual media. By the 1920s, photographs had disappeared from the journal. Michael Guggenheim (2015), who co-started the first UK-based MA in Visual Sociology (in 2013), remarks how the “exclusion of imagery from sociology is a continual complaint” and a condition for Visual Sociology’s very existence. Ironically, sociological textual data are often translated into graphs, charts, and diagrams, yet are not considered visual sociology by sociology. In other words, only certain types of images were exiled, betraying what John Grady (1991) had identified as suspicion toward mass media. But this posture is not specific to sociology’s iconoclasm, as the image was already seen as suspect more broadly with calls for strenuous interpretive vigilance (Mitchell 1984): Scholars claim sociology’s allergic reaction to images was mobilized to justify a scientistic leaning and direction aimed a legitimizing sociology (Wagner 1979). In Grady’s (1991) words, “sociology’s image of itself as a science and theory driven discipline and its correspondingly restricted view of what constitutes acceptable analytic practice” (23) leads to “avoidance and dismissal of more aesthetic or technically innovative styles” (Cheatwood and Stasz 1979, 265) among sociologists, or a general lack of concern with visual culture or visual methods (Harper 2000, 730). Grady’s (1991) contention that sociologists should admit that “even non-visual sociology has an aesthetic dimension” (34) is reiterated when Guggenheim (2013) deplores sociology’s media-­ determinism: “‘Visual’ is considered to be strange, not really sociology, not really scientific, or it is simply forgotten. In many other disciplines the same situation does not apply. […] A non-visual astronomy simply does not exist” (online). His claim mirrors Howard Becker’s (1995) observations of how sociology’s view of visual materials “as unscientific is odd, since the natural sciences routinely use [them] […] Contemporary biology, physics, and astronomy are unthinkable without photographic evidence” (Becker 1995, 8). Thus, Guggenheim (2015) lays the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of a

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

737

discipline that analyzes how other disciplines use “complex technical devices to help produce facts, while the fact production of our own discipline remains largely unexamined and falls short” (346). Although transgressing disciplinary boundaries since its inception “continues to be a defining feature of sociological scholarship” (Rimke 2010, 241), valuable epistemological lessons provided by those incursions do not seem to have been rigorously directed at understanding historical shifts in the field itself. The very sociological imagination facilitating an understanding of “the larger historical scene” to “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society” (Mills 1959, 5–6) is largely missing in view of the discipline’s own shifting epistemological commitments.

2   Visual Sociology Unbound Early debates about marginalization reveal a tension between the word discipline (sociology) that sits uncomfortably after a word that refuses to be constrained by disciplines (visual), which might better be understood as post-disciplinary. Many labor to define the field, while others insist it remain undefined. Luc Pauwels (2010) reasons that “developing a more cumulative and integrative stance” (546) may help avoid the repeated reinvention of the field’s conceptual frameworks and particularly its visual methods, which he sees as somewhat connected to the fragmented institutionalization of visual sociology. For him, “valid scientific insights in society can be acquired by observing, analyzing and theorizing its visual manifestations: behavior of people and material products of culture” (546). Illustrating this, when Howard Becker (1995) compared visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism, he concluded images gained their significance from contexts, which provided backgrounds for intelligibility (8). Therefore, they were interchangeable: “Each might be interpreted as one of the others, one might take a documentary photograph as a news photo or a work of visual sociology, it all depends on the context” (12). After analyzing Robert Frank’s photographs to show how meanings change, he explains, “What makes these images visual sociology is not their content alone, but their context” (12) and thus they illustrate “the contextual nature of all efforts to understand social life” (Becker 1995, 13). Because images are always social, for Henny (1986) visual study is the study of ways of seeing and includes problematizing how the instrumentation of the gaze has been naturalized, including that of the researcher. Hence, the preferred researcher’s viewpoint is one that addresses questions of who states? how? when? and in what situation? (Blanc 2013). Attention to practices, and accordingly macro- and micro-power relations, recognizes “the visual is implicated in the distribution of relations of power and possibilities for action” (Fyfe and Law 1988, 1). As D.N.  Rodowick (2001) shows, it also means recognizing how

738 

C. CAMBRE

technologies of figural expression offer unprecedented control over the strategies of divide in space, order in time, and compose in space-time. This is a question not simply of what happens on the screen (cinematic, televisual, or computer) but of how these technologies serve to define, regulate, observe, and document human collectivities. (2)

This stance prompts questions of institutional and infrastructural contexts within which these practices exist, and with which they interact both forming and being formed by them (see Traue et al.). Like Henny (1986), Richard Chalfen (2011) positions the core activity of visual sociology (and visual anthropology) as looking (seeing and being seen), something culturally dependent and subject to ethnographic inquiry. His analytical process redirects “attention from so-called ‘objective’ and ‘realistically accurate’ recordings of ‘what’s there’ to more complex questions of how one is looking, watching, viewing and seeing, with or without […] some form of scopic technology” (2). Elaborating, Chalfen (2011) describes how his emphasis on “looking” helps him avoid the “frequently cited and reductive coincidence of visual social sciences with a myopic attention to camera-use and picture-making, most notably, the practice of ethnographic film for visual anthropology and documentary photography for visual sociology” (25). In the 1980s Douglas Harper described visual sociology within a photographically oriented perspective as “a collection of approaches” addressing data gathering using cameras both found and researcher or participant produced. He notes, “The ‘visual-methods’ people are usually working on is  a specific research problem and a middle-range theory […] Using this approach, sociologists typically explore the semiotics, or sign systems, of different visual communication systems” (Harper 1988, 54). Beyond the photographic focus, John Grady was simultaneously calling for a return to doing sociology the way Roy Stryker had suggested in the 1930s where the question was not about the picture or the camera but rather “Every phase of our time and our surroundings has vital significance […] The job is to know enough about the subject matter, to find its significance in itself and in relations to its surroundings, its time, and its function (quoted in Rothstein 1986, 2–3)” (Grady 1991, 36). Like Becker, Chalfen includes work by artists who explore sociological concerns through various media under the umbrella of visual sociology, much as early “social photographers” were included at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century (Henny 1986). As Henny (1986) dryly remarks, “there was probably more respect for photography as a method of data collection and as a means of disseminating research findings at the end of the nineteenth century than nowadays” (66). Yet, in the 1930s, sociologists and social photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothy Lange again used photos to document society in the USA, Germany, England, and other European countries. In line with this inclusiveness, it follows that Chalfen (2005) interprets the work of George Hashiguchi (1988) in Japan as containing a visual sociological perspective, “much as others have accorded August

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

739

Sander for his portraits during the Weimar Republic. George Hashiguchi’s work seems to give a fine example of ‘when art which is aimed at exploring society […] might just as well be social science information’” (Becker 1981 in Chalfen 2005, 31). Visual sociology scholars writing in the late twentieth century clearly identify the kinds of work relevant to the field across both time and space and beyond the institutional purview of the field. One current case could be Sarah E. Fraser’s work at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute of East Asian Art History on neo-colonial Chinese photography (Fig. 1). Fraser (2010) examines images from 1860 to 1920 (similar to Fig. 1) both endogenously and exogenously. The content within pictures was analyzed for patterns and tropes and then situated with the US and Chinese immigration contexts and discourses. She showed how certain practices of documentation in the nineteenth century lent themselves to presenting race, character, and profession in order to make identity claims. Then she connected them to how Imperial China’s depictions of ethnic minorities as barbaric were taken up by

Fig. 1  A Study in Chinese Faces, print on card; mount 9 × 18 cm, stereograph. Group of Chinese people posing. Keystone View Company. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

740 

C. CAMBRE

US policymakers. Their aim to criminalize Chinese immigration makes these connected identity construction processes visible. These practices of working through photographs as both rhetorical statements and documenting social conditions parallel the work of the “social photographers” who already understood images as processes that could activate conventions, yet dialogue or clash with everyday perceptions. As Eduardo Neiva (1999) stresses, “Images simulate situations that help us reach decisions, whether political or scientific. Personal identities spring from pictures that certify and authorize us. Images help to build us up” (75). For instance, Lewis Hine, Chicago School sociologist and photographer, contributed over 5000 photographs to the US National Child Labor Committee, and thus provided images as accusation (cf. Cambre 2019). These pictures were pressed into service as part of a broader imperative for social change (Fig. 2). Imagine at a time when photography was still very expensive and uncommon. The combined impact of thousands of photographs, many of them character studies of children (see Fig. 2), fused expression with content on social discourses of child labor in the early twentieth century. Hine also photographed American Red Cross (ARC) relief efforts in Europe after the Great War. His images were intended as information: documentation of human endurance and a visual record for the ARC international relief efforts. However, by looking at

Fig. 2  Lewis Wickes Hine, 10 year old picker on Gildersleeve Tobacco Farm, Gildersleeve, 1917, Connecticut USA.  Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

741

Fig. 3  Lewis Wickes Hine, Still cheerful in spite of being driven from their homes by the German invaders. These two refugees, grandmother and grandchild, are cared for at the free canteen maintained at the Gare de Lyons, the Bon Accueuil, a French relief organization, with the aid of the American Red Cross, June 1918. American National Red Cross collection. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

Fig.  3, and the lengthy caption provided by Hine, one sees he engages the affective register fully through compositional techniques to amplify his commentary on the impacts of war on innocents (old and young), and consequently elevating relief efforts within this context and that of the larger set of images. Such examples show that separation of the mimetic and conventional aspects is a forced artificial exercise, even when mobilized for analytical purposes. But this is not enough for visual sociology, because understanding that “images are not subservient copies; they are additions succeeding from a fundamentally creative agency” (Neiva 1999, 90), means that their participation in social worlds on micro and macro levels also implicate today’s viewers and the relationships between what we see and believe we know. Because aesthetic and affective registers invisibly condition viewing, observation is never simply given. Hine must have understood “the visible depends on a certain way of looking […] which establishes an order of foci, relations and visual priorities within a field” (Shields 2004, 26) and was thus able to mobilize and disrupt “processes of enunciation of knowledge mediated by the image” (Blanc 2013, 33) (Fig. 3). Elizabeth Chaplin’s (1994) insightful book explains how “representation can be understood as articulating and contributing to social processes” (1). She

742 

C. CAMBRE

observes that most sociological research already involves the visual, which is difficult to avoid since “we theorize what we ‘see’, social contexts, spatial arrangements, people’s appearances and their actions […]” (1). An aspect Tim Strangleman (2008) expands on by conceptualizing “a second sense in which we can think of these representations working is in combination with the written word” (1500) because they provide insights into complex, non-reductive understandings of people’s experiences. For Strangleman (2008), “At its most developed, the interaction between words and images produces a far deeper form of understanding of our subject” (1500). Images are not positioned below text in a hierarchy. Hedges and Beynon write in Born to Work: Images of Factory Life: “the text has not been written as ‘expanded caption’, nor are the photographic images meant to ‘illustrate’ some point made in the writing. What we have attempted to produce is two sympathetic interpretations—one visual, one verbal—of life in factories” (Hedges and Beynon 1982, 6  in Strangleman 2008, 1500). In other words, the images are the argument (Cambre 2019, Traue et al. 2019). While within sociology, they echo James Agee’s (1941) earlier wish: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs” (13) at the start of the fifty-nine-page stand-alone gallery in the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Before the title page, preface, acknowledgments, or any other cipher, readers encounter page after page of photographs without interruption or support from text. In his preface, Evans asserts the photos are “not illustrative” and that “they, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent and fully collaborative” (1941, xv). Or as Patti Lather (1994) describes it, “Evan’s photographs […] resist narrative, sentimentality and sensationalism while still ‘reveal[ing] the ways differences can be organized and contained’ (163)” (Quinby in Lather 1994, 42), marks this photographic encounter as an effort to refuse closure and turn “the analytical categories of the human sciences against themselves” through which Agee and Evans “enact the struggle of an ‘I’ to become an ‘eye’ that both inscribes and interrupts normalizing power/knowledge” (42). The rich informative dimension of Evans’ photographs, to the extent that Agee’s text has been described as one long caption (Lather 1994), cannot be negated, or ignored (Fig. 4). Chaplin’s (1994) book proposes ways for sociologists to use visual analysis and depiction throughout their work, something that Becker (1995) would say is already the case if one recognizes that images resemble “all the other ways of reporting what we know, or think we have found out, about the societies we live in, such ways as ethnographic reports, statistical summaries, maps, and so on” (5). What are needed then are deeper problematizations of taken-for-­ granted concepts such as “observation” and the development of critical attitudes by researchers toward visual experience, documentation, and creation in research methods and research representation. Lack of critique is akin to de Certeau’s view over New York where “the exultation of a scopic drive” has him realize: “Just to be this seeing point creates the fiction of knowledge” (in Shields 2004, 6). This necessary critical discernment toward visual experience can be assessed through evaluation of how researchers indicate their awareness

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

743

Fig. 4  Walker Evans, Tengle Children, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Office of War Information, Photograph Collection. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

of the visual as already cultural in their studies. My claim is that adopting such a stance not only makes the research results more compelling and convincing but also strengthens visual methods as a whole through robust epistemological reflection. This awareness can be manifested by explicitly including considerations of the researcher’s own seeing acts whereby they demonstrate an understanding of “the supposed solidity of the visible to be constructed in such a manner that the eye [can be] tricked. Quite other things can be taking place […] than those we think we are witnessing” (Shields 2004, 10). This move also allows researchers to address what is felt but not articulated, that unseen factors that create conditions for visuality, the ways things come into view, or what sociologist Rob Shields (2004) calls visualicity. So far, I have described some of the conditions whereby an area denominated visual sociology emerged as a para-field in the USA and the kinds of work it includes. I have reviewed texts by scholars who identify as visual sociologists writing about visual sociology both within and beyond academia, and include artistic work manifesting social concerns in sociologically compatible ways. It remains to be acknowledged that visual sociology as described here is fairly widely carried out within mainstream sociology, but without adopting that categorization. Georg Simmel’s Sociology of the Senses, for example, uses historical perspectives to describe relations between different sensory modes. His sociology of fashion exemplifies the study of everyday visual culture. Max

744 

C. CAMBRE

Weber considers the image as a source of charismatic rule. The Chicago School sociologists based their studies on observations of urban cultures rich in audio-­ visual-­ tactile dimensions. In French sociology, Emile Durkheim’s and in anthropology Marcel Mauss’ studies of religion contain important considerations of iconic representations of society. Goffman’s everyday actors use image management, and his examination of advertisements looks at visual social conventions of marking and displaying gender. Among the many possible inclusions of works by well-known scholars, one must wonder about the existence of sociologists who have been forgotten or who were never recognized, especially in the case of women. Partly due to hegemonic vectors of invisibilization that impact women and racialized scholars disproportionately, one might assume that barely the tip of the iceberg of their work has been appreciated. It becomes necessary, then, to question statements like this one: “After the depression, however, sociology experienced a long period of visual impoverishment. It was only in the 1960s that sociologist rediscovered the camera and the term visual sociology became more widely used” (Curry and Clarke 1977 in Henny 1986, 3). Claims like these are difficult to support, in fact, John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor’s (2018) work on Pearl Jephcott proves them untrue, and begs the question of how many more scholars like Jephcott exist.

3  The Case of Pearl Jephcott Goodwin and O’Connor (2018) describe a context of British empirical and survey oriented sociology in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s when Jephcott started working with and through images and “‘visual sociology’ was not that fashionable” (7). Using drawing, photography, ethnographic immersion, biographical methods, and participatory action research, Jephcott conducted groundbreaking work on the everyday lives of women, and what had emerged as “teenagers” in post-war Britain (e.g., Clubs for Girls (1942), Girls Growing Up (1942), Rising Twenty (1948), Some Young People (1954b), Married Women Working (1962), A Troubled Area: Notes on Notting Hill (1964), Time of One’s Own (1967), and Homes in High Flats (1971)). Goodwin (2018) recounts his biographical research on Jephcott and the difficulties of assembling the narrative from dispersed fragments, noting that Jephcott, who worked primarily as an adjunct professor at various institutions, never quite achieved the security of a permanent position and that “some senior male colleagues treated her unprofessionally in the early stages of her career by undervaluing her contribution” (ibid.) and failing to see the stellar quality of her work (Fig. 5). Goodwin and O’Connor (2018) discuss how both published and unpublished paintings, drawings and photographs (see Fig. 5), writings and accompanying images contribute insights into the lives of the 1960s teenagers from their clothes, social lives, and spaces to work. Jephcott’s research for Time of One’s Own included 600 interviews “detailed research notes collected during

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

745

Fig. 5  Pearl Jephcott, examples from Jephcott’s notebooks. Courtesy of John Goodwin

seventy-six informal small discussion groups, written commentaries from 1600 young people and through meetings with an additional forty youngsters and, finally, diaries from ‘just a few adolescents’” (5–6). She had a “unique” use of images: “area photographs […] nine half tone plates printed on high-quality, ‘photographic’ style paper, two maps and twelve distinctive black and white line drawings” (14). Given the volume, quality, and span of time over which Jephcott’s sociological and simultaneously visual sociological studies were conducted, Goodwin (2018) puzzles over why her work is barely mentioned in social science research (and describes how he only found one of her books

746 

C. CAMBRE

accidentally). He surmises that there has been a “narrowing of our vision or what Elias referred to as the retreat of the sociologists to the present” symptomatic of trends that pressure researchers for quick results. Recovering work such as Jephcott’s enriches sociology and visual sociology equally, but still leaves questions about others whose work most certainly would diversify and nourish what has up till now been cited as “canonical”.

4  A Para-field with Post-disciplinary Features Visual Sociology does not designate a subject like subfields do (sociology of “category” or “category” sociology). Hence, “visual sociology is not really a specialized field of sociology in the same way as the sociology of law, or sociology of culture, but a cross-cutting field of inquiry” (Pauwels 2010, 559). In other words, visual sociology can be understood to be adjacent to sociology, a para-field that includes all the same topic concerns: A way of doing and thinking that influences the whole process of researching (conceptualizing, gathering, and communicating). It is not just a “sociology of the visual” (as subject), but also a method for sociology in general (whatever its field: law, religion, culture, etc.) and a way of thinking, conceptualizing, and presenting ideas and findings. (Ibid.)

Visual sociological work, like much sociological research, aims to achieve a balance between empirical depth and highly developed theoretical fluency, with practice and theory mutually co-constituting each other. As a para-field visual sociology can address all sociological subfield topics, from urban sociology (Krase and Shortell 2011) to ethics and disability (Garland-Thomson 2006). Empirical studies effectively combine sociological with visual concerns. For example, Laura Krystal Porterfield’s (2017) study analyzes the visual culture of a school environment and what students learn in terms of race, gender, and place. Using ethnographic, photographic, and discourse analysis, Porterfield (2017) argues that even in the context of an award-winning, progressive school culture, young working-class black women are subtly encouraged to create certain versions of themselves deemed more “palatable”. Studies like this one, which inform sociology of education as much as visual sociology, demonstrate matching concerns between those of a sociological subfield and its parallel in visual sociology. In another example Jon Rieger (1991) recounts teaching a visual sociology course in an article that could have just as easily been published in Teaching Sociology as in Visual Studies. He describes his interests in the “visual perspective” in sociology since the 1960s, manifested in his 1970 community study incorporating a photographic survey, as well as his 1980s participation in the IVSA, and his taking Becker’s course in visual sociology. Rieger’s course focused heavily on photography with projects around self-portraiture, social landscapes, and lectures on the use of photo-elicitation, the photo-essay, and ethnography and time series techniques (Rieger 1991). Classes were used for

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

747

developing techniques and skills, which were nourished with guest lectures, theoretical texts (e.g., Becker’s Studying Society Photographically, David Neuman’s The American Courtship of House and Car, Curry’s photo-­elicitation interview, Collier’s “Visual Fieldwork”), and examples of visual sociological work (Rieger 1991). While vigorous empirical work is abundant, methodological sophistication has fallen behind. When considering visual methods, a vast array of works and scholars in keeping with the size of the field is available. Visual research methods draw deeply from across the social sciences and primarily sociology and anthropology. As mentioned, Pauwels (2010) sees visual methods being reinvented “without gaining much methodological depth and often without consideration of long existing classics in the field” (546), or newer landmarks (e.g., Knowles and Sweetman 2004; Prosser 1998; Banks 2001; Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001). Pauwels (2010) bemoans how recent narrow empirical work fails to operationalize rigorous methodological frameworks within which visual research can approach “the collection, production, analysis, and communication of visual aspects and insights or an in-depth description of visual media’s expressive capabilities” (547), and he is concerned that the potential of using visual media will remain unrealized. He also critiques superficial approaches limited to discussing techniques like photo-elicitation, systematic recording, or visual essay, “often without trying to explain the existing diversity, underlying claims, or methodological caveats” (554). In other words, Pauwels (2010) laments a lack of balance and/or integration between theory and practice in current research. As practice-led research (or research-creation) continues to gain ground, the explicit articulation of theory-as-practice or vice-versa becomes part of framing a research project. Long ago Chaplin (1994) called for “a feminist and reflexive stance in arguing for the reshaping of sociology so that it encompasses the complexity of the visual dimension” (11), demonstrating it in her own work in visual diaries and co-creation with artists. Many of these shifts are in progress. As perspectives change, they are reflected in modifications of terminology. For example, the technique of representing research through a narrative interplaying image and text was described by Harper (1987) in Visual Anthropology’s first ever issue, as a “visual ethnographic narrative”. Later it became known as a “photoessay” and currently the term “visual essay” prevails to welcome filmic, drawn or work otherwise beyond photography. The notion of visual here gestures toward the post-disciplinary as it opens itself to creative expressive means, altered photographs, metaphoric representation, and interventions that serve the purpose of communicating research findings beyond disciplinary constraints. For similar reasons Pauwels (2010) suggests the practice of data collection under the rubric of “photo or film elicitation” might better be termed visual elicitation, again to avoid limiting this technique to photographic media (553). This openness was signaled long ago when the International Journal of Visual Sociology changed its name to Visual Studies, and continues to be emphasized by scholars who now refer to their work as “visual social science” to include their commitments to overlapping visual foci across areas like sociology, anthropology, and geography in ways that blur disciplinary boundaries.

748 

C. CAMBRE

Visual sociology treats theory as an important element in analysis. Macro-­ level theory typically draws on major sociological frameworks like functionalism or conflict theory and then works to productively articulate those with mid- and micro-level analyses many of which specifically address visual analysis (e.g., visual semiotics, socio-semiotics, visual rhetoric, iconology, visual discourse analysis). Because, “a depiction is never just an illustration […] it is the site for the construction of social difference” (Fyfe and Law 1988, 1), the analysis examines both how every image produced is linked to a point of view (how the gaze is situated) and how the researcher’s own ocular perceptions are implicated regardless of whether the study focuses on depicted representations, their production or consumption, the conventions of style, or the uses of various visuals and the discourses surrounding them. Nevertheless, to address the image, research in visual sociology demands another theoretical layer beyond sociological requisites, and it is partly this lack that hampers methodological sophistication. The image calls for a scholarly practice reaching beyond the empirical “to include the entire phaneron—the psychological, remembered and ideological aspects of the event of experience—diverse visual processes which are also articulated with the operations of power and governance” (Shields 2004, 2). At least since Ibn al-Haytham (Latin, Alhazen, c. 965–1039) used an Egyptian tomb as a camera obscura (Illich 1991) revolutionizing the “gaze” in the eleventh century, the relationships between the visible and perception have been core to image theory. Studying the social with and through images (moving or static, virtual or concrete, abstract or representational, manipulated or machinic) means researchers need to attend to and intentionally position themselves vis-à-vis the image conceptually. Useful theoretical frameworks range from Hans Belting’s (2011) triadic Body/Medium/Image; Georges Didi-Huberman’s (2004) triad of Visible/ Visual/Virtual; to Rob Shields’ (2004) six forms of visualicity (gaze/glance/ focus/depth/figure/ground). Often visual sociologists will use Barthes’ punctum, studium, and myth. Phenomenological approaches might use Merleau-­ Ponty’s four layers of the invisible. Or if the study considers images performatively, Pavel Florensky’s (1996) theory of image as event is worthwhile, as are Harun Farocki’s “operational images”, those which “do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation” (Grønstad and Vågnes 2019, 79) or Alfred Gell’s (1998) idea of images as distributed agency. Whether a micro-analysis looks at discursive effects or social semiotics, the researcher needs to ground the analysis with a concept of the image. Triangulating theoretically this way inevitably pushes the work beyond disciplinary bounds because the image demands to be understood on its own terms. In this light, Becker (1995) and Guggenheim (2013) describing how imagistic visual materials were thought “strange” or “odd” within sociology is unsurprising. The conditions for emergence of the para-field of visual sociology despite sharing sociology’s goals of enhancing sociological knowledge are simultaneously pressured to exceed disciplinary bounds by the image. Shifting

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

749

terminology and expanding theoretical and methodological repertoires are symptomatic of the image’s post-disciplinary demands. Blanc (2013) recounts how Pierre Naville’s point in a seminal 1966 article is vitally relevant today: Naville envisions “using the creation of images as a way of posing a problem, and as a way of interpreting the meaning of its elements”. From the outset, the emphasis is on the possibilities of sociological knowledge produced through the visual. The visual becomes an “instrument that detects relationships that cannot be grasped in any other way”. (31, my emphasis)

5  Coming Full Circle: W.E.B. Du Bois As noted, scholars critiqued how mainstream sociology in the USA has largely failed to judiciously examine its own production; a weakness permitting exclusions and erasures that generate knowledge hierarchies and create “a logic of segregation [that] shaped all aspects of American society, including American sociology” (Collins 2007, 576). In 2017, Akosua Adomako Ampofo’s closing IVSA plenary, where she shared her work on representation and missing African voices, stressed the need for sociology as a whole and visual sociology in particular to reframe the everyday of scholarly work by giving more attention precisely to the work of scholars long sidelined within the discipline like W.E.B.  Du Bois. While re-examining Du Bois’ sociological importance has recently been highlighted (see Morris 2015, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B.  Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology) much more attention is warranted. The marginalization of African-American scholarship crystalizes in Du Bois’ biography, work, and school. Despite evidence that the Du Bois-led Atlanta Sociological Laboratory was the first US school of sociology, predating the Chicago School, Earl Wright II (2015) asserts that “it remains largely excluded in contemporary sociology textbooks” (online). Wider recognition of Du Bois’ legacy means understanding that not only did he lead the first school of sociology in the USA, the first urban sociology program and conduct the first US scientific sociological study, but also that he was also the first visual sociologist. His work must be recognized as so innovative that it could easily inform the latest developments in visual sociology today. On February 23, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King paid tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois’ life and works; it was to be his last major address before his assassination on April 4th: Long before sociology was a science he was pioneering in the field of social study of Negro life and completed works on health, education, employment, urban conditions and religion. This was at a time when scientific inquiry of Negro life was so unbelievably neglected that only a single university in the entire nation had such a program and it was funded with $5,000 for a year’s work. Against such odds Dr. Du Bois produced two enduring classics before the twentieth century. His Suppression of the African Slave Trade written in 1896 is Volume I in the Harvard Classics. His study The Philadelphia Negro, completed in 1899, is still

750 

C. CAMBRE

used today. Illustrating the painstaking quality of his scientific method, to do this work Dr. Du Bois personally visited and interviewed 5,000 people. (King 1968, reprinted in Foner 1970, 14)

In 1900, Du Bois conducted one of the earliest scholarly rethinkings of the social methodologically through and by images. He went to the Paris World’s Fair to challenge the belief that blacks were inferior to whites. Du Bois wrote: “The bulk of the exhibit is an attempt to picture present conditions. Thirty-­ two charts, 500 photographs, and numerous maps and plans form the basis of this exhibit […]” (576). The Exposition Report noted: “It is impossible to do justice to this exhibit in a few lines of descriptive matter. The material presented was not only of high scientific value, but was shown in the most graphic way” (volume 2, 408–409). He displayed the photographs and infographics (or data portraits) in the award-winning Paris exhibition with three thick albums of hundreds of photographs, and two sets of infographics. Through curation, the albums, which contained no captions, pushed viewers to reframe how they were looking at the contents. And the data visualizations of sociological statistics induced viewers to de-automate their tacit perceptions, spurring them to newly rethink the information. The various parts of the exhibition referenced each other to build an internally rich and coherent research argument (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6  W.E.B. Du Bois, Pharmaceutical laboratory at Howard University, ca. 1900, Washington DC. African-American Photographs assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

751

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the predominant image of African-Americans to those in other countries and on other continents was that of enslaved or subservient people and was served by a photographic practice that had been pressed into service for racist messaging. But Du Bois used photographs of affluent young African-American men and women included a wide range of hair styles and skin tones to reveal diverse, cultured, and prosperous individuals as a powerful counter discourse. Through these images, he both discredited the pseudo-scientific racism embodied in the Social Darwinism arguing racial differences brought about inequality, and at the same time celebrated the staggering progress African-Americans had made only a few decades following emancipation from Jim Crow laws and over 200 years of slavery. Along with the photographs were infographics showing increases in literacy rates, school enrollments, land ownership rates, and other indicators of social progress. Grounded in demography, information science, and cartography the data visualizations mesh specific narrative interpretations into the statistics themselves, manifesting Du Bois’ literal understanding that “there could be no rift between theory and practice” (Du Bois in Foner 1970, 7) (Fig. 7). Du Bois combined his research with census data to create visual illustrations of his findings in astonishing bar graphs created collaboratively with his graduate students. Suggestively, he begins the first series with his famous words, “The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line”. Used a combination of methods to show the realities of racism and how it impacted the lives and opportunities of this community, he provided much-needed evidence in the battle to counter prevailing discourses of cultural and intellectual inferiority. In his proposal to the US Congress, Du Bois states, “For instance, it should have something of the African background, and in this department, and in all departments, we could make use of […] maps and charts and models and mechanical figures of various sizes, and marble, pictures, and perhaps, photographs could be shown” (Hearings on “Semi-centennial Anniversary of Act of Emancipation”, Senate Report No. 31, Sixty-Second Congress, Second Session). In that exhibition, Du Bois made sophisticated visual arguments that provided compelling social insights, while mobilizing the image as a liquid interface. Undeniably, he showed how powerfully sociology, as visual sociology, could be wielded by scholars in ways that would be revolutionary even today.

6  Liquid Interfaces In Traue, Blanc, and Cambre (2019), we observed how French-speaking visual sociology bifurcates the research practice into either as the study of the social by images (sociologie par l‘image) (Naville 1966; Terrenoire 1985; Hamus-­ Vallée et  al. 2013) or as a sociology on the image (sociologie sur l‘image) (Goldmann 1974; Péquignot 2008). Both use researcher produced images for examining the social through optical technologies. This sociological image functions as an interface between researchers and the social worlds they study,

752 

C. CAMBRE

Fig. 7  W.E.B.  Du Bois, a nested pie chart shows 25 years of the taxable value of African-American property, 1900. Pointing into a black core through vivid rings marking time spans, the red, white, yellow, blue and beige spears show 149% increase over that period. The multi-million dollar figures on this chart visually force the discourses of African-American property value from one of “nothing” to one of prosperity. The colors get brighter and the spears become larger in correspondence with the increasing amounts. Library of Congress, Washington (in public domain)

an understanding related to ethnographic long-term observation. Sociology on the image, positions images in the context of visual practices in social fields, understanding them as relational; interfacing between the social and the ways it’s represented. And sociology on the image conceives of the image in two ways, as product and as document of sociality. Historically, this view is often tied to the Panofskyan tradition, in the German context combined with Karl Mannheim’s “documentary method” (Bohnsack 2008). The image points to historical double mediation through interpretations of the image. On a macro level, social structurations such as habitus can be accessed methodically by means of distinguishing visual patterns (e.g., photography for Bourdieu 1965).

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

753

In another trajectory, Visual Culture Studies as linked to “the British Cultural Studies (cf. Mirzoeff 1999) school with Stuart Hall and in the Latin American vein, Nestor García Canclini (1979, 2014), the study of the image pursues the image not simply as document, but as product of, and productive of, conflicting visualities and the trajectory of their conflict” (Traue et al. 2019). Both sociology by and on the image are often criticized for various shortcomings, and our mentioned work (2019) claims that the context of todays’ everyday practices of imaging through multiple screen and platform technologies, and the popularity of urban and rural amateur arts invites us to consider a “sociology with the image and its related sensualities” (Traue et al. 2019). A sociology with the image intentionally engaging thinking by and on as well as through the image can be understood to theorize the image as a liquid interface. Liquid in Zigmunt Bauman’s (2007) sense of being mobile, ephemeral, and always becoming: Interface as both noun, something lying between or a face of separation between aspects of matter, time, and space that may or may not be contiguous; and verb, a practice of both connecting and separating. In a sociology with the image, that dialogues, argues and refuses to divorce the image from the social world (Mirzoeff 1999; Knoblauch and Schnettler 2007; Traue 2013; Blanc 2013; Cambre 2014), visual sociology would both analyze the image as a social product and study how its production simultaneously produces society: “Doing research with the image supposes that social reality thickens through various materialities, practices, and visibilities” (Traue et al. 2019 my emphasis, 4). We have further noted that as a component in interdiscursive worlds of meaning and beyond, The idea of isolating the image from other modalities of meaning, its subtitles, its metadata, its introductions, the strategies it is part of—as it is often in fact practiced in empirical research—is a deeply flawed notion. Creating a specialised social study of images, we want to argue, easily leads to a methodological iconocentrism. This iconocentrism, often proudly announced as a rehabilitation of visuality and visual knowledge, is subject to similar limitations as the more logocentristic specialisations. Just as conversation analysis insists on a limiting logocentrism in its exclusive focussing on “conversation” as a main mirror and source of social reality, a purely “visual sociology” locked into its specialized method protocols runs danger of entrenching itself in an equally limiting iconocentricism. The anti-­ theoretical bias of some visual research is another indicator of tendencies of epistemic closure. (Traue et al. 2019, 5)

Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2010) points how we often describe social theory itself as a way of seeing by using the notion of “lenses” (68) and as such visibility would not be positioned either as an object or symbol, instead “it is an element within which procedures for visibilisation and styles of visibilising are enacted, repeated and contested. These styles and procedures ultimately correspond to modes of existence” (70). The notion of visuality highlights how dividing knowledge into aesthetic and cognitive categories is a fallacy that fails

754 

C. CAMBRE

to recognize the aesthetic as cognitive and vice versa, in a context whereby social sciences generally have never been without the image (Traue et al. 2019). Visual sociology aims to provide analytical spaces for investigating image-­ relations and to provide benchmarks for deeper insights into the significance of visuality/visualicity socially, politically, and culturally. By their very nature, images challenge authoritative interpretations since elements one overlooks may be noted by another. Thus, visual sociology is uniquely positioned to provide much-needed traction for resistance to the “dominant, foundational, formulaic and readily available codes of validity” (Lather 1994, 39) (Traue et al. 2019) beyond binary approaches favoring either mimetic or conventionalist fallacies. The sociological lens corrects both the assumption that images accurately represent their objects (mimetic) and the determination that an image is determined wholly by its culture (conventionalist). This lens also guards against both visual essentialism “that either proclaims the visual ‘difference’—read ‘purity’—of images or expresses a desire to stake out the turf of visuality against other media or semiotic systems” (Bal 2003, 6) and what Johannes Fabian calls visualism to describe the dominating role of vision in scientific discourse hierarchies. A “more visual” sociology would recognize the ways in which it both parallels and overflows sociology’s disciplinary boundaries and points toward post-disciplinary futures. Acknowledgments  I am dearly grateful to both Mathias Blanc and Boris Traue for allowing me to draw heavily from our previous work together.

References Agee, James and Evans, Walter. 1941. Let us now praise famous men: Three tenant families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bal, Mieke. 2003. Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 2 (1): 5–32. Banks, Marcus. 2001. Visual Methods in Social Research. London: SAGE. Bauman, Zigmunt. 2007. “Liquid Arts”. Theory, Culture, and Society, 24 (1): 117–126. Becker, Howard S. 1995. “Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It’s (almost) all a matter of context”. Visual Studies, 10 (1–2): 5–14. Belting, Hans. 2011. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blanc, Mathias. 2013. “Le savoir sociologique par l’image Éléments sur les conditions d’acceptabilité d’une épistémologie visuelle”. Revue de l’Institut de sociologie, 2010–2011: 31–51. Bohnsack, Ralf. 2008. Qualitative Bild- und Videointerpretation: Die dokumentarische Methode: Einführung in die dokumentarische Methode. 1. Aufl. Stuttgart: UTB. Bourdieu, Pierre (ed.). 1965. Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Éditions De Minuit. Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. 2010. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

755

Cambre, Maria-Carolina. 2014. “Becoming Anonymous: A politics of Masking”. In: Educational, Psychological, and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities. Ed. by  Vivek Venkatesh  et. al.  Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Cambre, Carolina. 2019. “Visual criminology and the social image/s of crime”. Current Sociology, Special Subsection on Visual Criminology, 67 (5): 645–649. Canclini, Nestor Garcia. 1979. La producción simbólica. Teoría y método en sociología del arte. México: Siglo XXI. Canclini, Nestor Garcia. 2014. Art beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society without a Story Line. Durham: Duke University Press. Chalfen, Richard. 2005. “Looking at Japanese society: Hashiguchi George as visual sociologist”. Visual Studies, 20 (2): 140–158. Chalfen, Richard. 2011. “Looking two ways: Mapping the social scientific study of visual culture”. Ch. 2. In: SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. Ed. by E. Margolis and L. Pauwels. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications. Chaplin, Elizabeth. 1994. Sociology and Visual Representation. Routledge: London. Cheatwood, Derrall and Stasz, Clarice. 1979. “Visual Sociology”. In: Jon Wagner (ed.) Images of Information. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2007. “Pushing the Boundaries or Business as Usual? Race, Class, and Gender Studies and Sociological Inquiry”. In: Sociology in America: A History. Ed. by Craig Calhoun. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Curry, Timothy J. and Clarke, Alfred C. 1977. Introducing Visual Sociology. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2004. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1970. WEB Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890–1919. Ed. by P. S. Foner. New York: Pathfinder Press. Florensky, Pavel. 1996. Iconostasis (original from 1922. Trans. by D.  Sheehan and O. Andrejev). Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s seminary press. Fraser, Sarah E. 2010. “The Face of China: Photography’s Role in Shaping Image, 1860–1920”. Getty Research Journal, 2: 39–52. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Fyfe, Gordon and Law, John. 1988. “Introduction: On the Invisibility of the Invisible”. In:  Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations. Ed. by G.  Fyfe and J. Law. London: Routledge. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2006. “Ways of Staring”. Journal of Visual Culture, 5 (2): 173–192. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Goldmann, Annie. 1974. Cinéma et société moderne. Paris: Denoël. Goodwin, John. 2018. “Searching for pearls: ‘Doing’ biographical research on Pearl Jephcott”. Contemporary Social Science, 14 (3-4): 528–541. Goodwin, John and O’Connor, Harriet. 2018. “Pearl Jephcott: reflections, resurgence and replications”. Women’s History Review, 28 (5): 1–17. Grady, John. 1991. “The visual essay and sociology”. Visual Studies, 6 (2): 23–38. Grønstad, Asbjørn and Vågnes, Øyvind (eds.). 2019. Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

756 

C. CAMBRE

Guggenheim, Michael. 2013. “What was Visual Sociology”. Blog of the Centre for Invention & Social Process, Goldsmiths. At: http://www.csisponline. net/2013/07/01/what-­was-­visual-­sociology/. Guggenheim, Michael. 2015. “The media of sociology: tight or loose translations?” The British Journal of Sociology, 66 (2): 345–370. Hamus-Vallée, Réjane et  al. (eds.). 2013. “Sociologie de l’image, sociologie par l’image”. CinémAction, 147. Harper, Douglas. 1987. “The visual ethnographic narrative”. Visual Anthropology, 1 (1): 1–19. Harper, Douglas. 1988. “Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision”. The American Sociologist, 19: 54–70. Harper, Douglas. 2000. “The image in sociology: histories and issues”. Journal des Anthropologues, 80–81: 143–160. Henny, Leonard M. 1986. “A short history of visual sociology.” Current Sociology, 34 (3): 1–4. Illich, Ivan. 1991. “The Scopic Past and the ethics of the Gaze” (unpublished) Mirror II, Available at: http://www.pudel.uni-­bremen.de/subjects/entkoerperung/ SCOPICPU.PDF. King, Martin Luther. 1968. “Honoring Dr. Du Bois”. Reprinted in: Foner P. S. (ed.) WEB Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890–1919. New York: Pathfinder Press. Knoblauch, Hubert und Bernt Schnettler. 2007. Powerpoint-Präsentationen. Neue Formen der gesellschaftlichen Kommunikation von Wissen. Konstanz: UVK. Knowles, Caroline & Sweetman, Paul (eds.). 2004. Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination. London: Routledge. Krase, Jeremy & Shortell, Tim. 2011. “On the Spatial Semiotics of Vernacular Landscapes in Global Cities”. Visual Communication, 10 (3): 367–400. Lather, Patti. 1994. “Fertile obsession: Validity after post-structuralism”. In: Power and method: Political activism in educational research. Ed. by  A.  Gitlin.  New York: Routledge. Mills, Charles Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. London: Oxford University Press. Mirzoeff, Nicolas. 1999. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1984. “What is an image”. New Literary History (Image/Imago/ Imagination), 15 (3): 503–537. Naville, Pierre. 1966. “Instrumentation audiovisuelle et recherche en sociologie”. Revue française de sociologie, 7 (2): 159–168. Neiva, Eduardo. 1999. “Redefining the Image: Mimesis, Convention, and Semiotics”. Communication Theory, 9 (1): 75–91. Pauwels, Luc. 2010. “Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and Cultural Research”. Sociological Methods & Research, 38: 545–581. Péquignot, Bruno. 2008. Recherches sociologiques sur les images. Paris: L’Harmattan. Porterfield, Laura Krystal. 2017. “(Re)Seeing Black girls: intersections of liberalism, difference, and the hidden curriculum”. Visual Studies, 32 (4): 301–312. Prosser, Jon. 1998. Image-Based Research. London: Routledge. Rieger, Jon H. 1991. “Visual sociology: A practical pedagogy”. Visual Studies, 6 (1): 38–43.

  VISUAL SOCIOLOGY 

757

Rimke, Heidi. 2010. “Remembering the sociological imagination: Transdisciplinarity, the genealogical method, and epistemological politics”. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 5 (1): 239–254. Rodowick, David N. 2001. Reading the Figural or Philosophy after the New Media. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Shields, Rob. 2004. “Visualicity”. Visual Culture in Britain, 5 (1), 23–36. Stasz, Clarice. 1979. “The Early History of Visual Sociology”. In: Images of Information. Ed. by Jon Wagner. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications. Strangleman, Tim. 2008. “Representations of Labour: Visual Sociology and Work”. Sociology Compass, 2 (5): 1491–1505. Terrenoire, Jean-Paul. 1985. “Images et sciences sociales: l’objet et l’outil”. Revue française de sociologie, 26 (3): 509–527. Traue, Boris. 2013. “Visuelle Diskursanalyse. Ein programmatischer Vorschlag zur Untersuchung von Sicht- und Sagbarkeiten im Medienwandel”. Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, 1 (2): 117–136. Traue, Boris; Blanc, Mathias, and Cambre, Carolina. 2019. “Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social with the Image”. Qualitative Inquiry, 25 (4): 327–337. Van Leeuwen, Theo and Jewitt, Carey. 2001. The Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: SAGE Publications. Wagner, Jon. 1979. “Photography and Social Science Process”. In: Jon Wagner (ed.). Images of Information: Still Photography in the Social Sciences. Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications. Wright II, Earl. 2015. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory”. Berkeley Journal of Sociology [online] http://berkeleyjournal.org/2016/02/ w-­e-­b-­du-­bois-­and-­the-­atlanta-­sociological-­laboratory/.

Images and Architecture Vlad Ionescu, Maarten Van Den Driessche, and Louis De Mey

1   Architectural Representation: Some Key References Apart from numerous surveys of archives, museums or exhibitions, few major works on the symbiotic relationship of architecture and the images that it produces have been published. The few surveys that strive to offer an overview mostly depart from an institutional collection, like Architecture and its Image. Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. Works from the Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1989). This relation, however, has been the topic of debate and research for centuries, albeit focusing on smaller timeframes or techniques. Research into the relation between architecture and images can roughly be divided into two strands. On the one hand, there is a longstanding interest in the constitutional function of drawing in architecture. It investigates the role of drawing for architectural creation or, as a heuristic process, as an attempt at systematizing the process of design. The basic premise here is the Renaissance notion of disegno: it separated architectural design from the building process and thus established the role of the modern architect. On the other hand, the second strand studies the role of images within (an expanded notion of) architectural culture. This focus implies a public character attached to images that circulate in various cultures and that audiences consume. It is this second strand that this chapter will pursue. V. Ionescu (*) Hasselt University, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] M. Van Den Driessche • L. De Mey University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_46

759

760 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

While the two strands of research often overlap, the focus on images that have been staged publicly offers the explicit opportunity of continuously positioning the discipline of architecture within a broader cultural history. The points of contact between the cultural field of architecture and other cultural developments in the fields of painting, knowledge production or reproduction media highlight the moving contours of the discipline of architecture and the interchanges within the broad field of visual culture. As cultural historian Hélène Lipstadt writes in the seminal text “Architectural Publications, Competitions and Exhibitions”, the three fields in the title make up the key ecologies of architectural images (Lipstadt 1989). It is through these ecologies and their historical context that images are endowed with meanings. First, a designer’s insight into architectural principles depends both on treaties, plans and models, and on images that depict various perspectives, sensations and atmospheres associated with a building or a city. Either as models, engravings, paintings, photos or films, images of architecture are fundamental means for viewers and architects to get acquainted with and understand the built environment before and after it has been built. The function of images in this case is to allow the initial appropriation of the building to come. Second, architectural principles have always been transferred and adapted to different environments by means of images. Third, the layered memory of the built environment depends on a visual history that records the transformations of buildings, their heritage and artistic value. Hereby we focus on three major developments in the interplay between architecture and images. Each development takes as starting point the ecologies of images that have a distinct character in all three eras. These ecologies give us cause to sketch the different nature of the images in circulation and their role within the practice and culture of architecture. The three time-spans are partly overlapping and are thematically describing these subsequent evolutions.

2   Archeology and Architectural Connoisseurship 2.1   Printing Press and the Renaissance Treatise The starting point of the evolution sketched in the introduction can be considered the development of the printing press. From this point onward, texts combined with images can be faithfully reproduced and shared with an audience (Carpo 2001). For many historians that have conceptualized architectural practice up until today, Alberti’s treatise De Re Aedificatoria (1485) remains a crucial landmark. The book marks the distinction between the architect as master builder and the architect as an intellectual that reflects on the meaning of architecture. This crucial moment is generally taken up as the birth of modern architecture practice. This means that the architect, operating from behind his desk, is mainly operating with words and images, mostly drawings (Forty 2000).

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

761

2.2   Grand Tour and the Cultural Industry of Southern Europe In the context of the Renaissance, the tradition of the grand tour that connected the North of Europe to Italy significantly developed architectural imagery. Model books from Italy are brought into the Netherlands, as it was the case with the Dutch architect and theoretician Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527–1607). This transfer between the North and the South of Europe entailed a thorough interaction between intellectuals and architects. The tradition of the grand tour has kept its appeal to architects ever since. That was also the case with the neo-classical Beaux-Arts tradition, considering that the Prix de Rome was established in 1663. An excellent student of fine arts was allowed to study in Rome and the scholarship included first painters and sculptors and later also architecture students. In this context, the seventeenth-century Dutch cityscape is an instance where architecture employed imagery in order to facilitate a specific kind of experience. The veduta entailed a specific perspective on a delimited place. The cityscape is a similar constructed representation, yet it comprised the city as a whole, grasped from a distant view. The cityscape is a type of image that architecture required in order to provide the perceiving viewer with a sense of the whole city. The cityscape is neither a panorama nor a map: it does not claim the exhaustive representation yet it mediates the generic, the stable structure of a city at a given time. El Greco’s View and Plan of Toledo (ca. 1610–1614) (Fig. 1) illustrates this distinction quite well: while the figure on the right holds a map of the city, the cityscape unfolds deep into the background. While the map delineates the territory, the cityscape is the area that is connected to the

Fig. 1  El Greco, View and Plan of Toledo, ca. 1610–1614, oil on canvas, 132 x 228 cm. El Greco Museum, Toledo (in public domain)

762 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

heaven by the rising Virgin Mary who shrouds Saint Ildefonso in his chasuble. Due to the varying degrees in the quality of light, the viewer receives an intuitive insight into the urban fabric and its atmosphere. With the cityscape, the architecture of the city surpasses the level of a diagram and becomes a comprehensive overview. The cityscape transforms the city into an image that can be memorized and passed on. Vermeer’s View of Delft (ca. 1660) is another famous illustration that appeared in Delft around the middle of the seventeenth century. Culturally, the cityscape is a typical Dutch phenomenon because at the time cities enjoyed a privileged social and political status; they were interconnected and promoted international trade (Wattenmaker 1977). In a similar fashion, the Dutch church interior is a type of image that allows the viewer to appropriate this accessible, quotidian “public interior” (Pimlott 2016; Liedtke 1982). Like the cityscape, the church interior relies heavily on variations of light and shadow that alter the architectural form but also involve the body of the viewer in the perception of the represented space. After all, light and shadow are indexes that signal bodily movement and a shifting visual perception. As Aloïs Riegl points out in his (yet) unpublished manuscripts on the Dutch art of the seventeenth century, this type of image is closely bound to space because its function is precisely to depict the relation between objects in space, by means of light and shadow. Objects are, as he puts it, the “substrate of spatial connectivity” and the function of the image is to absorb the viewer’s gaze. Aloïs Riegl (together with Heinrich Wölfflin) conceived the image exclusively in phenomenological terms, as a relation between senses (touch and sight) and spatial dimensions (closeness and distance). In Riegl’s conception of the image, architecture is thus more than an iconographic motif—the experience of space is the pertinent criterion for the understanding of fine art, including seventeenth-­ century Dutch art (Ionescu 2013). Referring to the same style, Burckhardt too underlines the phenomenological function of this type of images as the structuring of light, line and volumes that connotes the perceiving human body at a specific instant by means of inclined views (Schrägblicke) on the church isles and partially lightened architectural volumes (Burckhardt 2016). 2.3   Archeological Findings Images of buildings are both archeological documents and architectural tools that in this case determine the image of antique architectural principles. The modern awareness on heritage is also bound to the work of the vedutisti, from the late seventeenth-century vedute of Lieven Cruyl to the revolutionary work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi who described his Antichità Romane (1756) as a means to preserve Roman ruins (Choay 1992) (Fig. 2). The study of aesthetic categories relied in the eighteenth century on the vast (re)production of images. For instance, Kant illustrated his analytic of the sublime both with natural events and with the Egyptian pyramids or Saint Paul’s cathedral, buildings that he only knew from engravings (Kant 1974). The magnitude

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

763

Fig. 2  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Veduta dell’Anfiteatro Flavio, detto il Colosseo, 1757, drawing, 44.4 x 70 cm. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

associated with the sublime was drawn from the scale that he could conceive on the basis of images. If a building is the iconographic motif of an image, then it can connote different types of values. After all, sixteenth-century engravings that represented antique architecture had various significances: while Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum’s representation of Diocletian’s thermae (after Sebastiaan van Noyen, 1558) had archeological value, Philip Galle’s engravings emphasized the atmosphere of the ruins (De Jonge 2013). However, cultural connections with the Roman past were important for the Dutch at that time; hence, for the embellishment of their castles, like Maria of Hungary’s Binche Castle, both copies and originals would inspire the design. Original images would obviously carry prestige but copies could also implement a strong cultural identification with Antiquity. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Pieter Coecke van Aelst translated and published  Sebastiano Serlio’s third book of his architectural treaty, a document that represented the Roman heritage. The architectural images themselves varied between documentary value and “age value” (Riegl), thus facilitating an imaginary identification with a great past. Furthermore, the “architectural truth” that engravings carried in the eighteenth century generated an iconographic specialism, the capriccio and the entire culture of an imagined Antiquity (Roussel-Leriche and Petkowska Le Roux 2013). PierreAntoine Demachy (1723–1807) transformed archeological documents to the point that his representations of ruins are imagined stenographical constructions that are based on material remains. This proves that architecture can

764 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

expand its own life beyond the topographically accurate representation of concrete monuments; it is through images that the ruin surpasses that materiality of the original design and becomes a model for new designs, thus exploiting its architectonic potential. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1780) worked with Roman ruins in a way that combined archeological documentation with a truly original conception of Antiquity. In the case of Piranesi, architecture becomes a model for an image of Antiquity that will return throughout history (Van Eck 2015). As Van Eck argued, an innovative aspect of Piranesi’s image of the Pantheon consists in the transformation of the monument in order to introduce the viewer into the portico. The image becomes an immersive tool that allows its viewer to appropriate the interior of the famous monument. With Piranesi, Rome is not just an archeological site but a horizon of architectural forms that can be appropriated, transformed, adapted, and reinterpreted. Piranesi’s Santa Maria del Priorato shows real and imagined elements to the point that the building itself can be viewed as a stenographic montage where architectural images fundamentally determine the design. The Cammini, too, are a “creative archaeology” that combines Etruscan, Egyptian and Roman elements with no historical accuracy or continuity (Verschaffel 2015). In the case of Piranesi, images transform Roman architecture from an archeological object into a model of Antiquity that will bring about other types of images, as in Eisenstein’s scenography (inspired by the Carceri), the stage design of Alessandro Sanquirico, modern Italian architecture or Giorgio de Chirico’s trophy figures (Jacobs 2015; Kirk 2006; Verschaffel 2010). 2.4   Structuring Knowledge and Making Public As one of the biggest revolutions in the Western epistemic tradition, the age of Enlightenment had major repercussions on the discipline of architecture and its relation to (the circulation of) images. The two most important developments in this respect are the changing public sphere and the academic traditions that also developed in France. The first evolution hugely impacted visual culture in general, and the second was crucial for the development of the discipline of architecture. Between the seventeenth century and the French Revolution, the public sphere determined substantially the configuration of European culture (and of France in particular). The emergence of salons and coffeehouses but notably also the growth of (illustrated) journals and newspapers defined a new public regime that heavily targeted the large audience of the working class. As Richard Wittman pointed out, this resulted not only in architectural investigations into public architecture but also in a public debate and discourse on architecture (Wittman 2008). Furthermore, around 1600, the classical culture of the Italian academies entered France with Giorgio Vasari’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno as one of the prime models. This marked the conception of the French tradition of the Académies, at first focusing on sculpture and painting, but gradually taking up architecture as a discipline as well. In

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

765

1671, the Académie Royale d’Architecture was founded and housed in the Louvre. It dissolved in 1793 but returned in 1816 under the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Its architectural projects and notably the architectural drawings were mostly canonized in the 1975 MoMA exhibition The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, curated by Arthur Drexler, David van Zanten, Neil Levine and Richard Chafee. Until the first half of the eighteenth century, architectural discourse in France has been revisiting classical paradigms, notably in the language of the large public. The books that distributed these architectural theories heavily relied on specific images. In his famous Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens (1683), Claude Perrault thoroughly studied the classical Orders while also implicitly claiming authorship of a new “French” order (Fig. 3). It was the image of the order that implemented it in French architectural discourse. In the eighteenth century, images determine architectural typologies. Exemplary in this case is the “allegory of architecture” by the engraver Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen, an image that was published in the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s canonical Essai sur l’Architecture (1755). The image of the “primitive hut” that represents the origin of architecture is one of the most famous drawings in the history of architectural theory. The structuring of knowledge is highly significant in the formation of public discourses on various disciplines. The most important work in this respect is the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1772) by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The structured notion of an encyclopedia marks a shift in binding together various layers of knowledge and presents it in an ordered (alphabetical) system. In order to communicate such a vast array of topics to a broad audience, the importance of the didactic nature of the plates cannot be underestimated (Stafford 1994). It is no coincidence then that this period provides us with new conventions for

Fig. 3  Claude Perrault, Jean Marot, The Principal Façade of Louvre, 1674–1676, engraving, 39.3 x 72 cm. Bibliothèque Municipale de Valenciennes (in public domain)

766 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

architecture drawing. To avoid any ambiguity concerning the nature of the intended materials, military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1700) established a series of graphic conventions for infrastructural drawings. The conventions were mostly based on color, most famously visible in the pink ink-wash of the sections from that period. These color conventions are opposed to the strong mimetic tradition of the use of color in the German and Dutch world. 2.5   Monge and Choisy: Architectural Drawings on Display In London, starting from the middle of the eighteenth century, architectural knowledge enters the public realm through architectural exhibitions. The first architectural exhibitions that target an audience beyond professional architects are staged in this decade. Unsurprisingly, this celebratory display of architectural drawings takes place in the same area and era in which the picturesque sensibility flourishes. A large exchange took place between painting and architecture, more specifically landscape gardening. In picturesque paintings, architectural motives such as bridges, garden pavilions or grotto’s are applied in order to contrast and strengthen the naturalistic roughness of the landscape, as exemplified in the work of the French Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (1604–1682), or the English J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). In architecture, presentation drawings are becoming more expressive and “painterly”. The clearest examples are the imaginative paintings by Joseph Gandy for Sir John Soane’s architectural projects (Fig. 4). They often depict

Fig. 4  Joseph Michael Gandy, Soane Royal Academy lecture drawing showing different styles of churches, 1824, watercolor. Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (in public domain)

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

767

the buildings in a ruinous state and exemplify the nature-nurture tension that picturesque artists favored. After 1800, architectural drawings also start to appear in the French salons. Leading up to this, the architects of the académies in the second half of the eighteenth century were trained in the atelier of Piranesi and started to produce increasingly large and bright drawings. These images took up rhetoric techniques to seduce the juries of the concours (Baudez 2015). These competitions are the embodiment of the émulation principle that characterized the académies. Progress was made by imitating classical examples and competing with a set of drawings in a monthly concours d’émulation among students. This tradition became one of the cornerstones of the curriculum, supplemented in 1720 with an annual, grand national competition that was to become the famous Concours du Grand Prix de Rome. In these competitions, architects were trained to design buildings that represented the glory of the king and its public programs. However, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, three “revolutionary architects” started to oppose these representational qualities of architecture: Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Etienne-Louis Boullée and Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Kaufmann 1952). These architects favored geometry and building masses as architectural disposition more than the classical orders and the representational decorum. The outcome consisted of powerful large-scale drawings of often utopian building projects. Equally important, Boullée started to simplify compositional schemes (parti drawings) and hybrid programs in favor of monofunctional buildings that represented their program. This can be seen as a first attempt toward the formation of building types. In 1795, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, a pupil of Boullée who was trained in the academic tradition, became professor of architecture at the École Polytechnique. Instead of a model based on emulation, he started to develop an alternative teaching model based on a systematic approach toward building typologies. Already in his Receuil et parallèle des édifices de tous genres, anciens et modernes (1801) this systematization became apparent in a sequence of large engraved plates that illustrated the historical evolutions of architectural programs. This comparative research came to fruition in the canonical and controversial Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École Royale Polytechnique (1802) where Durand fully developed the notion of architectural type. This type was to be infused with the right caractère to make up a proper building suited to its program (Durand, Picon, and Britt 2000). The third volume of the “Précis”, the partie graphique, exhibits this rationalist approach in a very rich series of typologically grouped plates. In Germany, contrary to the models provided by Imperial Rome, Friedrich Schinkel developed an architecture influenced by Ancient Greece models. Through marvelous paintings that function as presentation drawings of unrealized designs in Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe (1820–1837) (Fig.  5) and archeological drawings in the posthumous Das Architektonisches Lehrbuch, Schinkel’s drawings were not limited to Germany as a similar approach can also be found in the magnificent drawings of the French Henry Labrouste (1801–1875).

768 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

Fig. 5  Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Berlin Theater, 1818, print. Buch Sammlungs Architektonischer Entwürfe 1819–1840 (in public domain)

2.6  Conclusion During the Enlightenment, rationalization had an enormous impact on architectural drawings. In the shift from emulation and imitation toward profound geometrical projection systems and typologically driven design methods, architectural drawings increasingly became charged with conventions, regimes of display and prescribed drawing types. Between 1901 and 1904, Joseph Guadet published Éléments et théorie de l’architecture, a work that provided a systematic approach to the educational system of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and disclosed its methods for the first time in print. This signaled the end of this educational tradition and its architecture. However, the methods of Durand’s Polytechnique and the shift toward “typologies” of its revolutionary precursors can be traced during the twentieth century in Oswald Mathias Ungers’ typological research or in the work of Colin Rowe.

3   Architecture in the Age of Mass Media The third major revolution in the interplay of architecture and images is based on what Walter Benjamin called the age of mechanical reproduction. Given the recent digital turn and the interest in pop culture that grew during the twentieth century, we are slightly altering this notion into the age of mass media. This evolution starts in the nineteenth century with the emergence of mass media and continues to this day, culminating in the digital hyperreal media world of

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

769

today. Printing the Past. Architecture, Print Culture, and Uses of the Past in Modern Europe (PriArc) is an international, multidisciplinary research project based in the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies that focuses on these first steps of a new public regime, and “studies the preconditions of architectural culture in the contemporary world”. Along the way, architects and architecture historians started to critically instrumentalize images and explore new horizons of the printed page, of the exhibition, and finally of digital images. The visual mediation of architecture in mass media started in 1840 when the French architect César Daly created the first major architectural periodical, the Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics (1840–1888). The magazine addressed a broad audience and discussed a myriad of contemporary topics, architectural history as well as technical reports. While the Revue was not the first architectural periodical, it served as a model for the spreading of architectural images (Lipstadt 1982). While it was distributed nationally and internationally, this representative character can also be traced in the selection of articles (Saboya 1991). The magazine was the first step toward a splurge of journals in the first half of the twentieth century. The proliferation of mass media throughout the nineteenth century culminated in the realm of architecture in the first decennia of the twentieth century with the distribution of architectural manifestos and the publication of many “little magazines”. They were comprehensively addressed in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Avant-garde movements such as cubism, Dadaism and constructivism actively employed this mass medium of the “little magazine” to spread ideas and new forms of art. Subsequently, they used these platforms to create and share their work. The persuasive and polemical role of architectural drawings is evident in the futurist manifestos, containing rendered visions of la cità futturista (1909), as well as in Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architektur (1919). The role of photographs on the other hand is exemplified by Le Corbusier. Nothing conveys his famous dictum “The house is a machine for living in” better than the enormous cruise liner depicted in Vers une Architecture (1923), or the comparison of Greek temples and contemporary automobiles on a single spread. Again, visual images are inseparable from the way architectural culture and design have emerged in Western culture. Magazines offered many architects new distribution possibilities as well as an editorial control over their work. Beatriz Colomina has shown how Mies van der Rohe and some contemporaries were able to gain international acclaim solely by means of architectural representations, with little or no actual built work (Colomina 2005). Mies carefully curated presentations of his work in print and in exhibitions and meticulously supervised the reproduction of his projects. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, had a larger built oeuvre and was known to precisely direct the photographic representation of his work (Colomina 1994). The role of private photography for the work of Le Corbusier cannot be underestimated (Benton 2013) (Fig. 6). As the ultimate authorial

770 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

Fig. 6  Le Corbusier, the Punjabi government building at Chandigarh, 1955; photo by Lian Chang, 2006. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

control, Le Corbusier self-published his Oeuvres Complètes in eight parts, starting in 1929, thus taking full control over the visual reception of his oeuvre. An editorial control of a different kind but no lesser scale can be found in Sigfried Giedion’s historiography Space, Time and Architecture (1941), notably in his montage-like juxtapositions of pictures (Harbusch 2015). The possibilities offered by photography functioned as a catalyst for these important publications (Oechslin 2010). He actively implemented new viewing perspectives into the rise of new building types such as the skyscraper. It is exactly this technique of montage that opened up new perspectives for the early modernists. More than a mere representational tool, the montage can be seen as a conceptual way of interpreting and shaping the world. Echoing Panofsky, Martino Stierli claims that montage serves as the “symbolic form” of the twentieth century (Stierli 2018). Proto-photomontages are montages of architectural drawings or model photographs into photographs of the real site. They have been employed since the turn of the century, almost exclusively in the presentations of competition entries. Adolph Loos’ project for the Verkehrsbank in Vienna (1904) is a clear example. However, it was only by the early 1920s that montages were developed as a conceptual tool within architecture. The most renowned modernist montages and collages are probably the ones that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe conceived. One of the crucial moments of his career was the cover that he designed for the third issue of the magazine G, a publication with which the

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

771

Fig. 7  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project—Berlin, 1921, charcoal and graphite on paper mounted on board, 173.4 x 121.9  cm. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

architect was actively involved since 1923. The cover is a montage that combines typography with Mies’ design for a skyscraper on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin (Fig. 7). Not coincidentally, the contributors to the magazine G were avant-garde artists: Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Man Ray, pivotal members of De Stijl, such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, along leading figures of international constructivism, like El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and Naum Gabo. Collage and montage were of utmost importance to these artistic currents. More in-depth investigations of the crucial role of photomontages in the oeuvre of Mies were undertaken by Andres Lepik (Lepik 2001), Neil Levine (Levine 1998) and in the MoMA catalogue accompanying the exhibition Mies van der Rohe. Montage Collage (Bergdoll et  al. 2017). Lepik

772 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

emphasized that Mies had no intention in producing photorealist representations and that the goal was to generate the strongest possible image. The Independent Group was founded in 1952 and included visual artists like Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson and critics, notably the architectural historian Reyner Banham. To challenge the dominant modernist and presumably elitist ideals, the Independent Group started to include popular culture in their work. They are considered the first British artists to introduce mass-media images into their art and are known as “the Fathers of Pop”. Through the medium of montage, they took up popular references and motives, thus steadily thematizing post-war consumerist culture (Foster 2003). When compared to Mies’ montages of interiors, Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) clearly demonstrates the challenge of modern ideals. Soon after, a splurge of utopian projects that consisted of drawings and montages and took up this “pop” tropes started to emerge, like Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace (ca. 1964), Hans Hollein’s Aircraft Carrier City in a Landscape (1964) and Archigram’s Plug-In City (1964). Architecture historian Reyner Banham went as far as to state that Archigram was “in the image business” (Banham 1963), meaning that these “evocative images” (a term later coined by Hans Hollein) relied heavily on the particular media they mobilized. They have affected architectural culture and historiography to a larger extent than these designers’ actually build projects (Buckley 2018). In the post-war consumer society of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a growing belief in the communicative value of architecture. In a fundamentally postmodern way, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were interested in an architecture for the information age and rejected an architecture that nostalgically expressed the industrial age. In their courses and in the eponymous book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), they developed a semiotics of architecture, exploring the semantic and visual richness of the Strip. The work emancipated the graphic material from the textual content and became “more like an experience than an explication” (Stierli 2010). The methods employed in their book heavily rely on typography, photographic material, experimental layout formats and expressive diagrams, among others, taking cue from photomontages by Ed Ruscha’s artist book Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966). It is hardly surprising then that the architects of this generation also took great interest in the production of “little magazines” as a catalyst as well as a distribution medium for their montages, designs and ideas (Colomina 2010). Hans Hollein’s Alles ist Architektur (1968), an issue of the journal Bau, might be the most renowned example of this boom in provocative journals and possibly the epitaph of the “little magazines” of the twentieth century. Through a myriad of images ranging from artworks, architecture to fashion advertisements, Hollein clearly demonstrated his view that architecture exists in a reality driven by large quantities of heterogeneous images. With this strategy, he aimed at breaking architecture free from its disciplinary chains and at illustrating the subsequent expanding visual culture (Branscome 2018).

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

773

3.1   The Drawing as Project Architectural drawings became both distinct catalysts of this early information age and an exponent of the radical Zeitgeist of progressive thinking and utopian spirit. In this sense, they are a privileged area where a visionary future is designed. Craig Buckley calls the revolutionary projects of the 1960s “projects in their own right”. A canonical example of the radicality involved is Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969). In the words of one of the founding fathers of the collective, Adolfo Natalini, the project consists of “a single piece of architecture to be extended over the whole world. [Its] static perfection moves the world through the love that it creates, [through] serenity and calm, [and through its] sweet tyranny”. From the 1970s onward, galleries with a focus on architecture start to emerge from within the art world. The influential Castelli Gallery was among the first to devote in 1977 an entire show to the architectural drawings of, among others, Aldo Rossi, Walter Pichler, Richard Meier, James Stirling and Robert Venturi. An entire market appeared in which architectural drawings were appreciated along visual arts (Kauffman 2018). This profound interest in architectural representations as both historical documents and objects with aesthetic qualities has eventually led to a period of institutionalization of architecture. New institutes for architecture were founded (CCA in 1979, DAM in 1984), the first Venice Architecture Biennale was held in 1980 and architectural drawings became cultural capital due to galleries that specialized in architecture. The Architectural Association (AA) and its director Alvin Boyarsky epitomized the importance of this autonomous idiosyncratic image production. The educational system of the AA was built around utopian drawing practice and exhibition practice (Marjanović and Howard 2014). Boyarsky considered drawing a form of architectural inquiry, beyond the mere representation of a building. It should not be seen as a coincidence that one of the major essays on architectural drawing, Robin Evans’ Translations from Drawing to Building (1997), was written and produced in the context of the school. Through exhibitions and publication projects, Boyarsky encouraged students and alumni to find their own graphic and spatial language, and to address architectural issues in an experimental way. An exceptional exponent of this exhibition and publication culture is the Folio series, published alongside exhibitions of alumni in the school’s gallery space. Each folio consists of a square box containing a set of plates, mostly architectural drawings, of one particular project. Daniel Libeskind created the first box in 1983 and he was soon followed by architects like Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Cook and the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. 3.2   Digital Explorations By the end of the 1980s, the first digital techniques made their entrance into the discipline of architecture. Experimental architectural practices started to explore these digital technologies for visualizing and describing objects

774 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

Fig. 8  Frank Gehry, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2003; photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 2005. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

geometrically. These new technologies allowed for complex amorphous forms, as in the case of Greg Lynn. Complex algorithms seemingly and autonomously constitute designs out of a set of parameters, as in the case of Peter Eisenman. They can also constitute the exact geometrical description of forms to be prefabricated, as with Frank Gehry (Fig. 8). Research into these early digital modeling tools can be found in the Archiving the Digital, an ambitious project curated by Greg Lynn at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. More interesting here, however, is the impact the digital has had on architectural representation ever since these first explorations. It is no coincidence that in the early days of digital tools, a number of architects were grouped together in the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, curated at the MoMA by Phillip Johnson and Mark Wigley in 1988. It is equally no coincidence that a number of them were involved in the AA School under Boyarksy’s management. While most of the exhibited projects were still conceived in analogue ways, they clearly demonstrate a conception of architecture that is no longer bound to “simple” descriptive geometry, but instead explores the full potential of extremely fragmented spaces, continuous spaces and non-Euclidian spatial representations.

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

775

In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo reviews the rise of digital design techniques and addresses the point that buildings no longer are conceived as identical copies of architectural drawings. He claims that the rise of digital techniques also meant the undermining of the Albertian, authorial paradigm in which design is the central criterion for building (Carpo 2011). Scheer goes further by arguing that digital methods increasingly transform drawings into exact documents for the sole purpose of construction. Digital rendering aims at the best possible naturalistic and illusionistic representation of reality and thus “collapses the distance” between reality and representation (Scheer 2014). Considering the complex impact of digitalization in architecture, Picon’s critical overview of the recent tendencies is quite important (Picon 2010). In recent years, however, terms such as dirty realism (Vassallo 2016) and post-digital drawing have been coined for a different take on the digital. They designate images that take up digital techniques but mimic the appearance of analogue drawings or techniques. While these drawings are often described as naive or even conservative, the rudimentary montages of textures, drawings in pastel tones and sampling of historical (painterly) motives have not been studied thoroughly. We could postulate that this development points at a condition in which architects have become accustomed to the digital world and its methods, and are actively taking a stance toward it. The digital image has changed both architectural design and architectural culture. 3.3  Conclusion We have seen thus that architecture entails a definite paradigmatic shift between the documentary and the modeling function of images. Engravings and paintings of buildings have always had this double function: on the one hand representing the built environment so that it can be appropriated and on the other hand constituting a horizon that allows architects to model new designs, in architecture proper or in other domains. By way of a conclusion, we have first detected here a tendency of architecture to borrow the visual language from the “popular” culture. Secondly, a spectacle revolving around image production is intimately bound to the popularization of architecture. Images mediate architectural culture in a few fundamental ways: on the one hand, they transmit information about the built environment, its meaning and aesthetic constitution. In this sense, from the primitive hut to pop art, images have always been used in architecture as a way of appropriating the designed architecture. They are a way for both architects and users to receive an insight into design, its craftsmanship, aesthetics and socio-cultural layers. On the other hand, images popularize architecture as a practice that transcends—to the Vitruvius’ language—the level of firmness (firmitas) and use (utilitas). Images relate architecture to a community’s broader socio-cultural layers, thus shaping up its artistic sensibility, its memory and its imagination.

776 

V. IONESCU ET AL.

References Banham, Reyner. 1963. “A Clip-On Architecture”. Design Quarterly, 63: 30. Baudez, Basile. 2015. “L’Europe architecturale du second XVIIe siècle: Analyse des dessins”. Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture, 30: 43–58. Benton, Tim. 2013. LC Foto: le Corbusier: secret photographer. Zürich: Lars Müller. Beitin, Andreas F.  et. al. (eds.). 2017. Mies van der Rohe: Montage  – Collage. Köln: Walther König. Branscome, Eva. 2018. “Bau Magazine and the Architecture of Media (1965–1970)”. In:  Mediated Messages. Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture. Ed.  by Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka. London: Bloomsbury. Buckley, Craig. 2018. Graphic Assembly. Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Burckhardt, Jacob. 2016. Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band 18. Neuere Kunst seit 1550. München: Beck. Carpo, Mario. 2001. Architecture in the Age of Printing. Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory. Trans. by Sarah Benson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Carpo, Mario. 2011. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Choay, Françoise. 1992. L’allégorie du patrimoine. Paris: Seuil. Colomina, Beatriz. 1994. Privacy and publicity: modern architecture as mass media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Colomina, Beatriz. 2005. “Media as Modern Architecture”. In: Architecture Between Spectacle and Use. Ed. by Anthony Vidler. Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute. Colomina, Beatriz. 2010. Clip, stamp, fold: the radical architecture of little magazines, 196X to 197X. Barcelona: Actar. De Jonge, Krista. 2013. “De Oudheid van Hieronymus Cock. Archeologie en architectuur tussen Italië en de Nederlanden”. In:  Hieronymus Cock. De Renaissance in Prent. Ed.  by Joris Van Grieken, Ger Luijten, and Jan Van der Stock. Brussel: Mercatorfonds. Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis; Picon, Antoine, and David Britt. 2000. Precis of the lectures on architecture; with Graphic portion of the lectures on architecture. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Forty, Adrian. 2000. “Language and Drawing”. In: Words and buildings: a vocabulary of modern architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. Foster, Hal. 2003. “On the first pop age”. New Left Review, 19: 93–112. Harbusch, Gregor. 2015. “Work in text and images: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, 1941–1967”. The Journal of Architecture, 20 (4): 596–620. Ionescu, Vlad. 2013. “The rigorous and the vague: aesthetics and art history in Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer”. Journal of Art Historiography, 8: 1–24. Jacobs, Steven. 2015. “Eisenstein’s Piranesi and Cinematic Space”. In:  Aspects of Piranesi. Essays on History, Criticism and Invention. Ed.  by Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel, and Pieter-Jan Cierkens. Ghent: A&S Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Kritik der Urteilskraf. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Kauffman, Jordan. 2018. Drawing on Architecture. The Object of Lines, 1970–1990. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kaufmann, Emil. 1952. Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society.

  IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE 

777

Kirk, Terry. 2006. “Piranesi’s Poetic License: His Influence on Modern Italian Architecture”. In: The Serpent and the Stylus. Essays on G.B. Piranesi. Ed. by Mario Bevilacqua, Heather Hyde Minor, and Fabio Barry. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Lepik, Andres. 2001. “Mies and Photomontage, 1910-38”. In:  Mies in Berlin.  New York: Museum of Modern Art. Levine, Neil. 1998. “The Significance of Facts: Mies’ Collages Up Close and Personal”. Assemblage, (37): 70–111. Liedtke, Walter. 1982. Architectural Painting in Delft. Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers. Lipstadt, Hélène. 1982. “Early Architectural Periodicals”. In:  The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture. Ed. by Robin Middleton. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lipstadt, Hélène. 1989. “Architectural Publications, Competitions, and Exhibitions”. In: Architecture and its Image. Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. Works from the Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Ed.  by Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marjanović, Igor and Jan Howard. 2014. Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association. St. Louis, MO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Oechslin, Werner. 2010. Sigfried Giedion und die Fotografie. Zürich: gta Verlag. Picon, Antoine. 2010. Digital culture in architecture: an introduction for the design professions. Boston: Birkhäuser. Pimlott, Mark. 2016. The Public Interior as Idea and Project. Heijningen: Jap Sam Books. Roussel-Leriche, Françoise and Petkowska  Le Roux,  Marie (eds.). 2013. Le temoin méconnu. Pierre-Antoine Demachy 1723-1807. Versailles: Musée Lambinet. Saboya, Marc. 1991. Presse et architecture au XIXe siècle: César Daly et la revue générale de l'architecture et des travaux publics. Paris: Picard. Scheer, David R. 2014. The death of drawing: architecture in the age of simulation. London: Routledge. Stafford, Barbara Maria. 1994. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stierli, Martino. 2010. Las Vegas im Rückspiegel. Die Stadt in Theorie, Fotografie und Film. Zürich: gta Verlag. Stierli, Martino. 2018. Montage and the metropolis: studies on the conception and representation of space in modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Van Eck, Caroline. 2015. “Architectural History without Words. Piranesi’s Representations of Rome”. In: Aspects of Piranesi. Essays on History, Criticism and Invention. Ed. by Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel and Pieter-Jan Cierkens. Ghent: A&S Books. Vassallo, Jesús. 2016. Seamless: digital collage and dirty realism in contemporary architecture. Zurich: Park Books. Verschaffel, Bart. 2010. “The Trophy Figure in the Work of Giorgio de Chirico (and Piranesi)”. The Journal of Architecture, 15 (3): 337–358. Verschaffel, Bart. 2015. “Rome Pictured as a World: On the Foundation and Meaning of Staffage in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute”. In: Aspects of Piranesi. Essays on History, Criticism and Invention. Ed.  by Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel, and Pieter-Jan Cierkens. Ghent: A&S Books. Wattenmaker, Richard J. (ed.). 1977. The Dutch Cityscape in the 17th century and its Sources. Amsterdam: Amsterdams Historisch Museum and Art Gallery of Ontario. Wittman, Richard. 2008. Architecture, print culture, and the public sphere in eighteenth-­ century France. Repr. ed. New York and London: Routledge.

What is Design Theory? Oliver Ruf

1   Starting Position Against the backdrop of visual culture studies, the field of design theory refers to a basic dispositif and as a sign of this faces an at least threefold challenge: (1) design practitioners still look on its emergence with skepticism (Mareis 2011, 29); (2) there is still no shared understanding of which methodological attributions, epistemological approaches and scientific-historical positions can be used to develop the discipline (Romero-Tejedor and Jonas 2010); and (3) to this day there seems to be an—almost—insurmountable hurdle in helping design-­ oriented projects gain acceptance as specifically design-theoretical academic qualifications. This observation results in the need for three conclusions too: (item 1) the union of theory and practice should in future be pushed much more emphatically: bringing these together is necessary not only in the basic teaching of design but also within research; (item 2) a design science should also agree on a canon of design theory literature and a set of interdisciplinary research methods that refer back to it (cf. Edelmann and Terstiege 2010); and (item 3) since design theory seems to lead a shadowy existence within the international higher education teaching of design, it is vital that its essentiality is centrally established in order for it to be understood and then

Translated from German by Alexandra Berlina. This translation was made possible with funds from Department III of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. The particular thanks of the author goes to the Dean of Faculty, Professor Dr. Johannes Geilen. O. Ruf (*) Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_47

779

780 

O. RUF

communicated—a point at which the following explanations begin, by wanting to address in detail and exemplify the thus briefly outlined discourse on the topic, in particular to explicate a design research that is guided by theory. To this end, suggestions should be made as to how works of design theory that are trying to solve this problem might look. This sketch is based on scientific-­ theoretical remarks that illuminate the field of design science as design research in the design theory discourse under discussion. Paths are also being taken that offer up an amalgamation of their milestones: an appeal should be made for projects that, within an adequate research framework, inhabit independent, design-theoretical and therefore also design-aesthetic positions. These fulfill the requirements of traditional scholarship, but at the same time differ from it in essential aspects. This results in the creation of works that operate on the notion of the aesthetic in the sense of Baumgarten and Hegel, and which therefore favor them, so to speak, in their specific character (Menke 2008). It is therefore necessary to conceptually develop the idea and areas of design theory in order to connect further method-centered explanations. Finally, reference is made to the detailed contouring of the subject design theory, as it can be described with a focus on a particular school of thought.

2   Clarifications and Concepts The question of what design theory means in a specifically interdisciplinary context comes close to an answer here with a sentence that has virtually written design theory history. The sentence, which is almost 40 years old and comes from Lucius Burckhardt (1981), states, “Design is invisible”. Briefly, by this he means non-visible processes in or for design decisions, such as social conditions or relations between objects. Here, this sentence should act as a formula to signify at least a basic understanding of design theory. The three component parts of the sentence can be used to emphasize in these observations how theoretical work essentially functions: namely, by referring back to individual theoretical positions that have been reframed. A first look at the semantics of the sentence parts clarifies a general definition of design theory: one could say that it is both a school of concepts (since it has to contain a definition of the term design) and a school of reflection (since it is the essence or the “being” of the viewed objects and processes that is being considered). It is also a school of perception (discussing on the one hand how perception works, and on the other, how it can be realized in design). These three points correlate in this description with both a thematic and content-related understanding of design theory (which could also be called its vision) as well as a notion of design research that is responsive to the scientific requirements and practical aspects of design. In the discussion surrounding this question, we can conclude that design theory always has to deal with a certain past of things, objectifications, structures, systems, materialities and so on. However, at the same time it asks questions about the current state, the design present, how it is continuously being

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

781

reshaped in a constantly changing society (which currently means making, e.g., a reflexive distinction between medial and communicative, literary and pictorial innovations). The disciplinary context of a theory of this kind can be called a praxeological design science in the sense of Bourdieu (1979), because it sits, as it were, between the two stools of methodology and epistemology: between art, media and cultural studies and also between philosophy, sociology and sign theory. Cordula Meier phrased this idea: A design theory must always be seen as a network of different complex scientific systems. […] design theory is already in principle—and particularly so—interdisciplinary; this interdisciplinarity results from the medium itself; because it is important to analyse and evaluate the complex design structures. (Meier 2003, 24)

Design theory is thus still rooted in innovative practice and new cultural techniques (Ruf 2014a). These require an understanding of media technology and, above all, an analytical toolkit in order to comprehend and implement these processes and conditions from a design perspective. Yana Milev has similarly “interpreted the study of an elementary understanding of design” as “a mode of cultural production”, “as it is in the signature, the mark and writing, the designation of things that are existential such as being and existing, in the (survival) signal or in identification figures such as I, person, name, voice, to which symbols and myths can be linked”, and how it is represented “by the protagonists of semiotic, sociological and anthropological culture (technology) or research such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Clifford Geertz, Emile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel de Certeau, or by those that dominate contemporary research such as Roland Posner, or Alaida Assmann” (Milev 2013, 16f). And thus we have a helpful listing of the canon of theoretical literature. A theory of design conceptualized in this way must concern itself with understanding what is happening at all in these processes between man, machine, society/culture, perception, artifact, technology, design, one’s own body and so on. Using the example of current, digital media technology, this postulate becomes—in a nutshell—clearer: in this specific case it refers to a body-discourse that links design (not just “the media” as prostheses or externalizations) back to the body or to parts of the body. In particular, this refers to the hand as the designing hand that creates the design and at the same time plans a design that demands permanent manual perception; in more precise terms, this means not only in the operation of media devices but also in terms of the feel of packaging or coverings and so on (Ruf 2014b). In this way, design theory is culture theory if it has to consider intercultural or intersocial aspects when analyzing cultural technology. At the same time it is also always media theory, that is, it is flexible in terms of its subject area. In associated teaching and research projects, the ultimate goal is the fulfillment of this promise of interdisciplinarity: gaining inspiration from the methodology in order to be able to deal theoretically with the phenomenon under investigation. This is

782 

O. RUF

because “the study of design is the place and time in which a practical and aesthetic judgment for everyday life regarding the production of material as well as immaterial culture can be repeatedly negotiated and tested” (Meier 2003, 26). There is another question here, posed as the point of intersection in this notionally sketched design theory in an interdisciplinary context: how is a reference system of this kind composed of the past (specifically from the history of design, media and culture) and the present (here the emergence of new cultural techniques) teachable within the framework of an applied, design-­ oriented course of study, both as form and model? And how is this understanding of design theory learned? One answer is—of course—through reading: through reading the basic theoretical texts mentioned above, which remain a fundamental tool for transmitting design theory. However, design theory as a reading exercise should go further than the level of simply receiving information. The knowledge gained in this way must be consistently taken further both by examining it in existing designs (learning by object) and by relating it to one’s own designs (placing one’s own creative work in relation to the studied positions: learning by example). The aim of this would be for relevant knowledge, developed according to theory, to be created in the form of scientific results, as a work of interpretation, as documentation that has been verified by sources, discussed and deemed discursively appropriate. Related qualification targets include applying standards of scientific method, differentiating important theoretical approaches in design research, being able to place the discipline and the history of design in context, identifying the historical and systematic interrelationships between different media and designs and also developing an individual position within the context of aesthetic discourse from past and present. However, this kind of concept does not stop with past and present but must look to the future: toward the unpredictable, indeed toward the invisible or the unclear (pictorially speaking). This means searching into the future for a reflexive and critical debate on directions, developments and aesthetic standards of design. This regards media cultures (if, using design history as a starting point, dealing with staging strategies, production and presentation conditions) in connection with looking at pictorial and written cultures (if the diverse cultures of inscription can be made thematic, that is, issues surrounding the pictoriality of the written word that link both iconic and graphic approaches to design: from classic paper surfaces to touch-sensitive displays) in the context of cultural semiotics that focuses on theories of culturalization. This can then go on to explain the emergence of cultural phenomena and the development of cultural spaces, while always ensuring that this knowledge is linked back to questions of design. This leads us on to a proposal for a more detailed concept, composed of three pillars:

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

783

1.

Design criticism: here, the focus is instead on the writing of design-critical texts. Critical thinking and design knowledge should be combined. The ability to make judgments is taught; this leads on to a critical look at design classics and everyday products. There are exercises in social criticism; media and cultural criticism (including popular phenomena such as Hollywood blockbusters, TV series, comics, fashion etc.) are included. Mediating design: the ways of mediating design in a society are discussed, that is, a didactic of design. This covers ways of mediating historical design teaching, for example, the education of taste in the 1950s–1960s (unity of form, material and functional balance in the Gute Form [good design]; ethics and morals in design, historical ways of teaching, such as the teaching kits of the Werkbund); educating consumers in the 1970s–1980s (politicization of design, critical consumer education, democratization of the consumer, sociocultural task of design) or today’s problem-solving skills (patterns of behavior through design, search for cultural identity). For the future of design theory research, the construction of this image particularly emphasizes production-focused research. This aims to look at the evidence of design, such as tools, surfaces, design methods, brainstorming processes, that is, an aesthetics of production, as the cultural sciences emphasizes it with the idea of scene. What this means is design scenes that encompass a variety of object areas: whether in the area of image, space, writing, word and time, or in the area of object, jewelery and product, or in the area of commerce, organization and brand, or architecture. However, all this must consistently focus on enabling the designers who are educated in this way in design theory to situate themselves within the suggested dispositif of tradition (history, the past), now (today, the present) and invisibility/unclarity (impenetrability, mysteriousness and future) in such a way that each is able to find their own style as a designer. In other words, to step from invisibility into visibility, also in the sense of taking shape or understanding, as a designer, how to recognize the invisible secrets of the designed objects and be able to apply and manipulate these for one’s own purposes.

3   Paradigms and Revolutions In line with Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory-based terminology (2001), one could say that design theory—seen as a discipline that understands the interdisciplinary nature of design as part of its own discourse and questions the scientific approach to the subject of design—is currently contributing to the transition of design science from normal to revolutionary science. External signs of this are

784 

O. RUF

the growing number of relevant research projects in recent years and, as a result, the noticeable increase in the number of design-theoretical papers (Mareis and Windgätter 2013), book series (see Ruf 2018b) and recent monographs (see Mareis 2014; Feige 2018; Arnold 2018) in the Design Turn (Schäffner 2010, 38f), as part of the process of turning the subject into a science. When considered alongside a scientific commitment to design, what we find is an almost unprecedented interest in moving toward a scientific approach; indeed it is a veritable explosion of science within design. The comparatively revolutionary character of the current phase in its history is not only reflected in the discussion and testing of new design scientific questions as research fields that have long been heavily neglected; it can also be seen precisely in the fact that what seemed before to be insurmountable scientific boundaries are now under discussion. This means that the status of a paradigm in the sense of Kuhn (2001, 28–30) may already have been attained. A paradigm shift of this kind is, on the one hand, very positive: older paradigms can be broken down and a hopeful new paradigm established that can be evaluated on its own terms—progress in research always seems to be carried out by means of scientific revolutions. On the other hand, the dangers that accompany a paradigm shift in the current situation must not be ignored. One major danger is that the followers of competing paradigms wear themselves out, as it were, in mutual polemics. By having to protect and defend their respective paradigm, they lose sight of long-standing missions, such as the ongoing effort to drive the initiatives and work that are still required to establish a joint, in-depth design-theoretical debate (Schneider 2009, 266f). However, this danger may be mitigated by the promising advances toward a theory-based design science that have emerged in recent years. These advances have not been forced into the background by the anticipated ideological battles, but are steadfastly pursued and developed in their various subject areas. These require the conviction, with regard to design-theoretical research, that the subject’s self-concept against these backgrounds is to explore aesthetic practices with theoretical models and to contribute to the basic understanding of design. This will enable the future promotion of a fairly unified design science. What stands in the forefront is not the contrast between design/ practice and science/theory, but their mutual exchange of ideas and their mutual conditionality: their interfaces and points of connection, their mutual support. On the one hand, if, as postulated, reflexive skills are taught in academic institutions, research should at least aspire to independent, noteworthy, and potentially effective theories, and at best formulate these itself. This it can do, for example, through projects to do with publishing, distributing and institutionalizing design theory or communicating a theoretical profile in design. Through research, at that point the fundamental relationship between design, the designed, the designer, and the world in general can be discussed from a theoretical

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

785

perspective. Relationships and tendencies lend themselves to this as research subjects, for example those between man and material, body and technology, individual and artifact, subject and object, subject and subject, physiology and psychology, space and time, space and space, ethnicity and culture, privacy and publicity, mediality and virtuality, acting and feeling, and so on. b) the goal, with regard to the teaching of design theory, to present, expound and discuss both relevant and less well-known theoretical fields, categories, positions, concepts and concepts of design. It is also about passing on important methods, categories and subject terms using examples chosen from a broad range (in particular using current and provocative/radical/paradigmatic developments). Observing, describing, comparing and arguing objectively with regard to understanding, explaining and interpreting design are practiced. In some cases, a design analysis is tested and correlated with prevailing theories. Related events are devoted either to superordinate developments or to individual phenomena (such as a school, a single designer, a genre, a motif, a classification, a peculiarity etc.). These can be rounded off with visits to institutions, museums and exhibitions, participating in and organizing conferences, that is, through smaller and larger field trips as well as external collaborations. Added to this are special courses—such as those on design critique, as mentioned above, and how to convey design; these are project-like in that they culminate in practical work based on theory—or colloquia. Arrangements of this kind should be structured with discursive segments, exchanging of experiences and discussion. Traditional subject structures should be consciously broken up in favor of production- and process-led analysis of phenomena, joint reading of texts, keynote presentations and debates. as a field of design theory, on the one hand, the sense that design is already conceptually influenced by the idea and concept of drafting (Milev 2013, 13f) is reiterated. Today, on the other hand—as a result of this discursive development of idea and concept, as well as in the sense of Gui Bonsiepe (1996)—design is in many cases also concisely united by the metaphor as interface (e.g., between user and device, man and society, art and not-art, among others); design therefore means presenting a special organization of—often material—surfaces that make what is beneath them more usable, understandable, perceptible, and even occasionally more beautiful. Modern teaching of design that is grounded in theory goes a step further by not only being interested in surface design but also focusing on its function: primarily interactivity (in a communicated, e.g., social, and also digital understanding). Design theory comes in when designed artifacts are reflected as a form against the foil of their content for the first time and integrates related theorems within its remit: for example, Kant’s aesthetics, Hegel’s reason, Heidegger’s ontology, Habermas’s communicative action, Luhmann’s system, Bourdieu’s

786 

O. RUF

everyday things and so on. In turn, attention can be paid to the convergence of design and architecture that come together in the shared dispositif of built spaces and digital interfaces in reality and virtuality. Design theory thus means design strategies, imaginations and discoveries; it situates the intertwining of doing and reflecting as a component of research, and has the potential to achieve completely new insights. It can be a new form of science that captures the creative in its scientific approach and the theoretical in its creative inspiration, but does not seek a pure scientification of design. Underlying the finding that design science as design theory takes up scientific devices, works with them and locates design elements within theoretical constructs, there is an assumption that the future of design science per se depends crucially on how consistently it shapes its proposed theories and how productive its specific work on the relevant text (and also object) will be. To speak of a strong design theory as a way of approaching this premise presupposes—once again—that design-theoretical texts and designed/to-be designed objects are not to be examined and discussed solely as objects of analysis and as models. Rather, that the way that design is mediated, including how it is interpreted and experienced aesthetically, is linked back to the study of its genesis and that how it is established is essentially based on an understanding of how design is applied. This means a consideration both of the process of drafting designs and of the structures and conditions of the place where the design usually originates: the desk, monitor, board, sheet of paper, office, factory, conference room, and so on, as well as the design world per se. Design science as design theory is, in fact, more revolutionary than normal scientific procedures and also reveals something more. To illustrate this assertion, a small descriptive example is needed of what design scientific-theoretical papers structurally do that can be termed academic. This requires a representative sketch, as well as a stipulation of the themes that are considered constitutive for them. There is now a question to be asked about the relevance of their scientific choices or formal implications, that is, a question around the name of their academic signature.

4  Model and Title A primarily design theory-oriented design science lends itself very well to academic work because it takes up all these factors thematically, without neglecting the practice of creative thinking and action. The choice of perspective regarding production means that it can explicitly examine, vary and innovate informative structures, and then subsequently repeat this process while automatically implementing them. In these cases, perhaps by considering the design scenarios that have been suggested, design theory provides models for identifying and enthusing about, as well as maintaining distance, resisting and revaluating, which rely on the conscious or unconscious break with (supposed)

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

787

archetypes. There are four points that make clear why these models, which make a potentially lasting contribution to the question of new stimuli in design theory for design science, are methodologically appealing for sustainable work in design theory. The overtly theoretical character of design science distinguishes it only superficially from purely practice-oriented forms that supposedly block out any scientific elements. Since the former (as has been shown) always provides theory-building on, among other things, industrial products, media, aesthetic phenomena, commerce and architecture, or also on what role the designer, drafting/design and user/buyer plays in clarifying the reception process of design, it gives the designer’s perception a theoretical- and practice-oriented depth of focus which in fact enhances the objects under scrutiny in a revolutionary way. Its methodological starting point is a revolutionary interaction with its own and other creative practices and institutions. This therefore extends back the field of identifying design and enables different views to be formed on what we consider to be well-known objects. It is only from this perspective that the links between design revolutions is revealed. The revolutionary character of design-theoretical design science aims at processes behind the normal scientific procedures. This is because, against almost a galaxy of theoretical texts in specific scenarios, they describe formation, changes and self-assertion, the disappearance and existence of creative practicabilities, of insights and opinions. For this they use a constitution-theoretical, that is, hugely self-reflective toolkit, as they draw a generally processual picture of creative action. From this perspective, the “world” of design is a space in which its elements mutually constitute themselves in constant motion. Design science is dynamic or living theory in the sense that it generally makes this constitutional achievement of a moving design the subject of its descriptions. The interdisciplinary core of design theory allows its discipline descriptive and analytical access to a phenomenon that may lie at the heart of every engagement with things created by oneself or others: the quotation or (in the words of Derrida) citing as grafting (Derrida 2001, 32). For Derrida, this is the metaphor for the essential iterability of signs, which safeguards their identifiability as well as their recontextualizability. Iterability means that each sign can “break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion”; the sign’s “force of breaking” with a syntagmatic concatenation opens up the possibility of assigning the sign new ways of functioning by “inscribing or grafting it into other chains” (ibid., 27). If one understands the process of design-theoretical learning, teaching and research as a process of actively creating, shifting and superimposing creative traces, then the description, analysis and testing of design as a graft in the course of work in and with corresponding units occur not just as ingrowth but also as

788 

O. RUF

suitability to receive the ingrowth (see Rheinberger 1997). Since design theory makes this graft visible, it sheds light on the conditions for design opportunities. Its guided and stimulated focus on its production, reception and distribution methods is therefore also a crucial starting point for examining and reviewing potential design quality. This is precisely why design theory is on this side of what is aesthetic, that is, it places itself on the side of perception, comprehension and disclosure. 4.

5  Typology and Steps At this point, the general question remains about what design theory can continue to achieve against this backdrop. The specific form of the answer to this question can be seen, as previously mentioned, in the paradigmatic considerations of Vilém Flusser. We can thus come back to Flusser, in an illustrative way, by presenting variants of his phenomenology as a combination of a variety of theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon of design. In other words, that what Flusser stands for, namely moving to a significant extent between cultures and therefore being an outstanding example of intercultural action and thinking, is to fold back to his theoretical work: to an identity of the Da/zwischen [“there/between”] (Jentsch 2006). Starting from the specific description of Flusser-like incidences of design-theoretical positions, one can then at least envisage what limitations and purposes this form comprises, that is, what kind of operative and intellectual work it provides. Flusser’s phenomenological standpoint can thus not only be questioned in terms of what typology of a design theory he embraces, but can also be understood as a rich reservoir for examples of it, whose usefulness must be re-assessed for current initiatives. In a particular phase of his media genealogy and for the first time in 1985 in Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser devised something based on a five-step historical phase model, which becomes increasingly abstract and distanced and which, at first sight and above all, is an opportunity to describe culture from a historical perspective. At the same time, however, this work (and also a series of other texts by Flusser) is more than a mere historiographical undertaking. It is also a proposal to narrate culture once again in its historicity.

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

789

From this perspective, Into the Universe of Technical Images is a work of historical criticism. What this text does is to re-describe its objects: as a model, this triggers a change of perspective so that what they are can no longer be seen in the same way as before. Flusser’s text has this effect and it proceeds step-wise against this background, as if one is slowly climbing a staircase. The first step is for the “primitive man”, who finds himself in an environment of immediate and “concrete experience”, and is able to shape it and thus create culture. However, there is no subject-object perception here that is tangible or comprehensible—there is no connection in-between and space and time. Instead there is a “four-dimensional space-time continuum of animals and primitive peoples” (Flusser 1985, 10), In the second step, man starts to become interested in objects; the environment becomes three-dimensional and thus a subject-object separation takes place when man learns to grasp objects or to use and produce: “This is the level of grasping and shaping” (ibid.: 10f.). We pass from here to the third step where a two-dimensional environment shapes human culture, that is, traditional images (whether graphic, imaginary or fictitious) appear that fix this environment in image form (see Mersch and Ruf 2014). Man slips into a “mediation zone” “between himself as subject” and the “objective situation” (Flusser 1985, 11), which in the fourth step undergoes a one-dimensional twist. History is understood, narrated and durably fixed in writing; a linear-textual mediation zone joins the pictorial or figurative one: “This is the level of understanding and explanation, the historical level” (ibid.). Finally the fifth step, which continues to the present day, consistently follows its chosen path, at least from Flusser’s perspective, as we find ourselves in a phase that is post-literate, of zero-dimensional technical images. In this phase texts lose their real function, which these new images assume by carrying (over) information: “This is the level of calculation and computation” (ibid.). As mentioned, whether traditional images come about through intuition or imagination or fiction, whether technical images made of point elements are created by “computations of concepts” (ibid.) and are manufactured (also as surfaces) by machines, they have to be understood and read as texts (see Ruf 2014c). In Flusser’s step model cultural history is being rewritten, which makes it possible to reinterpret it based on design or rather to retheorize design by means of it. In order to deliver on this thesis, it is necessary to clarify what design—independently of Flusser—means in general and how this conceptual teaching can be reconciled with Flusser’s ideas before it is shown through close reading that Flusser adds an interdisciplinary logic to this theory construction. By doing this, he redeems his intermediate position in the views set out above. It will eventually be necessary to decide which perspective an interdisciplinary design theory of this kind makes into an effective means for the present-day creatively virulent, but in truth also old, media-archeological questions.

790 

O. RUF

6  Definition and Reflection What is design and how does it work from a genuinely theoretical point of view? Many definitions show how this question is directed toward certain practices that generate cultural techniques. However, this generation does not always automatically have a fixed plan or undergo specific planning, even though this might be preferable for an intended outcome. It often happens spontaneously, instantaneously, in order to stabilize, indicate, anticipate and focus on the course of a process, one might also say: to bring into line, to sketch it. This word comes from the Greek schediázein meaning to be fleeting, to do something on the spot or from autoschedíazein = to talk in an improvised way. Quintilian (2006) draws on this in his book, The Orator’s Education, in which he talks about rhetorically wanting to follow a fixed path, where habituation and practice, skill and routine, rules and virtuosity are necessary in order to be able to express oneself in spoken language unprepared, situationally and freely. The word sketch depicts this rhetorical-ancient, oral as well as spiritual practice. Between the middle and end of the sixteenth century (most notably in Florence, Italy), however, it is upgraded as a written form (see Kemp 1974, 231–235). The disegno (the draft drawing on paper) that Giorgio Vasari (2006) terms a science of lines, that Bernhard Siegert (2009, 23) sums up as “practice of drafting as a cultural technique”, implies as it were coming back to the ground from the heights of an “incomprehensible act of creation” in the mind, to the “field of concrete sign practices”. These are tools of external fixation and provision, which constitute a “space of optical consistency” (on a concrete surface such as a sheet of paper) and thereby the “open to the future”, the “possible”: “The open, the unfinished, appears with techniques that operationalise the possibility of writing the unrealised, the merely possible” (ibid., 43f). Looking back at etymology further illustrates the discourse of planning, sketching and capture. The Latin designare means to outline, to draw and to depict and also stems from the Latin signum = sign, badge, mark, signal, image, seal or carved mark, carved image (from secare = “to carve, cut”). From the Latin and the Italian disegnare (= to intend, designate) and its above-mentioned nominalization disegno, comes the French term dessin or the more commonly used English term design in the sense of draft (of something), shape, appearance and plan, or more specifically, pattern, model shaping, forming. Since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, and at the latest since 1945  in Germany, this word-giving movement has started to try and unite itself under the name design, a word that has significantly lost definition with increasing use. The term stopped being specific. It moved away from its origins and, like so many other things in language, became almost arbitrary (whether as a designation of a creative process or of consciously designed properties of a real or virtual object, a service or brand).The term became meta-ized to denote the design of the design (Götz 2000), in more general terms: to a theorization of the primitive practical.

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

791

From the point of view of application, this seems to amount to a complication of the term design. The term benefits from a theoretical perspective and gains a not inconsiderable strength by being connected with terms that are closely related to it or, more specifically, with terms that appreciably complete it. This apparent complication, this connection and completion has a deeper practical meaning. To the extent that design originally designates the process of creating something, of making something, it is dependent on the related, preceding or simultaneous process of thinking or considering something, and then objectifying it in material form. This idea assumes that design says something about the hinge, keeping the door between theory and practice, between thinking and doing if not open or closed, then ajar. “Design means relating thinking and doing” is also Wolfgang Jean Stock’s (1991, 12) programmatic phrase, with which he introduces Otl Aicher’s essay The world as design. This sounds appropriate for establishing the connection between the act of the drafting and design and the resulting material and conceptual artifacts. It is also apt because in this relationship it is important to emphasize the “productive interplay” of “‘imagination’ and ‘representation’”, of “‘thinking’ and ‘doing’”, and ultimately of “‘eye’ and ‘hand’”. “In tension” becomes “an ideal setting which has an equally meaningful potential for design and design theory”: “as a mediating and synthesising activity that is able to address a variety of cognitive achievements in a holistic way” (Mareis 2011, 31). Thus addressed, we can see how far design exists as a formation of culture and how much it relates to a system of what man himself creates. This is in contrast to those aspects of nature that have not been created and changed by man. Design and culture are both ideas and actions of man that have an additional proportionality once something has been created within these processes with the name design and the name culture that bears the same names. This questions the connection between man and what he creates for himself, for other people and for other things created by him or by other people. And it questions how one can be perceived by the other. This brief consideration relates to a basic concept, namely the concept of the medium, in a technical sense, as discussed by Friedrich Kittler with reference to McLuhan (see Kittler 2011, 26). The attempt to relate Kittler’s critical reply to McLuhan, that sometimes suggests taking the concept of media “from there […] to where it is most at home: the field of physics in general and telecommunications in particular” (ibid., 29), to the concepts of design and culture, means introducing new tools for advanced design practice. These necessarily rely on the “use of computer systems, automatic drafting machines [et cetera]” (Moles 1999, 213), and therefore on digital media. Within the context of his approach stemming from cybernetics, generative aesthetics and information aesthetics, Max Bense (1988, 258) speaks of “conceptions and notions”, “which belong not only to mathematics and semiotics, but have been taken from physics, information theory, communication theory, signal theory and system research”. He is concerned with an “objective and material aesthetic that works not with speculative, but rational means”. The emergence of digital design tools correlates with

792 

O. RUF

historical concepts of design and with aesthetic models that are compared with them: here we see a new unity with technology (see Ruf 2018a). As a strategy, this idea leads to the notion of understanding design itself as an interface. This almost inevitably leads to the concept and objectification of the digital. Gui Bonsiepe (1996, 26, 20, 27) “first tried to take the activity of design out of its traditional theoretical frame of reference of form, style, function and product” (ibid., 120) and tried to “fix it in the domain of effective action”. For him, interface is a dimension in which the interaction between “the user’s body”, “the tool” and “the purpose of action” are organized. Interface makes “objects into products”, “comprehensible information from data”, “from mere existing—in Heidegger’s terminology—readiness-to-hand”. “Design”, according to Bonsiepe, “bridges the gap between the alien world of technology and everyday practice”. Among the current developments of media technology, this trend of formulating concepts is able to make “eye-catching correlations into information theoretical discourses”, for which Mareis (2011, 123) in turn defines the “conceptual-­notional dimension of the digital” as a “paradigmatic function”, where “the aspects mediation and interaction between (supposed) material and digital creative spaces, techniques and objects play a central role”. In the words of Bonsiepe (1996, 21), the data digitally stored on a data carrier, coded in the form of 0 and 1 sequences, strive to be translated into a visual space and from there conveyed to the users. “Coding, translating and conveying are therefore the central processes that characterise the interface-‘concept’ and design instructions that are thus projected”. In this respect, one can always invoke the fact that the concept of interface already describes the “physical phase boundary of two states of a medium” in the natural sciences. It also “in a cybernetic sense—figuratively describes the property of a system as a black box”, “of which only the surface is visible”, whereby communication is only possible via this, or that adjacent black boxes can only communicate with each other “if their surfaces ‘fit together’”—the Latin inter means “between” and the Latin facies means “appearance or shape”. What lies between the appearance or between the forms, is a boundary that, in order to succeed, to decode, translate, convey, must be permeable or finite on both sides. “Design”, says Bonsiepe (1996, 21), ends “in the body”; its job is “to connect the artefacts to the human body” through material and immaterial tools (the software). Design to connect artifacts to the human body: this idea helps us understand the point of encounter at the boundary between what is artificial and what is natural/the biological, between an inner setting as substance and inner structure and an outer setting, an environment (see Simon 1996, 3, 6). This encounter becomes, on the one hand, a place and thus the starting point for the beginning of new media. It becomes the actual interface and thus serves the purpose of fulfilling creative tasks that engage to semantically redefine and render visible the contact between man and machine. With it a tool and a method of design are discernible, or an asset or system that takes the content of information technology developments seriously—a system that is literally

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

793

revealed behind the terms Interaction Design or Human Computer Interaction Design. The relationship that it promises is known as interaction; the idea behind this concerns less the function of the thing than the feeling of the person who uses or should use the thing. This encounter does not exclude the idea that man and machine touch, and interact and communicate with each other; rather it explicitly includes it; it implies this thought and encourages it to be put into practice. In the meaning of the concepts that follow it, it allows an action to be acknowledged as a relationship, to characterize design as a universally human activity that brings a technical or technological influence to man here in a kind of structure. The structure, the schema and the construction of this correlation are the job of the designer of the media that are designed and to be designed in this way (cf. Sloterdijk 2010, 15f). On the other hand, this encounter provides information about the potential of the givenness not of what is, but of what should be: about the possibilities of new conceptual and material formation, about problem-­ solving processes and the creation of new form. This is characterized externally as optical clothing of the designed object and internally as a wiring of electronic systems, a circuit. Our encounter takes place between outer and inner forms—initially by us supposedly looking from the outside into the inside and yet never seeing what is concealed there (see Hornecker 2008, 235). This is done through a design and a culture that is in fact “capable of consciously taking into account the invisible overall system comprised of objects and interpersonal relationships” (Burckhardt 1995, 24).

7  Deceit and Obstacles All of these elements of the concept of design within or during the course of culture, which emphasize the designer as creator of form, correlate with the phase model of the writing of cultural history in Into the Universe of Technical Images. In The Shape of Things, however, Flusser (1993, 9) takes these explanations further: cunning and deceit are inscribed into the process of design. He goes so far as to see the designer as a “a cunning plotter laying his traps” (ibid., 9) because they fraudulently—both as a technician and an artist—seduce people, in the Platonic sense, into perceiving ideas that are turned into matter in a distorted way (ibid., 10). This would explain why technology and art are nowadays mostly regarded as in competition with each other; Flusser, however, optimistically attributes this observation to the “modern, bourgeois culture” in which “the arts world” was contrasted against “that of technology and machines”. In his view, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the word design reconnects the two, forming a bridge between them: “Hence (…) design (…) indicates the site where art and technology (along with their respective evaluative and scientific ways of thinking) come together as equals, making a new form of culture possible” (ibid., 10f). Nevertheless, Flusser is firm in his thesis of the deceptive and deceit; “This is the design that is the basis of all culture: to deceive nature by means of technology” (ibid., 11). This pessimistic or

794 

O. RUF

negative position on culture is in fact not intended to be either pessimistic or negative. Flusser uses them instead as an alternative to aesthetic design theories to outline a practical or praxeological conception of design, that is, a theory of creative forms that emerge in cultural practices and procedures. His focus is the design of everyday practices, in which, for example, actions and decisions or, initially, perceptions are formed. From this kind of perspective, design is not a domain in which completed, made objects move, but in a sense an arena for the construction of cultural obstacles or obstructive goods. At least in this point, Flusser’s design theory is based on an attempt to make design practical in terms of cultural processes. Design is formed as a reflexive unit (and, incidentally, often forms itself as such). A theory of this kind captures design as experience, as medium. Design theory according to Vilém Flusser is therefore always also a theory of the media, a media theory. The medium is caught between forms of culture, to which it owes its specific form (cf. ibid., 41). In Flusser’s view, the question of design can be understood as an Obstacle for/to the Removal of Obstacles: as objects for daily use are designed, obstacles are put in the way where the object, and not the subject, is the focus of attention. The designer thinks about the designed utensil, not about its user. The result of Flusser’s journey through the cultural theory of design is to rehabilitate this user of everyday objects (cf. Busch 2008). It is the insight that design has to find direction in the opposite, in the other person, that is, in methods of understanding them, and then behave in this way toward itself. That design, in a specific way, is formed in the tension between culture and communication leads us to infer that Flusser’s dictum also includes a critique of design, or rather, of designers that every design and every designer has to face as a minimum—as a place of self-questioning and resistance (cf. Flusser 1993, 42). Flusser shows a conceptualization and typology of design in which the theorem of becoming-a-medium is applied by taking into account—in particular— the digital discourse. This interpretation can be seen, for example, in his idea of the “designer’s way of seeing” that has “a sort of pineal eye (partitioning just like a computer in fact) that enables him to perceive and control eternities” (ibid., 17). In the actual work of the designer, who no longer or no longer exclusively sketches and no longer or no longer exclusively creates real objects, the digital media effect of design is exposed: “The design of all of these expresses the peculiar aesthetic quality of a blending in with the environment, a disintegration of the self” (ibid., 24). At the same time, a justified, design-­ theoretical conception can be found in Flusser’s attempt to explain another central word of design theory, which is not coincidentally reminiscent of the fundamental transmission field of digital media (cf. ibid., 90). Elsewhere it is said that if “one feeds the equations that science uses as a means of expression into a computer, then the scientific image of the world will appear on the screen. In fact, this will be in the shape of a network of intersecting and overlapping connections” (ibid., 101). This is a thought that serves as a starting point for Flusser to propound his idea of a matter (ibid.) and thereby ultimately refer to materiality as another essential design word (see ibid., 105).

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

795

In the end, Flusser’s text appears to favor a design theory in which not only the media but also forms and materials become cornerstones of design science research. Here, the aspect in Flusser’s work that is pointedly devoted to design theory emerges in the contrast between form and matter, giving rise to phenomenological conclusions such as form is the How of matter and matter is the What of form and that therefore design is a way for lending form to matter. Design, like all cultural articulation, shows that matter, “as everywhere in culture, is the way in which forms appear” (ibid., 109). The effectiveness of Flusser’s design-theoretical writing also lies in the fact that he highlights the technical or, as he also calls it, the synthetic images in this context: “the technical equipment allowing one to display algorithms (mathematical formulae) as colour (and possibly moving) images on screens” (ibid., 110). Design as theory poses this question about culture, that is, no longer about “forming the material to hand to make it appear”, but rather “a flood of forms pouring out of our theoretical perspective and our technical equipment, and this flood we fill with material so as to ‘materialize’ the forms”; no longer “giving formal order to the apparent world of material”, but “making a world appear that is largely encoded in figures, a world of forms that are multiplying uncontrollably”; no longer “formalizing a world taken for granted”, but “realizing the forms designed to produce alternative worlds” (ibid., 111). The vital essence of Flusser’s design theory lies in this mobilizing of the realization of design forms through a culture that deal with the genesis of things through design. Design theory according to Vilém Flusser is therefore always a theory of culture, a cultural theory.

8   Conclusion The question of what design theory is, outlined here, still has an important interdisciplinary value in this context, which makes it ideal for the critical work of elucidating design phenomena. In conclusion, the reason why design theory has methodological appeal for tackling burning questions on this subject can be briefly summarized in four points: The intermedial character of design theory distinguishes it from purely art-related conceptions. These generally conceal or neglect the layer of design that relates to media and therefore do not do justice to the conception of new designs that also facilitate new ways of being received. The intercultural nature of design theory aims to transcend processes underlying traditional practices, established perceptions and lived positions. Within hypothetical scenarios to be studied, it describes what lies between these practices, perceptions and positions: their dialogue. The semiotic framework of design theory thought, that also takes communication into account, enables it to affect phenomena that should be at the heart of any fundamental design: culture as text or as sign, visuality, feel and beauty (to name but a few).

796 

O. RUF

4.

The intermediality, the interculturality, the semiotics and intermateriality of this design theory are the cleaning agent needed to academically tackle the present blurring (and revolutionizing) of dichotomies in design. Theory here is not the enemy of practice, but its essential shadow, indeed its best friend. Flusser (1994, 237), in particular, is very aware of this: “This, our feeling of being in a revolution, manifests itself as, among other things, a sense of having to reorient ourselves to be able to act at all, as a sense of needing to develop new kinds of theories.” The hope that design theory may enable design practice is the true contribution of this philosophy.

References Arnold, Florian. 2018. Logik des Entwerfens: Eine designphilosophische Grundlegung. München: Wilhelm Fink. Bense, Max. 1988 [1968]. “Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik”. In: Max Bense. Ausgewählte Schriften, Vol. 3. Ed. by Elisabeth Walther. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. Bonsiepe, Gui. 1996. Interface: Design neu begreifen. Mannheim: Bollmann. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis auf der Grundlage der kabylischen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Burckhardt, Lucius 1981. “Design ist unsichtbar”. In: Design ist unsichtbar. Ed. by Helmuth Gsöllpointner, Angela Hareiter and Laurids Ortner. Wien: Löcker. Burckhardt, Lucius. 1995. Design ist unsichtbar. Ed.  by Hans Höger. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Busch, Kathrin. 2008. “Kraft der Dinge. Notizen zu einer Kulturtheorie des Designs”. IMAGE—Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, 8: 16–24. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “Signatur Ereignis Kontext”. In: Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Ed. by Peter Engelmann. Wien: Passagen. Edelmann, Thomas and Terstiege, Gerrit (eds.). 2010. Gestaltung denken: Grundlagentexte zu Design und Architektur. Basel: Birkhäuser. Feige, Daniel Martin. 2018. Design. Eine philosophische Analyse. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Flusser, Vilém. 1985. Ins Universum der technischen Bilder. Göttingen: European Photography. Flusser, Vilém 1993. Vom Stand der Dinge: Eine kleine Philosophie des Design. Ed. by Fabian Wurm. Göttingen: Steidl. Flusser, Vilém. 1994 [1991]. Gesten. Versuch einer Phänomenologie. Frankfurt/M: Fischer. Götz, Matthias (ed.) 2000. Der Tabasco-Effekt: Wirkung der Form, Formen der Wirkung. Beiträge zum Design des Design. Basel: Schwabe.

  WHAT IS DESIGN THEORY? 

797

Jentsch, Tobias. 2006. Da/zwischen: Eine Typologie radikaler Fremdheit. Heidelberg: Winter. Kemp, Wolfgang. 1974. “Disegno: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Begriffs zwischen 1547 und 1607”. Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 19: 219–240. Kittler, Friedrich A. 2011. Optische Medien. Berliner Vorlesung 1999. Second Edition. Berlin: Merve. Kuhn, Thomas S. 2001. Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Mareis, Claudia and Windgätter, Christof (eds.). 2013. Long Lost Friends: Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Design-, Medien- und Wissenschaftsforschung. Zürich: Diaphanes. Mareis, Claudia. 2011. Design als Wissenskultur: Interferenzen zwischen Design- und Wissenskulturen seit 1969. Bielefeld: Transcript. Mareis, Claudia. 2014. Theorien des Designs zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Meier, Cordula. 2003. “Design Theorie. Grundlagen einer Disziplin”. In: Design Theorie: Beiträge zu einer Disziplin. Ed. by Cordula Meier. Second Edition. Frankfurt/M: Anabas. Menke, Christoph. 2008. Kraft: Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Mersch, Dieter and Ruf, Oliver. 2014. “Bildbegriffe und ihre Etymologien”. In: Bild: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. by Stephan Günzel and Dieter Mersch. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. Milev, Yana. 2013. “Der erweiterte Designbegriff in einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Verortung”. In: Design Kulturen: Der erweiterte Designbegriff im Entwurfsfeld der Kulturwissenschaft. Ed. by Yana Milev. München: Wilhelm Fink. Moles, Abraham A. 1999 [1968]. “Die Krise des Funktionalismus”. In: Theorien der Gestaltung: Grundlagentexte zum Design. Ed. by Volker Fischer and Anne Hamilton. Second Edition. Vol. 1. Frankfurt/M: Form. Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius. 2006. “Die Rede aus dem Stegreif”. In: Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. Ausbildung des Redners: Zwölf Bücher [ca. 35-100 n.Chr.]. Ed. by Helmut Rahn, Vol. 2, Book 10, Chapter 7. Darmstadt: WBG. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. “Von der Zelle zum Gen. Repräsentation der Molekularbiologie”. In: Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur. Ed. by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Bettina Wahring-Schmidt and Michael Hagner. Berlin: Akademie. Romero-Tejedor, Felicidad and Jonas, Wolfgang (eds). 2010. Positionen zur Designwissenschaft. Kassel: Kassel University Press. Ruf, Oliver. 2014a. Wischen und Schreiben: Von Mediengesten zum digitalen Text. Berlin: Kadmos. Ruf, Oliver. 2014b. Die Hand: Eine Medienästhetik. Wien: Passagen. Ruf, Oliver. 2014c. “‘Bewegtes’ Schreiben: Multimediale Schrift zwischen Wissensdesign, medientechnischer Materialität und virtuellem Ereignis”. In: Diesseits des Virtuellen: Handschriften im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Ed. by Urs Büttner et al. München: Wilhelm Fink. Ruf, Oliver. 2018a. “Design und Technik. Lektüren der Theorie”. Schliff, 8: 167–180. Ruf, Oliver (ed.). 2018b. Smartphone-Ästhetik: Zur Philosophie und Gestaltung mobiler Medien. Bielefeld: Transcript. Schäffner, Wolfgang. 2010. “The Design Turn. Eine wissenschaftliche Revolution im Geiste der Gestaltung”. In: Entwerfen–wissen–produzieren. Designforschung im

798 

O. RUF

Anwendungskontext. Ed.  by Claudia Mareis, Gesche Joost, and Kora Kimpel. Bielefeld: Transcript. Schneider, Beat. 2009. Design: Eine Einführung. Entwurf im sozialen, kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Kontext. Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhäuser. Siegert, Bernhard. 2009. “Weiße Flecken und finstre Herzen: Von der symbolischen Weltordnung zur Weltentwurfsordnung”. In: Kulturtechnik Entwerfen: Praktiken, Konzepte und Medien in Architektur und Design Science. Ed. by Daniel Gethmann and Susanne Hauser. Bielefeld: Transcript. Simon, Herbert A. 1996 [1969]. The Science of the Artificial.  Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2010. “Das Zeug zur Macht”. In: Der Welt über die Straße helfen. Designstudien im Anschluss an eine philosophische Überlegung. Ed. by Peter Sloterdijk and Sven Voelker. München: Wilhelm Fink. Stock, Wolfgang Jean. 1991. “Einführung”. In: Otl Aicher, Die welt als entwurf. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn. Vasari, Giorgio. 2006 [1568]. Einführung in die Künste der Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei. Ed. by Matteo Burioni. Berlin: Wagenbach.

PART V

Contemporary Thinkers

W. J. T. Mitchell Krešimir Purgar

W. J. T. Mitchell, a longtime American professor at the University of Chicago, came to the forefront of public attention with his book Picture Theory in 1994 in which he presented his insights into the field of visual culture to the general academic public, such as in the famous essays “Pictorial Turn” and “Metapictures” as well as several others on the relationship between literature and visual arts. The early 1990s were a time when the search for a new, more comprehensive theory of the image and visuality had already seriously shaken the position of art history as a former “master discipline” in the field of art and images in general. In the German-speaking world, Hans Belting published his landmark book Bild und Kult in 1990 (Belting 1990) (translated into English in 1997 as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art) in which he significantly deviates from the traditional art historical axiological narrative. Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal published the influential text “Semiotics and Art History” in 1991 (Bal and Bryson 1991) as probably the last call for the discipline of art history to modernize its own paradigm, at least through belated reactions to the (post)structuralist season. What distinguished Mitchell from a series of similar attempts was his belief in the power and relevance of all images, not just artistic ones, and not only those we see but also those we can only imagine. We begin our review of Mitchell’s remarkable work with a concept that gave him a planetary visibility, a concept that has become an epitome of an entire society at the turn of the century and whose consequences are inexorably spreading. This chapter draws heavily on my earlier research on Mitchell published in English (Purgar 2017b) and Italian (Purgar 2019). K. Purgar (*) Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek, Croatia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_48

801

802 

K. PURGAR

1   The Pictorial Turn Mitchell’s concept of the pictorial turn was first published in Artforum in 1992, but it had actually been embedded in his critical assessment of two important books that appeared just at that time: one was the English translation of Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky 1991), and the other was Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, published one year earlier (Crary 1990). At the very beginning of his article, Mitchell mentions that although various models of textuality and discourse that emerged during the twentieth century had already been classified by Richard Rorty as a “linguistic turn” (Rorty 1967), “it does seem clear that another shift in what philosophers talk about is happening, and that once again a complexly related 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” (Mitchell 1994, 11). But where exactly did he see the pictorial turn taking place, and is there any systematic interpretation of what it means, how it works or 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 would probably have become just another discipline with its theoretical apparatuses and ideological agenda—the kind of discipline that creates its object of study according to the discipline’s “rules of engagement” and not according to the object itself. More to the point, the particular symptom or object of the pictorial turn resided specifically in these two books, which Mitchell saw at the time as an allegory of the entire epoch— as a symbol of a renewed interest in visuality. One could argue that the publication of these two books (one of which was an English translation of a half-century-old German essay) is everything but paradigmatic and that no theory can be based on that fact alone. I counter such an opinion with the following thesis: the purpose of the pictorial turn as a conceptual matter was never for it to become a theory proper, to organize a body of knowledge or to represent somebody’s point of view. Instead, as theory, it should be regarded—together with Mitchell’s whole project of critical iconology—as a sort of “cultural symptomatology”, as I will propose later. 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 could be applied following general instructions for use, but rather in the form of nondisciplinary tactics of explanatory seeing—which is basically what the methodology of visual studies is now. This kind of programmatic de-disciplinarization is paradoxically visible in what turned out to be Mitchell’s most programmatic text: “The Pictorial Turn”. The most frequently quoted passage from that article states,

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

803

Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of a picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse bodies, and figurality. (Mitchell 1994, 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 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 of thorough observation of various artistic, media, political and social phenomena and then putting them under the scrutiny of a sort of methodology—or iconology—“on demand”.

2  Iconology as a General Image Science Every art history student will tend to link iconology with the study of the narrative thread of classical art in the West, and it is certainly unusual that a theorist, an expert in English literature by vocation, used the title Iconology for his first programmatic book on the effects of all images, not only classical or artistic ones. It is also interesting that in this book, published for the first time in 1986, Mitchell refers only sporadically to the founder of iconology as a scientific discipline, Erwin Panofsky. In the opening lines, the American theorist states, If Panofsky separated iconology from iconography by differentiating the interpretation of the total symbolic horizon of an image from the cataloguing of particular symbolic motifs, my aim here is to further generalize the interpretive ambitions of iconology by asking it to consider the idea of the image as such. (Mitchell 1986, 2)

Mitchell entered into serious discussions of the theories of the German art historian only eight years later, and that debate would mark the future of visual culture, visual studies and the scholarly work of Mitchell himself. In 1994, Mitchell published Picture Theory, which would later prove to be his most notable and influential work. Here he introduces and explains for the first time the concept of the pictorial turn which has remained a sign of his intellectual ingenuity to this day. It is interesting that he did not introduce this concept as a finalized and reasoned notion, complete with “instructions for use” or at least accompanied by the bases of its applicability in the analysis of images; rather, he refers to this turning point with an introductory note in the text, the primary function of which was to draw attention to the first American edition of the classic Panofskyan work Perspective as Symbolic Form, originally

804 

K. PURGAR

published in 1924. Although he is rather critical of some of Panofsky’s theories, Mitchell acknowledges that the German scholar has done something much more significant than the typology of iconographic models, which consists of having established the position of the observer as subject in relation to the work of art as object. By linking the observer to the constitutive experience of the work of art—since the completeness of the work conditions the skills of its observer—Mitchell “forgives” Panofsky for having associated the observer’s perception with pictorial conventions that can be recognized once in “symbolic forms” and then in natural, psychological or historical mechanisms. Above all, he recognizes that Panofsky had tried to transform the simple iconographic taxonomy of works of art into a “critical iconology”, capable of being sensitive to everything that constitutes a visual experience—even disparate elements, such as the image’s materiality, formal execution and iconographic analysis on the one hand, and conventions of the gaze, perspective as a symbolic form and iconological interpretation on the other (Purgar 2020, 9–11). Despite being an art historian, Panofsky began to transform his discipline into a history of culture; therefore, he needed an iconology understood as a general science of the imagination in order to develop a sensibility both toward visual manifestations of culture and toward its technical, political and ideological conditions. He therefore sought to situate art, as Aby Warburg had done before him and Ernst Gombrich would do later, within a much wider frame of phenomena related to the image, that is, within what we now call visual culture. His clear distinction between iconography and iconology (Panofsky 1972 [1939], 5–8) suggests that he was fully aware that a work of art is not just a historical artifact that testifies to the ingenuity and skill of our predecessors, but also a material and symbolic object that is part of a complete series of unexpected interactions—this means that the meaning of a work of art cannot remain fixed and immutable forever. When Mitchell speaks about critical iconology in his numerous works, he is referring precisely to the need to dispel the ideological-conventionalist criteria in art and in the visual sphere, hence the attention given to the famous Panofskyan fable of a passer-by who greets an acquaintance by removing his hat. Greeting someone by removing the hat from one’s head is not just an indicator of a real event that has occurred in time and space, nor is it just a sign of respect for another person; it is also a manifestation of the social norms both of the individual and of society as a whole (Mitchell 1994, 25–32). Mitchell is interested in the mechanisms of visual culture and in the way in which they condition the formation, use and interpretations of images as cultural manifestations. However, in speaking of critical iconology, he does not take and will never invoke the Panofskyan iconological method, since he does not recognize any particular method or any disciplinary theory as taking a critical position in the analysis of images; from this perspective, he feels closer to the deconstructionist “anti-method” of Jacques Derrida, whose connection with Mitchell will be discussed later.

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

805

2.1   Literary Iconology: The Reciprocity of Text and Image We could define literary iconology as the set of interdisciplinary practices whose interests are focused on the relationship between text and image. The point of departure of the literary iconology of Mitchell is the principle of reciprocity. In simple terms, it maintains that if the verbal component is an essential part of the figurative descriptions, the texts themselves are then able to evoke a particular type of image called mental images. This position not only derives from the long line of reasoning that allowed the American scholar to elaborate his theory of the pictorial turn or from the visual paradigm through which we observe the world today, but was also stimulated, to name just one example, by the observations of Erwin Panofsky, who conferred upon iconology—this eminent visual science of images (eikones)—the aspect of the word (logos) in an institutional and essential form. The “iconological paradox” is manifested when we want to recall the beauty of any visual media product or when we simply want to describe it: in this case, the paradox consists of leaving room for the radical aniconicity of language. However, the non-iconicity of language, understood as the linguistic system’s inability to master “true” images, is transformed again when the narrator, with a greater or lesser degree of skill, describes an image. Words only deconstruct the image to build it anew in the second degree of the visual structure: the mental image. Based upon this premise, literary iconology deals principally with the problems of those images that reside within language or receive their form through its transmission. Considering Mitchell’s proposition, it seems that the work of a literary theorist is not only limited to verbal images, that is, to all those stylistic pictures and all those descriptions that belong to the field of literary writing. First of all, he must deal with discovering the mechanism by which the (verbal) medium of language produces (verbal) images and with how he returns  these mental images, elicited by language, back to language, the dominant medium of the image in question. When we immerse ourselves in reading a literary work, the creation of mental images, unlike graphic or optical ones, can only take place in the reader’s mind if such images, or at least similar ones, already existed in his mind. It is very easy to explain this: not even the most precise verbal description will allow a man who has never seen Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to really “visualize” what the Renaissance master painted or understand what people who have seen it at least once have in mind when they think of that particular work. Semiotics has found a solution to this problem by eliminating objects that cannot be recognized as signs from its system. Literary iconology, aided by visual studies and Bildwissenschaft, enters the field of “invisible” images and begins to interpret them on the basis of their “origin”, that is, by evaluating the type of medium, starting from the question of whether the image is static or in motion and whether it already exists in the mind of the reader. Mitchell strived to shed light on this problem at a more general theoretical level. The theory that he put forward argues that words cannot only be an intellectual prosthesis capable of transmitting an individual visual experience in

806 

K. PURGAR

the system of the interchangeable ideas within a language, but that they themselves become somehow co-responsible for the importance of the image: Insofar as art history aims to become a critical discipline, one that reflects on its own premises and practices, it cannot treat the words that are so necessary to its work as mere instrumentalities in the service of visual images or treat images as mere grist for the mill of textual decoding. It must reflect on the relation of language to visual representation and make the problem of “word and image” a central feature of its self-understanding. Insofar as this problem involves borders between “textual” and “visual” disciplines, it ought to be a subject of investigation and analysis, collaboration and dialogue, not defensive reflexes. (Mitchell 1996, 53)

Therefore, the relationship existing between image and text is irreversibly inserted into our way of understanding the world, and the visual aspect of an object cannot have characteristics that are distinctive, and related to the signifier, that are sufficient to make it an object different from another, just as no verbal conception possesses an autonomous, perpetually inscribed signifier that would incontrovertibly link it to a physical object or concept of thought. Since art history can no longer treat words as simple tools to make ideas visible (in this case, those with which we describe works of art), it must accept that with the help of words, we create meaning by ourselves and we ascribe this meaning to things and phenomena. 2.2   Typology of Images in Mitchell’s Iconology If we also want to classify those types of images that are comprehensible outside the established semiotic systems, it is necessary to depart from the divisions into categories of images that refer only to other images, with which the former have a more or less direct relationship. Insisting on the image as a reference for a previous event will always lead us to concepts such as sign, simulacrum or substitute for an original experience. The semiotic discourse on the image is, in reality, a discussion on the possibilities and on the conditions that a single medium has of showing the physical world, and not a discussion on the world in question. Mitchell has tried to deal with images in an anti-semiotic key, classifying them based on the way in which people recognize them; he thereby differs from the semiotic subdivision of images, working instead on the basis of the method of reproducing real events, objective reality and so on. In his work Iconology, we find a division of the image into five fundamental types: graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal (Mitchell 1986, 10–14). It is interesting to note how each of the five types, according to Mitchell’s explanation, belongs to a different scientific discipline. Graphic images are those that we strictly consider as images: they fully embrace artistic production, all types of reproductions by means of printing and methods of traditional reproduction. All of these, of course, fall within the sphere of competence of

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

807

art history. In contrast, optical images are characterized by their immanent vision technique, that is, they only become perceptible thanks to the mediation exercised by certain physical laws or with the help of specific technologies. For example, all electronic projections, images reflected in mirrors or optical phenomena fall within this group. All this falls within the field of physics and electronics utilized within the entertainment industry. Perceptual images are inserted by Mitchell between the physically recognizable world and the senses: these are “ghosts” and all kinds of sensory phenomena placed on the border between reality and fantasy, between what we have (perhaps) once seen and the feeling—whether imaginary or real—of actually seeing it at a particular moment. The best specialists in this field are psychologists and neuroscientists, as they may be in possession of experimental data obtained through measurements on the basis of which it is possible to say that certain images are “produced” by brain activity, even if their objective status, content or appearance cannot be guaranteed. Mental and verbal images fall within the “invisible” sphere and therefore, perhaps, we should not even call them images; therefore, how should we define an image that we are not able to perceive or, more accurately, how should we define an image when we are not able to show that we have seen precisely that and not something else? 2.3   Iconology as Entanglement: Image–Mind–Language Mitchell has been brought to the problematic of mental and verbal imagery mostly by analyzing the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the nature of images that this Austrian philosopher presented in his books Tractatus Logico-­ Philosophicus, originally published in 1921, and Philosophical Investigations from 1953. Mitchell found the differences in the ways that Wittgenstein approached the role of images in his earlier and later works particularly interesting. Mitchell first reminds us in his Iconology that classic Western metaphysics has relied on oppositions such as mind-matter and subject-object that can generally be translated into a model of representation: on the one hand, there are pictorial objects (or images, in the case of visualizations in the mind) and, on the other, objects from the material world that images stand for. In this way, “consciousness is itself understood as an activity of pictorial production, reproduction, and representation governed by mechanisms such as lenses, receptive surfaces, and agencies for printing, impressing, or leaving traces on these surfaces” (Mitchell 1986, 16). Then he directs our attention to some crucial Wittgensteinian statements from Tractatus in which the Austrian philosopher rectifies Western metaphysics, particularly in claiming that “A picture is a model of reality” (2.12) and then that “A ‘state of affairs is thinkable’: what this means is that we can picture it to ourselves” (3.001) or that “[a proposition] is a likeness of what is signified” (4.012) (Wittgenstein 2001 [1921], 9–14). We should bear in mind that all of the notions that Wittgenstein develops at the beginning of Tractatus reflect some physical or pre-existing status—state of affairs, facts, objects and forms—and the first thing related to human

808 

K. PURGAR

consciousness in his theory is exactly the picture: “We picture facts to ourselves” (2.1) and “A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs” (2.11). In this last statement, at the very beginning of his explication, we can see how Wittgenstein conceives pictures: if they can present the non-existence of a state of affairs, then it is rather obvious that he is not referring to pictures as material objects but to images in the mind, or mental images—more specifically, the human consciousness. So, consciousness and self-awareness are first reflected in the human capability of creating images in the mind. We may go even further and claim that imagining and not depicting—that is, creating mental images of objects, forms and states of affairs—is a prerequisite for thinking. Physical pictures would then be an additional achievement of a more advanced, linguistically capable mind. Inasmuch as human intellect existed prior to language, so thinking in images existed prior to drawings and paintings. As a philosopher of visual studies, Mitchell must have been struck by the importance that Wittgenstein gave to images in the construction of human consciousness. At the same time, it contributes to the profoundly dialectical nature of the Wittgensteinian image critique taken as a whole to which Mitchell refers in one of his early works, the article “Wittgenstein’s Imagery and What It Tells Us” from 1988. In this article, Mitchell discusses what consequences Wittgenstein’s use of the term picture might have had for literary theory and, in a more general sense, what the place of images in literary texts is. Although the Austrian philosopher presents a kind of “picture theory” of meaning and mind in his early work, because of a very unsystematic deployment of mental images and their relationships with mind and matter, it is never completely clear how one shall apprehend the way images help in creating consciousness. Mitchell suggests that a philosophical uncertainty has led to literary fallacies about images, claiming that a psychological notion of imagery, with its naive idea that the meaning of a word is something like a picture in the mind, is strongly advocated in Wittgenstein’s claim that “[i]t is no more essential to the understanding of a proposition that one should imagine anything in connexion with it, than that one should make a sketch from it” (Mitchell 1988, 362; Wittgenstein 2009 [1953], §396). So, literary critics should recognize that they use the word image in very different ways—that sometimes they are talking about a rhetorical practice, sometimes about a mental “object”, sometimes about an act of representation, sometimes about a relationship like isomorphism or similitude. (Mitchell 1988, 362)

All this will lead Mitchell to his famous assertion that there are no (exclusively) visual media, nor are there any (exclusively) textual media. Visual media, in both their graphical and optical forms, consist of elements that can only be verbally explained, just as all verbal and textual propositions—not only ekphrastic or metaphorical ones—contain visual residues that cannot be uttered in language or written as plain text (Mitchell 1996, 2005a, 2015).

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

809

Unlike the mentioned quotes from Tractatus, according to the “late” Wittgenstein concerns, derived mostly from Philosophical Investigations, there can be no straight analogies between images, words and mind, but nor is some strange “pictorial turn” to be blamed for our succumbing to images. His most iconoclastic assertion that “A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 2009 [1953], §115) points to a conclusion that if there are pictures in language, then it is not language that has let them enter that ostensibly clean space of mind and verbal propositions. In my opinion, this helped Mitchell considerably in conceiving the concept of imagetext, for it not only dispels the illusions of the pure media that he has been supporting throughout his career but also goes back to the impurity of both images and language in the so-called iconoclastic, “post-pictorial” phase of late Wittgenstein. In his theory of images, Mitchell is well aware of the sort of dialectic that has been the only viable solution for the understanding of images throughout the history of civilization, from Philostratus’ Εἰκόνες and Horace’s Ars Poetica, through a detour proposed by Lessing in the “Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry”, to his own descriptions of the “imagetexts” of the romantic artist William Blake (Mitchell 1994). What no theory can aspire to, let alone the theory of images or literature, is excluding that which it misses due to its own structural shortcomings; in our case, accounting for what is invisible in pictures and inexpressible in language. That is why Mitchell is pointing to a Wittgensteinian conversion to “iconoclasm” in Philosophical Investigations, a conversion that is never completely free of the influences of pictures on language and that warns us that Wittgenstein himself was always “against thinking of verbal meaning as a kind of mental picture that accompanies the words, like invisible illustrations to a visible text, or graphic ‘signifieds’ that may be cashed in for the verbal signifiers” (Mitchell 1988, 364).

3   The Basics of Mitchell’s Image Theory: Cultural Symptomatology One of Mitchell’s most significant insights—from which he later developed his method of interpreting images—can be found in a concept that he mentions almost by accident, in a footnote in his 1994 book Picture Theory. In a passage in which he talks about the relationship between image and text (a topic that, as we have seen, he often referred to in his books), he says, I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate the “image/ text” as a problematic gap, cleavage or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text”, with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal. (Mitchell 1994, 89)

810 

K. PURGAR

Image and text, therefore, can be in a completely symbiotic relationship: they can complement each other or they can be in complete conflict. However, for Mitchell, the relationship between image and text was not simply a theoretical problem that no theoretical discipline in the field of art and literature, except for philosophy, primarily that which followed Ludwig Wittgenstein, could objectively address; rather, in the inexorable collision of language and image, he recognized the model of studying all apparently detached systems of communication, as he showed paradigmatically in the relationship between the “mute” image and “resonant” language. In his most recent work, Image Science, he further emphasizes the interconnections of image and text in a highly media-based contemporary context, proposing, instead of the diacritical signs “/” and “-” (slash and hyphen), the sign “x” (Mitchell 2015, 40–41). In this way, he tried to graphically display the multitude of new possible interactions that occur during the communication between language (i.e. signs) and the image (i.e. visual perception or the sensory sphere). From this representation, we can see that “x” indicates the relationship between signs and the sensory sphere, that is, between what we understand and what we feel. In addition to the fundamental conceptual and visual relationship, which we generally recognize as the relation of text (word) and image, signs and senses can obviously be compared to many other analytical pairs: for example, as recounted in our work “Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology” (Purgar 2017a, b), “clone x fear”, “golden calf x iconoclasm” or “dinosaur x pictorial turn”. The sign “x” can also encourage us to move toward much more complex processes of meaning production, not only through the relationship between image and speech/text but also by linking the dramatic conflicts that are at the basis of the visual construction of contemporary culture: “media x neocolonialism”, “technology x perception of virtual spaces” or eminently political ones. The Mitchellian concepts of imagetext and image x text are only necessary (albeit quite loose) disciplinary compromises that aim to increase sensibility toward cultural manifestations, both those in the field of images, media, and verbal communication and those born under the auspices of modern technology which influence visual culture in a critical way. The in-­ disciplinary method of Mitchell and of visual studies in general consists of atomizing the apparently restricted interests of certain disciplines by de-­ disciplining them, de-ideologizing them and de-generalizing them in order to change the focus from the point of view of a particular discipline to that of the analyzed object. It is now clear to us that the literary iconology of Mitchell and his image x text system are the conceptual bases of a wider interdisciplinary, or rather “in-­ disciplinary”, strategy (Mitchell 1995, 540–544), aimed at broadening the cultural space that we must consider if we want to understand the relationships between different visual phenomena. The most important thing for this method, which I have termed elsewhere as “cultural symptomatology” (Purgar 2017b, 2019), is that the key theoretical terms are “produced”, that is, anticipated and applied, during the analytical process itself, which is

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

811

diametrically opposed to the procedures of disciplines such as semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, art history, gender studies or Marxist theory. In the following lines, we will address the ways in which the American theorist formulates iconology as a science open to new methods and critical meanings and, with the use of two characteristic examples, we will analyze how he transforms cultural manifestations into theoretical instruments: in the first, we will see how the capacity of images to “reflect” as if they were alive is proposed, and the second combines specific images that are utilized both in a metonymic sense and for the biopolitics of images. 3.1   Metapictures: Dinosaurs–Clones–Golden Calf Mitchell’s concept of metapictures reveals the fundamental nature of the picture: the picture cannot be identified either with reality or with itself. It must be constituted as a fact independent of the structures of interpretation. Metapictures themselves as artifacts portray and make possible the discourse on images in such a way that they make visible the perceptual and hermeneutical processes and mechanisms that make them visible as images. They are both self-referential and intertextual, and due to their own dialectical structure, they become close to the structure of everyday perception. This means, for example, that in everyday looking we do not use words to explain to ourselves what we see but interpret what we see as the difference between the perception of an image, its visual representation and verbal, that is, ekphrastic, explication (Mitchell 1994, 35–82). In The Last Dinosaur Book, Mitchell is concerned with the metapicture of the dinosaur as a product of both nature and culture, where “culture”, dealing in this particular case with apparently extinct species, takes clear precedence over nature: it is never possible to “see nature” in a kind of un-contaminated, primordial state; instead it is always bound with the inescapable surplus meaning of language and representation (Mitchell 1998, 58). He is interested in the seemingly paradoxical popularity of things we know so little about but are so eager to paint and draw, to photograph and to collect. Mitchell asserts that our creation of the generalized image of a dinosaur largely corresponds with the way we create all images: as representations and visual conventions that may or may not have iconic or indexical similarities to their referents from the “real” world. The dinosaur is therefore a “constructed image” and the product of the “creative imagination” (ibid., 50–51). The dinomania that took place 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 the purposes of joy and secular (totemic) adoration (Fig. 1). But for Mitchell, the dinosaur is more than just a contemporary object of commercially induced desire—it is “the totem animal of modernity” (ibid., 77). Being contemporary, it differs greatly from traditional totems:

812 

K. PURGAR

Fig. 1  The cover of the Life Magazine, September 7, 1953 (fair use) 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 p ­ rovide 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. (Mitchell 1998, 79)

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

813

By resurrecting extinct animals and transforming them into ubiquitous public figures—proliferating in movies, toy shops and cereal packages as well as on towels and slippers—people have created huge amounts of images of dinosaurs only in order to retain the soon-to-be-lost control over all images for as long as possible. Dinomania as such is not just the popular-cultural metaphor of the pictorial turn but the 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. Dinomania was, according to Mitchell, a sign of a complete change of the way people make sense of images that was to become painfully evident in the first years of the twenty-first century. Techno-scientific discoveries that made possible the resurrection of extinct species, albeit only in Hollywood spectacles and amusement parks, have now been turned into an insidious warning that there is nothing essential to culture, be it high or low—there is only a visual construction of the mediatized continuum of the present we still call reality. 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” (Mitchell 2005b, 6). He presumed, “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 appetites” (ibid.). In What do Pictures Want, and later on in Cloning Terror, Mitchell gives a more extensive concept of the pictorial turn that takes into consideration the most recent techno- and bio-scientific discoveries as well as the most recent dreads they have provoked. What interests him now is how it happened that ovis aries, a quadruped that would barely do any harm to anybody, has become an 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? The concept and the actual practice of cloning (of which Dolly is the uncontestable metapicture) have an extremely high metaphorical charge for Mitchell. The problem with the clone is that it has eventually proved to both stand for and act as a symptom of what it signifies (ibid., 15). The insurmountable physical and metaphysical space dividing divine creation and human intervention is now lost, allowing for the new biotechnological practices to act as an eerie nexus between the conceivable and the (once) inconceivable: The clone signifies the potential for the creation of new images in our time—new images that fulfill the ancient dream of creating a “living image”—a replica or copy that is not merely a mechanical duplicate but an organic, biologically viable simulacrum of a living organism. The clone renders the disavowal of living images impossible by turning the concept of animated icon on its head. Now we see that it is not merely a case of some images that seem to come alive, but that living

814 

K. PURGAR

things themselves were always already images in one form or another. (Mitchell 2005b, 12–13)

While it is probably only a perverse twist of fate, the fact remains that Dolly the Sheep, even before it was born after one of the successful genetic experiments, already had a potential successor: the Twin Towers in New  York City. Two clone-like structures, planted in the heart of the planetary financial circulation system and razed to the ground soon after the Al-Qaeda attacks in 2001, were certainly iconic both before and after 9/11 (Fig. 2). 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 (ibid., 15). 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 took place. The figure of the clone is not just a biotechnological fact for Mitchell, even if his concept of biopictures heavily depends on radically new technologies of producing images and experiencing them as living beings. The metapicture of Dolly the Sheep does not come exclusively from the domain of images, and therefore it is not primarily about pictures at all: it comes from the domain of technology to eventually become part of ideological and social formations. Only then, in the third instance, does the image of a sheep begin metaphorically to reflect the semantic burden acquired in the first and second instances (Mitchell 2011, 25–29). The metapicture of Dolly the Sheep (“an image of image-making itself”) is thus not just a metaphor of such a re-­conceptualization but also an iconic example of yet another level of the pictorial turn whereby meanings of terms like representation and signification open the way for a constitution of a new sort of image altogether: If an image is an icon, a sign that refers by likeness or similitude, a clone is a “superimage” that is a perfect duplicate, not only of the surface appearance of what it copies, but its deeper essence, the very code that gives it its singular, specific identity. (Ibid., 29)

While dinosaur is for Mitchell the totem animal of modernity, the Golden Calf is the idol of our secular cult of spectacle and consumption; while Dolly the Sheep is 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. According to Mitchell, the first ever enactment of the turn toward images is described in the Old Testament where, in the Book of Exodus, yet another (but historically the first) creature appears—the Golden Calf. As described in the Old Testament’s narrative, the decision made by Aaron to fulfill the desire of his people and to make them a new God that 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

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

815

Fig. 2  (up) New York World Trade Center, the photo taken in 1995 by Karl Döringer. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; (down) United Airlines Flight 175 hits New York WTC south tower on September 9, 2001. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

816 

K. PURGAR

over people’s beliefs. This old story is actually an admonition warning that images and clones as visible things have the means to take over power from the invisible deity—to become both visible and alive. The taboo on image-making is in Exodus expressed very vividly 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 then burns the Golden Calf in the fire (Exodus, 32:20). Probably one of the most intriguing aspects (or readings) of the story of the Golden Calf and of the pictorial turn altogether is that a 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 unfolds several layers of meanings of this Biblical story, which is put into perspective with its actual physical incarnation presented by the painting by Nicolas Poussin. The iconoclastic nature of this story is revealed in full only when it takes the shape of visual 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 understand to the full 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 particular phenomenon (Mitchell 2007a, 17). 3.2   Biopictures: Terror–Virus–Ideology In his recent scholarship, Mitchell has begun putting greater emphasis on political issues in a stricter sense, dealing, for example, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East, the “war on terror” implemented by the administration of George W.  Bush Jr. as well as various Occupy movements across North America and North Africa during the Arab Spring. What is of particular interest for us here is that his “iconology as cultural symptomatology” proved to be a viable theoretical tool for explaining both real-world problems and issues pertaining to the more specific language of theory. While it is relatively easy to understand Mitchell’s political positions in all mentioned conflicts, which are described in his books Cloning Terror: The War of Images from 9/11 to the Present (Mitchell  2011), Seeing Through Race (Mitchell  2012) and Occupy: Three Inquiries on Disobedience (Mitchell et al. 2013), it is much less clear where the exact place of the theory of images is in all these works. In my opinion, in order to answer that question, one should familiarize themselves first with finding “pictorial moments” in Mitchell’s writings and be aware that they are not necessarily to be found in the descriptions of particular images or in references to visual arts and media. As we have seen earlier, following the examples of the three symbolic animals, if there is any theory that could be

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

817

ascribed to him, let alone the theory of visual studies, it is the kind of theory that can be reassembled in some new epistemological way only after the existing system of knowledge has previously been disassembled, but this is not to set itself free from ideological purposes of nations, races and religions—on the contrary, it is to make all those national, racial and religious self-determinations all the more visible. It comes then as no surprise that Mitchell felt particularly indebted to those thinkers who were programmatically “against theory” like Paul Feyerabend (Mitchell 1985) and, more than anyone else, Jacques Derrida. Shortly after the death of the great French philosopher in 2004, Mitchell dedicated a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry to his more recent (and less known) work, and a book was subsequently published under the title The Late Derrida (Mitchell and Davidson 2007). Mitchell’s contribution to the book is very significant for an understanding of his own iconological methods inasmuch as his article “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity” (Mitchell 2007b) shows not just the admittedly Derridean line of his thinking but also the in-­ disciplinary nature of the whole “project” of visual studies. As was the case in numerous earlier and later instances, the American scholar preferred to build his case not around an image but a cultural trope, a recurring phenomenon that could only marginally have been connected with a concrete image, but which in turn—once the appropriate image has been chosen and assigned to that phenomenon—would help one to understand it in much more depth. At the beginning of the article “Picturing Terror”, Mitchell reminds us first of “intellectual terrorism”, the notion Derrida has been associated with since his Grammatology achieved world fame, and, second, points our attention to the French philosopher’s claim that “the real ‘terror’ consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting […] the image of this terror by the target itself” (quoted in Borradori 2003, 108). The concept of terror that finds its utter fulfillment in a paradoxical pictorial twist must have sounded very familiar to Mitchell, as at approximately the same time he was writing his Cloning Terror, a book on the contemporary iconology of religious, economic and state-promoted violence. A profoundly iconoclastic Derridean theory, according to which images of terror proliferate on behalf of those who have suffered from the real terror, resonated in Mitchell with his own concept of the clone as a visual eponym of the pictorial turn. In an interview given to Giovanna Borradori shortly after 9/11, Derrida turned in their discussion of terror to a biological metaphor—the immune system of the human body—diagnosing the attacks of September 11 as “a distant effect of the Cold War”, more precisely, of “a Cold War in the head”, a global disease that had now mutated into an “autoimmunitary process […] that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (ibid., 92–94). In medical terms, if a person gets immunity against his or her own immune system, it means that it becomes vulnerable to whatever alien organism tries to attack that person. So, the

818 

K. PURGAR

biological metaphor of autoimmunity to terror would make sense only if we could stretch it to the extent that it is justified by some higher cause. In this political diagnosis of Derrida, Mitchell rightfully discerns something counterintuitive, for the thousands of innocent victims in this terrorist attack must have been, to continue with the medical jargon, a strong counter-­ indication to achieving any higher goal. But inasmuch as it is “only” a metaphor, a figure of speech or inner picture rather than a political agenda, Mitchell is willing to go for it and try to see how useful the “picture” of autoimmunity might be. Visual studies as an anti-disciplinary critical practice had recognized in the philosophical deconstruction (at least on a general level) a precursor to the kind of thinking that does not rely on disciplinary knowledge and does not see in traditional critical theory the ability to respond to the challenges of technology, culture, and political systems that humanity would inevitably confront in the near future. The threads of that sort of reasoning can be found in numerous Mitchellian concepts, such as metapictures, biopictures, imagetext or the pictorial turn, for all of them are based precisely on shifts, junctures, transitions and mutations— and not only in a metaphorical sense. Following the metapicture of Dolly the Sheep, we have learned that one of the greatest fears in every human being is that of his/her exact double, for what makes us individuals and subjects is our uniqueness, which is reflected in both the unlikeness of our genetic code and the singularity of our character. The clone is, then, precisely what we do not want to be: it is the opposite of a human, although it looks (or will look) like a human, as it is immune to the human concept of difference, which means that it is immune to its own immunity or responsibility, as Derrida would have it. But in my opinion, Mitchell is not so interested in following the line of the cynical political implications of such a metaphor, but rather in its iconological value—namely, the passage from the validity of exactly this metaphorical picture to the way it pictures knowledge about the world; in other words, in its “surplus value” as a metapicture of theory. The surplus value of the “autoimmunity image” is not in its impertinent meaning with which Derrida tried to find the balance between all parties involved in the frame of reference of the “autoimmunity image”—the terrorists, the American government, the system of global superpowers and so on— but in a concept that transcends the real attack on the Twin Towers and thus becomes a practical tool for differentiating the mere image of terror from the visual culture of terror. What follows is Mitchell’s insight, according to which the contemporary media sometimes produce images that hover in a certain state of abeyance and undecidability, not in terms of right or wrong, true or false, morally justifiable or unacceptable, but in terms of how these images are used politically. In the particular case of images depicting the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and their subsequent proliferation across the media, Derrida opted for an autoimmunity metaphor because he needed a learned way of presenting his political opinion about the complex chain of events that preceded the act of terror together with the dramatic consequences

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

819

that followed the event. For Mitchell is neither a politician nor a theologian, but an iconologist and a philosopher, he did not get involved in the discussion on 9/11 from an ideological but from an iconological point of view. This means that he would first have envisioned the pictorial matrix through which the particular event has been mediatized, dramatized, and commented upon, and only then would he propose an iconological tool appropriate for describing both its iconological and ideological foundations. This method is clearly visible when he explains Derrida’s metaphor as consisting of both sociopolitical and biomedical frames of reference that only become iconologically plausible when used together. The sociopolitical part of the picture consists of “invaders and defenders, hosts and parasites, natives and aliens, and of borders and identities that must be maintained” while the biomedical part is in the sense that cloning, as a figure for indefinite duplication of a life-form, is somehow the most apt image of the process by which terrorist cells breed and clone themselves. The comparison of terrorism to a virus or cancer, of invisible sleeper cells hidden inside the body waiting to strike, and of course to the biblical predictions of plague and pestilence in the last days all converge with the prospect of literal bioterrorism. (Mitchell 2007b, 280)

The true meaning of images produced on 9/11, together with the millions of reproductions and screenings thereof that followed the event, is what should matter for the field of visual culture. Mitchell contends that every picture, no matter how truthful or authentic it might be, no matter how faithfully it represents what really happened, is necessarily questionable as a picture, for pictures represent only that which anyone wants to see in them, or what they stand for in somebody’s imaginary, and not what they really reproduce. Those images that will always produce ideological meanings depending on the beholder’s social, political or ethical investments and will never “just” reproduce what really happened, he has called “bipolar images”. The effect of the bipolar image, then, is “to produce a situation in which there is no literal meaning, nothing but the resonances between two images, one biomedical, the other political” (ibid., 282).

References Bal, Mieke and Bryson, Norman. 1991. “Semiotics and Art History”. The Art Bulletin, 73 (2): 174–208. Belting, Hans. 1990 [1997]. Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. Eng. ed.: Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. from German by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

820 

K. PURGAR

Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.). 1985. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1988. “Wittgenstein’s Imagery and What It Tells Us”. New Literary History, 19 (2): 361–70. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1995. “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture”. Art Bulletin, 77 (4): 540–544. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1996. “Word and Image”. In: Critical Terms for Art History. Ed. by R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1998. The Last Dinosaur Book. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005a. “There Are No Visual Media”. Journal of Visual Culture, 4 (2): 257–266. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 2005b. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2007a. “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science”. In: Visual Literacy. Ed. by James Elkins. New York and London: Routledge. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 2007b. “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity”.  Critical Inquiry, 33 (2): 277–290. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2011. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2012. Seeing Through Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2015. Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. and Davidson, Arnold. 2007. “The Late Derrida”. Critical Inquiry, 33 (2). Mitchell, W.  J. T.; Taussig, Michael,  and Harcourt,  Bernard E. 2013. Occupy: Three Inquiries on Disobedience. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1972 [1939]. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Routledge. Panofsky, Erwin. 1991. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Trans. by Christopher C. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Purgar, Krešimir (ed.). 2017a. W.  J. T.  Mitchell’s Image Theory. Living Pictures. New York and London: Routledge. Purgar, Krešimir. 2017b. “Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology: Dinosaurs, Clones and the Golden Calf in Mitchell’s Image Theory”. In:  W.  J. T.  Mitchell’s Image Theory. Living Pictures. Ed. by Krešimir Purgar. New York and London: Routledge. Purgar, Krešimir. 2019. Iconologia e cultura visuale. W. J. T. Mitchell, storia e metodo dei visual studies. Roma: Carocci editore. Purgar, Krešimir (ed.). 2020. The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-figurative Images and the Modern World. New York and London: Routledge. Rorty, Richard (ed.). 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

  W. J. T. MITCHELL 

821

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001 [1921]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [Logisch-­ Philosophische Abhandlung]. Trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinnes (first translation: 1961, rev. 1974). New York and London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations [Philosophische Untersuchungen], fourth edition. Trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Michele Cometa Valeria Cammarata

Michele Cometa can be considered one of the founders of Italian visual culture, which he considers both as a cultural approach and as an academic discipline or, rather, un-discipline, that is, an approach that maintains a subversive potential toward the traditional disciplines that have dealt with images (from art history to aesthetics), answering the questions posed by the pictorial turn. So far, his attempt has been that of not simply translating foreign visual culture (especially from Anglo-American and German traditions, but also from French one)—which he has long practiced, particularly concerning the works of W.J.T. Mitchell—but also that of finding an Italian way to visual culture. This way seems to be founded in the multiple forms of relation between images and words like in ekphrasis, iconotexts or phototexts, in which the two parts of the problematic relation become icons of a period and of a culture. The study of the relationship between “word and images”, Text und Bild, most of the time a problematic one, has a long tradition in international comparatists which often fails to clearly define what each of these terms really means. Cometa prefers to focus on terms such as “literature(s) and visual arts”, which can better take into account both the complexity and the hybrid form of each of the two parts. These forms of hybrid, which Mitchell calls mixed media, allow each of the two parts to bring out their limits before the “other”. From classic statuary to avant-garde images, from contemporary pop images to cave art images, the relation between literature and visual arts appears no longer as a form of rhetoric but as a “practice preparatory to the study of the other by oneself, an even more crucial exercise of dispossession and contextual recognition of the

V. Cammarata (*) University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_49

823

824 

V. CAMMARATA

ontological weakness of the verbal and the visual, and with them of the subjectivity” (Cometa 2004a, 20). The most important thing for Cometa as a scholar has always been to “go out of one’s home”. Basically he has always done so: when dealing with textual facts, he has never neglected the visual facts; when he studied mythologies he always did so in the field of rational thought, and even in the most recent studies, which deal with the theory of culture, he felt the need to resume the discourse on nature and bios. The history of culture has always been at the center of his interests, as a complex interplay of different media: essentially those of literature, figurative arts and architecture. In this complex relationship, the figurative arts represent the key to access the representation that a society makes of itself. This representation is constructed through the media and the forms of writing (such as, e.g. atlases, which perhaps represent Cometa’s favorite forms as both an object of study and a form of his own reflection, as we will see later), in which cultural research becomes concrete. It is therefore no wonder that Cometa constantly remembers to consider visual culture discipline as a part of Cultural Studies tradition. In fact, visual culture has played a decisive role in renewing the methodologies and the forms of Cultural Studies themselves, starting from the traditional theory of images to the reflections on the notion of gaze and device, to the notion of bios. From the birth of Visual Culture, and other approaches such as those of gender studies, queer studies, post-colonial studies and the most recent studies on neuroscience, the problem in the study of culture is what remains outside the text, that is, which is expressed through embodiment, performance and the most diverse cultural practices. All these things considered, it is clear why Michele Cometa chooses to use the term visual culture (cultura visuale) instead of visual studies: because it means that “to choose a single name for the discipline and the subject of the discipline itself—visual culture actually studies the visual culture of a specific era, nation, culture precisely” (Mitchell 2017, 11). In his attempt to bring the different questions and approaches of visual culture in Italy, Cometa has invested both in international meetings—which have brought in Italy, especially in Palermo, the most relevant representatives of international Visual Culture—and the foundation of Visual Culture as an academic discipline, together with the definition of the aim of this kind of studies. From this point of view, the beginning of this work can be dated back to September 2006, when he organized the first international conference on visual culture and comparative literature in Italy: Cultura visuale in Italia. Prospettive per la comparatistica letteraria (Visual Culture in Italy. Perspectives for literary comparative studies). This conference was dedicated to the study of the changes that visual technologies have brought on literature in the pre-­ photographic era, in the era of photography and in the era of cinema. The conference was joined by some of the leading figures in visual studies at an international level: from Hans Belting, who presented his impressive Iconology of the Gaze, to W.J.T. Mitchell, who laid the foundations for a disruptive examination of the relationship between representation and cultural digitization, to

  MICHELE COMETA 

825

Philippe Hamon, who explored the fruitful intersections generated in the meeting ground between literature and visual studies (Cometa 2008; Coglitore 2008). The upgrade of this initial encounter was held twelve years later in March 2018, with the conference Cultura visuale in Italia. Prospettive della ricerca (Visual Culture in Italy. Research Perspectives). This was a new chance to reconnect the “Italian way to visual culture” with the international one. It was also the occasion for W.J.T. Mitchell to return to Palermo, to gain new insights on his up-to-date concept of Iconology 3.0 and of his encounter with the anthropological point of view on imagination and its forms of visual relationship—as for the case of Carlo Severi—or, among others, with Mauro Carbone’s philosophy of screens, and the neuroscience perspective of Vittorio Gallese (Coglitore, Cammarata: forthcoming). However, between these two strongholds, or even before and beside them, Cometa has organized many other encounters and meetings on different themes related with Italian and international visual culture such as (to name but a few) Lo sguardo di Foucault (Foucault’s Gaze) 2005  (see Cometa and Vaccaro 2007)—an international conference dedicated to the notion of “gaze” in the thought of the French philosopher; Iconografia e storia dei concetti (Iconography and history of concepts) 2006—it was the occasion to analyze the intersections between iconography and the history of concepts, disciplines that study, from complementary perspectives, the relationships that link discourses and images; or Al di là dei limiti della rappresentazione. Letteratura e cultura visuale (Beyond the limits of representation. Literature and visual culture) 2012—a conference dedicated to paintings and photographic images, as well as those “invented” by cinema and literature, at the same time questioning the relationship between text and image, verbal and visual in modern and contemporary culture. The halfway education between aesthetics and German literature, between Italy and Germany, is at the basis of Cometa’s interest in the production, reception and circulation of images, but perhaps, most of all, for their survival(s), for their relation to gazes and devices and finally for their agency. It transpires from his first writings on Pirandello’s theater, aesthetics, myths, metaphors and symbols of Goethe’s and romantic age (Cometa 2017d), but also in those about literature and history of ideas between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This primary education is probably what triggered his interest for the forms and the meanings of the myth, which in his view is at the basis of any cultural imaginary. Despite the fact that visual matters have always been fundamental in his research—to the point that Mitchell considers him a true iconologist—his writings have begun to be centered on visual culture proper since the early 2000s, focusing, in particular, on the relationship between image and literature. He has, indeed, framed a true and complex system for ekphrasis, a lifelong object of his studies, in books such as Description and Desire (Descrizione e desiderio, Cometa  2005) or The Writings of Images (La scrittura delle immagini,

826 

V. CAMMARATA

Cometa 2012). Within this field, more recent essays are devoted to a different kind of relation between literature and visual art: that of phototext (see Phototexts. Literature and visual culture, 2016, edited with Roberta Coglitore, see Cometa and Coglitore 2016). Within the visual culture approach, another important field of studies is that of the archeology of optical devices to which he has devoted writings such as Literature and vision devices in the pre-­ photographic era (Letteratura e dispositivi della visione nell’era prefotografica, 2008); Seeing the Crowd (Vedere la folla, Cometa, Montandon 2009); Framing in Crisis. Literature and Optical Devices in the Age of Hoffmann (2016) and Archaeologies of the Device. Scopic Regimes of Literature (Archeologie del dispositivo. Regimi scopici della letteratura, Cometa 2016). In recent years, his approach has gradually shifted from an archeological to a paleontological research, studying the origins and the human urgency of image- (and story-) making in prehistoric evidences such as cave art (for which he has been granted two professorships, at Clark Institute, Williamstown, and at Columbia University, New York). His methodological approach is more and more affected by a biopoetic turn and, particularly, by neuroscience applications for literary and artistic production and reception in the way Vittorio Gallese, a close friend of Michele Cometa’s, has taught us. That turn is evident from his most recent books—such as Why do stories help us live? The necessary literature (Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere. La letteratura necessaria, 2017) and Literature and Darwinism. Introduction to Biopoetics (Letteratura e darwinismo. Introduzione alla biopoetica, Cometa 2018)—and essays—such as The Challenge of Cave Art. On the Future of Visual Culture (2016), From Image/ text to Biopictures: Key Concepts in W.  J. T.  Mitchell’s Image Theory (2017c); Surfaces profondes. Au-delà de l’écran dans les cultures visuelles paléolithiques (2018); Bodies That Matter: Miniaturisation and the Origin(s) of ‘Art’ (2020); From unburdening to liberated embodied simulation. A history of concepts (2020). All the paths of his research on visual culture finally converge in his last book Visual culture: a genealogy (Cultura visuale. Una genealogia, 2020) which can be considered somehow the summa of his approach so far.

1   Forms of Writing, Forms of Thinking: Atlases and Iconotheques The turning point of Cometa’s approach to image studies has certainly been Gli Déi della lentezza (The Gods of Slowness, 1990), a study on the metaphoric of patience in German literature, from medieval mysticism to the Baroque up to the twentieth century, but which in fact proves to be his first study on the iconography that founds both a literary and an artistic imaginary. This imaginary is at the basis of a completely modern reasoning on the theme of patience, suffering, on the relationship between creature and creator, as well as between artist and a work of art. In these pages Cometa begins to create his personal collection of images, his first iconotheque, that will accompany him, along with

  MICHELE COMETA 

827

many others, throughout his research, transforming itself—as we will see shortly—into the first tables of an atlas, in the Warburgian sense of the term, with Visions of the End (Cometa 2004b) and in the overall ekphrastic fresco of the Triumph of Death (Cometa 2017). In an excursus on the semantic field and on the variants of patience starting from the first Greek, Latin, biblical, and medieval formulations, the study traces a direct connection between literary and iconographic representations, in allegoresis as well as in engravings and in the foundation in the second half of the fifteenth century of a lexicon that will haunt the German Baroque imaginary. It begins with the analysis of the Ars moriendi tradition, from the fifteenth-century engravings by Maestro E.S. to the “canonical” iconology of Cesare Ripa between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the later pictorial relapses of painters such as Bosch and Brueghel. The core of the study lies in the identification of a turning point, precisely between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this period, in fact, in the treatises dedicated to the emblems and in the allegories of great painters (such as Michelangelo or Vasari) the theme of patience undergoes a variation, and the semantic field is widened by abandoning the aspect of punishment in favor of that of duration, the slowness indeed. This is the sign of a Stoic-secular rather than a religious inspiration that was maintained from Renaissance thought to the twentieth-century artistic representations and philosophical reflections. This turning point is even more evident from Romanticism on, and especially in the encounter between literature and visual arts, which together reflect on the topic of virtuous Christian patience and guilty impatience: From this moment on, two traditions of German literature can be distinguished. The first that […] could be traced back to Goethian Classicism and which reaches as far as Rilke, Roth, Handke […] a tradition of patience, and a second one that is mindful of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian lesson […] but also of certain nihilistic existences of Romanticism […] a literature of impatience. (Cometa 1990, 65)

Cometa dedicates the central pages of his book to the comparison of Rilke’s writing with Rodin’s sculpture and Cézanne’s painting, considered by the writer as his mentors in the art of describing and listening to the essence of things, an apprenticeship of patience. The life and work of Rodin, as well as in some ways that of Rilke, are marked by a continuous tension between a “mysterious patience”, as Rilke himself defines it, and a creative impatience that threatens to destroy the work. In the case of Cézanne, the reflection on the patience that the painter arouses in Rilke (but also in Peter Handke who dedicates the novel Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire to him) is precisely the series of paintings of the mountain of Sainte-Victoire, the archetype, perhaps, of all landscapes—a test of daily work in a position of waiting, a position of no foresight. Cometa defines it “An untiring approximation without hope” (Cometa 1990, 74), relating it to the positions that will later be those of German expressionism.

828 

V. CAMMARATA

Beyond the critical conclusions on twentieth-century literature and philosophy, it is the last part of the book that makes it the first work of visual culture by Michele Cometa. The last part is, in fact, entitled Iconologies and it is, as we said before, a collection of the pictures of patience from 1470 to 1770, from the engravings of Maestro E.S. to those of Cesare Ripa and Pieter Bruegel, from the emblems of Alciato to the allegories of Vasari and Serpotta. However, what is worth nothing is mostly the fact that Cometa reserves a proper space for images, a room in which they can speak their own language somehow stating the irreducibility of the visual to the verbal. It is fundamentally what W.J.T. Mitchell has stated in the first volume of his “trilogy”, non-perchance titled Iconology, a book in which he insisted on the need for a visual literacy, which allows the overcoming of the textolatry typical of the linguistic turn, free from the model of the text. Together with Mitchell, Cometa is convinced of the centrality of texts (especially literary ones) in the interpretation of cultural phenomena; in fact it is precisely to textual representations that most of his book on patience is devoted. But both Mitchell and Cometa have devoted their lifetime’s work to asserting the need to overcome the linguistic turn “which ran the risk of completely missing the understanding of the cultural products of modernity when it decides to resolve (dissolve) all cultural practices within purely textual phenomena” (Mitchell 2017, 19). Establishing the irreducibility of the verbal and of the visual, however, does not mean, for either the American or the Italian scholar, also establishing their irreducible separation. In fact, since “all media are mixed media” (Mitchell 2005), it is impossible to find a media that is purely verbal or purely visual, despite the radical independence of verbal language from the “pragmatics” of images. Cometa’s way to this pragmatics of images is precisely an iconological recollection or, as he says in his last book Visual Culture, the (real or virtual) iconotheques, “that is the arrangement and collection of images and texts on a single media, be it the book, a black canvas, a paper collage” (Cometa 2020, 147). They are the only ways through which to build the discourse on images. Indeed, from Warburg, Freud, and Benjamin, to Malraux, Bataille and Richter up to Godard’s “cinematographic atlas”—not to mention natural or medical sciences atlases—only the “atlas principle”, in the words of Didi-Hubermann, can allow us to give the right weight to the verbal-visual dimension and to overcome, as we said, the traditional Western textolatry. In short, it is a question of constructing a cultural history of images that considers images as subjects of social interaction, of social change and of a given culture. And this is precisely what Cometa does in the two books that, many years later, can be considered the consistent application of the “atlas principle” first encountered with the Gods of Slowness, for what concerns the subject, the authors examined, the methodology, and the “form of writing” of images: Visions of the End and The Triumph of Death. The object of study of Visions of the End: Apocalypses, Catastrophes, Extinctions (2004) is, as one can understand, the representation of the apocalypse through apocalyptic literature, images of mass culture, theological reflection and

  MICHELE COMETA 

829

popular mythologies. Just as in the case of the previous work, it is an analysis of the functioning of myth in modernity and of its relationship with history. The book is composed of four chapters (The Salvation of Oblivion, Apocalypse Now, Apocatastasis, Extinctions), each of which is introduced by a table that collects, in the manner of the Warburg atlas, images that provide a counter-­representation with respect to the literary or philosophical (in short, textual) one contained in each chapter. The first chapter deals with the myth of Prometheus, starting however from the inadequacy of the mythological tale in the modernity of the rationalization of the world and the progress of technology. Through Kafka’s poetics and Blumenberg’s philosophy, we reach the definition of oblivion as “the true essence of every true mythological memory […] the myth of Prometheus [but not only] seems to consist precisely in the cancellation of its original nucleus” (Cometa 2004b, 22). The table collects different representations of the myth in question by Füssli, Moreau, Dürrenmatt, Juon, Depero, and a vascular representation of Prometheus and Atlas, which narrate the survival of the myth over time (or against time, says Cometa) without any explanation or description needed. The same happens for the chapter dedicated to Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, analyzed not as a film about myth but as an application of the systems of mythological writing. The visual equivalent is represented by some depictions of different moments of the apocalypse—for instance in the works of Gerung and Dürer—or of allegoric events that can be considered apocalyptic such as The Destruction of Temesvar in Hungary, by Blümel, or the Destruction of the War by Goya. Thus the analysis of the theme of judgment in literature from Kleist to Kafka, from Hölderlin to Dürrenmatt is “accompanied” by the composition on the table of the works of Signorelli, Memling, Grünewald, Swanenburgh and Bach; and the last chapter, dedicated to the theme of the catastrophic end in the history of nature—a theme scientifically founded in post-Newtonian studies that become particularly favored in the aesthetics of the sublime from Kant to Jean Paul and Shelley—is preceded by the most various catastrophic representations of natural events such as earthquakes, comet passages or apocalyptic apparitions, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The conclusions of this study are drawn now not only with words but also with images. Or rather, with an image that, in the last table entitled Bathos, presents the painting by William Hogarth, Colophon, or the Bathos, an engraving of 1764, in its entirety and through five enlarged details (Fig. 1). The choice of the “writing images” form used in this book is obviously not accidental and refers to the method of investigation on visuality inaugurated by Aby Warburg, the famous art historian who revolutionized his discipline on the turn of the twentieth century and laid the foundations of what would be its successor, the visual culture precisely, or as Cometa defined him “the true innovator of image theory” (Cometa 2020, XI). It is first of all the multiplicity and diversity of the images that allow us to trace the method of Cometa back to that of Warburg; secondly, the anachronism. In fact, it is not a historical or historiographic investigation that interests both the scholar and the precursor

830 

V. CAMMARATA

Fig. 1  William Hogarth, Tailpiece, or The Bathos, 1764, etching and engraving, 31.8 × 33.3 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

of visual culture. It is well known that the birth of Warburg’s Atlas, Mnemosyne, arises from Warburg’s and his collaborators’ need to have tables on which to arrange books and, above all, images in such a way as to be able to grasp, at a glance, the core meanings of images and their combinations and recombinations: this meant being able to verify at any moment, with a single glance, the point of the situation, providing the word with an effective visual aid; above all it also meant being able to exploit in its pure form the potential of a kind of communication quite different from the written and spoken one. (Forster and Mazzucco 2002, 56)

The same function, as we have seen, is played by the tables in Michele Cometa’s work. Furthermore, even the rules that define the relationship between the images of the individual plates respond to Warburg’s criteria for

  MICHELE COMETA 

831

which each image acquires a particular meaning by virtue of the image that precedes and follows it (criterion of good neighborliness), but also of the interstices created between one and the other (of the iconology of the interval), metaphor of the “uninterrupted flow, verbal as well as visual, of the associations, of the memories, of the survivals that characterize the life of images” (Cometa 2020, 160), and between an image as a whole and its details. In general, it is the visual editing technique (i.e. the combination of images produced by different media, in ancient or modern times, by high or low culture) that allows the “Atlas system […] to communicate effectively and to induce reflection and questioning precisely through the disclosure of the complexity of human figurative thought” (Forster and Mazzucco 2002, 64). But it is above all the notion of Pathosformeln that explains every atlas of memory—in Warburg as in Cometa, in Berger as in McLuhan—that is to say those mnestic traces that are imprinted in the psyche of humankind and that recur in the most unpredictable places and moments. In Warburg’s own words, these are the “engrams of emotional experience [which] survive as a heritage of memory, determining in an exemplary way the outline created by the artist’s hand when the highest values of gestural language want to emerge in the creation through his hand” (ibid., 3). This principle makes it possible, indeed necessary, to put together on the same table the Great Heroic Act with the Dead by Goya, The Sounding of the First Trumpet by Gerung, The Opening of the Seventh Seal by Dürer and to make a montage inside a studio of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and of all its textual sources, from Conrad to Frazer to the Doors. The last iconotheque in Cometa’s Wunderkammer is that of the Triumph of the Death (Fig. 2), the fifteenth-century fresco preserved in Palazzo Abatellis, the Gallery of Modern Art in Palermo, to which Cometa devoted one of his last books. Actually, this is an image that has accompanied him throughout his scholar life, at least since 1993 when he began his studies on the topic and, moreover, 2006 when he presented some of his conclusions on the history of concepts at the Palermo conference on Iconology and History of Concepts, that we have already presented. Indeed this can be considered properly an essay belonging to the history of concept, for it shows a way of analyzing a traditional subject of art history but from two eccentric points of view: on the one hand, that which analyzes both the concepts actually “embodied” in the fresco, which derive from the medieval tradition of the “triumph of death”, macabre dances and ars moriendi, but also those conceptual energies that would be only unfolded a few centuries later, and yet they are already perfectly contained in this unconventional representation of death; on the other hand, the point of view of the visual culture of the court of Alfonso V the Magnanimous that transpires from the polyphonic visual dialogue established between the multiple characters of the fresco—now very distant from theological iconography and closer to an economic secularization—and the bearers of the intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic gaze. And, of course, with the different visual and literary sources that follow the fresco in this new atlas: from Pietro Novelli to Brueghel and Dürer; from German Totentänze to the gothic paintings of the Catalan

832 

V. CAMMARATA

Fig. 2  Unknown author, The Triumph of the Death, fresco in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, ca. 1446, 600 × 642 cm. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

Martorell and Borrassà to Picasso; and from Petrarca and Boccaccio to the Roman de la rose. In addition to being perhaps the most important piece of Cometa’s iconotheques, this essay also represents the highest point of reflection on and putting into practice of the technique of ekphrasis. Indeed, it is not per-chance that it begins with a literary ekphrasis of a picture which is at the same time a narrating picture and a narrated one. The whole fresco speaks of course about death— typical story of a city, indeed of a continent, oppressed for ten years by the plague—a tale which is widespread throughout Europe, but which, in Palermo, now wholly devoted to trade, politics, diplomacy, especially theocracy, takes on a unique meaning, an enigmatic one. In fact, Cometa’s research is essentially an investigation that tries to reveal who made the fresco—who are the two painters who look at us from the intra-diegetic space?—and, above all, who commissioned it. The whole fresco can be divided into thirteen individual scenes, but especially three of these, and moreover, their characters, can disclose the hidden meaning of the tale: an astonished lady dressed in red at the center of the scene, two gentlemen holding hands at the bottom right, a falconer together with a group of young people around the fountain at the top of the scene—as

  MICHELE COMETA 

833

well as obviously the death on horseback, which would soon become an icon of modernity. According to Cometa, these characters carry out three concepts, three “tones of the soul”, which will become key words of the philosophical lexicon of modernity—stupor, care and longing—and through three groups of figures that stand out among the curved lines of one of the most chaotic frescoes in history. With their accessories, drapery, jewels and their vests they tell the tale of “the splendor of the wealthy classes, but above all a complex geopolitics that draws daring routes on waters of the Mediterranean”, who embody a social history that “sanctioned the triumph of an economy not easily inscribable in a story of salvation” (Cometa 2017, 65). It is the new wealthy class that the fresco is addressed to, a class now freed from the classes of nobles and clergy both pierced in the throat and mouth: the bourgeoisie that faces an unknown modernity, in front of which one can get lost, and for which grace has no longer any mystical meaning. An indignation of the world, which we could define as Gnostic, rules the whole fresco. The three “tones of the soul” now acquire entirely new meanings: the stupor is no longer wonder but “seeing through, seeing all outlines and limits of what we see, understand suddenly all the implications. […] With the stupor of this damsel [in red] begins the modern thought” (ibid., 137); the cure is now secular devotion that “has nothing left of the otherworldly feeling that religion has cultivated for centuries. If anything, it has become the specific form of taking care of the other in the world abandoned by God” (145); the longing is embodied by the falconer who looks beyond the hedge: “his nostalgia is already fully Sehnsucht, yearning, desire for beyond, finally, salvation. With it he will perhaps defeat death” (148). These figures bring a “figurative message” that goes beyond the fresco and reaches out to us; they tell “three stories that transcend that representation, creating a supplement of meaning that we still recognize today as the only antidote to the triumph of death” (26).

2   Painting Words and Writing Images If the form of writing and thinking that most interested Michele Cometa is that of the atlas of images, the object of studies that has engaged his research the longest is undoubtedly that which concerns the relationship between words and images, be they pictorial, sculptural, architectonic, cinematographic, photographic or “biological”. One of the first approaches to this study, again an iconological one, is The Novel of Architecture, an investigation into the way in which the artistic conscience of the greatest figures of (not only) German Classicism and Romanticism was formed through southern Italy, especially through Sicily and its Doric and Gothic architecture. Through the reconstruction of the (real or imagined) travels in Sicily of Winckelmann or Riedesel, of Brydone or D’Orville, of Payne Knight or Shinckel, of Hackert or of Goethe himself, Cometa rebuilds the moment, as long as the whole age of Goethe, in which Sicilian temples became, for intellectuals all over Europe, not only a

834 

V. CAMMARATA

metaphorical place, the place of a lost Arcadia, but also an opportunity for the construction of a contemporary project, as demonstrated for example by all of Shinckel’s architecture. Travel diaries and antiques, as well as architectural reliefs and reconstructions, are combined with a real poetic vision that will reach the maximum degree of intensity with Goethe and his Journey to Italy, a journey into the myth as well as into the social history and customs of a country other than the one imagined. “We are now on the threshold of modern odeporics, whose fundamental trait is certainly that of being first of all a personal novel, an experience that is embodied and manifested in the mythological space of a Greekness dreamt rather than seen” (Cometa 1999, 32). However, the core of this part of Cometa’s project is the trilogy Words that Paint: Literature and visual culture between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries (Parole che dipingono. Letteratura e cultura visuale tra Settecento e Novecento, 2004), Description and Desire: The living pictures of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Descrizione e desiderio. I quadri viventi di E. T. A. Hoffmann, Cometa 2005), and The Writing of Images. Literature and Visual Culture (La scrittura delle immagini. Letteratura e cultura visuale, 2012). Each of these books is devoted to the study of ekphrasis, or the description of images, that Cometa considers fundamental both for the literary critics studies and for visual culture studies, since it demonstrates how the relationship between word and image should not simply be considered within studies on artistic (figurative or literary) experimentalism but within a reflection on intermediality as the very foundation of modern Western (visual) culture. It allows a study of modernity no longer as a succession of movements, genres or styles, but as a question, at least from Foucault onward, of the forms and possibilities of representation and as a philosophical reflection on images, on their reciprocal relationship, within one or more cultural koinè, and on their relationship with literature and society. The study carried out in Words that Paint on the greatest representatives of the genre or form of the ekphrasis (from Winckelmann to Heinse, from Kashnitz to Kerenyi, from Nietzsche to Dostoevskij, from Bernard to Handke) demonstrates how all modern philosophical and literary thought rests on “a secret picture” that triggers reflection and animates the debate, since it is often based on a shared iconology. Description and Desire, on the other hand, is more focused on the specific link between the dynamics of desire and the modes of the fantastic in the romantic ekphrasis, especially in Hoffmann’s works. Here, painting becomes a room of compensation or replacement (sublimation, as Freud would later put it) of sexual desire and expression. The fact that in almost all Romanticism, and in Hoffmann in particular, pictures are always “devices of the fantastic”, that trigger a continuous change of planes of reality or, precisely, of fantasy, is not secondary. Finally, with The Writing of Images Cometa presents his own specific theory or, better, taxonomy of ekphrasis, now definitively inserted within the approach to the specific visual culture approach that this author, as we have already said and as we will shortly see more specifically, defines as the study of the scopic

  MICHELE COMETA 

835

regime that characterizes the relationship between gazes, images, devices, bodies, and environment within a particular society and its culture. This approach allows the studies on ekphrasis to give new space to the “logic of images” and to their liberation from textolatry which, it is now clear from what has been said so far, is one of the objectives of Cometa’s entire research. Thus, it is a new kind of critics on ekphrasis, much more interested in the side of images and not only in a literary approach. This also allows the Italian scholar to build a true taxonomy of ekphrasis which goes from the simplest form—that of denotation, which is the “explicit citation of a painting in a text, […] often reduced to a mere name of the work” (Cometa 2012, 85)—to the different kinds of dynamization—the form that allows ekphrasis to overcome the traditional Lessingian distinction between the arts of space and the arts of time, transforming the “coexistent” into “subsequent”—to the different forms of integration—when “the reader is invited not only to penetrate the image with his gaze but also to integrate it with his own preconceptions and with his own previous experience” (ibid., 116). We must then dwell on the fact that this trilogy is based on a common collection of images, which somehow represent the founding images of Cometa’s thought on the ekphrasis, as well as the founding icons of the figurative koinè that goes from Romanticism to the late twentieth century. In fact, no reflection on the relationship between images and text, but not even on images as such, would be possible without the reflections that, at least from Winckelmann onward, were conducted on Laocoön, on Sistine Madonna, on the iconographic complex of Magdalene and on its declinations between S. Rosalia and S. Teresa. These images are fundamental not so much because they belong to a canon, but because they represent the “precipitate” of different historical periods and, therefore, of different visual cultures and, in some way, are the basis of the entire discipline, because they are substantially present in the reflections of the greatest theorists or precursors: from Winckelmann’s Laocoön to Heidegger’s Sistine Madonna, therefore, there are no “works of art” at stake but icons that organize thought, society, customs and behavior. Mine is therefore not a research on the structure of texts […] but on the topoi that these images inhabit in the contemporary imagination, on the myths they display, on their cultural consistency. (Cometa 2004a, 15)

3   Archeology of the Scopic Regimes In addition to the pictures mentioned so far as elements of Cometa’s “collection/atlas”, there is another one that can be considered an icon of his theory: it is Dürer’s engraving The Painter and the Lying Model (1525). This picture has a different meaning than the previous ones, as it does not represent the embodiment or crystallization of the culture of an era, of the concepts that characterize its Stimmungen or that prefigures its evolutions. This image, instead, can be defined, in Mitchell’s words, as a metapicture, that is, an image

836 

V. CAMMARATA

that reflects on itself or on images in general, and does so by freeing itself from the tyranny of word and text. In short, it is an image that speaks through the language of images (Mitchell 1994). Dürer’s engraving can be considered an archetype of metapictures, since, in its perspective schematicism, it is the perfect representation of a scopic regime (in particular that of the Cartesian perspectivism). It is no coincidence, in fact, that many studies on the visual, from different disciplines, use it as an example of the “institutional” setting of the study of perspective laws. For Cometa this engraving is a real staging of the scopic regime and of the relation (or interplay as Mitchell defines it) among its elements: the image, the gaze, and the device. But it is also much more: “at stake are the practices of seeing/not seeing, the devices of vision, such as the perspective reticle and the obelisk in front of the artist’s eyes which forces the monocular vision hypothesized by the perspective, and the images that literally arise under the eyes of the man” (Cometa 2020, 33). Thus, all the elements that Martin Jay in his founding study Scopic Regimes of Modernity (Jay 1988) considered essential to the constitution of a scopic regime. However, represented in the engraving there are also some “frames” that “break through” the back wall framing of a Mediterranean landscape (which Cometa brings back to the reminiscences of the trip to Italy) and which obviously recall the Albertian window. And again, it is configured in a specific “environment”, the academy, a “social device” that legitimates some otherwise illicit looks and images and denies others. These are also constitutive and characterizing elements of every scopic regime, of which Cometa gives his personal definition: “The complex interaction, or rather the system of relations between those who exercise vision and those who are the object of the scopic drive, as well as between images, gazes and devices” (Cometa 2020, 34–35). Each of the elements underlying the scopic regime has its own tutelary deity, one of the figures belonging to the genealogy that Cometa reconstructs in his latest book Visual Culture. Thus Warburg can be considered the “reformer” of the discourse on images, the founder of a new “iconology”; Freud, on the other hand, revolutionized the studies of the gaze by indissolubly tying it to sexuality, also rediscovering its biological, social, political and even economic connotations; Benjamin inaugurated the twentieth century’s reflection on media, and the broader notions of device, apparatus and assemblage, which today allow us to connect visual technologies with the most recent studies of neuroscience and ecology. The genealogical or archeological investigation that, as we have seen, characterizes the entire work of Michele Cometa, has not only a historiographical value. In fact, if it is important to trace the origin of the contemporary reflection of a discipline such as visual culture in the figures of Warburg, Freud and Benjamin, it is because “their reflections contain energies that can be reactivated also and only from the perspective of the present” (Cometa 2020, 298) and of the future, as we will see in conclusion. Also, the tripartition between images, gazes and devices, which, according to Cometa, should guide every

  MICHELE COMETA 

837

study of visual culture, not only serves for a historical reconstruction of the past but is also at the basis of possible future developments of the discipline. Indeed, the latest developments of Cometa’s studies, which are also a promise for future ones, concern the study of the agency of images. This seems to be the natural evolution of the path taken up to now which, in general, has shown that “the image-making, but also the spectatorship and the media, must be included in the framework of an investigation into the fundamental behaviors of homo sapiens and therefore within a biology, more precisely an ecology that explains the meaning of the relationships we establish with images, the interactions between gazes and bodies and the construction of devices have had for its evolution” (ibid.). It is a call for a bio-cultural change in visual culture. Studying the agency of images means, first of all, studying their power (Freedberg 1991), that is, their ability to induce reactions in the viewer that do not depend only on cultural contexts but also on biological conditions, especially neuronal ones, at the basis of cognitive processes. Fundamental in this field is the influence that the neuroscience studies of the Parma school (Rizzolatti and Gallese), from the discovery of mirror neurons to the studies on liberated embodied simulation, have had on the studies of aesthetics and visual culture in general and on Cometa in particular  (Cometa 2017b, Cometa 2019). This is why studies on ancestral visual phenomena such as totemism, animism and fetishism have been reconsidered, or questions are asked about the relationship between human and non-human gazes, or about paleontology of screens (Carbone 2016; Casetti 2019; Mitchell 2015; Cometa 2018b). This is how, according to Cometa, biological reflection renews the meanings and mechanisms of each of the elements that make up scopic regimes. Invested by this bio-cultural turn, images are no longer studied only as “stimuli” for the social actors, but as social actors themselves. The most recent studies are based on this principle, from the study of Mitchell’s “life and loves of images”, to the anthropologies of images by Ingold and Severi, to the ontologies of the image inaugurated by Descola. And it is always a biological reflection that interests today’s theories on the gaze which, also heirs of feminist reflections, invest it with meanings linked to gender and difference. Not even devices are safe from biological “fury”, being no longer only the product of technological advances that amplify our biological abilities, but elements of the “wider context of the ecological and technological niche in which Homo sapiens makes its visual experiences” (Cometa 2020, 303). On the other hand, Cometa points out, already from Benjamin’s history of perception the subject who perceives, with his own body, is a means that in him/herself link the organic to the inorganic (Belting 2009), and from Foucault and Agamben onward, “the continuum of all the ‘biological’ arguments on images, gazes and devices has been the biopolitical substance of the practices of control, surveillance, communication” (ibid.). In his most recent studies, Cometa tries to respond to this bio-cultural challenge by tracing the visual practices of Homo sapiens precisely to its cognitive and neuronal characteristics, as demonstrated by the cases of cave art (Cometa

838 

V. CAMMARATA

2016b), of the human passion for miniatures (Cometa 2020b), from the Paleolithic up to today, or a possible paleontology of screens that gives a new meaning to the relationship that humankind has always established with the depth and surface of screens and projections. Particularly interesting are the reflections on the role of narration, fiction and imagination as forms of unburdening. These can be considered as forms of aesthetic “adaptation” that Homo sapiens would have developed to observe a safe distance from reality. Thanks to this unburdening, of which the liberated embodied simulation is a form (Gallese), Homo sapiens would be able to survive his paradoxical weakness and, in some way, to control the anxiety that derives from it (Cometa 2017; 2020c). These studies lead to a redefinition and a reinterpretation of images, unhinging the old canons and the old categories of disciplines such as aesthetics, art history, literature and philosophy. But, above all, by tracing the reflection on “image-making” (Cometa 2015; 2015b)  to cognitive studies, evolutionary aesthetics, biology and neuroscience, they allow us to rethink the role that images play in today’s evolutionary state of Homo sapiens, which in Cometa’s view should be the first aim of our discipline.

References Belting, Hans. 2009. “Immagine, medium, corpo: un nuovo approccio all’iconologia”. In: Teorie dell’arte. Il dibattito contemporaneo. Ed. by Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Carbone, Mauro. 2016. Filosofia-schermi. Dal cinema alla rivoluzione digitale. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Casetti, Francesco. 2019. “Primal Screen”. In: Screen Genealogies. From Optical Devices to Environmental Medium. Ed.  by Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe and Francesco Casetti. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Coglitore, Roberta (ed.). 2008. Cultura visuale. Paradigmi a confronto. Palermo: Duepunti. Cometa, Michele. 1990. Gli dei della lentezza. Metaforiche della “pazienza” nella letteratura tedesca. Milano: Guerini. Cometa, Michele. 1999. Il romanzo dell’architettura. La Sicilia e il Grand Tour nell’età di Goethe. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Cometa, Michele. 2004a. Parole che dipingono. Letteratura e cultura visuale tra Settecento e Novecento. Roma: Meltemi. Cometa, Michele. 2004b. Visioni della fine. Apocalissi, catastrofi, estinzioni. Palermo: Duepunti. Cometa, Michele. 2005. Descrizione e desiderio. I quadri viventi di E. T. A. Hoffmann. Roma: Meltemi. Cometa, Michele. 2008. “Iconocrash. Sul disastro delle immagini”. In Cultura visuale. Paradigmi a confronto. Ed. by Roberta Coglitore. Palermo: Duepunti. Cometa, Michele. 2012. La scrittura delle immagini. Milano: Cortina. Cometa, Michele. 2015. “Sulle origini del fare-immagini”. Fata morgana, 26: 111–132. Cometa, Michele. 2015b. “The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo”. In:  Monstrous Anatomies: Literary Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed.  by Raul Calzoni and Greta Perette. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.

  MICHELE COMETA 

839

Cometa, Michele. 2016. Archeologie del dispositivo. Cosenza: Pellegrini. Cometa, Michele. 2016b. “The Challenge of Cave Art. On the Future of Visual Culture”. In: Theorizing Images. Ed. by Žarko Paić and Krešimir Purgar. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cometa, Michele. 2017. Il Trionfo della morte di Palermo. Un’allegoria della modernità. Roma-Macerata: Quodlibet. Cometa, Michele. 2017b. Perché le storie ci aiutano a vivere. Milano: Cortina. Cometa, Michele. 2017c. “From Image/Text to Biopictures: Key Concepts in W.  J. T.  Mitchell’s Image Theory”. In:  W.  J. T.  Mitchell’s Image Theory. Living Pictures. Ed. by Krešimir Purgar. New York: Routledge. Cometa, Michele. 2017d. Fantasmagorie. Sulla cultura visuale dell’età di Goethe. Macerata-Roma: Quodlibet. Cometa, Michele. 2018. Letteratura e darwinismo. Introduzione alla biopoetica. Roma: Carocci. Cometa, Michele. 2018b. “Surfaces profondes. Au-delà de l’écran dans les cultures visuelles paleolithique”. In: Des pouvoirs des ecrans. Ed. by Mauro Carbone, Anna Caterina Dalmasso and Jacopo Bodini. Paris: Editions Mimesis. Cometa, Michele, 2019. “Letteratura e scienze del bios: il caso di Siri Hustvedt”. I quaderni della ricerca, 9: 27–37. Cometa, Michele. 2020. Cultura visuale. Una genealogia. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Cometa, Michele. 2020b. “Bodies That Matter: Miniaturisation and the Origin(s) of ‘Art”’. In: Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts. Ed. by Alessandra Violi, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti, and Pietro Conte. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Cometa, Michele. 2020c. “From unburdening to liberated embodied simulation. A history of concepts”. Reti, saperi, linguaggi 17: 103–122. Cometa, Michele, Coglitore, Roberta and Mazzara, Federica (eds.). 2004. Dizionario degli Studi Culturali. Roma: Meltemi. Cometa, Michele and Vaccaro, Salvo (eds.). 2007. Lo sguardo di Foucault. Roma: Meltemi. Cometa, Michele and Montandon, Alain. 2009. Vedere. Lo sguardo di E. T. A. Hoffmann. Palermo: Duepunti edizioni. Cometa, Michele and Coglitore, Roberta (eds.). 2016. Fototesti. Letteratura e cultura visuale. Macerata: Quodlibet. Forster, Kurt W. and Mazzucco, Katia. 2002. Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all’‘Atlante della Memoria’. Milano: Mondadori. Freedberg, David. 1991. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jay, Martin. 1988. “Scopic regimes of modernity”. In: Vision and Visuality. Ed. by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 2005. “There are No Visual Media”. Journal of Visual Culture, 4: 257–266. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2015. “Screening nature (and the nature of the screen)”. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 13 (3): 231–246. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2017. Pictorial Turn. Saggi di cultura visuale. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.

Paul Crowther Elena Fell

1   Introduction Paul Crowther began his academic career as Lecturer in Art History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He taught at St. Andrews for fifteen years, taking two years out to do a doctorate on Kant’s theory of the sublime at the University of Oxford. In 1995, he took up a Lectureship in History of Art at Oxford, becoming an Official Fellow of Corpus Christi College. A professorship in the subject had been in existence since the 1950s but Crowther was the first University Lecturer in the History of Art to be appointed at Oxford. In 1999, he took up a chair in Philosophy at the Centre for Professional Ethics at the University of Central Lancashire, followed by a chair in Philosophy and the Visual Arts at Jacobs University Bremen and the position of Established Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since 2018, he has held a personal chair in Philosophy at Alma Mater Europaea Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Crowther’s importance for image-studies arises originally from his work on the sublime and then for his more extensive work on the philosophy of visual images in all their variety—from their cognitive significance in relation to vision, and their ontological embodiments in different visual art media, notably pictures, abstract art, photography, sculpture and assemblage, architecture, and digital media. He has covered these issues in sixteen monographs and numerous papers. Generally speaking, the best introduction to Crowther’s work on the image is Chapter 2 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) (Crowther 2009, 19–39). The methodology that sets Crowther’s approach

E. Fell (*) Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk, Russia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_50

841

842 

E. FELL

apart from others is his combination of art-historical knowledge with detailed philosophical arguments—that draw on both the phenomenological and analytic traditions. However, even within this general orientation, his work has a more particular distinctiveness. There is a sense in which his work extends Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic form, by modifying the corporeal phenomenology found in Merleau-Ponty,1 but unlike either of those thinkers, Crowther makes the process of creating the image and its visual status into the main center of interest. Crowther’s relation to Cassirer is discussed as the subject of two dedicated monographs by Ioanna Kopsiafti and myself (Fell and Kopsiafti 2015; 2016).

2  The Sublime The first major effect of Crowther’s work on visual studies came through his work on the sublime. In 1988, Oxford University Press asked to publish his doctoral thesis as the first in a new series, and the resulting book—The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Crowther 1989)—has become very influential. In his book on the history of the sublime, Robert Doran says that Prior to Crowther’s 1989 study, there are no monographs on the Kantian sublime in English. Thus Crowther’s 1989 work, along with Lyotard’s seminal 1991 study (tr. 1994), appeared to have opened the floodgates, as it were, for the reconsideration of Kant’s theory of the sublime in English. (Doran 2017, 5 n15)

Crowther has applied his interpretation of the Kantian sublime in relation to visual images many times, most notably in his book How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine of 2016. Here Crowther critically reconstructs Kant’s theory of the mathematical and dynamic sublime, showing how it might be applied to visual phenomena—both natural and artistic. It involves phenomena, which are overwhelming in terms of their vastness or power, or which are represented in this way in pictures. Crowther describes what this involves: Insistent repetition of parts, insistent irregularity or asymmetry of parts, exaggerated size, animation, and (especially) suggestive concealment are all features that emphasize the threatening aspects of phenomena. […] Recognized on the basis of such cues, in other words, the fearful aspect of phenomena are especially emphasized at the perceptual level. It is this that allows them to be a source of the sublime. (Crowther 2016, 65)

In the How Pictures Complete Us book, Crowther also extends the Kantian approach in an entirely new visual direction through his concept of the “pictorial sublime”. This experience happens when the overwhelming effect of 1  This research was carried out at Tomsk Polytechnic University within the framework of the Tomsk Polytechnic University Competitiveness Enhancement Program grant.

  PAUL CROWTHER 

843

the fearful or threatening implications of a represented visual state of affairs depends on understanding the image’s narrative meaning. A man nailed to a wooden cross, for example, is just that, but if we know the religious narrative of Christ, then his suffering is given an altogether more overwhelming impact. In this same book, he also offers a close investigation of the mystical sublime found in color-field abstractionists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

3   Philosophy of the Visual Image Crowther’s most important contributions to image  studies are based on his extensive analyses of their ontological and cognitive structures and aesthetic significance. He has written ten monographs on pictorial and abstract art and other visual media, together with another book on Kant’s aesthetics and some works on general aesthetics. His interest in the visual image seems to be driven by a single problem—how it is possible for art to have a history? For Crowther, this is not an empirical question concerning the different societal contexts under which visual images are created; it is something that goes deeper—into the aesthetics and ontology of the different forms of meaning. He emphasizes that in talking of artistic images the concept of the artistic has to be given center-stage. In doing this, Crowther becomes extremely critical of what he describes as a “contemporary orthodoxy” in how the visual image is approached. See the Introduction to his Theory of the Art Object (Crowther 2019a, 1–16). This orthodoxy involves rigid versions of the social history of art, and related feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist critique, all of which treat the visuality of the artistic image as no more than a means to an end—a vehicle of informational or persuasive functions in the site of class, race, and gender struggles. This leads to an almost exclusive preoccupation with the artwork’s relation to modes of visual spectatorship. The image’s status as a physically made thing is reduced to a mode of signification that counts as no more than one thing among other elements in the “construction” of meaning. Crowther argues that this allows the western art management structure— historians, critics, curators, and administrators—to redefine art on the basis of their own professional interpretative interests. To show why this reductionist approach is so one-sided Crowther establishes the primacy of the visual image as a made object. So, in the very act of making an image (irrespective of one’s practical intentions and subsequent uses of the image) one literally acts upon the world, and in so doing, changes one’s relation to both the represented object and to oneself, and to existence in more general terms. (Crowther 2009, 18)

More technically, this means that in Crowther’s theory the making of an image involves acting upon reality in a way that changes the existing relation between subject and object of experience (where the subject in question is the artist, and

844 

E. FELL

then, at a secondary level, the spectator). This changed relation in Crowther’s theories is the basis of the image’s intrinsic aesthetic significance. He takes great trouble to show how this approach is unaffected by fashionable emphases on “difference” and the “de-centredness” of the subject, by arguing that the subject-object relation is the basis of any possible communication between people. No meaning of any kind—socially “constructed”, “gendered”, or otherwise—is possible without shared recognitional structures (objective constants in experience) that are formed through the relation between space, perception, consciousness, and embodiment. The book What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture of 2017 represents Crowther’s most complete investigation of the transition from the image’s general cognitive significance to its ontological embodiment and has some claim to be his most important contribution to the study of visual images. In it, he is concerned with the ontology of the visual image as such, as well as its artistic forms. Another important contribution is found in his book The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History (2002). In the chapter “The Fundamental Categories of Art History”, Crowther shows how a full understanding of the pictorial image involves consideration of many different aspects—all of which he identifies by reference to particular historical works (Crowther 2002, 69–140). He is thus able to combine and revise ideas from Wölfflin and Panofsky together with many insights of his own and in this way create a highly accomplished conceptual tool for understanding different aspects of the pictorial image. More recently, Crowther has given renewed emphasis to objective factors in how images are made. In Theory of the Art Object (2019a), for example, he explores these through the concept of material ontology: Material ontology involves the relation between the physicality of the artwork and those particular structures of reference (bound up mainly with criteria of visual resemblance and illusion) that distinguish modes of visual art from one another, and from non-visual art forms. And these factors converge, in turn, on the relation between vision, space, the making or assembling of relevant material, and the embodied subject’s sense of self (vis-à-vis both the creators and spectators of visual art). (Crowther 2019a, 1)

By considering material ontology, it becomes possible to identify the unique features of the many different forms of visual art and to explain why it is possible for them to be used for such a wide variety of communicative functions in so many contrasting cultural and historical contexts. It discovers the meanings that allow art to have a history over and above mere physical survival through time. Material ontology is necessarily linked to the primacy of vision. In poststructuralist and feminist discourses, vision is often treated as little more than the basis of “scopic regimes” whereby the attitudes of a hegemonic class, race, or gender are embodied in visual formulae of communication that allow them

  PAUL CROWTHER 

845

to control those who are not members of the hegemony. However, Crowther shows that, whatever the particular uses of visual communication, its visuality as such is of the very greatest cognitive significance. Vision allows the understanding of spatial things and relations simultaneously—at a distance that extends beyond the range of touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Such enhanced capacity is assisted by the body’s ability to stand and move upright in a way that allows the entire space surrounding us to be surveyed through 360 degrees, and above immediate ground level. But also, [e]qually importantly, we recognize through vision that this field reconfigures systematically in correlation with our own movements through it. […] Vision is the basis of the perceptual field as a systematic structure. […] [Indeed] To put it simply: without vision, no perceptual field qua field; and without the perceptual field, no rational animal qua rational. (Crowther 2019a, 9)

In much of his work, Crowther emphasizes that in negotiating this visual field the human subject is always positioned through its power of imagination and especially the cognitive function of the mental image. In such imagining, we not only make mental projections of alternative positions to those of the immediate perceptual field but we also—in a sense—inhabit those alternatives. This is because while imagination has to specify the objects it is imagining, its generation of these involves spontaneous activity of a creative kind that, according to Crowther, “bonds us” to what we imagine: The image embodies both an object and a style of experiencing it, and this extends to both our own memories and how we posit alternative possibilities to those given in the present perceptual field of objects and events. Style allows us to inhabit the things we imagine, and make them into an expression of freedom. Through all these factors, imagination is fundamental to our existence as individuals. It is not some luxury “add-on” cognitive capacity, but rather one through which we live. (Crowther 2017, 25)

In his theories, the origins of visual art are in these very phenomena or rather in the way that the making of art intervenes upon and transforms the image. In our mental images we can decide what to imagine and to change aspects of how it appears. But once we have made these choices the image’s fabric of appearance—its particular way of appearing before the mind—is not something we can choose. The image just makes its appearance spontaneously on the basis of what we have decided. However, in the example of making a picture, the image’s fabric of appearance is itself subject to the will. In making something such as a picture, the artist is able to exert conscious control by fixing the nature of the particular image in terms of its shapes, lines, colors, volumes, masses, textures, densities, and so on. Crowther concludes that [t]his takes personal style in imagination to an entirely higher level of accomplishment. Whereas the mental image is unstable and, in a sense, never completed

846 

E. FELL

(insofar as it is simply replaced by other images in the flow of consciousness), the picture is stabilized in the making of a physical object and brought to completion. It can have a stable final state that is chosen by the artist. In this way it achieves an autonomy that images qua mental can never achieve. (Crowther 2017, 27)

Crowther argues then that by making a visual artwork, the artist is able to develop his or her power of imagination much further and make its personal style accessible to other people. Indeed, by making the image in a publicly accessible form, the uniqueness of the artist’s vision is emphasized even more through the comparisons and contrasts it presents with the work of other artists. In all this, the artistic image is expressing features that are basic to how humans dwell in the world, which is why it has a significance that exceeds any culturally or historically specific functions it is created to serve. In fact, as this author often says, the very question of why visual images are able to communicate so many different functions, so effectively, in so many different historical and cultural times and places—of itself points to them having an intrinsic aesthetic significance that supports such functioning—see, for example, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts: Even the Frame (Crowther 2009, 16).

4  Material Ontology of the Image The general material ontology of the artistic image is given unique expression by the structures of different visual art forms. The nature of these art forms has been Crowther’s most persistent interest in recent years, especially in relation to pictorial and abstract art. One of his most important concepts is that of “presentness”. This concept is required because the making and aesthetic appreciation of pictures intervene upon normal perception in a way that goes further than the general features described earlier: They create immobile figures and groups whose selected shapes, lines, and shading resemble similar features in the subject-matter. By being represented, the subject-matter is both referred to, but, also in a sense ‘bracketed off’ for special attention, from the flow of real life. (Crowther 2019a, 32)

This presentness is something that involves a particular kind of perceptual activity, because of the distinctive ontology of spatial things. The unity of a temporal event involves perceiving its component parts in a strict linear order of occurrence, but in the case of the unity of a spatial object we can perceive its parts in any order we choose, starting at the left or the right or the top or the bottom, and moving our attention in any direction we choose. In the case of the picture (and also sculpture), this open unity has some interesting features. The author describes them in this way, On the one hand, the picture is a physical thing consisting of a plane surface with lines or marks placed or inscribed upon it; on the other hand, its unity can be

  PAUL CROWTHER 

847

explored in terms of the illusionistic content—the three-dimensional items and states of affairs that are presented “in” the surface. Even more importantly for aesthetic purposes, we can also attend to the complex relation between both these aspects. Our perception is free to explore how the virtual three-dimensional content is made to emerge from the picture’s physical material. And this can even encompass another level also—namely, a sense of this emergent relation being created in the first place—through the artist’s gestures and compositional thought. (Crowther 2019a, 32)

According to this theory, the picture’s intervention on experience is far more dynamic than simple recognition, and in its dynamism, it compensates us in a way that is simultaneously aesthetic and metaphysical. According to Crowther, this compensation is due to the way it alters our experience of the temporal present. When a human brings some project to completion, the satisfaction is soon washed away by the advent of new situations. Everything we perceive converges on a present moment of perception that connects both our past and our anticipated future, but perception never stands still, it is always replaced by a new moment of experience. As he says, the present has a profound significance in terms of human goals and fulfilments. We desire these to be realized in sustained terms, but such realizations mainly converge on the high points—on specific presents of achievement and gratification. However, whilst the Present is thus a central focus of human existence, as soon as one reflects upon it, it has gone. Whether they are moments of achievement one has striven to attain or mere passing perceptual orientations, one Present replaces another even in the very act of thinking about it. […] We strive for its absolute possession, but to no avail (…). (Crowther 2016, 40)

This elusive present has another important feature in Crowther’s theory. In every person, it has a different emphasis—a different cognitive style—as it arises from a relation between the body’s position in relation to the world, and to our reasons for being in such a position, all of which relate to our past experience and our expectations of the future. Our perception of the present, in other words, always has a complicated psychological style based on the perceiving subject’s personal history and the social and cultural context in which they exist. But we can only know this style from the inside—by living it. However, in making a picture or other visual representation, the artist’s making of the work intervenes upon and transforms our experience of the present. A possible scene—a present visual perception is shown in a way that frees it from the flow of time: The transitory present is symbolically possessed and fixed in place. Indeed, through the artist’s choice of materials and specific modes of handling, the personal existential style that inform any experiential Present is here manifest at a publically accessible level. In effect, it shows a possible way of seeing that is brought to enduring completion through the artist’s making of it into a picture.

848 

E. FELL

[…] In this way […] the Present’s striving for self-possession, and the style which both informs it and makes it meaningful, both find objective expression through pictorial art. The otherwise transient present and the existential style that sustains it are realised in a symbolically autonomous form. (Crowther 2019a, 35)

The points Crowther makes about the pictorial image here are ones that he often contrasts very carefully with the experience of photography (Crowther 2016, 39). The photograph is an image that is created mechanically by the causal impact of light effects on the surface of what is photographed. It represents a temporally arrested state of affairs. This has its own kind of unique aesthetic interest, but according to him, it is not the same as that of the pictorial or sculptural image (Crowther discusses the intrinsic aesthetic significance of the photographic image in a dedicated chapter of Theory of the Art Object (Crowther 2019a, 103–127)). Pictorial and sculptural images are created through marks on a plane or through shaped three-dimensional material—they are the product of gesture, and no matter how realistic this representational effect might be, we always know that the image has been created through long and complex sequences of physical activity. This knowledge mediates how both artist and spectator view the work. In relation to pictures, he remarks: The created pictorial image […] represents an enduring possibility of vision rather than an arrested visual reality. […] The picture presents a possible visual scene that is not connected to the flow of real time. The pictorial medium declares its narrative content as created—as a possibility that is not embedded in the real flow of spatial appearances. In actual life, the present is always experienced as transitory, but, in the picture, it is eternalized. It is symbolically possessed and fixed in place. It has the character of presentness. (Crowther 2019b, 38)

The discussions of presentness involve many insights in addition to those already described, but for convenience I will now look at another of the important ideas he brings to bear on the pictorial image, namely his interpretation of perspective. There is controversy concerning whether linear perspective is a western cultural convention of representation alone or whether it is a mode of representing that embodies the truth of optical perception. Crowther’s answer avoids this duality. He argues that perspective has indeed an “objective significance” but this is not because of any correspondence to the optical perception. It is to do, rather, with movement through space. In any picture, the image creates a possible space which the spectator could enter as an imaginary internal viewer, and could in those terms move through. In pictorial spaces with strong recessional structure, this internal viewing experience is accentuated. The author describes this in the following terms: Depth needs movement in order to be negotiated, and the phenomenon of movement is inseparably tied to time. The recessional emphasis of pictorial space, in other words, suggests the possibility of imaginary movement through time— occupying different viewing positions within the represented space […] ­perspective

  PAUL CROWTHER 

849

intervenes on perception. Specifically, it offers visual cues suggesting that if one moved in the picture’s virtual space, one would be able to move through it systematically—i.e. the visual appearance of things would change in exact correlation with such movement. Perspective renders the systematicity of how subject and object of experience are correlated through embodiment. (Crowther 2019b, 42)

This interpretation means that if we want a mode of pictorial representation that best conveys the systematic way in which the body occupies and moves through space, then perspectival cues are what we need. What is at issue, in other words, is not optical perception but the visual expression of the body’s systematic mobility. This is its objective significance. According to Crowther, the work need not even have exact perspective to do this. All that is needed is that—like most pictures created between the Renaissance and the advent of Modernism—an image has the look of perspectival structure. In all these arguments, he has been talking about pictorial works, and in other places, he takes a similar approach to sculpture—while noting that medium’s own unique structures. But one of the most interesting things in his approach is the way he extends—in effect—the idea of the visual image into the realm of abstract works. I will now look at this in detail.

5  Abstraction and the Allusive Image Crowther’s theory of abstraction starts from a few uncontroversial empirical facts—that abstract art was created by exploring the limits of pictorial representation and then by going beyond them. But there is also an important continuity. Abstract works may be very different from pictorial idioms, but it mainly keeps to their presentational formats—such as painting on a plane surface (often within the contours of a frame) and being displayed within an exhibition space such as a gallery. He emphasizes that this simple continuity is of the most vital importance: “It sets up a cultural expectation that such works are about something over and above their physical being, and, more importantly, that this aboutness is connected with how they look in specific visual terms. I call this the presumption of virtuality” (Crowther 2019a, 43). This presumption means that when we encounter such works we look for them to be “about” something, even though we do not see in them the kind of subject-matters that pictures and representational sculpture present to us. In many cases, artists will say—in manifestoes, and the like—something about what they are trying to communicate, but in many cases, these descriptions are very obscure, and the vast majority of people who see abstract works have no knowledge of these ideas anyway. Nevertheless, abstract works still find an extensive audience and do so in both western and non western contexts of spectatorship. Crowther asks how is this possible—what is it about the appearance of the works themselves that satisfies the presumption of virtuality?

850 

E. FELL

The answer he provides begins with the phenomenon of optical illusion: A mark of one colour placed on a ground constituted by another colour can appear to be in front of the ground—to be pushing towards the viewer, or else appear to be an incision in it—to be showing through from a position beneath the ground. Or again, a ripple in a uniform field of paint, or a variation of physical thickness in how the paint is laid on, can create an optical illusion of movement or, in the latter case, of the colour field as a mist. Once an abstract work is hung on a wall or placed on a plinth (or whatever) none of its immediately visible properties is virtually inert or neutral. Optical illusion—no matter how minimal—is created. […] The presumption of virtuality and optical illusion are the conceptual basics of abstract art. (Crowther 2019a, 42)

For Crowther, in perceiving the optical illusion in abstract and semi-abstract works, we are taken to a realm of pictorial allusion instead of illusion. They suggest things we are familiar with but which we cannot simply identify because they are so complicated in their perceptual range: [T]he visible spatial world is subtended by details, relations, and associations of astonishing complexity. These are not simply incidental; they are the very matrix of visual being—a plethora of structures that allow themselves to be comprehended synoptically as objects or states of affairs of such-and-such a kind. This matrix extends to many different levels, and makes the key recognitional mode of vision possible, even though, of necessity, its massive richness has to be overlooked […] we shall describe this matrix as transperceptual space, insofar as it crosses and subtends perception, and yet, as a condition of perception—also transcends it. (Crowther 2019a, 45)

Any artist makes selective use of elements of transperceptual space—using colors, shapes, textures, lights, shadows, and so on—that allow the image to be recognized as a representation of some kind of three-dimensional thing. But in the abstract work, the optical illusion of the work does not converge on such recognizable subject-matter; instead, it evokes aspects of transperceptual space: It is […] pictorial allusion. In this idiom, transperceptual elements do not crystallise into the presentation of a definite three-dimensional object or state of affairs; rather, they are left open. They allude to possible configurations in transperceptual space—colors, shapes, textures, relations that suggest features at the margins of perception, or things given under unusual aspects, or as the outcomes of strange physical and/or atmospheric processes. (Crowther 2019a, 46)

Crowther narrows the layers of transperceptual space into five levels of meaning (and admits that there may be more), with his most extended discussion of abstract art found in The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style (Crowther 2012, 217–250). The levels he has talked about most recently are:

  PAUL CROWTHER 

851

Spatial items and relations not normally available to perception or which are hidden or taken so much for granted as not to be noticed. Examples of this are shapes or details at the boundaries of immediate attention, microscopic details, or the internal states of things as they might appear in a cross-section, and unusual visual viewpoints such as seeing something from above. 2.

Visual configurations that seem to vary the appearance of how things normally appear. Examples include the distortion or fragmentation of things or states of affairs, and partially remembered details of things we have experienced. Idealized treatments of structural features of perceptual space. These involve such things as the emphasis of “primary qualities”, for example, volume, mass, density, shape, and spatial relations such as “in front of” or “behind”. They can also involve insistent presentations of hue, density, and differentiation in different areas of color. Varieties and relations of shape and color presented as bearers of specific ranges of emotional association. Crowther acknowledges that his will often be a feature of any striking artwork—abstract and representational, but points out that in many abstractionists (such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko) this is emphatic. In describing these levels of transperceptual space Crowther always makes sure to discuss them in relation to the works of specific artists—discussions which, for the sake of brevity, I am unable to include here. However, one important qualification which Crowther makes should be noted. Many artists have styles that can be interpreted in terms of more than one level of transperceptual space, and, indeed, there are many individual works in which multiple levels of such space can be claimed to be operative.

6  The Digital Image There are many other aspects to Crowther’s discussions of the visual image but I will concentrate on a more recent development. The concept of Postmodernism has been a recurrent theme in Crowther’s work since Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993). These have led to a recent major work (in effect, a two-­ volume study of Postmodernism in the visual arts) that comprises Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation: The Birth of a Medium (Crowther, 2018a) and Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology As Iconology (2018b). Crowther argues that the Postmodern era since around 1960 involves a transformation of artistic creativity that is inspired by Duchamp’s practice—where artworks can use material originating as technologically produced artifacts.

852 

E. FELL

This became particularly influential in the 1960s and after because of a widespread attitude that Crowther identifies as follows: Technology is naturalized. It is no longer merely a question of training the human sensorium but, rather, augmenting it, directing it, and providing an addictive source of leisure gratifications through mobile phones, gadgets, “apps” and internet access. Technology is what we exist in, as much as something we use—a kind of extended techno-habitat. […] This naturalization of technology is a key criterion of Postmodern culture. (Crowther 2018a, 7)

From this, Crowther draws the conclusion that digital art is the purest Postmodern art form, since “[i]t springs from the organizational technology that is central to both production and to leisure in contemporary society” (Crowther 2018a, 7). He argues that the concept of digital art centers on the explicit recognition of the computer’s involvement in the creation of an artwork. This can take different forms such as still-images, dynamic modes (using temporally successive sequences of imagery), IT assisted modes such as robotically executed painting or computer-directed installations, and finally, interactive modes that give the audience an active involvement in how the work is presented. Of these, the still-image is the most vital, according to Crowther, because of its own intrinsic nature and because it isolates those graphic structures that are central to how all the other computer art forms operate and achieve their effects. He says, [I]f these are to be regarded as visual artworks, then the visual aspect must have some special character—if only because interactive uses depend upon and are often directly structured by the character of the digital images or imagery involved. […] Digital images are the aesthetic subconscious in which all modes of computer art operate. Even textual information itself takes on an image-character insofar as it draws attention to the visual style in which it is presented. (Crowther 2018a, 8)

This leads Crowther to interpret the digital image as having a very special significance as the bearer of what he calls digital art’s “aesthetic imprimatur”: To recognize an image or unique possibility of interactivity as computer-­generated is to recognize a distinctive aesthetic effect. […] In the case of painting and sculpture, the autographic element is a potential distraction from reading the representational content of the work. But digital virtual realization carries no such restrictions. It is possible for the digital medium to project three-dimensional content so comprehensively that it can even exceed the real three-dimensional effects of Super Realist sculpture. (Crowther 2018a, 11)

In this way, the digital image asserts the look of the technological through the intense visual lucidity of its appearance. It is the most perfect expression of that

  PAUL CROWTHER 

853

naturalization of technology which Crowther sees as fundamental to the Postmodern era. Interestingly, this unique aesthetic imprimatur of the digital image has a second aspect—of a more paradoxical kind, that again relates to deeper aspects of the finitude of the human situation; Crowther describes this as the “aesthetics of quasi-magic”. Given a digital image on screen or printed out, we know that—by definition—it has been designed through information processing. However, the image’s sensory hyper-intenseness creates a fruitful tension— between the vividness of its presence and our awareness of its origins in the realm of algorithms and electronic circuitry. As Crowther says, This connects to something deep. A finite rational being knows its endeavors are limited by bodily constraints. Yet we often yearn to escape those constraints—to find a means to create material things through thought alone. Now, the digital artist designs programs at the level of information but which are realized at the level of sensory presence. He or she, in effect, seeks abstract formulae to cast the spell that will conjure up sensible configurations. Of course, this is not literally magic, but the transition from electronic data to final work leaves a gap—it is something that cannot be exactly followed in perceptual terms; we cannot see how the information transforms into visual configuration. […] The gap between information and digital visual realization is, accordingly, filled with mystery […]. (Crowther 2018a, 11)

Crowther’s point, in other words, is that while we know the digital image is generated through electronic and algorithmic means, yet we do not see this actually happen—it is as if the image is created by magic, a gift we would love to have for ourselves. Hence he concludes that “it is this which gives the digital imprimatur its unique aesthetic fascination. There is a felt harmony between the power of creative thought and the world of the senses through the quasi-­ magical leap from one to the other—as focussed in the particularity of the work” (Crowther 2018a, 11).

7  Conclusion Crowther offers an entirely different way of understanding the ontology of the image and its cultural significance. He identifies what can be called the subconscious of visual representation—all the things that enable pictures, sculptures, and assemblages to be meaningful even though they are not drawn attention to directly. In particular, this author explores the key roles of vision itself and of imagination. What sets him even more apart from other researchers is the way he emphasizes the making of the image. The many complex processes embodied and accomplished in such making allow features that are fundamental to our experience, to exist in a more complete form. This is why Crowther assigns so much importance to the aesthetic and artistic image. In most cases, visual images serve simple purposes of communication and entertainment, but he

854 

E. FELL

goes on to show what enables these functions and also allows image-making to be pursued for its own sake as an artistic practice. Many critics try to dismiss art and the aesthetic as no more than preferences of the white male middle classes— reflecting their world views, and so on. But for Crowther such an approach treats the artwork as if it were no more than of narrative interest, and by failing to engage with its made and distinctively visual aspects, the approach that distorts all aspects of its understanding. By emphasizing the artistic image’s intrinsic significance, Crowther establishes its foundation as a normative phenomenon. Indeed, by emphasizing its publicly accessible practical realizations he at the same time illuminates the canonic aspect of image-making. (Crowther’s main discussion of the canon is in his general aesthetics book, Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (2007); see especially 89–123). This involves a history based on how the medium is changed so as to offer new possibilities of visual narrative or even new ways of imaging. The kind of narrative told is not the decisive factor. What is central is the way in which some images open up possibilities that can be used or adapted by other practitioners of the medium. The normative worth of an image consists, accordingly, in how it presents its symbolic content, rather than the content alone. All in all, it is reasonable to conclude that Crowther does indeed succeed—by many routes—with his main aims of showing how it is possible for art to have a history.

References Crowther, Paul. 1989. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crowther, Paul. 1993. Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crowther, Paul. 2002. The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowther, Paul. 2007. Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crowther, Paul. 2009. Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Crowther, Paul. 2012. The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style. London and New York: Continuum. Crowther, Paul. 2016. How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Crowther, Paul. 2017. What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture. London and New York: Routledge. Crowther, Paul. 2018a. Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation: The Birth of a Medium. London and New York: Routledge. Crowther, Paul. 2018b. Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology as Iconology. London and New York: Routledge. Crowther, Paul. 2019a. Theory of the Art Object. London and New York: Routledge.

  PAUL CROWTHER 

855

Crowther, Paul. 2019b. The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower. London and New York: Routledge. Doran, Robert. 2017. The Theory of the Sublime: From Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fell, Elena and Kopsiafti, Ioanna. 2015. Thinking Space, Advancing Art: Cassirer and Crowther. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fell, Elena and Kopsiafti, Ioanna. 2016. The Cognitive Basis of Aesthetics: Cassirer, Crowther, and the Future. London and New York: Routledge.

Hans Belting Luca Vargiu

Hans Belting began his career as a historian of Byzantine and medieval art. During his almost sixty years of research, he gradually broadened his interests, both in terms of content, ranging from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and in terms of reflection, by questioning the methods and the role of art history and of the institutions of the art world (the museum, the exhibitions, etc.) in the contemporary context. The results of this reflection lead at first to a farewell from a traditional art-historical study to promote an approach addressed to the history of the image within a contextualist and functionalist framework. In a second moment, Belting took leave also from a linear historical perspective, to arrive at the elaboration of an anthropology of the image centered on the conceptual triad “image–medium–body”. In more recent years, Belting intensified the relationship between image and visual studies, deepening the issues related to gaze and vision. At the same time, he continued his reflections on the institutions of art in the current context, with an eye to the acquisitions of postcolonial thought.

1   Biographical Notes Born in Andernach (Germany) on 7 July 1935, Belting studied history of art, archeology and history in Mainz and in Rome and furthered his education at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies (Harvard University). Among his masters were Friedrich Gerke, Ernst Kitzinger and Otto Demus.

L. Vargiu (*) University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_51

857

858 

L. VARGIU

Belting achieved the Habilitation in Hamburg in 1965 and then taught history of art in Heidelberg from 1969/1970 to 1980; subsequently he moved to Munich. In 1993 he moved to the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe: a higher education institution focused on the interchange between artistic research and theoretical reflection, in which theories and practices dialogue with the new media, in close contact with the exhibition and research center ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien). Belting taught science of art and media theory there until 2002 and, since 2000, directed the research group Image, Body, Medium: An Anthropological Perspective. In 2002/2003 he held the Chaire européenne at the Collège de France in Paris, leading a seminar entitled Corps et image. Pour une iconologie anthropologique. From 2004 to 2007 he directed the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, launching the theme “Cultures of Vision”. In 2015 he developed the project “Iconic Presence: The Life of Images in Religion and Art”, funded by the Balzan Prize. In 2016 he donated most of his personal library to the Masaryk University of Brno, thus founding the Hans Belting Library. He has been a visiting professor at many leading universities and is a member of various scientific associations.

2  The End of the History of Art From the late 1970s onward, Belting’s broadening of interests was accompanied by criticism of the disciplinary status of art history, in light of the fading out of the paradigm inaugurated by Vasari, which marked the origins and development of the discipline until the mid-twentieth century. These considerations took place in the two books provocatively dedicated to the “end of the history of art” (Belting 1983; Belting 1995) and in some articles related to them (Belting 1997; Belting 2000a). Doubtless because of its provocative stance, it is one of the most well-known aspects of Belting’s reflection. However, the end of the history of art has no apocalyptic connotation: it does not imply the death of the discipline, but rather “the emancipation from received models of the historical presentation of art” aimed at conceiving art as “an autonomous system, to be evaluated by internal criteria”, and its history first and foremost as a history of style (Belting 1983, English trans. ix–x). In the first book, the farewell from a history of art oriented almost exclusively in a stylistic sense leads to a multifaceted consideration, which holds functionalism, contextualism and reception theory together. Belting described this volume as criticism conducted within his own disciplinary field, due to dissatisfaction with the way in which art historiography was canonically presented, as a field “where the old heroes were sacrosanct and new ideas were unwelcome” (Belting 1998a, 23). The “revision” of 1995 presents itself no longer as a contribution to criticism of the discipline, but rather as a discussion on the way in which the “institutional, art historical and cultural changes” of present times have modified the role of art history. Thus, whereas previously the question concerned an internal

  HANS BELTING 

859

point of view, then it regarded an external point of view, where the core of the discourse “is no longer whether art history needs the best possible method, but whether art history can react, can move, can continue in order to be of importance in a very different context” (Belting 1998a, 23). It is a context whose dominant features, summarily listed, are as follows: the differences within the Western world between Europe and the United States, against a supposed myth of artistic and cultural internationalism; the new perspectives opened after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc—a problem even more crucial in Germany; globalization and the disapproval of Euro-centrism that it entails. It also includes remarks that have been driven to certain forms of cultural hegemony by gender studies, postcolonial studies and other forms of critical thinking. Furthermore, it includes the relationship between art and mass culture and the difficulty of always clearly distinguishing between “high” and “low”; the emergence of the new media; and finally, the hiatus between museums and institutions devoted to contemporary art. Although Belting tends to accentuate the difference in approach between the two books, various elements of continuity remain. Indeed, numerous pages and the general structure of the second part of the 1995 text are taken almost literally from the 1983 version. Neither is any internal criticism of the discipline absent, as, on the contrary, Belting seems to suggest. In fact, the discussion on the role of art history in the current cultural context certainly cannot exclude a reflection concerning concepts, orientations and methods of the discipline.

3  Function, Context, History of the Image The fortune and the sensation already raised by the first book are also due to the fact that, as a result of it, Belting became the de facto spokesman for problems and needs shared by a whole generation of German art historians. In Germany, the interest in methodological and meta-scientific aspects and the proposal of theses such as the rejection of the paradigm of an art historiography centered on the idea of a linear stylistic development, as well as a critical attitude toward iconology and structural analysis have constituted, for Belting’s generation, a field of common consensus. Such a consensual terrain can also be found in the propositional aspects: the study of art as art in context, the analysis of the functions embodied in the works, the openness toward the dimension of reception and the investigation of the medium in his relations to the artistic genres and to the functions were so widely shared themes to promote, in the 1980s, occasions of collaboration, such as Funkkolleg Kunst and Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung. The first one was a distance education project organized by the University of Tübingen, in collaboration with the Saarländischer Rundfunk, and directed by a group of scholars under Werner Busch’s supervision. It comprised a series of radio programs that were broadcast from 1984 to 1985, and a set of reference materials for students; these materials were subsequently collected into some volumes (Busch 1987; Busch and Schmoock 1987; Vargiu 2018). Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung, on the other hand, was a manual

860 

L. VARGIU

dedicated to the approaches and methodologies, published in 1986 and then re-issued several times, edited by Belting himself together with Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp, Martin Warnke and Willibald Sauerländer (Belting et  al. 1986; Schoell-Glass 2012, 350–351). The hermeneutic value of the concept of image began to be relevant in Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter (Belting 1981), aimed at investigating the problem of the different relationships between changes in form and changes in function, with attention paid to the medium and the sphere of the reception. Belting specified this approach already in a preparatory essay, where he affirmed, “If we learn to use images as sources relevant to the social and cultural trends of a given age, we may be able to answer the questions of why art had a history and of how history affected art” (Belting 1980–81, 15–16). In this way, he ended up thematizing the historicity of art: a thematization linked to the need to contextualize the images and to identify, at the same time, the reasons why they arose and their uses. From such a viewpoint, in this essay, Belting argued that “the history of art is the history of images”. He stated that images are not “self-explanatory”, but that they perform specific functions, to be understood on the basis of their context (Belting 1980–81, 1). In Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter he deepened his approach, up to the point that he no longer affirmed the coincidence between history of art and history of images. Here the relationship between image and art began to feel the effects of being conceived as historically conditioned and of being dependent on the functionalist connotation attributed not only to artworks and images but also to the concept of art itself. Apropos of such an attribution, this book can be regarded as a first significant step of a development that will find its methodological systematization, via the chapter written for Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Belting 1986), in Bild und Kult (Belting 1990).

4  The Era of Image Before the Era of Art This book, translated into English in 1994 as Likeness and Presence, immediately became a new classic. As the subtitle states, here Belting formulated the idea of A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, that is, a story of all those images that cannot be uncritically related to the concept of art developed from the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation onward and then established as a cornerstone of modern aesthetics. The question is introduced as follows: “Art”, as it is intended here by the author, presupposes the crisis of the ancient image and its new appreciation as a work of art in the Renaissance. It is linked to a representation of the artist in his autonomy and to a discussion on the character of art of his invention. While images of the old type are destroyed by the iconoclasts, at the same time new images arise, destined for artistic collecting. From that moment on, we can talk about an era of art, which lasts until today. It was

  HANS BELTING 

861

preceded by the era of image, which the author for the first time tries to expose in his unity. (Belting 1990, 9)*

Analogously to the 1981 book, the image as a subject emerges, above all, from a historical point of view, as a consequence of a reflection in which the inadequacy of the concept of art to characterize the Middle Ages is highlighted. In this context, “art” is understood in both a historical and functional sense, as a notion of Modernity and as a term that designates a function—the aesthetic function—not yet prominent in the Middle Ages (Vargiu 2007a). As early as in some writings of the 1980s as well as in a more recent interview, the conviction emerges that the concept of art must be historically circumscribed, as “it has no universal way of manifesting itself” (Belting 2004, 117). Such a concept, “as we understand it, is relatively modern and therefore cannot be automatically applied to a society of the past” (Belting 1982, 279). It is only in the Renaissance that the question of the artistic character of the (art)works emerges, that is, in the times “in which the collector’s image arises, and the artist is recognized the right to be the creator of the work” (Belting 1986, 231). In terms of fundamental options, therefore, Belting leans toward a historicized concept of art: for him “art” is only that one that became autonomous in Modernity, which has its own raison d’être in the “understanding of an aesthetic character” (Belting 1986, 230). The historical consideration of the images is not, for Belting, limited to the Middle Ages. At least until the enterprise of the anthropological project, which raised some doubts about the universality of a linear historical approach, he thought that the image has a long story, “which, on the one hand, reaches back into prehistorical times and, on the other hand, goes on until the present day and will last as long as mankind survives” (Belting, foreword to the English trans. of Belting 1990, xxii). He considered it necessary to adopt an ad hoc historiography, which integrates the history of art without, however, eliminating it. As he wrote in the second book on the “end”: The history of the image could, on the one hand, do justice to the pictorial media (Bildmedien) right there, where they always appear and, on the other hand, it would also identify art where it historically arose, enforcing its right. Art would then appear as a historical phenomenon, as well as the art collection and the artistic literature, which also arose only in well-defined times. (Belting 1995, 168–169)*

That the history of the image integrates but does not replace or incorporate the history of art is a further sign of the fact that the “end” envisaged by Belting has no apocalyptic meaning: the history of art continues to have its validity, albeit limited to a historically circumscribed phenomenon. This shows that Bild und Kult and Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte are to be read in parallel (Didi-­ Huberman 1995, 164 footnote 6). Although the fortune of the distinction between the era of art and that of the image may suggest an articulated discussion of the question, the

862 

L. VARGIU

aforementioned passage from page 9 of Bild und Kult is the only occurrence where such a question is discussed. A few more details can be found in the foreword to the English edition, where Belting admits that the subtitle “is still in need of explanation, as the reader may be puzzled by the uncommon notion of an ‘era of art’” (Belting, foreword to the English trans. of Belting 1990, xxi). For the rest, the problem is never dealt with by itself. Rather, it remains always in the background with respect to, from time to time, the specific object of the investigation. Moreover, although the subtitle announces a “history of the image”, Bild und Kult, in fact, neither examines the problem of the medieval image in every aspect nor, consequently, considers the era of the image in its entirety. For this reason, the book cannot be considered as a summa, a definition sometimes advanced by critics: both from the point of view of the medieval interests of its author and in relation to the subject, it appears incomplete, given that, due to Belting’s choice of field, it is almost exclusively addressed primarily to the Eastern icon and then to its transformations in the West. Therefore, of the two great categories of the medieval image—shortly said, the image of a person (imago) and the narrative image (historia)—Bild und Kult dwells only on the imago, while the historia, at least in its late medieval vicissitudes in the Italian context, is the topic of a little earlier volume, Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit, edited with Dieter Blume (Belting and Blume 1989): a volume open to the participation of art historians, sociologists, historians, philosophers and scholars of political theory, according to a cultural-historical perspective. In this way, Belting shows concretely that the end of the traditional art historical canon implies an openness toward a more general history of culture, to which corresponds, consequently, an openness by those who study it: a conviction defended by Belting as early as in the first book on the “end”, in which he wrote that the “openness to other disciplines is surely to be encouraged, even at the price of professional autonomy” (Belting 1983, English trans. 30). Within this framework, the openness toward image plays also a role: In the meantime, the question of the image, which has been developed as a new paradigm in various academic disciplines, has finally also reached the science of art, where it asks to assert its rights alongside the question of art. Once again, the debate focuses on opening the science of art to a science of culture, what Aby Warburg already tried in vain. (Belting, afterword to the 2nd edition of Belting 1995, 202)

Actually, Aby Warburg had defined his project almost with the same words, speaking of “comparative linkage of the images of art in history [with a view toward a] science of culture” (Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne. Grundbegriffe II, 1928–1929, 14, manuscript, Warburg Institute Archives, Londra, III, 102.4, quoted in Didi-Huberman 2002, English trans. 312). Therefore, he is seen by Belting as an important precedent for his own approach.

  HANS BELTING 

863

5  From the History of the Image to the Anthropology of the Image In Bild und Kult an interest in an anthropological approach also appears. Belting thought that anthropology could be helpful for addressing a very general subject: the investigation of “the basic features of human response to an image” (Belting 1990, English trans. 9). However, at this stage he especially saw the limits of this approach, relating to a certain misunderstanding that it could raise. Thus, he eventually preferred to avoid it, being convinced that “we have such a firmly established perception of our own culture’s history that anthropological discoveries continue to be treated like arbitrary intrusions into an already cohesive system” (Belting 1990, English trans. 9). Whatever the outcome in Bild und Kult, the anthropological approach is increasingly accentuated in the subsequent writings: an accentuation which is coeval to a growing distrust in the impossibility of narrating a linear story, which, whereas in the 1980s, had concerned the history of art in favor of the history of the image, subsequently it ends up involving the history of the image itself, in the early 1990s still conceived, as already seen, as unitary. Thus, while the historicist consideration of the image was still explicitly defended in 1994 in the foreword to Likeness and Presence, in the immediately following years it is reformulated in favor of the anthropological approach. The project of an anthropology of the image, in fact, starts from the belief that the explanatory model of a linear history cannot be employed, and therefore it is necessary to find other ways (Belting 2000b, 9). In the development of this idea, the second book on the “end” seems perhaps an intermediate phase, given that here he continued to talk about the history of the image and its relations to the history of art. The afterword of 2002 and the English edition of 2003, instead, affirm the anthropological standpoint. It is for this reason that the relationship at stake here is between the science of image and the science of art. It is also for the same reason that, together with the building of a science of culture on the example of Warburg, Belting postulates the constitution of a “new type of iconology” as a general science of the image, in a sense close to that specified by W. J. T. Mitchell in Iconology (Belting 1995, 168–169; Belting, afterword to the second edition of Belting 1995, 202; Belting 1995, English trans. 164; and Belting 2001a, English trans. 12, with reference to Mitchell 1986). That the anthropological perspective precisely constitutes the new iconological approach is further specified in the seminar held at the Collège de France—whose subtitle was Pour une iconologie anthropologique (Belting 2002–03, 1027–1028)—and in the subtitle—“A new Approach to Iconology”—of an article published in Critical Inquiry, the journal directed by Mitchell (Belting 2005a). In the preface to the original edition of Bild-Anthropologie, Belting ascribes the merit of having aroused “doubts about the sense of a ‘history of the image’ linearly conceived” to David Freedberg (Belting 2001a, p.  7).* The controversy between the two theorists had arisen soon after the publication of Bild

864 

L. VARGIU

und Kult and was based on a divergence concerning a meta-historical level of the investigation that Freedberg admitted and which he did not find in Belting’s book (Freedberg 1995). The last lines of the dispute, therefore, turn toward a rapprochement by the German scholar to the South-African born colleague, which, at the same time, reveals a self-criticism. At first, in fact, Belting had seen in The Power of Images, issued a year before Bild und Kult (Freedberg 1989), “even […] a warning against attempting to devise a history of the image at all” (Belting, foreword to the English trans. of Belting 1990, xxi), accentuating its meta-historical character up to misunderstanding. The last act of the controversy is represented by a reversal of the judgment, up to a point that the two appear unanimous, at least in the pars destruens, in the rejection of the traditional models of art historiography and of their possible applications to the broader universe of the images (Vargiu 2007a, 115–125; 2008). In the sense of a skepticism toward a linear history of the image are therefore to be understood both the statement contained in a preparatory writing to Bild-Anthropologie, in which Belting pointed out that “a history of images would acquire its genuine meaning […] in an anthropology” (Belting 2000b, 9), and the affirmation written in a subsequent book, Das echte Bild: In this book I return to the subject “image and cult” [Bild und Kult], with questions that can no longer be dealt with in a linear “history of the image”, as in 1990 the subtitle still said. Rather, the new way of seeing continues my project of an “anthropology of the image”. (Belting 2005b, 217)

6  Image–Medium–Body In Belting’s anthropology, medium and body make up a fundamental triad with the image. “Medium”, generically, is intended as “a carrier or host medium”: The what of an image (the issue of what the image serves as an image or to what it relates as an image) is steered by the how in which it transmits its message. […] No visible images reach us unmediated. Their visibility rests on their particular mediality, which controls the perception of them and creates the viewer’s attention. (Belting 2005a, 304)

The body, as “locus of images”, is conceived not only as capable of producing and incorporating images but also as their medium and catalyst. That is, the body itself is a medium, as a physical support (as in the case of make-up, tattoos, masks and disguises), as a set of organs and functions by which we perceive, remember, imagine, produce, dream images of every kind, and as a foundation of the techniques and operations aimed at the production of material pictures. In short, only if the images are combined with the human body can they fully express their meaning: the cultural history of the image is reflected in an analogue cultural history of the body (Belting 2001a, 23).*

  HANS BELTING 

865

Although the conception of the body as “locus of images” is tested also in dialogue with contemporary artists, for example with Jai-Young Park (Belting et al. 1993), to motivate its anthropology Belting dates to the dawn of humanity. The nexus between images, media and bodies goes back to the very origins of the production of images, which is linked to the different practices of the cult of the dead, when images, like effigies, casts or death masks, were conceived as capable of filling, with their visible presence, the emptiness left by the deceased: Images, preferably three-dimensional ones, replaced the bodies of the dead, who had lost their visible presence along with their bodies. Images, on behalf of the missing body, occupied the place deserted by the person who had died. […] The dead, as a result, were kept as present and visible in the ranks of the living via their images. But images did not exist by themselves. They, in turn, were in need of an embodiment, which means in need of an agent or a medium resembling a body. This need was met by the invention of visual media, which not only embodied images but resembled living bodies in their own ways. (Belting 2005a, 307)

The perception of these images is conceived by Belting as a form of “animation”, that is, as a way of retaining over time sensitive features destined to decay and disappear. As this quotation also seems to suggest, Belting, at least at the level of the research he conducted, seems more interested in a circumscribed aspect of the question, that relating to the human image, or rather to the embodiment of man in the image. It could thus be said that rather than the body as “locus of images” he gives the idea of considering images as “locus of the body”, overturning the terms of his own formula. Or else, taking up the more extreme critique by Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov (2005b, 86), it could be noted that Belting radically gives up “an analysis of the conditions of experience, to fully focus on the analysis of the contents of the experience”. In the same order of ideas, Matthew Rampley (2012, 128), extending the discussion to a broader scope, emphasizes that “the privileging of certain kinds of image—death masks, effigies, moulages, portraits—as paradigmatic of all images [is] open to the charge of arbitrariness”: an arbitrariness that seems to rely “on an essentialist logic that runs counter to the predominant contemporary concern with the cultural and historical specificity of images”.

7  History Versus Anthropology In Bild-Anthropologie, the abandonment of a linear history does not coincide with the farewell to a historical perspective tout court. Belting warns that the anthropology of the image “refers to a temporality different to that admitted by the evolutionary historical model” (Belting 2001a, 12).* In this regard, he refers to historical anthropology, which in the years between the two millennia was establishing itself as “a modern form of science of culture” (Belting 2001a, 23),* thanks to authors such as Christoph Wulf and Dietmar Kamper, with

866 

L. VARGIU

whom Belting collaborated on several occasions (Belting and Kamper 2000; Belting et al. 2002; Belting 2002a; cf. Vargiu 2007b). As Wulf (2004, English trans. xi) points out, “historical anthropology” does not mean a discipline of its own, but rather a unitas multiplex, that is, “a science that brings together a multiplicity of individual disciplines”, which concern several research topics commonly dealt with by various human sciences. Among them, explicitly named, there are also the image and the imagination. Such a perspective is opposed by Belting to the suspicion that an anthropology that deals with images can betray a vision of history linked to the idea of progress. The historical anthropology “seeks its material both in the past and in the present of its own culture” (Belting 2001a, 23)* and thus shows another possible approach, though still historical, but nevertheless different from a progressive linear history. In addition to these hints, the problem of historicity does not undergo a development so that the problem of understanding its sense remains undefined. The analysis of the way research is conducted in practice, however, sheds light on it. In Bild-Anthropologie, as well as in subsequent writings—in an exemplary way in Das echte Bild and in Faces (Belting 2013)— the investigations are organized by topics: among others, the representation of the body in the West, the heraldic coat of arms and the portrait between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern, the relationship between image and death in ancient civilizations, the iconoclasm and the image of Christ, the image in the Protestant Reformation, the face and the mask (the latter, a specific topic of Faces). All those subjects are dealt with in their historical and cultural contextualization, always starting from the links between the three elements of the triad image–medium–body, sometimes identified in a somewhat too mechanical or didactic way. According to Rampley (2012, 128), the consideration of such a wide range of materials runs the risk of undermining the theoretical coherence of Belting’s anthropology. However, the reference to a wide range can be seen not necessarily as a weakness but rather as a strength, in the sense of an invitation to extend the field of interest even more broadly than Belting himself did. For example, the attempt made by the cultural geographer Claude Raffestin (2005, 61–63) to bring Belting’s anthropology into dialogue with the theory of landscape is worth noting. Besides, other statements complicate the picture. In Bild-Anthropologie, Belting writes that “the body always accesses the same experiences, such as time, space and death, which we seize in the images already a priori”. The images, in their turn, “certainly possess, in the historical techniques and media, a temporal form, and yet are generated by super-temporary themes such as death, body and time”. All images “have a temporal form, but they also convey timeless questions, for which men have always invented images” (Belting 2001a, 12, 23 and 55).* In this way, alongside the historical perspective, there appears also a dimension outside, or at least above, history and time, which must be understood in its features and in the “coexistence” with the historical aspect.

  HANS BELTING 

867

On this question Rampley (2012, 128) notes that the meta-theoretical account of the image remains “significantly undertheorized”, while Collenberg-­ Plotnikov highlights a “radical de-historicization of the subject matter” and reads the question in terms of a diachronic and totalizing generalization (Collenberg-Plotnikov 2005a, 146 and Collenberg-Plotnikov 2005b, 86). Christopher S. Wood (2004, 371) also writes that Belting “offers precisely not a plot, a narrative about images, but rather an ahistorical schema”. It is true that in Belting some concepts assume the status of super- or meta-historical constants. However, consistent with the approach of historical anthropology, the way in which these constants take shape is rooted in history. For it is in history that images migrate through time and space and are embodied in different media; equally, it is in history that the media are transformed, new ones are born and others become obsolete, and the bodies themselves redefine their “medial” skills in contact with images and media (Pinotti and Somaini 2016, 189–190). Belting thus points out, The fact that images are always linked to a historical situation, although their questions refer beyond that historical context, only confirms the fundamental assertion that mankind cannot express itself except in historical determinations. (Belting 2000b, 8)

8  Latest Developments The anthropology of the image has not monopolized Belting’s interests. As early as 1990s, he deepened the study of Flemish painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Belting and Kruse 1994, partially reedited as Belting 2010; Belting 2002b), from the viewpoint of the history of the medium—the easel painting or the picture  in its modern meaning. According to Victor Stoichita and Didier Martens (1996, 735 and 734), it is a viewpoint “at the intersection between art history and ‘medialogy’”, not far from some conclusions reached by Régis Debray in Vie et mort de l’image (Debray 1992). Alongside several essays dedicated to contemporary artists (among others, Thomas Struth, Sigmar Polke, Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Hiroshi Sugimoto, György Jovánovics, Jeff Wall, and Peter Greenaway), it is worth mentioning the 1998 volume Das unsichtbare Meisterwerk, conducted under a perspective defined by Belting himself of the history of ideas: a book dedicated to the modern conception of the work of art, from the inauguration of the Louvre to the movements of the 1960s (Belting 1998b). From a methodological standpoint, it is a further confirmation of a non-linear  historiography, in which the reference to some aspects of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history takes on a decisive role (Vargiu 2012). The reflections on the contemporary museum and the art world in a globalized context are also worth mentioning, which bring the author close to the postcolonial thought (Belting 2001c; Belting and Buddensieg 2009; Belting et al. 2011; Belting et al. 2013). The point of arrival is so far represented by

868 

L. VARGIU

Belting’s latest monograph, dedicated to the figure of Senghor (Belting and Buddensieg 2018). Alongside this, it is to be noted a “return” of Belting—if ever there was abandonment—to the Middle Ages. In any case, this “return” also occurs from the anthropological point of view. From a conceptual perspective, a broadening of the theoretical platform developed in Bild-Anthropologie toward an integration of the triad “image– medium–body” with the dimension of the gaze is to be seen here. This notion, however, is not understood as a fourth element, but rather as a vector that interacts with the other three concepts. For this purpose, Belting develops the aspects that have to do with the relationship between the gaze of the viewer and that of the picture, within the frame of an “iconology of the gaze” (Belting 2006 and 2008a). Moreover, he re-reads some phases of its history, such as those relating to cultural exchanges between East and West from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, which were the basis of the codification of the Renaissance perspective (Belting 2008b). With this broadening, the intent of conceiving his own research project as a “coherent history of perception” (Belting 2001b, 5) is even better defined. * These passages are missing in the English translation.

References Belting, Hans. 1980–81. “An Image and its Function in the Liturgy: The Man of Sorrows in Byzantium”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 34–35: 1–16. Belting, Hans. 1981 [1990]. Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion. Berlin: Mann. Trans. by Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer as The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion. New Rochelle: Aristide D. Caratzas. Belting, Hans. 1982. “Storia dell’arte”. In: La civiltà bizantina dal XII al XV secolo: aspetti e problemi. Ed. by André Guillou. Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Belting, Hans. 1983 [1987]. Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? Überlegungen zur heutigen Kunsterfahrung und historischen Kunstforschung. München: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Trans. by Christopher S.  Wood as The End of the History of Art? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belting, Hans. 1986. “Das Werk im Kontext”. In: Belting et al. 1986. Belting, Hans. 1990 [1994]. Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. München: Beck. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belting, Hans. 1995 [2003]. Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren. München: Beck. 2nd edition 2002. Trans. (with some changes) by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen as Art History after Modernism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belting, Hans. 1997. “Die Ungeduld mit dem Ende”. Die Zeit, October 7. Belting, Hans. 1998a. “Contradiction and Criticism”. Interview by Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager. In: The Archive of Development. Ed. by Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager. Lier en Boog. Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory, 13.

  HANS BELTING 

869

Belting, Hans. 1998b [2001]. Das unsichtbare Meisterwerk: Die modernen Mythen der Kunst. München: Beck. Trans. (with some changes) by Helen Atkins as The Invisible Masterpiece. London: Reaktion Books. Belting, Hans. 2000a. “L’histoire de l’art au tournant”. Trans. by Jean Mouchard. In: Université de tous les savoirs, vol. 3: Qu’est–ce que la société? Ed. by Yves Michaud. Paris: Jacob. Belting, Hans. 2000b. “Zu einer Anthropologie des Bildes”. Foreword to: Belting and Kamper 2000. Belting, Hans. 2001a [2011]. Bild–Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. München: Wilhelm Fink. Trans. (with some changes) by Thomas Dunlap as  An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Belting, Hans. 2001b. Vorwort to Andrea Pozzo und die Videokunst: Neue Überlegungen zum barocken Illusionismus, by Felix Burda-Stengel. Berlin: Mann. Belting, Hans. 2001c. “Orte der Reflexion oder Orte der Sensation?” In: Das diskursive Museum. Ed. by Peter Noever. Vienna: MAK and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Trans. as “Place of Reflection or Place of Sensation?” In: The Discursive Museum. Ed. by Peter Noever. Vienna: MAK and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Belting, Hans. 2002a. “Mediale Körper: Neue Fragen an das Bild”. In:  Logik und Leidenschaft: Erträge Historischer Anthropologie. Ed. by Christoph Wulf and Dietmar Kamper. Berlin: Reimer. Belting, Hans. 2002b. Hieronymus Bosch: Garten der Lüste. München: Prestel. Belting, Hans. 2002–03. “Chaire européenne”. Annuaire du Collège de France, 103: 1027–1029. Belting, Hans. 2004. “Das Bild als anthropologisches Phänomen”. Interview by Klaus Sachs-Hombach. In: Id., Wege zur Bildwissenschaft. Interviews. Köln: Halem. Belting, Hans. 2005a. “Image, Medium, Body: A new Approach to Iconology”. Critical Inquiry, 31 (2): 302–319. Belting, Hans. 2005b. Das Echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. München: Beck. Belting, Hans. 2006 [2009]. “Der Blick im Bild: Zu einer Ikonologie des Blicks”. In:  Bild und Einbildungskraft.  Ed.  by Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf. München: Wilhelm Fink. Translated as “The Gaze in the Image: A Contribution to an Iconology of the Gaze”. In: Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image between the Visible and the Invisible. Ed. by Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf. London: Routledge. Belting, Hans. 2008a. “Per una iconologia dello sguardo”. Trans. by Michele Cometa. In:  Cultura visuale: Paradigmi a confronto. Ed.  by Roberta Coglitore. Palermo: Duepunti. Belting, Hans. 2008b [2011]. Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. München: Beck. Trans. by Deborah Lucas Schneider as Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Belting, Hans. 2010. Spiegel der Welt. Die Erfindung des Gemäldes in den Niederlanden. München: Beck. Belting, Hans. 2013 [2017]. Faces: Eine Geschichte des Gesichts. München: Beck. Trans. by Thomas S.  Hansen and Abby J.  Hansen as Face and Mask: A Double History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Belting, Hans; Birken, Jacob; Buddensieg, Andrea, and Weibel, Peter (eds.). 2011. Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.

870 

L. VARGIU

Belting, Hans and Blume, Dieter (eds.). 1989. Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit. München: Hirmer. Belting, Hans and Buddensieg, Andrea (eds.). 2009. The Global Art World: Audience, Markets, and the Museum. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Belting, Hans and Buddensieg, Andrea (eds.). 2018. Ein Afrikaner in Paris: Léopold Sédar Senghor und die Zukunft der Moderne. München: Beck. Belting, Hans; Buddensieg, Andrea, and Weibel, Peter (eds.). 2013. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Belting, Hans; Groys, Boris, and Park, Jai–Young. 1993. Der Ort der Bilder: Hans Belting und Boris Groys im Gespräch mit Jai-Young Park. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Belting, Hans and Kamper, Dietmar (eds.). 2000. Der zweite Blick: Bildgeschichte und Bildreflexion. München: Wilhelm Fink. Belting, Hans; Kamper, Dietmar, and Schulz, Martin (eds.). 2002. Quel Corps? Eine Frage der Repräsentation. München: Wilhelm Fink. Belting, Hans and Kruse, Christiane. 1994. Die Erfindung des Gemäldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei. München: Hirmer. Belting, Hans; Dilly, Heinrich; Kemp, Wolfgang; Sauerländer, Willibald, and Warnke, Martin (eds.). 1986 [2008]. Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung. Berlin: Reimer. 7th edition. Busch, Werner (ed.). 1987. Funkkolleg Kunst: Eine Geschichte der Kunst im Wandel ihrer Funktionen. München: Piper. Busch, Werner and Schmoock, Peter (eds.). 1987. Kunst: Die Geschichte ihrer Funktionen. Weinheim: Quadriga and Berlin: Beltz. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Bernadette. 2005a. “Die Funktion der Kunst im Zeitalter der Bilder”. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 50 (1): 139–153. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Bernadette. 2005b. “Wissenschaftstheoretische Implikationen des Kunstverständnisses bei Hegel und im Hegelianismus”. In:  Kulturpolitik und Kunstgeschichte: Perspektiven der Hegelschen Ästhetik. Ed.  by Ursula Franke and Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Sonderheft. Debray, Régis. 1992. Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident. Paris: Gallimard. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1995. “Imaginum pictura… in totum exolevit: Der Anfang der Kunstgeschichte und das Ende des Zeitalters des Bildes”. Trans. by Andrea Hemminger. In:  Kunst ohne Geschichte? Ansichten zu Kunst und Kunstgeschichte heute. Ed. by Anne-Marie Bonnet and Gabriele Kopp-Schmidt.. München: Beck. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2002 [2016]. L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps de fantômes selon Aby Warburg. Paris: Minuit. Trans. by Harvey L. Mendelsohn as The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms; Aby Warburg’s History of Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Freedberg, David. 1995. “Holy Images and Other Images”. In: The Art of Interpreting. Ed. by Susan C. Scott. Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, 9. Mitchell, W.  J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pinotti, Andrea and Somaini, Antonio. 2016. Cultura visuale: Immagini, sguardi, media, dispositivi. Torino: Einaudi.

  HANS BELTING 

871

Raffestin, Claude. 2005. Dalla nostalgia del territorio al desiderio di paesaggio: Elementi per una teoria del paesaggio. Firenze: Alinea. Rampley, Matthew. 2012. “Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the Image in German-­ Language Scholarship”. In: Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks. Ed.  by Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Kitty Zijlmans. Leiden: Brill. Schoell-Glass, Charlotte. 2012. “Art History in German-Speaking Countries: Austria, Germany and Switzerland”. In:  Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks. Ed.  by Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Kitty Zijlmans. Leiden: Brill. Vargiu, Luca. 2007a. “Prima dell’età dell’arte: Hans Belting e l’immagine medievale”. Aesthetica preprint: Supplementa, 20. Vargiu, Luca. 2007b. “Antropologia storica e antropologia dell’immagine”. Itinerari, 46 (3): 17–33. Vargiu, Luca. 2008. “Hans Belting e lo sguardo dell’etnologo”. Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 94: 29–34. Vargiu, Luca. 2012. “Hans Belting e il ‘Benjamin postmoderno.’” Itinerari, 51 (3): 111–117. Vargiu, Luca. 2018. “Function and Context: Funkkolleg Kunst Thirty Years Later”. In: Following Forms, Following Functions: Practices and Disciplines in Dialogue. Ed. by Federica Pau and Luca Vargiu. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Wood, Christopher S. 2004. Review of Bild-Anthropologie, by Hans Belting. The Art Bulletin, 86 (2): 370–373. Wulf, Christoph. 2004 [2013]. Anthropologie: Geschichte, Kultur, Philosophie. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Trans. by Deirdre Winter, Elizabeth Hamilton, Margitta and Richard J.  Rouse as Anthropology: A Continental Perspective. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Klaus Sachs-Hombach Lukas R. A. Wilde

Because little of his writing has been made available for English-speaking readers, and no English translation of his major publication Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft [Pictures as Communicative Media: Elements of a General Image Science] (2003, presently available in a fourth revised edition) exists as of this writing, theoretical thoughts building on Klaus Sachs-Hombach’s work remain comparably scarce in international contexts. The contrast to the German-speaking parts of the world, where few names are more closely connected than Sachs-Hombach’s to terms such as “picture theory” or “image studies”, could not be more pronounced. Apart from his own considerable theoretical contributions, this is equally due to his tireless efforts to connect and to interrelate the many voices, traditions, and disciplines engaged with pictorial communication in last decade of the twentieth century—ranging from art history to semiotics and from analytical philosophy to film studies, to name just a few. His project of a “general image science” [allgemeine Bildwissenschaft] was mainly an effort to identify all these traditions as sharing a common branch of research, even as their methodological and conceptual assumptions varied significantly. The following article first presents a short biographical introduction to Sachs-Hombach and his work. In the second section, I will trace his project of a “general image science”, focusing especially on some of the special connotations of “image” [Bild] and “science” [Wissenschaft]  in German academia, terms which carry the potential for misunderstandings when translated into

L. R. A. Wilde (*) Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_52

873

874 

L. R. A. WILDE

English. In the third section, I will outline the conceptual foundation of his theoretical framework: considering pictures as “perceptoid signs” [wahrnehmungsnahe Zeichen]—signs close to perception. As there have been many reservations in terms of considering pictures within semiotic approaches, this section will be mainly concerned with these reservations, since Sachs-Hombach’s understanding differs considerably from structuralist perspectives and instead aims to include theories of perception, cognition, and psychology. The fourth section narrows its focus even more, condensing Sachs-Hombach’s understanding of “predication” from which all complementary functions of pictorial communication can be derived. I will address two major concerns in regards to “pictorial predication” since this concept has often been criticized for an alleged “linguistic bias”.

1   A Short Biographical Introduction Klaus Sachs-Hombach studied philosophy, psychology, and German literature at the University of Münster, Germany, where he published his dissertation, supervised by the philosopher Ferdinand Fellmann, on the development of psychology from the nineteenth century onward (Sachs-Hombach 1993). His subsequent research was firmly rooted within a branch of methodological reflection sometimes referred to as “methodological constructivism” or “Erlangen constructivism” (after the University of Erlangen, where philosophers such as Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen were based). In the Anglophone world, this approach is represented for instance by Gilbert Ryle (2009 [1949]). Sachs-Hombach’s teacher Arno Ros was specialized in systematic problems of argumentation theory, especially with regard to the history of concepts, or rather the concept of concepts itself (Ros 1989–1990). In his later work, Ros turned to the philosophy of mind and investigated the mind-body problem with special focus on psychological considerations (Ros 2005). Sachs-Hombach first applied these perspectives to pictorial problems when he started to intervene in the debates surrounding “mental pictures”, the problem of whether or not “visual imaginations” can be adequately described as internalized pictorial representations. Beginning with a volume he edited (1995), he then started to connect the various picture theoretical approaches prevalent at the time, sometimes described as an “imagic turn” (Fellmann 1991), an “iconic turn” (Boehm 1994) or a “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 1992) within the humanities and beyond. He himself preferred the term “visualistic turn”, as pictoriality could be seen as a mere subset within a broader spectrum of visual communication (including other visual tools such as diagrams or abstract paintings, to name just a few). He subsequently inspired interdisciplinary collaborations that were still rare at the time, especially with respect to the application of methodological reflection to empirical research. Three especially noteworthy results should be mentioned. First, he occupied a leading role for the initiation of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Pictures (ZiB) which launched the interdisciplinary e-journal IMAGE for picture-theoretical

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

875

and analytical investigations (from 2005 on, still published biannually to this day). Second, he contributed substantially to the initiation of the research association Netzwerk Bildphilosophie (“Philosophy of the Image”, 2009–2012) which maintains a highly useful online dictionary for picture theory (Netzwerk Bildphilosophie 2009–). Third, he published a comprehensive handbook on methods of pictorial research (Netzwerk Bildphilosophie 2014). Within these contexts, Sachs-Hombach developed an anthropological interest on the functions of pictures within human communication (Schirra and Sachs-Hombach 2011, 2013). This was often done in comparative views on linguistic signs (which anticipated his later interest in multimodality research, in which he started to integrate his earlier thoughts, see Sachs-Hombach 2019), as well as with regard to evolutionary media theories such as those of Marshall McLuhan (Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2009). From 2011 on, Sachs-­ Hombach continued his research as a professor for media studies at the University of Tübingen, with a special focus on media evolution and media change. Complementing his theoretical reflections, he also applied his understanding of pictoriality back to the many specific contexts in which pictorial communication plays a salient role, investigating the functions of pictures in heterogeneous domains such as religion and mysticism (Sachs-Hombach 2011c) or the empirical sciences (Sachs-Hombach 2013). Starting early on in his career (around 1998), he also  conducted many collaborations with Jörg J. R. Schirra, a scientist in the field of computers and information as well as an analytical philosopher. Schirra applied many thoughts of the analytical philosopher Ernst Tugendhat to problems of pictorial communication. Tugendhat’s Traditional and Analytical Philosophy: Lectures on the Philosophy of Language (Tugendhat 1982) formed the basis for Schirra’s “modal” (or “context-based”) theory of pictures, published comprehensively in English as Foundation of Computational Visualistics (Schirra 2005; see also Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2011). Sachs-Hombach’s own major work is certainly his post-doctoral thesis, Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium (2003). As the title already suggests, the author outlines in this book what a shared field of research, perhaps even a discipline concerned with pictures, could look like.

2  The Project of a “General Image Science” [Allgemeine Bildwissenschaft] First, a general introduction to the scope of the project is in order. During the first “wave” of Sachs-Hombach’s conferences, collaborations, and publications surrounding picture theoretical approaches, it became clear that there had been a great number of philosophical theories on the topic of pictorial communication which had already thoroughly covered that disciplinary point of view (Novitz 1977; Scholz 2004 [1995]; Lopes 1996). Instead of developing yet another philosophical account of “pictorial meaning”, Sachs-Hombach instead turned his attention to a methodological reflection of these approaches

876 

L. R. A. WILDE

themselves, asking whether the various pictorial “turns” postulated within the humanities and beyond could coalesce into a “general image science”, and what shape such a field could have (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 14–26; 2011b). Many academics whose professional training had been centered entirely on the description, historization, and theorization of pictures—especially art historians—mistrusted such an endeavor by a philosopher as a kind of “hostile takeover”. In response to these early conflicts, Sachs-Hombach therefore tried to build bridges, rather than to mark claims, as has been documented in his 2004 publication Wege zur Bildwissenschaft [Roads to an Image Science, Sachs-­ Hombach 2004]. In this publication, he conducted interviews with seventeen prominent German-speaking scholars from various fields, disciplines, and backgrounds concerned with pictures and images, from art history, semiotics, and archeology to film and media studies, mathematics, anthropology, and phenomenology. The methodology applied by Sachs-Hombach and Schirra was sometimes referred to as a “philosophical visualistic” by the authors (Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2007, 36). Differing from visual culture studies which consider pictorial (and, more broadly, visual) phenomena mainly with a critical stance when it comes to their relation to social power (Stocchetti 2011), “philosophical visualistics” share a theoretical and systematic interest in pictorial communication, and for its role for and within academic disciplines themselves. Such an endeavor was distinguished sharply from a level of research concerned with specific pictures. The methodological reflection on picture theories themselves, “up to now not interrelated” and “not all theories in the same sense” (Sachs-­ Hombach 2011b, 229), might comprise the most original contribution of his prolific writing. Both parts of the compound noun Bildwissenschaft, however, can have multiple meanings and connotations, and even their very translation into English— as image science (or image studies), as it is done here—is somewhat problematic. Regarding the first term, the German designator “Bild” does not necessitate a distinction between the English concepts of “image” and “picture” (see, for instance, Mitchell 1984). Since “image” can refer to various mental, conceptual, or purely metaphorical phenomena, it corresponds more closely to what Sachs-Hombach calls a “broad” concept of “Bild” (2003, 15f.). “Pictures”, in contrast, are subject to a more “narrow” understanding, limiting itself to “external” material artifacts that possess the “capacity to provoke the imagining of absent objects by visual sensory stimulation” (Sachs-Hombach 2011b, 232). In this narrower understanding, which is the focus of Sachs-Hombach’s research, a Bild will always consist of a specific materiality and mediality. Even more explanation might be required to understand the intended scope of “Wissenschaft”. In Anglophone contexts, “science” is usually reserved for empirical fields while the term “studies” is predominant within the humanities. In German, both can be a “Wissenschaft”, as the discipline of Literaturwissenschaft, “literature science”, shows. When Sachs-Hombach launched the journal IMAGE, he chose the English translation Journal of

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

877

Interdisciplinary Image Science for the German subtitle Bildwissenschaft (maintained, for instance, in Sachs-Hombach and Winter 2013). As many or most of the IMAGE contributions are firmly rooted within traditions of textual analyses, cultural negotiations, or philosophical reflections, this term might seem odd to an international audience. To understand this choice of terminology, one must take the general scope of his project into account. When discussions about a “pictorial” or “iconic turn” were prevalent, there was yet little collaboration between the mostly hermeneutic traditions of the humanities on the one hand and the empirical sciences on the other. Analytical-philosophical writings about pictorial comprehension rarely took note of empirical research, opting instead only to speculate about conventions or “evident” introspection. Sachs-­ Hombach’s proposal for a shared field of research argued, more than for anything else, for an integration of psychological, cognitive, neurological, and other empirically validated fields of knowledge (Sachs-Hombach 2011a). In the tradition of methodological constructivism, the specific form of philosophy represented by the author is then mainly concerned with coordinating these complementary efforts with a “cartography of concepts and problems” (Sachs-­ Hombach 2003, 59; transl. L.W.), with the stated intent to generate a dialogue between disciplines through a careful evaluation of their respective methods, scopes and their explanatory power. Art history and art theory are then considered as specific, applied branches alongside and within the many Bildwissenschaften (plural)—although with a potentially special position (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 68–71). Right away in the introduction to his main book, the study of pictorial art is compared to the study of literature (9–13): alongside the study of novels, dramas, or poetry, however, there is the more foundational, generally narrower, but in any case complementary discipline of linguistics. The latter is concerned not with historically situated artistic achievements, but with verbal and written languages, their structures, and evolutions. The title of his book, Allgemeine Bildwissenschaft, is in fact inspired by the German synonym for linguistics, “Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft”, literally a “General Language Science” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 10.). Could there be a comparable discipline, then, for all forms of pictorial artifacts, Sachs-Hombach wonders, that should be as different from linguistics as classical paintings are from novels, yet sharing linguistics’ categorical and fundamental concerns for their respective media or modes of expression (verbal/written language and pictures)? The prospect would be to find a common ground, a coherent and consistent conceptual framework, not primarily for “artistic” pictures for which there might in fact not be any overarching, clear definition (as “one cannot give a rule for producing art”, Sachs-Hombach 2011b, 230). But how about our more foundational understanding of altogether mundane pictorial objects, from prehistorical cave paintings and information design to traffic signs and pictograms? Obviously, semiotics had tried to fill that role (and even a broader one) before, but, at the time of writing, structuralism had not proven to be a success in this respect; and multimodality research, which would aim for similar goals later (Bateman

878 

L. R. A. WILDE

et al. 2017), was not yet widely known. In any case, the hypothetical “discipline” investigated by Sachs-Hombach would not be concerned with all human artifacts or all social meaning, but would limit itself to those domains sketched out by his contemporaries (but left largely uncharted) as a “pictorial” or “iconic” turn. His answer concerning such a hypothetical “science” of pictures, it must be said, turned out to be conditional, at least in the narrow sense of the term “discipline” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 67–72). As a variety of approaches provide valuable and necessary vocabularies, methods, fields of experiences, and even paradigms to conceptualize and analyze pictoriality, no hypothetical “amalgamation” (let alone a new discipline) could be possible or actually desirable. What Sachs-Hombach’s outline of a “general picture science” comes down to, then, is a theoretical framework or an integrative “paradigm” (Sachs-­ Hombach 2003, 67; transl. L.W.) intended to facilitate a closer interdisciplinary cooperation between specialists from all these fields—not only, and maybe not even especially between prevalent “antagonists” within the humanities, but also between those and researchers within empirical sciences. Whether his subsequent theoretical construct was able to provide such a framework is still up for discussion.

3  The Theoretical Framework of “Perceptoid Signs” [wahrnehmungsnahe Zeichen] Within the many disciplinary approaches and paradigms concerned with pictures and pictoriality, there are many reservations toward the idea of treating the phenomena in question as “signs”. While it is certainly uncontested that a picture can be used as a sign—as, for instance, traffic signs doubtlessly are—this holds true for any perceivable object or event. The reluctance to consider a “sign” as the appropriate hypernym for all given pictures has been brought up by many art historians and phenomenological philosophers. For analytical philosophers such as Nelson Goodman (1969) or structuralist semioticians such as the early Umberto Eco (1976), any pictorial “meaning” can in fact only be derived from a cultural code, not fundamentally different from language. This is obviously to a large degree conventional or even arbitrary. To use a phrase by David Novitz: “[T]o say what the picture is of, is to use the picture in a certain way” (Novitz 1977, 19; emphasis original). Sachs-Hombach was not excluded from the criticism against such notions. Some scholars and reviewers consider his thoughts too entrenched within semiotic traditions to be able to function as the inclusive framework it was envisioned to be (cf., for instance, Schreiber 2003). The very designation of “perceptoid signs”, its additional focus on perception notwithstanding, turned out to be more divisive than intended in its conception. Taking something as a “sign”, however, merely implies two related aspects in Sachs-Hombach’s understanding: that some kind of interpretational

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

879

meaning can be attributed to the artifact and that interpreters usually remain aware of a communicative situation in which this meaning is or could be intended by someone (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 49–51, 77–85). In other words, they recognize—or are at least able to imagine—some kind of agent who wants to bring something to their attention; in the special case of pictorial signs, this agent aims “to bring into presence […] something else that is usually not present” (Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2007, 41). The “perceptoid” component of the definition acknowledges that seeing something “in” a picture (Wollheim 1998) involves certain perceptional competencies that are—up to a point— likewise employed in the interaction with “regular” kinds of objects or scenes: “The distinction between the picture and its represented object is almost annulled within the experience of perception, as our interpretation is delegated to our regular perceptional faculties automatically” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 138; transl. L.W.) At the same time, recipients are usually not led to mistake a picture for what it represents. There are obviously many borderline cases of pictoriality such as “natural pictures” in clouds. While, for a given observer, the respective pictorial impression might be similar, these cases can be clearly distinguished from the more prototypical cases of pictoriality in which a communicative situation is a prerequisite. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding of family resemblances between concepts, “natural pictures” would thus be farther away from the conceptual center of “pictoriality” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 54). Objections against semiotic theories do usually not question these assumptions, but criticize  structuralist accounts of “pictorial meaning” itself  instead. Sometimes, they even consider only the connection of some kind of external referent as a “semiotic” relation. Such a signification (a “pictorial denotation”) of actually existing, individual persons, objects, or places, however, is neither necessary nor especially important within most semiotic accounts—it might even be completely outside of central semiotic concerns, as Eco has argued (2000, 280–336). In trying to give the most comprehensive account of different levels of pictorial meaning that can play a salient role in a communicative interaction—a more specific approach within the intended framework—Sachs-Hombach differentiates between four semantic dimensions (2003, 173–190): a picture’s “content” [Bildinhalt], its “emblematic meaning” [sinnbildliche Bedeutung], its “referent” [Bildreferenz], and its “communicative function” [kommunikative Funktion]. The “content” is clearly identified with what someone “sees in” a pictorial surface, to use Wollheim’s terms once again, sometimes addressed by art historians as a picture’s “pre-iconographic” meaning (Panofsky 1955, 26; Sachs-Hombach 2003, 92, 154). To Sachs-Hombach, the difference to phenomenological accounts of “picture objects” is then more a preference of terminology (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 81). This picture content can, secondly, take on additional emblematic or symbolic relevance: when a pictorial dove is used as a sign for peace, for instance. In some cases, we can then, thirdly, infer an actually existing referent; and, finally, we only understand the interaction

880 

L. R. A. WILDE

completely if we can form some hypothesis as to why someone has produced and placed the artifact in question within the actual communicative contexts it was encountered in. This concerns the hypothetical illocutionary function that an agent is taken to perform: “We warn or promise, ask or demand, assert or doubt, to name just a few examples of illocutionary functions” (Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2007, 44; original emphasis). Building on the works of Søren Kjørup (1978) and other thinkers, Sachs-Hombach develops a critical survey of earlier theories of “pictorial acts” (analogous to “speech act” theories) that I will touch upon within the next section (Sachs-Hombach 2016). He also considers in detail to what extent the “classic” semiotic triad of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics might be applied to pictorial communication. Crucially, the perceptoidness of pictorial signs plays a decisive role in all three domains: if there was no primary picture “content”, we would hardly speak of any additional (emblematic, referential, or illocutionary) pictorial meaning. While the content is mostly subject to perceptual faculties, the perceptoidness will vary according to use: pictograms and computer icons can be used as examples in this context: “As strongly conventionalized pictures, they can be translated almost entirely in [linguistic] labels such as ‘Men’s Restroom’, or in instructions such as ‘Printing’” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 198; transl. L.W.). Notably, any picture can be used as a pictogram (such as photographs on toilet doors) so that the pragmatic dimension of picture use remains decisive in determining their communicative meaning. Often, the primary “perceptual comprehension” [perzeptives Verstehen] (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 288) of a picture content stays “untouched” by its various employments within different types of communicative interactions. For the primary content, too, however, not every element of the physical object has the same “representational relevance” [Abbilungsrelevanz] (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 119–122)—and some aspects have none: if a photograph is black and white, it is clear that “being monochrome” will be attributed to the physical vehicle of the picture, neither to what it represents nor to what we see in it. The concept of representational relevance becomes even more important for the subsequent levels of pictorial meaning. To take up pictograms once again: their various perceivable features (whether they are based on schematic simplifications or on photographs) are only relevant in one respect: to let recipients infer the respective (intended) linguistic label. If a subway map is not taken as a pure diagram (representing structural relations alone, Sachs-Hombach 2003, 201–207), but as an abstracted and simplified pictorial representation of an area, the representational relevance for most of its perceivable aspects will be quite low. Sometimes, then, the contexts of use determine the pictoriality, and not the other way around. Taken together, Sachs-Homach’s conception of perceptoid “signs” differs from structuralist accounts in two important ways: on the level of the primary picture content, he attributes much weight to theories of perception, cognition, and Gestalt psychology on the one hand, and to the respective materialities and medialities of the “picture vehicles” on the other (Sachs-Hombach

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

881

2003, 284–296). Cognitive semiotics, for instance, developed more or less independently from structuralism, giving special consideration to developments in the psychology of perception (Gibson 1979; Sonesson 1994; Blanke 2003). On the level of subsequent meanings (such as a picture’s possible references or its illocutionary functions), Sachs-Hombach prefers pragmatic and inferential models of communication and interpretation over those of coding and decoding (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 296–307). For Dan Sperber and Deirde Wilson (1995), for instance, there does not need to exist any kind of shared code between sender and receiver to make sense out of artifacts. We only need to rely on certain principles of relevance within processes of inferential reasoning, permanently creating, revising, and updating hypotheses (see also Keller 1995). Models of inferential judgments were widely used and largely uncontested in film studies for decades. They also comprise the conceptual core within many theories of multimodality. Together with some other works that have appeared since  (Forceville 2020), Sachs-Hombach’s detailed account of pictorial comprehension could be seen as a link between these traditions. Within all processes of reasoning with pictorial artifacts, however, there has to be a primary pictorial content which will, to a certain degree, show what the represented object looks like (in varying scales of representational relevance). This is why a specific notion of predication forms the conceptual core of Sachs-­ Hombach’s picture theory: whatever uses we make of pictures—we can employ the picture content to instruct, to warn, or to remind, for instance—their most foundational function will always be to communicate what a certain object, or a class of objects, can be perceived as. It is worth elaborating on this understanding of predication in more detail, not only because it forms the core of Sachs-Hombach’s thinking about pictorial signs, but also because it can be (and often was) misunderstood in ways that prove interesting.

4  Pictoriality and Predication The idea that the communicative function of pictures could be described in similar ways as linguistic predicates has been brought up by many philosophers. It has also been sharply criticized before and after the publication of Sachs-­ Hombach’s version of a related proposal. The underlying notion  is that, in linguistic utterances, the propositional content of sentences comprises a nomination on the one hand that a set of predications on the other is attributed to. Aspects of perceptoid signs (such as pictures) are obviously correlated to and interpreted with another logic altogether: either as part of a figure (and given more attention subsequently), or as part of the ground into which it is embedded by necessity. While this distinction has been discussed with reference to picture puzzles or reversible pictures most prominently (Arnheim 1969, 92), in another sense, it is crucial already in most (if not all) cases of picture comprehension: just the same as “ordinary” situations of perceptions, no picture can be comprehended “completely”. Its reception is always negotiation of

882 

L. R. A. WILDE

relevance or, as Elkins put it in his critical review: a negotiation of “attention and inattention” (Elkins 1998, 122). “[O]ur perceptual attention is not focused on all the surrounding objects but moves from one to the other so that something being figure at one moment may become the background of another figure in the next instant” (Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2007, 48). In other words: a picture holds a potential for almost unlimited figure/ground differentiations that recipients can “visually explore” (Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2007, 37). As the configuration in a picture holds infinitely many visual characteristics, it would be misleading to compare it to a sentence, or even to a finite number of sentences (“a picture is worth a thousand words”). This predicative “wealth” of pictorial signs is therefore a medium-specific, or rather mode-specific affordance that clearly distinguishes them from verbal utterances. All the depicted objects “in” a picture can function as either the subject (nomination) for subsequent predications offered by the visual configuration as a whole (“an older man with a sweater standing in a park”), as well as for references to “really existing” things in time and space that share a gradual perceptual likeness (Potysch and Wilde 2018). Since pictorial signs by necessity communicate the visual appearances of objects or scenes, Sachs-Hombach regards the predicative function of pictorial signs as elemental. This idea has been brought up by Novitz before: “Often when a picture is used to report or to explain, to warn or to illustrate, it is used not only to point or to indicate something […]; but also to attribute certain states or qualities to it, and in this sense to predicate” (Novitz 1977, 88). Deviating from Novitz’ (or Kjørup’s) understanding, however, Sachs-Hombach considers Veranschaulichen (“to illustrate”, “to visualize”, or, somewhat redundantly in English: “to depict”) not as one illocutionary function amongst others (and as such subject to mostly arbitrary conventions), but as a foundational one no pictorial sign can do without (Sachs-Hombach 2016). Differently complex affordances for pictorial predication (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 185–187) are mostly based on a picture’s specific materiality and the perceptional faculties of the observers. Potential references and other illocutionary acts can then be derived from this set of (pictorially communicated) perceptual characteristics. From the points of criticism to conceptualize pictorial communication in a predicative way, I’d like to discuss two in some detail, as they seem most essential to a proper understanding of Sachs-Hombach’s notion. Silvia Seja, a philosopher who published a theory of “acting with pictures” in 2009, raised an objection to Sachs-Hombach’s conception also brought up by Günter Abel (2004, 361–369): if someone looks at a represented elephant in a picture, they see a “picture-elephant”, not a set of predicates such as “has a long trunk” or “is an animal” (Seja 2009, 99–103). This criticism would apply to positions such as Goodman’s, who in fact claimed that the very nature of pictoriality is the exemplification of predicates. As has been illustrated above, Sachs-Hombach, in some contrast, takes theories of (and research into) perception into account and acknowledges that in

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

883

many prototypical cases of pictoriality, perceptual competencies likewise used in “regular” situations are sufficient to establish a primary picture content (what Seja would call a “picture-object”). The relation between the picture vehicle and what it predicates visually is then not arbitrary, but based on perceivable structures of materiality, on shapes, forms, and colors: “To determine what is represented in a picture, we can generally often rely on faculties that we have already developed in our ability to perceive regular objects” (Sachs-­ Hombach 2003, 88, transl. L.W.). That the relation is not arbitrary does not necessarily imply that it cannot be conventional if and when a specific pictorial way of realization is repeatedly preferred in a given cultural and historical context (Blanke 2003, 106). Sachs-Hombach’s theory insists, however, that recipients usually remain aware of some communicative context and will therefore try to form some hypothesis about a possible intention behind the artifact. This intention, whatever it may be, must then build on the predicative potential offered by what the recipient sees “in” the picture vehicle. If this first objection is then based on a reductive misreading of Sachs-­ Hombach’s understanding of “communication”, a second one is more profound. Since this particular objection has been brought up many times before, here is where Sachs-Hombach’s theory adds substantially to picture theory. What if there is no singular thing—or conversely, what if there is an overabundance of possible things—that the pictorial predication can be applied to? Kendall Walton’s position can be taken as an especially poignant example for this criticism: “There is no provision for using the bison-picture, with or without a caption or title, to introduce a proposition about a particular bison […]. It does not in any sense attribute the property it picks out to a particular thing” (Walton 1993, 129). To Sachs-Hombach, however, the most common “referents” of pictures—often inferred only after the initial “perceptual comprehension” of the picture content has already taken place—are not singular things at all, but rather general terms or concepts. A “picture-bison” may then be taken to make “claims” (to communicate countless possible predicates about) what “bisons” look like: that they have two horns, four legs, a specific body shape and so on (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 164–167; see also Sachs-Hombach and Schirra 2011, 9). Certainly, pictures are regularly used to illustrate or to exemplify—quite literally to depict—how classes of objects, scenes, or events can be perceived. In many cases, we will have linguistic labels for these classes (such as “bison”, once again) as well as for their visual attributes (a “thick, shaggy fur”), so the picture may be understood to communicate predicates about the visual appearance of linguistic labels and concepts. These can then be interpreted as complex predicates for a number of individual things themselves. Usually, labels close to linguistic “basic-level categories” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 292–294) will prove to be most likely intended within a pictorial interaction, although this, too, depends on the context of interaction (and thus the picture’s actual use). If we encounter a pictogrammatic depiction of a cigarette, for instance, recipients will readily assume that the picture is about “cigarettes”—not, or only secondary, about any specific one that they wish to smoke

884 

L. R. A. WILDE

within its vicinity. In the same way, any drawing of the Eiffel Tower must first make countless “claims” about the visual appearance of “towers” before the recipient can infer a specific one. “The function of any picture is thus necessarily communicative, as its presentation always (and by necessity) entails two components: the exemplified concept and some of its visual characteristics” (Sachs-Hombach 2003, 166; transl. L.W.). To consider a general term as a picture’s primary “referent” (albeit one that can often only be inferred in a provisional hypothesis) contributes considerably to the available theory. It leaves only one question: what if there are no linguistic categories available for a picture’s most salient features? Certainly, one of the most important functions of pictorial signs is to communicate sets of visual appearances “below” available linguistic labels or existing terms. The “non-­ linguistic and non-propositional aspects of the specific form of knowledge incorporated in the pictoriality of pictures are ignored if pictures are conceptualized in analogy to predicates”, Abel admonishes (2004, 346; transl. L.W.). Gunther Krebs, interestingly building on Sachs-Hombach’s work instead of arguing against it, gives examples for these “non-linguistic and non-­ propositional aspects”: An identikit may provide us with depicted shapes of various moustaches, while we may be neither trained nor interested in the correct terminology. To be sure, more fine-grained concepts might exist and the expert investigator might be able to communicate with his colleagues using those. But the point here is that the expert can communicate with laypersons by showing them characteristic shapes, allowing them to compare the look of pictorial samples with their memorized phenomenal content. (Krebs 2015, 15; original emphasis)

Pictorial signs may then be used to show what we have no words for. This is certainly one of the most pronounced criticisms against semiotic (or even “communicative”) picture theories. Yet, Sachs-Hombach’s concept of pictorial predication does not deny that language is transcended (or, more to the point, bypassed), but, quite to the contrary, explains how this can be possible in the first place. The main tensions to his account arise, perhaps ironically, for terminological reasons. To Sachs-Hombach, “predication” is a communicative function that might be most relevant in areas of interaction where no established linguistic terms are available. Since “predicates”, however, are typically linguistic units, the very designation of the term might not be ideal. Seja and Abel, as has been shown, criticize that the perceptual situation of picture comprehension is not analogue to that of understanding verbal predicates (because there might not even be adequate verbal descriptors for what we see “in” the respective pictorial surface). Sachs-Hombach’s “predicative function” of pictorial signs, however, does not assert any equivalency of the different types of signs (or, in later terminology, of their different modalities), merely an equivalency of their potential functions and uses—with vastly different affordances.

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

885

To avoid these misunderstandings, I have proposed to speak of a “pre-­ predicative” communication where the function of illustration or visualization (“predication”) is prevalent without pre-established linguistic categories— predicates—available to both parties of pictorial interaction (Wilde 2018, 137–156). Pictures can thus communicate or exemplify a phenomenal content, a “non-propositional content of experiences” [nicht-begriffliche Inhalte von Erfahrungen] (Abel 2004, 365) which could be stabilized by a linguistic designator—just as it is often not. “Knowing what something looks like means to anticipate the phenomenal experience, which we would have if we had direct perceptual or pictorially mediated contact with some thing or event” (Krebs 2015, 22). It is, for instance, not controversial that we are able to identify, remember, and discern a far greater spectrum of color hues—in “regular” objects as well as within their depiction—than we have linguistic distinctions for (Peacocke 1998). Krebs gives additional examples for such non-­propositional forms of “knowledge” incorporated in pictures: We regularly use pictures, when we want to inform others or ourselves about the appearances of persons, objects or scenes, or about bodily movements. For example, we track unknown persons by photographs, we check the view from a hotel room in advance online, or we learn to play the guitar with the help of instructive pictures. In informing ourselves about appearances, our propositionally individuated thoughts and expressions turn out rather inaccurate. (Krebs 2015, 13; original emphases)

In all of these cases, the picture vehicles offer only the potential to infer which of the countless perceivable aspects of the pictorial content (of the “picture objects”) might be relevant and could be given a linguistic designator—a predicate which does not yet exist or is not known to the observer. Sachs-­ Hombach’s theory of “pictorial predication” is then, interestingly, one of the few pre-predicative accounts of pictorial communication—if the term “predication” is understood narrowly with recourse to the linguistic categories of predicates. His notion, in contrast, is entirely functional and as such transmedial or, rather, “trans-modal”, actualizing vastly different predicative affordances in different media and modes of communication. This makes Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium highly compatible with different discourses in media and communication studies even today, without neglecting the specificity or the many peculiarities of pictorial communication.

References Abel, Günter. 2004. Zeichen der Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bateman, John A.; Wildfeuer, Janina, and Hippala, Tuomo (eds.). 2017. Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis: A Problem-Oriented Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.

886 

L. R. A. WILDE

Blanke, Börries. 2003. Vom Bild zum Sinn: Das ikonische Zeichen zwischen Semiotik und analytischer Philosophie. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag. Boehm, Gottfried. 1994. Was ist ein Bild? München: Fink. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto. 2000. Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition. London: Vintage. Elkins, James. 1998. On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fellmann, Ferdinand. 1991. Symbolischer Pragmatismus: Hermeneutik nach Dilthey. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Forceville, Charles. 2020. Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Goodman, Nelson. 1969. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. London: Oxford University Press. Keller, Rudi. 1995. Zeichentheorie: Zu einer Theorie semiotischen Wissens. Tübingen: Francke. Kjørup, Søren. 1978. “Pictorial Speech Acts”. Erkenntnis, 12: 55–71. Krebs, Jakob. 2015. “Visual, Pictorial, and Information Literacy”. IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft 22: 7–25. http://www.gib.uni-­tuebingen.de/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=111&Itemid=157&menuItem= miArchive&showIssue=79. Accessed 1 October 2019. Lopes, Dominic. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Clarendon. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1984. “What Is an Image?” New Literary History, 15 (3): 503–37. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1992. “The Pictorial Turn”. Artforum, 3: 89–95. Netzwerk Bildphilosophie. 2009. “GIB—Glossar Der Bildphilosophie”. http://www. gib.uni-­t uebingen.de/netzwerk/glossar/index.php?title=GIB_-­_ Glossar_der_ Bildphilosophie:Hauptseite. Accessed 1 October 2019. Netzwerk Bildphilosophie (ed.). 2014. Bild und Methode: Theoretische Hintergründe und methodische Verfahren der Bildwissenschaft. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Novitz, David. 1977. Pictures and Their Use in Communication: A Philosophical Essay. The Hague: Nijhoff. Panofsky, Erwin. 1955. Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City: Doubleday. Peacocke, Christopher. 1998. “Nonconceptual Content Defended”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58: 381–88. Potysch, Nicolas and Wilde, Lukas R. A. 2018. “Picture Theory and Picturebooks”. In: The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks.  Ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. London: Routledge. Ros, Arno. 1989–1990. Begründung Und Begriff: Wandlungen Des Verständnisses Begrifflicher Argumentationen. 3 volumes. Hamburg: Meiner. Ros, Arno. 2005. Materie Und Geist: Eine Philosophische Untersuchung. Paderborn: Mentis. Ryle, Gilbert. 2009. The Concept of Mind. 60th Anniversary Edition.  London and New York: Routledge. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 1993. Philosophische Psychologie im 19. Jahrhundert. Entstehung und Problemgeschichte. Freiburg: Alber.

  KLAUS SACHS-HOMBACH 

887

Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.). 1995. Bilder Im Geiste: Zur Kognitiven Und Erkenntnistheoretischen Funktion Piktorialer Repräsentationen. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2003. Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.). 2004. Wege zur Bildwissenschaft: Interviews. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (ed.). 2011a. Bilder–Sehen–Denken: Zum Verhältnis von begrifflich-­philosophischen und empirisch-psychologischen Ansätzen in der bildwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2011b. “Theories of Image: Five Tentative Theses”. In: What Is an Image? The Stone Art Theory Institutes Vol. 2. Ed. by James Elkins and Maja Naef. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2011c. “Mystim und Religion im Medium des Bildes”. In: Der religiose Charme der Kunst. Ed.  by Thomas Erne and Peter Schütz. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2013. “Epistemic Functions of Pictures: Some Conceptual Preliminaries”. In:  How to Do Things with Pictures: Skill, Practice, Performance. Ed. by András Benedek and Kristóf Nyíri. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2016. “Acting with Pictures”. Punctum: International Journal of Semiotics, 2 (1): 7–17. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2019. “Kommunikatives handeln, Medienwandel und Multimodalität”. In: Figurationen des menschlichen: Studien zur Medienanthropologie. Ed. by Philipp Stoellger. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus and Schirra, Jörg R. J. 2007. “To Show and to Say: Comparing the Uses of Pictures and Language”. Studies in Communication Science, 7 (2): 35–62. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus and Schirra, Jörg R. J. 2009. “Medientheorie, visuelle Kultur und Bildanthropologie”. In: Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des visualistic turn. Ed. by Klaus Sachs-Hombach. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus and Schirra, Jörg R.  J. 2011. “Prädikative und modale Bildtheorie”. In:  Bildlinguistik: Theorien–Methoden–Fallbeispiele.  Ed. by Hajo Diekmannshenke, Michael Klemm, and Hartmut Stöckl. Berlin: Schmidt. Sachs-Hombach, Klaus and Winter, Hellmut. 2013. “General Image Science and Interdisciplinary Research on Images”. In:  Transvisuality, Vol. I: The Cultural Dimension of Visuality. Ed.  by Tore Kristensen, Anders Michelsen, and Frauke Wiegand. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Schirra, Jörg R.  J. 2005. Foundation of Computational Visualistics. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag. Schirra, Jörg R. J. and Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2011. “Homo Pictor and the Linguistic Turn: Revisiting Hans Jonas’ Picture Anthropology”. In:  Bilder–Sehen–Denken: Zum Verhältnis von begrifflich-philosophischen und empirisch-psychologischen Ansätzen in der bildwissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ed. by Klaus Sachs-Hombach. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Schirra, Jörg R. J. and Sachs-Hombach, Klaus. 2013. “The Anthropological Function of Pictures”. In: Origins of Pictures: Anthropoligical Discourses in Image Science. Ed. by Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Jörg R.J. Schirra. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Scholz, Oliver R. 2004. Bild, Darstellung, Zeichen. 2nd ed. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Schreiber, Peter. 2003. “Klaus Sachs-Hombach: Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium. Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft”. Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger, 57 (1): 42–44.

888 

L. R. A. WILDE

Seja, Silvia. 2009. Handlungstheorien des Bildes. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Sonesson, Göran. 1994. “Pictorial Semiotics, Gestalt Theory, and the Ecology of Perception”. Semiotica, 99 (3–4): 319–401. Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Stocchetti, Matteo. 2011. “Images: Who Gets What, When and How?”. In: Images in Use: Towards the Critical Analysis of Visual Communication. Ed. by Matteo Stocchetti and Karin Kukkonen. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1982. Traditional and Analytical Philosophy: Lectures on the Philosophy of Language. Trans. by P. A. Gorner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, Kendall L. 1993. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilde, Lukas R. A. 2018. Im Reich der Figuren: Meta-narrative Kommunikationsfiguren und die “Mangaisierung” des Japanischen Alltags. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Wollheim, Richard. 1998. “On Pictorial Representation”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (3): 217–26.

Dieter Mersch Marcel Finke

Today, images are ubiquitous; they are everywhere, populating the most diverse corners of our culture. Images outnumber us by far, and in their sheer number, they are mundane; more often than not, we pay no particular attention to them, instead they contribute to the visual noise of our everyday existence. Despite (or perhaps because of) their anaesthetizing omnipresence, the German philosopher and media theorist Dieter Mersch (born in 1951) is still intrigued by images—for him they are objects of fascination. In his writings, he emphatically seeks to expose the peculiarity of images, their potentials, and powers. His publications are crucial contributions to the image debate and to the study of iconicity in particular. Within the discourse of the so-called iconic or pictorial turn, he presents a unique voice and a distinct, challenging theoretical position. Mersch’s overall approach can be described as post-hermeneutic event aesthetics that aim to disclose the productive fissures and moments of resistance within every practice of symbolization, meaning-making, and interpretation. In the context of this broader spectrum of thought, his intellectual involvement with images and issues of iconic visibility plays a vital role. He approaches this subject from a phenomenological point of view, insofar as visual perception and aesthetic experience are paramount for him. However, Mersch’s theoretical take on images has a specific character, since he is mainly interested in the seemingly trivial, nonetheless puzzling experience that an image becomes visible rather than being concerned with what an image makes visible. It is not the ontology of the image object, that is, the appearance of something in an image, that is central for him, but the primary aesthetic event that opens up the image

M. Finke (*) Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_53

889

890 

M. FINKE

in the first place. He aims at a more basic “perception-that”, thereby addressing a fundamental aspect that most phenomenological theories miss out. Mersch’s approach to images, thus, can be termed aisthetic (from Greek aisthesis). Moreover, he reflects on the mediality of images, that is, forms and modes of iconicity, rather than looking for a theoretical definition of the image in general. Consequently, he regards images not as static entities or given visual facts, but as particular perceptual events that are inextricably linked with material and performative practices. Mersch covers a broad range of image-related topics: for instance, he discusses the image as an aisthetic medium; examines its interrelation with the gaze; addresses the affective power of pictorial visibility and its grounding in modes of showing; deals with strategies of visualization in art and science; considers the image as argument and its role in pictorial thinking, and investigates the logic of iconicity. He also touches upon the subject in other theoretical contexts such as his critique of semiotics, his deliberations on negative media theory, his examination of avant-garde aesthetics and artistic research, or his reflections on perception, embodiment, and performativity. In the following, I shall only consider Mersch’s art philosophical, media and culture theoretical, aesthetic, and epistemological thoughts inasmuch as they shed light on his notion of the image and the iconic. It is the objective of this essay to describe the main features of his image philosophy and to introduce the reader to some of its core concepts. I shall proceed in four steps. First, I outline Mersch’s critical revision of semiotics and his efforts to rehabilitate aisthesis. Second, I summarize his idea of the image as an aisthetic medium, while paying particular attention to materiality, performativity, and showing. Third, I turn to the interrelations between the image and the gaze, which Mersch regards as the origin of pictorial power and efficacy. Fourth, I discuss aspects of his epistemology of the image, namely the logic of the iconic and issues of visual thinking. This division into four separate subject areas, however, is artificial. One of the principal characteristics of Mersch’s philosophical writing is that these topics and notions are closely intertwined. Therefore, I shall not only identify his key concepts, but also point out some of the interdependencies and connections between them.

1   Recovering Perception: From a Critique of Semiotics to the Redemption of Aisthesis In order to grasp the contours and main thrust of Mersch’s thinking on images, it is helpful to begin with his critical engagement with semiotics. It is against this backdrop that the specific nature of his conceptual framework becomes particularly clear. At first glance, this seems surprising, since Mersch is a harsh critic of semiotic approaches in general. It should be stated, however, that he is a proven expert on theories of the sign and the semiotic tradition. His writings from the 1990s up to his seminal monograph Was sich zeigt (2002a) deal

  DIETER MERSCH 

891

primarily with authors who were concerned with symbols, language, and discourse, from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Nelson Goodman, and Jacques Derrida. He published an introduction to the work of Umberto Eco, edited an anthology of semiotic and semiological texts (1993; 1997), and was chair of the German Society of Semiotics (2003 to 2005). Although his research focus shifted in the early 2000s, Mersch’s skepticism towards theories of the sign and signification is manifest in more or less all of his later texts, too. To a certain extent, his philosophy can be understood as a counter project to the semiotic and hermeneutical mode of thought. Mersch is by no means the only image theorist who explicitly adopts a critical stance towards semiotics. The problematization of theories based on concepts of the sign and symbolization is a prevalent trait of the iconic or pictorial turn, and the German-speaking discourse in particular. Mark A. Halawa (2012) has shown that largely the German debate on images was a fundamental critique of the sign and interpretation paradigm; an attempt to get rid of the constraints of language and hermeneutics in order to reveal the “true” nature and power of images. Mersch takes part in this endeavour to acknowledge the peculiarity of pictures and their differences from verbal and discursive forms, though his objections to the primacy of the symbolic and hermeneutic are more profound and more radical. His rejection is based on a detailed critical revision of the semiotic tradition, which he condemns as a “monstrous interpretation machine” (2010, 314). What Mersch attacks insistently is the “priority of the semantic” (2002a, 15), the a priori and totalization of meaning and signification. Not only with regard to images but also to culture in general, Mersch challenges the “hegemonic pretension of the hermeneutic” (2010, 26) and the “universal claim of the semiotic and semiological”, that is, its fundamentalism (2002a, 21, 23). Consequently, his philosophical thinking probes the “limits of the symbolic”, as the very first sentence of Was sich zeigt states (2002a, 9). This formulation, however, is more than an introductory remark to a specific book: it describes Mersch’s overall theoretical programme. It is worth mentioning that Mersch’s exploration of the “limits of the symbolic” does not aim at a realm beyond signification, that is, one absolutely external to semiosis; rather, it seeks to expose the limits, shortcomings, and perforations within every practice of signification. With regard to this, two of Mersch’s goals are of primary importance: first, disclosing the fragility and chronic incompleteness of symbolization, and second, recovering what has been overlooked, neglected, or diminished by semiotic theories (2002a, 16–21). His theoretical efforts attempt to lay bare immanent moments of withdrawal and resistance that undermine semiosis and make for the “impuissance of the symbolic” (2002a, 28) and the permanent drift of meaning. He insists that within every process of signification, there are aspects that refuse to be dissolved into language; and since they escape discursive regimes, semiosis can never be controlled entirely. For Mersch, this irremediable instability of

892 

M. FINKE

symbolization is key, on both large and small scales: it affects speech as well as images and, thus, causes the fragility of culture as a whole (2010, 330–339). His main point of criticism against semiotic and semiological approaches is that they are almost exclusively obsessed with the “immateriality of meaning and its legibility” (2003a, 210), thereby ignoring the “indispensability of the sensory” (2002a, 16). As a consequence, their fixation on signification and interpretation brings about the “disappearance of materiality” (2002b, 42), and a “crisis of aisthesis” (2003b, 45). What has been neglected, or at least problematically marginalized by the discursive regimes of symbolization, Mersch asserts, is the primary aisthetic dimension. Even worse than phenomenological approaches that commence their theoretical work with the already visible appearance of an image object, semiotic approaches with their preference for communicable meaning and content are always already too late: according to him, they miss out on the very event of the image, and fail to apprehend the enigma of iconicity and the origin of its power. In order to get to the bottom of images, Mersch aims “to rehabilitate the weight of perception as opposed to the predominance of the symbolic” (2003b, 44). Over and over again, he stresses the priority of aisthesis and the “irreducibility of presence” (2002b, 46), both of which he sees as closely intertwined with materiality and performativity. I shall return to this aspect of Mersch’s thinking in the next section, explaining it in more detail and in closer connection to the issue of images. At this point, I conclude with two observations on his critical examination of semiotics. First, both of Mersch’s findings, that is, the insights that no form of symbolization ever exhausts itself completely in language, and that every process of signification is inextricably bound to materiality, perception and presence, become particularly crucial in the case of images. Second, the relation between his critique of semiotic approaches and his reflections on images is twofold. On the one hand, Mersch seeks to protect the image against the confining grip of sign theories; on the other hand, image and iconicity are among his most prominent means to expose what he considers the deficiencies and limited scope of semiotics.

2  The Image as Aisthetic Medium: Materiality, Performativity, Showing Mersch’s objections to semiotic theories center around two rather simple, yet far-reaching ideas that come to full fruition in his reflections on images, namely the inherent duality of the sign, and the withdrawal of materiality. I shall dwell on these two notions for a moment because they make his image-philosophical argument easier to access. First, it should be noted that Mersch is not referring to the classic distinction between signifier and signified when he speaks of the “irreducible dualism of the sign” (2002a, 186). Taking his cue from Julia Kristeva, he addresses a more fundamental “difference within the difference”

  DIETER MERSCH 

893

(2002a, 160), pointing to the fact that the signifier itself is already internally cleft. In addition to the difference between the sign and that which it signifies, Mersch identifies an unbridgeable chasm between the functionality and the facticity of the sign, that is, between its meaning and its materiality (2002a, 133). Before being able to signify, he insists, every sign must become manifest and perceptible to the senses; it must come into existence by virtue of its own materiality. In order to exist and function as a sign, it must be there in the first place. To put it another way: no sign is capable of meaning or communicating anything, if it is not present itself. Mersch calls this the “necessity of embodiment”, as “there is no symbolization without the materiality of the sign” (2002a, 58, 138). Thus, in his reflections on the “difference within the difference” or the inherent dualism of the sign, he acknowledges its very conditions of existence, paying particular attention to what enables its indispensable presence. However, Mersch emphasizes that materiality not only facilitates the existence of the sign but at the same time causes its immanent limitation. He calls this double movement of enablement and restriction the “paradox of materiality” (2010, 139–142). The idea in its simplest form: “No sign […] is able to signify its own materiality” (2003a, 209). While every sign depends on its coming-to-­ appearance in order to refer to something else, it cannot simultaneously imply the conditions of its own existence. Mersch describes this as the “paradox of self-­inclusion” (2010, 141), pointing out that within every form of signification resides something that evades being signified by the very same sign, that is, a remainder that eludes from evaporating into meaning. In other words, a sign cannot mean or denote its own materiality, but can only exhibit or show it. I shall return to the important role of showing later in this section. For the moment, it is crucial to note that for Mersch, the withdrawal of materiality has to be understood as both the immanent deficiency of symbolization, and its excess (2002a, 209; 2003a, 212). It not only marks an inherent constraint, but also a surplus that transgresses the sign. Both aspects, that is, the negativity of the withdrawal of materiality and the positivity of its exceedance, are virulent within every signification; they constantly unsettle the latter, and make sure that it never comes to closure. Up until now, I have almost exclusively addressed some of Mersch’s thoughts on signs and symbolization. In order to understand how these reflections relate to images and iconicity, it is advisable to take another intermediate step: via his concept of medium. A first hint is given by Mersch’s remarks that “signs are media, insofar as the material carriers that bear the symbolic are concerned” and that the notion of medium draws attention to the “material side of the semiotic relation” (2002b, 61). Hence, in order to be present and function as a sign, the latter depends on its embodiment in some kind of medium that mediates between the signifier and the signified. For Mersch, the notion of medium points to the conditions that endow the semiotic relation of the sign and its meaning (2010, 149–150). In a way, he thus reformulates the “difference within the difference” as a medial difference. At first glance, the medium

894 

M. FINKE

appears to replace the notion of materiality. Yet, is the aforementioned duality of meaning and materiality simply superseded by the dualism of meaning and medium? No, it is not. Rather, he seems to introduce the medial difference to remove materiality further from the level of signification, to distinguish materiality as even more basic. Every medium, Mersch argues, is characterized by a similar “difference within the difference”, insofar as it is marked by a chasm between mediation, that is, the relation it enables, and its own mediality (2010, 18). The mediality of the medium, that is, its forming dispositif of techniques, apparatuses, forms of representation, and structures, “manifests itself in the material” and “relies on materialities” (2002c, 137), yet it is not materiality in itself. At this point, an idea reappears that is familiar from Mersch’s deliberations on signs: the withdrawal of materiality. “No matter how far the sovereignty of the symbolic and the medial is pushed forward”, he asserts, “something always remains excluded, namely the materiality of their own conditions” (2010, 23). To state this differently: just as no sign is able to signify its own materiality, no medium is capable of mediating its own materiality. Thus, the medium is also characterized by the “paradox of materiality”, complete with its duality of enablement and restriction, withdrawal and excess. In order to emphasize the importance and inevitability of materiality, Mersch therefore explicitly terms the medium a material dispositif (2002b, 62–63). The following definition of the medium is exemplary, and it clarifies Mersch’s notion of materiality: “The ambiguity [of enablement and restriction] justifies speaking of it as a material dispositif that has both a side of formation and a side of persistence, of intractability and constraint. Media not only possess an immaterial or virtual contour [i.e. functionality]; rather, as materialities they are part of this world, and thus retain their inertia and gravitation” (2002c, 152). When Mersch addresses the medium as a material dispositif, and emphasizes its dimension of materiality, it becomes apparent that he is not referring to some sort of thingness or physical components such as canvas or screen, paint or plastic, tools or technical devices. He refrains from identifying materiality with the hardware of the medium, and avoids restricting the notion to the stuff or substances comprising a medium. As far as pictures as media are concerned, materiality is not simply a synonym for the physical or technical image-carrier, that is, the material thing within which an allegedly immaterial image object appears visually. Rather, Mersch’s notion of materiality defies reification, since it is closely associated with terms that indicate forms of efficacy such as persistence, inertia, and gravitation. His concept of materiality, therefore, not only implies the totality of a medium’s conditions of existence, but also their bearing on perception. We may not single it out by enumerating individual physical aspects, and we may not objectify and take a hold of it as something, yet we have the experience that (something) is presented to and affects our senses by virtue of materiality. Mersch calls this the “ek-stasis of materiality”, meaning that it happens to stand, or reach into perception as a kind of affecting force (2002a, 18, 149–150, 180–181). As in the quote above, he repeatedly uses the metaphor of gravitation in order to give an idea of the sensible effectiveness of

  DIETER MERSCH 

895

materiality. Of course, when Mersch refers to the gravity of materiality, he does not address the fact that the medium as a material dispositif (or a picture, as it was) has a measurable mass. Rather, materiality manifests itself as gravitation inasmuch as it invests every medium with the “weight of being there”, giving it a non-negatable presence, and limiting its disposability (2002a, 17). The weight of materiality is experienced as a resisting force that burdens and thwarts the fleetingness and weightlessness of meaning (2002a, 184). By paraphrasing materiality as some kind of gravitation acting upon the senses, he places it within the realm of aisthesis, stressing the “weight of perception” (2002a, 151). This becomes particularly important in Mersch’s definition of the image as an aisthetic medium. In his media theoretical thinking, Mersch differentiates between four basic medial formats: image, sound, word, and number (2002c, 151–170, 249–253). While characterizing the last two as discursive media, he conceives of sound and image as aisthetic media. But why does he explicitly call the image an aisthetic medium at all? Isn’t it an unnecessary tautology, taking into account that he consistently emphasizes the fact that every medium inevitably depends on its being perceived? Thus, there is no medium without aisthesis. Moreover, in his definition of the medium as a material dispositif, he insists that every medium relies on materiality in order to come into existence, and thus to be perceivable in the first place. Hence, by virtue of its own materiality every medium has an aisthetic trait. Mersch’s claim that the image is an aisthetic medium, therefore, must imply more than the simple assertion that the image is a medium that depends on perception and materiality. Rather, the additional marking of the image as aisthetic should be understood as a decisive indicator. If aisthesis is intimately entangled with materiality, then we can conclude that he views materiality as playing a fundamental role in the case of images. It is one of Mersch’s theoretical achievements that he revealed the importance of materiality, which had been mostly ignored in the philosophy of images previously. What is crucial, however, is that he not only characterizes the image as a material dispositif, but also gives new meaning to the notion of materiality. As I have mentioned above, he avoids identifying materiality with the hardware of the image, that is, the physical thing or image-carrier. As a result, Mersch indicates an alternative to a figure of thought that is prevalent in theory, namely the immanent duality or twofoldness of the image. It is common to differentiate between the material artifact (picture) on one side, and the immaterial appearance (image) on the other. The problem with this idea is that materiality is almost exclusively attributed to one aspect of this iconic doubleness: if you focus on the picture, you are confronted with materiality (a physical thing in the real world); if you focus on the image, you see a purely visible object unburdened by our material world. Mersch’s approach is entirely different from this standard definition. According to him, materiality is not restricted to the physical side of the picture, but opens up this iconic twofoldness in the first place. Materiality is not what you see when you turn your gaze away from the image to look at the stuff comprising a painting, drawing, or photograph; instead, it

896 

M. FINKE

causes a division of the gaze resulting in our ability to distinguish between picture and image. Thus, he does not dismiss the duality of the image as such, but questions the idea that this dualism is always already in place. In Mersch’s view, materiality impregnates the image as a phenomenological whole; it belongs to both sides/sights insofar as it effects the “re-flection” of the gaze (2002b, 65–66), establishes the chasm between picture and image, and thus initiates iconic visibility. Materiality becomes a term for the non-objectifiable site of origin where the essential division of the gaze takes place. Herein lies the importance of materiality: without it, there is no image at all. Thus, Mersch turns materiality from a seemingly neglectable, secondary aspect into an inevitable and constitutive prerequisite for the emergence of iconic visibility. This revaluation has crucial consequences for the way he conceives of images. Until now, we have seen that in Mersch’s theoretical framework the notion of materiality is not restricted to thingness, that he does not limit materiality to the hardware of the picture, but understands it as a kind of force that acts upon perception. Materiality does not exist beforehand, as a fixed matter of fact, so to speak; instead it happens and unfolds within aisthetic occurrences. It is an event rather than a state; it is processual rather than rigid and stable. This has many implications for the aisthetic medium of the image, one of the most significant being that the opening up of its iconic twofoldness is a kind of happening in itself. Therefore, right from the start, every image originates from a dynamic primal ground. As materiality is not figured as some sort of bedrock serving as the secure foundation for a supposedly immaterial image-object, every image is necessarily precarious. In his thinking, Mersch questions the fixating habitus of the image, and sets its alleged stasis and stability in motion. Due to their grounding in materiality, even still or stationary images are essentially dynamic and processual. To put it more generally: according to him, iconicity as such is based on materiality and performativity, since both are inextricably intertwined (2003b, 48). In Mersch’s wide-ranging theoretical considerations, performativity is a pivotal and recurrent issue. I shall only touch upon three interrelated aspects that are particularly important with regard to images: the act of positing, the iconic process of making-visible, and the event of showing. First, Mersch reminds us of the seemingly trivial circumstance that images do not spontaneously pop up from nowhere. Something has to be done to instantiate and implement them into the world; they depend on acts of positing. Actions, procedures, and practices have to be performed to bring images into existence. Thus, it is only by virtue of performativity that they become manifest and apparent at all. Here, performativity is closely linked to materiality, since the very act of positing makes the image materially present (2003b, 48–49). Both are key aspects of embodiment, insofar as performativity points to the “ek-stasis of materiality” (2003b, 44), that is, the latter’s coming into appearance and reaching out into perception. To Mersch, however, it is less important what or how something is posited, but rather that an act of positing happens. The very fact that an image is brought into being is crucial, that is, the factum est of its

  DIETER MERSCH 

897

coming-into-existence. Two aspects of this performative dimension are significant: first, every act of positing exceeds the intentions of those who have performed it; hence, something incalculable always remains, which defies absolute mastery. Second, the actions and practices constitutive for the production and presentation of an image inscribe themselves into the very fabric of this image, yet they cannot be depicted by that particular image. Mersch calls this the “paradox of performance” (2010, 142–144). In addition, performativity comes into play when Mersch addresses the production of iconic visibility. According to him, the visibility of images is actively generated, rather than given in advance. Images may depict or represent something, like a still life, a portrait of a person, or a landscape, yet they have to bring these into visibility first. Therefore, he understands the work of the image as a process of making-visible. Images make visible, they bring forth a pictorial appearance by virtue of aesthetic means. The image is not a passive container for objects that have always already been visible; instead, it requires techniques of visualization, and practices and strategies of formation and representation that enable these objects to become visually present. Consequently, Mersch speaks of the “gift of visibility”, because images endow a sight (2014a, 16–17). In other words, images perform acts of showing, and by doing so give something to see. To Mersch, showing is the essential feature of the aisthetic medium of the image, and “the genuine mode of iconicity” (2014b, 315). Moreover, he stresses that showing should be understood as an event, meaning that it has a processual and “immediate performative character” (2014a, 21). He leaves no doubt about the outstanding significance of showing for image theory, and even considers it the key issue of his post-hermeneutic philosophy in general (2010, 82). In his writings, Mersch repeatedly points out that there are diverse orders of showing and a wide range of “monstrative practices” (e.g. 2016a). In the following, however, I shall only address two concepts at the basis of his theoretical approach: the difference between saying and showing, and the dualism of showing-as and showing-itself. The distinction of saying and showing is pivotal to Mersch’s critical revision of semiotics. He borrows this concept from Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose argument he expands and radicalizes (2002a, 240–255; 2005a, 145–160). The notion of “saying” refers to the discursive dimension, and points to the meaning of a sign (or image), its content, and its functionality. The focus is on what an image depicts, represents, or communicates. On the other hand, “showing” addresses the aesthetic dimension, and considers the very mediality of a sign (or image), its facticity and particular manner of articulation and appearance. The fact that an image makes (something) visible, and how it makes (something) visible is relevant here. Mersch emphasizes the irreducibility of saying and showing, yet also underlines that both are inextricably entangled with each other. In order to “say” or denote something at all, every image has to “show” or exhibit itself (2002c, 184). No matter what an image is referring to, its signification is accomplished by “the primary modus of showing”; therefore, he terms it “demonstrative saying” (2011, 170). Thus,

898 

M. FINKE

“showing” is paramount to the aisthetic medium of the image, and takes precedence over “saying”. Moreover, Mersch characterizes the difference between “saying” and “showing” as an unbridgeable hiatus, and calls “showing” the limit or the other of “saying” (1999, 1323). Here again, the idea of withdrawal and exceedance recurs: whatever a sign, a form of mediation, or an image may “say”, its own “showing” escapes the discursive dimension of its own “saying”. Accordingly, Mersch argues that in its “showing” every image already transcends the “possibilities of meaning” (2002a, 209–210; 2003a, 211–212). It can be concluded that he uses the saying/showing divide as a means to reformulate an already familiar thought, namely that fundamental chasms exist within every form of symbolization. Since images rely on “showing” more than other media, they particularly account for the instability and interminability of semiotic processes. In the above paragraph, two modes of showing were implied: “to show something”, and “to show itself”. To Mersch, this duality is as important as the hiatus between saying and showing. With regard to images, he asserts that “the chasm of saying and showing reduplicates into the difference of showing and showing-itself” (2003c, 35). The “dual nature of showing” (2016a, 60) adds to the already mentioned intricacies, and further increases the unrest of the image. “Showing something” (or showing-as) alludes to transitive or deictic forms of showing, that is, the dimension of re-presentation. An image shows something as something, that is, it depicts, refers, or points to objects or phenomena outside the image such as, for instance, horses, sceneries, stories, or sunsets. It is about what an image shows to us, or what we can see and observe in it. However, Mersch stresses that there are intransitive forms of showing, too (2011, 171–172). He uses the term “showing-itself” to differentiate the dimension of self-presentation, which also has a twofold structure: one can discern between medial and aisthetic forms respectively. First, Mersch points to the fact that in order to show something, every image needs to demonstrate or exemplify its own intrinsic qualities, that is, it has to feature its colors, textures, structures, forms, contrasts, its composition, perspective, and traces of production. No matter how sophisticated or simple an image may be, it has to manifest its own medial characteristics (2002c, 184–185). In addition, there is also an aisthetic form of “showing-itself”; and for Mersch, this is the most primary and significant. Here we come full circle, since this kind of “showing-itself” is closely linked with the materiality and performativity of the image. Mersch uses the notion to tackle one of his main ideas from a different angle: aisthetic “showing-itself” addresses the concurrence of both materiality and performativity, thus pointing to the “unique way of emergence and coming-to-­ appearance”, the particular “ek-static manifestation”, and the “becoming present” of the picture as such (2003c, 23; 2014a, 20–21). “Showing-itself” precedes the image’s possibility to show something (2005a, 159–160). Moreover, it can be neither “said” nor “shown as something” by the image, it cannot be symbolized or depicted, but rather has to take place and “show

  DIETER MERSCH 

899

itself” (2016a, 61). This further increases the paradoxical or chiastic constitution of the image, which Mersch insistently aims to reveal. In conclusion: to Mersch, the aisthetic medium of the image is mainly characterized by materiality, performativity, and showing. Therefore, he calls the image “medium of showing-itself” (2002c, 186). These ideas provide the basis for his reflections on the relation between image and gaze, as well as on iconicity and visual thinking.

3   Pictorial Power and Efficacy: Interrelations of Image and Gaze “Thus, the theory of images has to start with the eye”, Mersch (2002c, 175) writes to express the primacy of visual perception when it comes to the issue of iconicity. To him, the interrelation of image and gaze is the starting point and basic constant for any deliberations on the “logic of the iconic” (2011). Because the image is created by the “act of seeing” (2004, 99), he argues, iconicity needs to be deciphered by beginning with the gaze (2004, 101). In a way, these assertions are somewhat misleading, since Mersch’s notion of the gaze is complex, and does not simply refer to the beholder and his or her sense of vision. The linkage of image and gaze is much more intricate, as becomes clear when turning to his concept of the division of the gaze. According to him, the aisthetic medium of the image is characterized by a series of three divisions (or a threefold splitting) of the gaze: Mersch dubs these principles the “reflexivity of the gaze”, the “exchange of gazes”, and the “chiasm of gazes” (2004, 102–118). I have already touched upon the first principle, that is, the reflexivity of the gaze, when speaking of Mersch’s reformulation of materiality as an event that opens up the dualism of picture and image. With regard to the gaze, he comes back to this issue, yet describes it more generally as “framing”. The concept of framing points to the dispositif, that is, the medial and aisthetic conditions that mark an iconic difference, and thus set an object apart from its surroundings as a picture; moreover, it enables the act of seeing something in the image. In other words, framing causes a division of the gaze, insofar as it engenders a kind of “double vision”, and thus initiates the two sights of picture and image. Since the “double gaze” oscillates between these two sights, Mersch also calls it a “re-flective gaze” (2002c, 174–177; 2004, 103–104). It is the principle of framing that affords the reflexivity of the gaze, because it enables the “inversion of sight” and the perception of two chiastic views (2002c, 176; 2003c, 31). While the “reflexivity of the gaze” only concerns the peculiar mode of vision on the part of the viewer, the second principle of the gaze’s division refers to the “exchange of gazes” between image and observer. According to Mersch, the observer not only looks at an image, the image itself presents a gaze and thus looks back. One aspect of the image’s gaze has already been touched upon above, as I discussed the iconic process of making-visible. Images bring

900 

M. FINKE

something into visibility, and thereby construct a sight, and manifest a distinct way of seeing. Whatever an image shows, it always shows it in a unique manner. Every image inevitably establishes a particular view, and thus bestows a gaze that does not belong to the beholder. Hence, Mersch calls it the “gift of a gaze” (2014a, 15). The second aspect of the “exchange of gazes” is closely related to this. Mersch argues that in addition to giving a sight, images entice and affect the viewer’s gaze, that is, they demand its attention. To view an image, he asserts, means to acknowledge and respond to the gaze of the other (2004, 114–116). The allure of the image’s gaze forces the beholder to look, and to turn his or her eyes onto the image. According to Mersch, “the exchange of gazes” therefore has a “responsive structure” (2004, 116). The third principle of the division of the gaze further qualifies this idea of exchange, since it addresses the crucial fact that the beholder’s gaze and the image’s gaze never coincide. Both ways of seeing inevitably remain disparate; and the onlooker is confronted with an alterity that he or she can never appropriate. Mersch speaks of the “chiasm of gazes”, once again pointing to an irremediable hiatus at the core of iconicity (2004, 116–117; 2016b, 181–183). Moreover, he not only considers the divisions of the gaze as the “center of iconic mediality” (2004, 118) but also acknowledges this as the primary source of the unique “fascination of the image” (2004, 116). According to Mersch, the power and efficacy of iconicity originally reside in its paradoxical and chiastic constitution, rather than arising from the depiction. Materiality, performativity, the various modes of showing, and the threefold splitting of the gaze constitute the aisthetic medium of the image, its “enigma” and “aura”. Mersch mainly relates the “force of iconicity” (1999) to the “desire of the gaze” (2004, 101). The latter has two aspects: first, the observer’s gaze longs for the image, desires to see it in order to satisfy the “lust of the eye”; second, the image desires to be seen and longs for the observer’s gaze, arousing and seizing it (2004, 102). Mersch is primarily interested in the second aspect of the “desire of the gaze”, which he characterizes as having a double structure of both empowerment and the withdrawal of power. On the one hand, images grant a sight and produce visual evidence (2016b, 176–179), thereby endowing the viewer’s gaze with the possibility to oversee and control the visible to a certain extent. On the other hand, and more importantly to Mersch, images simultaneously deprive the viewer of his or her power. Because they entice the observer’s gaze, subject its “will to see”, and force it to look, he speaks of the “commanding attitude of the image” (2004, 102). For Mersch, however, its enigmatic appeal is not the only reason for the peculiarity of the image: its aisthetic attraction is paralleled by a unique epistemic potency.

4  Epistemology of the Image: Logic of Iconicity and Visual Thinking As we have seen, Mersch aims to rescue the image from the grip of semiotics, using iconicity to lay bare fundamental deficiencies within concepts of symbolization. This, however, does not mean that he regards images as being unable

  DIETER MERSCH 

901

to produce meaning and insights, or that they belong to the realm of irrationality. Rather, one of his main goals is to spell out the particular epistemic potentials and “logic of iconicity” and to qualify images as “genuine means of knowledge production” (2006, 405). He ponders on the possibility of “thought in images and with images” (2011, 162), characterizing images as a distinct “way of thinking” (Heßler & Mersch 2009, 8–9). Mersch has no doubt that visual or iconic thinking exists, and that images require an epistemology of their own. Due to the peculiarities of iconicity, images present an alternative mode of thinking, that is, one that differs from discursive and conceptual thinking (2011, 169). Its uniqueness follows from the aspects discussed above, particularly from the diverse orders and practices of showing and showing-itself. To Mersch, visual thinking is based on the “structure and logic of showing” (2011, 171), as the latter constitutes the “specific modus of iconic knowledge” (2005b, 325–326; 2006, 412). He pursues the question of how images generate meaning, and seeks to explicate the aisthetic, aesthetic, and medial conditions of their knowledge production. Mersch determines a number of aspects that he sees as lying at the bottom of the image’s epistemic potency: framing, the generation of differences, and the logic of contrast; non-negativity, affirmativity, non-hypotheticity, and the production of evidence; interspatiality and topological differentiality (Heßler & Mersch 2009, 18–30). I have already addressed the concept of framing with regard to the gaze. Framing also plays an important role in Mersch’s epistemological reflections, as it “creates the most basic form of contrast” (2011, 185), namely the distinction between picture and image, and thus lies at the heart of the fundamental “principle of iconic difference” (2009, 19). Iconic thinking, then, relies on continued divisions, juxtapositions, and the simultaneity of contrasts. One crucial feature of the logic of contrast is that both sides of its opposition are visible at once, that is, they do not mutually exclude each other, but are shown in an ambiguous state of both/and (2009, 24; 2011, 180). Related to this aspect is what Mersch calls the non-negativity of images, which in turn bears on the difference between “saying” and “showing”. As opposed to discursive formats and language, the aisthetic medium of the image is unable to express a “contradictory negative”, that is, it is not based on a “logic of exclusive distinction” (2011, 168–169). An image cannot show that something is not the case, nor can it show nothing: it is bound to visualize even that which it negates. Due to their logic of showing, images perform “non-dichotomous or non-oppositional ways of differentiating” (2011, 178), and are thus capable of making visible contrarian or “contrary negatives” (2011, 173). To express the idea of non-negativity in positive terms, Mersch also speaks of affirmation or the “affirmative power of the iconic” (2011, 176). Images exhibit their medial traits and what they depict all at once, they do not hide or withhold anything, but reveal themselves “without reservation” (2011, 185). Hence, in a basic sense, images are evident, insofar as they produce visual evidence (2016b, 176), which in turn leads to their non-hypotheticity: whatever they show is presented as a fact (2009, 23).

902 

M. FINKE

Moreover, the contrarian logic of iconic difference, he asserts, relies on the “spatial structure of iconicity” and the topological organization of the image (2009, 25–29). Thinking in images takes place by virtue of “com-positions” and “con-figurations”, that is, the interplay of patterns and groupings, proximities and distances, orientations, and other relations between marks, colors, structures, and forms. Iconic contrasts are spread out side by side, being visually present in simultaneous juxtaposition. Yet, it is not only the contrasting medial components themselves that matter, but also the spaces between them: therefore, Mersch speaks of “interspatiality” and “topological differences” (2011, 183). All the above-mentioned aspects considered, thinking in images follows other parameters and rules than thinking in language and the order of the discursive. To put it more generally: there is a different logic at work when it comes to visual thought. Accordingly, the aisthetic medium of the image and iconicity both entail and call for the “possibility of a different kind of reflexivity” (2014a, 39). To Mersch, the aesthetic practices and strategies of the arts provide the “strongest arguments for iconic thinking”, insofar as they give examples of “medial reflexivity” (2014a, 40; 2014c, 39). Consequently, art is one of his most important points of reference, and the primer for his theoretical explorations of iconicity: in a way, he thinks with, rather than about art (2002b, 157–298; 2015, 131–200). One could say that Mersch responds to the “becoming-philosophical of art” with a “becoming-aesthetic of philosophy”. According to him, artistic or aesthetic practices enable insights into the iconic because they operate in modes of showing, and are thus capable of reflecting the otherwise neglected mediality of images—he calls this capacity “showing-­ asunder” (2014a, 40, 44). By presenting visual paradoxes, “chiastic constellations”, and interventions, they expose what facilitates iconicity in the first place. Therefore, he argues that artworks provide “singular paradigmata” or individual “models of aesthetic reflexivity” (2015, 157). In a sense, then, Mersch aims to achieve something in a similar way to the arts and their aesthetic strategies— both seek to cause image trouble. On the one hand, their efforts aim to trouble the image, by laying bare its fundamental prerequisites and immanent unrest; on the other hand, they seek to trouble us, by pointing out the agency and recalcitrance of the iconic. Both are ways to lift the veil of ordinariness and familiarity off images, so that we can see them as if we had fresh eyes.

References Heßler, Martina and Mersch, Dieter. 2009. “Bildlogik oder Was heißt visuelles Denken”. In: Logik des Bildlichen: Zur Kritik der ikonischen Vernunft. Ed. by Martina Heßler and Dieter Mersch. Bielefeld: Transcript. Halawa, Mark A. 2012. Die Bilderfrage als Machtfrage: Perspektiven einer Kritik des Bildes. Berlin: Kadmos. Mersch, Dieter. 1993. Umberto Eco zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Mersch, Dieter. 1997. Zeichen über Zeichen: Texte zur Semiotik von Charles Sanders Peirce bis zu Umberto Eco und Jacques Derrida. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

  DIETER MERSCH 

903

Mersch, Dieter. 1999. “Die Macht der Bildlichkeit: Zur Revision des Aura-Begriffs”. In: Die Zukunft des Wissens. Ed. by Jürgen Mittelstraß. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Mersch, Dieter. 2002a. Was sich zeigt: Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis. München: Wilhelm Fink. Mersch, Dieter. 2002b. Ereignis und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Mersch, Dieter. 2002c. Kunst und Medium: Zwei Vorlesungen. Kiel: Muthesius Hochschule. Mersch, Dieter. 2003a. “Materialität und Nichtsimulierbarkeit: Zu den Grenzen maschineller Aufzeichnung”. In: Maschinen und Geschichte. Ed. by Ernest W. B. Hess-­ Lüttich and Walter Schmitz. Dresden: Thelem. Mersch, Dieter. 2003b. “Das Ereignis der Setzung”. In: Performativität und Ereignis. Ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke. Mersch, Dieter. 2003c. “Einleitung: Wort, Bild, Ton, Zahl–Modalitäten medialen Darstellens”. In:  Die Medien der Künste: Beiträge zur Theorie des Darstellens. Ed. by Dieter Mersch. München: Wilhelm Fink. Mersch, Dieter. 2004. “Bild und Blick: Zur Medialität des Visuellen”. In:  Media Synaesthetics: Konturen einer physiologischen Medienästhetik. Ed. by  Christian Filk, Michael Lommel, and Mike Sandbothe. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Mersch, Dieter. 2005a. “Die Sprache der Materialität: Etwas zeigen und Sichzeigen bei Goodman und Wittgenstein”. In: Symbole, Systeme, Welten: Studien zur Philosophie Nelson Goodmans. Ed. by  Oliver R.  Scholz and Jakob Steinbrenner. Heidelberg: Synchron. Mersch, Dieter. 2005b. “Das Bild als Argument: Visualisierungsstrategien in der Naturwissenschaft”. In:  Ikonologie des Performativen  Ed. by  Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas. München: Wilhelm Fink. Mersch, Dieter. 2006. “Naturwissenschaftliches Wissen und bildliche Logik”. In:  Konstruierte Sichtbarkeiten: Wissenschafts- und Technikbilder seit der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. by Martina Heßler. München: Wilhelm Fink. Mersch, Dieter. 2010. Posthermeneutik. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Mersch, Dieter. 2011. “Aspects of Visual Epistemology: On the ‘Logic’ of the Iconic”. In: Images in Language: Metaphors and Metamorphoses. Ed. by András Benedek and Kristóf Nyíri. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Mersch, Dieter. 2014a. “Die Zerzeigung: Über die ‘Geste’ des Bildes und die ‘Gabe’ des Blicks”. In: Bild und Geste: Figurationen des Denkens in Philosophie und Kunst. Ed. by  Fabian Goppelsröder, Toni Hildebrandt and Ulrich Richtmeyer. Bielefeld: Transcript. Mersch, Dieter. 2014b. “Zeigen, Etwas-Zeigen, Sichzeigen”. In:  Bild. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. by  Stephan Günzel and Dieter Mersch. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Mersch, Dieter. 2014c. “Sichtbarkeit/Sichtbarmachung: Was heißt Denken im Visuellen?” In:  Sichtbarkeiten 2: Präsentifizieren. Ed. by  Martin Beck and Fabian Goppelsröder. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes. Mersch, Dieter. 2015. Epistemologies of Aesthetics. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes. Mersch, Dieter. 2016a. “Ambiguitäten des Zeigens: Kleine Theorie monstrativer Praktiken”. In:  Valenzen fotografischen Zeigens. Ed. by  Katharina Sykora et  al. Kromsdorf: Jonas. Mersch, Dieter. 2016b. “Pictorial Thinking: On the ‘Logic‘ of Iconic Structures”. In: Theorizing Images. Ed. by Žarko Paić and Krešimir Purgar. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Horst Bredekamp Yannis Hadjinicolaou

1   Icononophilia and Iconophobia In a vaguely sketched but rather dry landscape, a man in a military uniform holds heavy ammunition grasped in both arms. Next to him, a two dimensional image of Buddha faces the viewer. Another image, this time a statue, possibly also of Buddha, can also be discerned. As we are informed, the photograph derives from July 1973 when the Khmer Rouge besieged Phnom Penh. The soldier is hoping to be doubly protected by those religious images during the heat of battle. Image, cult, and weapon are two faces of the same coin  and stand in dialectical relationship with/to one another. This image, acting as a kind of frontispiece, opened Horst Bredekamp’s doctoral thesis, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte. Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Art as Medium of Social Conflicts. Image struggles from Late Antiquity up to the Hussite Revolution, Bredekamp 1975). The first part of the title implies that art participates in or even triggers social conflicts. But in the subtitle, what strikes us is the term “Bilderkampf”, which could be translated as struggle or fight between images, reminding one explicitly of the book’s first photographic reproduction. Bredekamp puts forward here the argument that art and image should be considered synonyms, since “art” in the modern sense does not exist in the period he is looking at (Bredekamp 1975, 12). This surprisingly parallels Hans Belting’s classic study Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Belting The author would like to thank Robin Greeley for her critical reading. Y. Hadjinicolaou (*) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_54

905

906 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

1990) (Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Belting 1994). Notably, on the occasion of Bredekamp’s nomination as member of the Ordre pour le Mérite in 2014, Belting pointed out the specific impact Bredekamp’s doctoral thesis had on him (Belting 2016, 267–268). However, we should not forget Belting’s groundbreaking distinction between “Kunstbild” and “Kultbild” (“Artimage” and “Cultimage”; see also Hamburger 2016). Images, argues Bredekamp, move between iconophilia and iconoclasm, a crucial subject that characterizes both Bredekamp’s doctoral thesis and his subsequent work (Bredekamp 1975, 12). This positioning, we should note, is a starting point for any study on images. For Bredekamp, it is embedded in a historical as well as a social context—contexts that over the course of time might shift to a certain degree (Bredekamp 1975, 13). Georges Didi Huberman, who, unlike Bredekamp, did not begin his career with this kind of political agenda, has recently turned his attention to discerning the image politics of the Warburgian Atlas (see for instance Ex. Cat. 2016: Soulèvements). Bredekamp defended his PhD under his advisor Martin Warnke at the University of Marburg one year before its publication in 1975. Warnke, after having been fiercely attacked by conservative German art historians during a session of the 1970 Cologne German Art Historical Convention and thus nigh condemned to unemployment, was surprisingly elected professor in Marburg in 1971. This occurred with the support of Hermann Usener, a former partisan who fought against the Nazis during the World War II. Marburg, a traditional university town, revealed itself to be a highly stimulating and liberal place in the German humanities, with other personalities teaching there such as philosopher Hans Heinz Holz, literature historians Heinz Schlafer and Gert Mattenklott, among others (Raulff 2014, 10–28). The session that Warnke organized together with the émigré scholar Leopold Etlinger was titled Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung (The Artwork between Science and Ideology, Warnke 1970a). Its impact on German art history was immediate, with serious consequences for Bredekamp as well as for Franz Joachim Verspohl, Warnke’s other PhD student at the time. Some among the conservative art historians even called them “iconoclasts”. The subjects of conflict and iconoclasm take here a contemporary turn, combined with a historical and critical approach concerning the potency of images. It was Warnke who edited a volume on this very subject (Bildersturm [Iconoclasm] Warnke 1973) as a riposte to the Cologne accusation. There, Bredekamp published a text testing some of his doctoral arguments in the realm of Florence and Savonarola’s iconoclastic program (Bredekamp 1973). This “objectoclastic” program denounced certain images, such as those of musical instruments or playing cards, as vanities. Here we find in Bredekamp already the idea of approaching all kinds of objects beyond the strict realm of high art as dangerous vanity goods in the eyes of a Franciscan monk. Significantly, Bredekamp reminds the reader in the footnotes of his

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

907

doctoral thesis that it was his work on iconoclasm done under Martin Warnke that gave him the impulse for writing his book (Bredekamp 1975, note 5). There is a striking analogy here between those art historical protagonists aiming for the destruction of art, and the allegations from reactionary art historians accusing them of being similar to Savonarola. The way that those very art historians utilized a repressive, even militaristic language was already noted by Warnke in his epoch-making 1970 Cologne lecture (Warnke 1970b), one of the reasons it sparked such a fierce clash between the generations. But another methodological principle is also at stake here. First comes the image and then the argument. Or in other words the argument is always embedded into the analysis of the respective image. This is already evident in Bredekamp’s use of the aforementioned photograph, which decorated the introduction to his first book. Here lies the conviction that images are the central component that moves us emotionally, bodily, and socio-politically. The material and formal aspects of an artwork are not played against its content in a classic iconographic-iconological manner. Rather, the one defines the other and vice versa, without losing their dialectic relationship or the contradictions in their interdependencies.

2   The Critique of Aura After the completion of his doctorate, Bredekamp worked at the famous sculpture museum in Frankfurt, the Städtische Galerie Liebieghaus, where, together with Herbert Beck, he organized the exhibition Kunst um 1400 am Mittelrhein (Art around 1400 in Middle Rhine, Ex. Cat. 1975). One might wonder what his aim was in this exhibition, in terms of a broader understanding of the image, since at first glance it seems to deal only with high art in the traditional sense. But, following the rationale for the seriality of sculptures around the river Rhine, Bredekamp reread Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Benjamin 1963) (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) and criticizes his use of the term of “aura”. Benjamin believed that the power and aura of the image were getting lost through its reproduction (for instance, postcards depicting the Mona Lisa painting). Bredekamp turned this argument on its head. Reproductions of the Mona Lisa, he argued, in fact strengthen the aura of the original at the Louvre. This opinion is interesting, especially today if one thinks of images on social media. Here, Bredekamp is not at all distant from Aby Warburg, whose Bilderatlas Mnemosyne intuitively opposes Benjamin’s essay, even if in many other things both thinkers were quite close to each other (Zumbusch 2004). What is also remarkable here is that Bredekamp did not hesitate to criticize a thinker such as Benjamin, at a time when the latter was considered unchallengeable. This is another characteristic of his fluid thinking. The image’s transportability as a result of its reproduction generates its power to move through space and time. Reproduction thus functions, to use Aby Warburg’s term, as an “image vehicle” (Beyer et al. 2018), an agent rather than a passive object.

908 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

3   The Hamburg Period In 1979, Warnke moved to Hamburg, where Bredekamp followed as an assistant and, in 1982, became himself a professor of art history there. One could argue that the marginalization of Marburg had the unforeseen effect of spreading its intellectual roots to many different universities in Germany. Also influential in this regard were the reforms and politics taking place during West Germany’s liberalization. Warnke’s appointment in the Hanseatic city was almost the equivalent of establishing an alternative art history, a third path between the one in the East and the other in the West. Hamburg was not simply a big city with a huge harbor and a young but very lively university. It was also the place where the “Hamburg School of Art History” (as one of its protagonists, Erwin Panofsky, called it), emerged (see more recently, Levine 2016). Nevertheless, beyond their superficial similarities, Panofsky and Warburg could not have been more different from each other. This prompts the question: what kind of consequences would the juxtaposition of these two scholars in the broader context of the study of images have? Would it be enough that Panofsky was, like Warburg, not interested in high art exclusively, but rather in different types of images—something manifested in his famous essays on film or the ideological ancestry of Rolls Royce, beyond his crucial engagement in the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (Panofsky 1995)? The intellectual current formed at the beginning of the twentieth century that was interrupted by the Nazis was revived through figures such as Warnke and Bredekamp, among others. This line of thought was further established through conferences and publications on Warburg and Panofsky (Hofmann et al. 1980; Bredekamp et al. 1991; Reudenbach 1994). Thus, it is not only that the interest of “low” versus “high” art emerges here as a non-hierarchical understanding of the potential of all kinds of images to illuminate the visual ideology of any given society; it is also the continuation and actualization of an interrupted tradition. The 1972 publication of the journal Kritische Berichte on the one hand revived the famous periodical of the 1920s and 1930s, edited and published by scholars that fled the Nazis, and on the other hand focused upon a critical ideological work in word and image. One must remember here, in addition to Warnke’s lecture on the language used by German art historians, the readings of Berthold Hinz concerning the Bamberger Reiter at the famous 1970 session in Cologne  (Hinz 1970). This was the intellectual climate in which Bredekamp emerged, together with Franz Joachim Verspohl, as founders and then members of the initial editorial board of Kritische Berichte and the first of Warnke’s doctoral students. Bredekamp’s 1990 paper, read at the first conference dedicated to Warburg in Hamburg, follows a path already presaged in his doctoral thesis, prefiguring his work of the coming decades. The text, “Du lebst und thust mir nichts. Zur Aktualität Aby Warburg’s” (Bredekamp 1991), focused on Warburg’s enigmatic dictum “you live and do not harm me” and its historical resonance in 1990. Warburg’s phrase, argued Bredekamp, meant that the image is active

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

909

and even dangerous. It needs critical distance and reflection to be tamed, so to speak. The term “harm” alludes to a potential damage caused by the image (which also reflected Warburg’s own psychological instability). The point here is, however, that the sides are reversed: it is no longer the human who destroys or loves the image but the other way around—a major point for understanding Bredekamp’s notions of the agency of the image. Through Warnke, and as a result of his being awarded the Leibniz Prize, Bredekamp was directly involved in the establishment in Hamburg of an Index for political iconography, housed in the newly renovated Warburg House (the first seat of the Warburg library, next to Warburg’s private house, before the former migrated to London). This institutional success effectively laid the foundation for the establishment of the new critical German art history. In a non-hierarchical collection, all kinds of images involved in political representation or propaganda—whether stamps and posters or sculptures and tapestries— are available for research purposes. In this way, a connection between Aby Warburg and younger social historical approaches was established. One must also remember Warburg’s own socio-economic studies around 1900, dedicated to the powerful families of fifteenth century Florence such as the Strozzi bankers (Warburg 1902).

4  Epistemic Images Bredekamp’s major contribution to the epistemological status of images derives from a 1982 essay that was published as a small book in 1993, and translated two years later into English (Bredekamp 1995b). It is one of his best-known texts, dealing with the Kunstkammer, the cabinet of curiosities, as a model for the contemporary museum. Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. Die Geschichte der Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte (The lure of antiquity and the cult of the machine. The Kunstkammer and the evolution of nature, art and technology) traces a seemingly incompatible dialectic between the power of machines and the lure of antiquity by connecting both spheres around the microcosmic model of the cabinet of curiosities. The Kunstkammer, argues Bredekamp, acts as a type of intriguing game of the sovereign, in which objects are gathered in an egalitarian way, hence “naturalia” (shells, for instance), “scientifica” (such as compasses) and “artificialia” (paintings, e.g.). How far those objects can also be said to be implicitly non-egalitarian expressions of the manner in which the sovereign gathered them is another point that will not further occupy us in this essay. However, at the end of his brief book, Bredekamp formulated his future program of art history as image history: High-tech societies are going through a phase of Copernican change from the dominance of language to the hegemony of the image. The Kunstkammer, which had almost completely relied on thinking in and through images, demonstrates that disciplines such as mathematics, linguistics, psychiatry, and neurobiology

910 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

[…] remain blind, as it were, if they ignore the historical material compiled by art history. Without knowledge of the history of art, the world of digitized images cannot begin to be grasped. (Bredekamp 1993, 102)

It is also in 1993 when the trilogy art-science-political philosophy starts to emerge with Bredekamp’s appointment at Humboldt University. His position covers a huge span of subjects across time, from late Antiquity up to the end of the Early Modern period. However, because of his interest in the history of art history as well as in modern and contemporary art, Bredekamp’s research trajectory can also be discerned in contemporary issues in several media as well as areas. From this expansive curriculum, it appears that the study of all kinds of visual phenomena is logically interrelated. Bredekamp’s goal in exploring the art-science-political philosophy trilogy was to pursue an historical science of the image based on three personalities of the seventeenth century from the fields of politics, science, and philosophy. For Galileo, drawing was a fundamental way of perceiving the moon through the telescope, something that was made possible also because of his work as an artist. Bredekamp’s central idea concerning the constituting power of drawing for the perception of the moon by Galileo was not dependent upon the infamous forged copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Schmidle 2013). Furthermore he published a revised version of his 2008 book in 2015 (Bredekamp 2008c; Bredekamp 2015b, Eng. ed.  Bredekamp 2019). In this last case it is Erwin Panofsky’s Galileo and the Arts (1956) on which he relied by merging it with his own thinking (Panofsky 2012). The first book of Bredekamp’s trilogy was not the Galileo monograph, however, but that on the theoretician of the State, Thomas Hobbes (Bredekamp 2006, Eng. ed.  Bredekamp 2020). In it, Bredekamp tried to show by an analysis of the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan how sovereignty could be achieved through optical experiments or attempts with lenses and other image systems such as anamorphism. In other words, the image is responsible for the crafting of political representation. Last but not least, with the second book of the trilogy dedicated to the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bredekamp demonstrated how images and the reflections that they unfold are hardly intelligible if those very artifacts are not approached and viewed in their respective historicity. Images have a semantic potency that is directly leveraged in Leibniz’ thinking, a model of thought that is nevertheless incomprehensible without the body and the sensual perceptions acquired through the smallest perceptual experiences—the “petites perceptions”, as Leibniz called them, such as the sound of waves (Bredekamp 2008b). Bredekamp’s study on Darwin with the model of coral functioning as a complex model of his thinking takes up a similar argumentative thread as in the trilogy (Bredekamp 2005). As the follow up to Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben, simultaneously marking Bredekamp’s attempt to reformulate and reshape Art History as

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

911

an historical science of the image (historische Bildwissenschaft), the trilogy on art, science, and political philosophy was launched in the important exhibition Theatrum Naturae et Artis (Ex. Cat. 2000) in which we find again a number of topoi of his Bredekamp’s thought. It is also remarkable and merits mention that Bredekamp used the medium of exhibition to open up those paths to a broader public, something that derives from his curatorial experience in Frankfurt.

5  Art History and Cultural History Bredekamp’s interests further included a cultural-historical take on Florentine soccer, where he deployed political iconography in order to understand the representational policies of the Medici, notably through the use of balls in the Medici coat of arms, such that soccer appears as a kind of political Gesamtkunstwerk (Bredekamp 2001). It is in constant transformation, a moving tableau vivant revealed to be a genuine connection of “low” and “high” culture. Homo ludens finds here possibly its most felicitous expression. Bredekamp’s thinking connects opposing terms, cultures, and even methods, without negating the dialectic relationships between them and keeping intact the contradictions carried in those symbolic objects as images. Another comparable approach to Florentine soccer from a totally different vantage point is Bredekamp’s work on Der Schwimmende Souverän (The Swimming Sovereign) connecting the visual sphere of the ruler’s body with his image (Bredekamp 2014a). It is crucial to underscore here that by broadening the canon of art history, Bredekamp simultaneously cultivated the “older” canon by using the traditional art historical methods, enriching it nonetheless with new ideas that do not derive from the very canon he applies (Bredekamp 1988, 1995a, 2000, 2009, 2018a). One may speak broadly of Bredekamp’s egalitarian approach toward images. Yet this does not imply that certain artworks are not more aesthetically pleasing than others, or that there is not a distinction between complexity and simplicity, between artwork and image. This also means that the formal characteristics or aesthetics are not played down at the expense of semantics, but are embedded into the overall interpretation of an image. One could critically argue that Bredekamp is not systematic enough in his pursuits and theories, and that, in the long run, he neglects history. On the other hand, such criticism could be considered unfair since for him the point is to start always from the empirical and phenomenal dimension of the image. Thus he keeps at bay any overly linear sense of history, but without losing sight of historical processes. By engaging in complexity, the goal is to illuminate the image’s cultural-historical meanings and dimensions.

912 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

6   Technical Images and Media Out of Bredekamp’s engagement with opening up art history to epistemic and scientific images, a whole project emerged that seems at first glance to be based on Vilém Flusser’s work but which, with further probing, reveals its divergence from Flusser and the originality of its goal: Das Technische Bild. Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder, 2008 (Bredekamp et al. 2008) (The Technical Image. Compendium of the History of Style of Scientific Images, 2015: Bredekamp et. al. 2015c). One of the principal aims of this text was to show that the more an image appears as “natural” in scientific publications, that is, as purportedly “mere illustration”, the more it is constructed. In other words, it is highly artificial. Bredekamp argued that critical analysis of how scientists use images in drawing their conclusions demonstrates their dependence on those very images they put forward as simple illustrations. Following Bredekamp, one might even say that scientists base their analysis on those highly constructed images, which in turn influence, however subtly, their conclusions. Like Panofsky’s disjunction principle, where form and content do not necessarily overlap or may even work against each other (Panofsky 1927), the term technical image underlines how art history’s analytical procedures can be useful in the context of the sciences. Just to give an example, the double helix model of DNA was created by the British artist Odile Crick who was indebted, on the one hand, to minimalism and, on the other, to the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder. In other words, the construction of the image of the double helix was based upon an art historical impetus quite apart from any scientific discourse or experimentation. Yet most people believe that the image of the double helix is an objective one based on empirical evidence (Daston and Gallison 2007). The same might be said for computer displays or X-ray images that depend on the development of photography. This demonstrates that scientists should work together with art and image historians, because both disciplines need each other to augment their analytical work. What is at stake here is a genuine interdisciplinarity. In addition to the Technisches Bild, the cluster of excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” also emerged out of discussions at the Helmholtz Center of Humboldt University. I will return to this below. Bredekamp argues for art history as media history. This is a reaction to the discipline—media science (Medienwissenschaft). Media science ignores certain lessons of art history, in order to develop a distinct, not necessarily historical stance, toward images. Bredekamp underlines that, from its disciplinary beginnings, art history was based on researching media such as photography, something today expanded into other arenas such as touch screens that generate virtual images which are not indexically lodged in reality (Bredekamp 2008a). In this sense, art history is also a media science, connected to those media practices themselves. Here one might also consider the relationship between analogue and digital media, an underexplored arena awaiting further research. In their diversity, these media offer different perspectives that can add to both

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

913

traditional humanist studies and contemporaneity. In both cases, however, critical analytical procedures must be maintained if both sentimental historicity and neoliberal superficiality are to be avoided. The digital versus analog issue also concerns the body-mind problem, something to be addressed later. Bredekamp demonstrated that the art historical stance toward new media was a Warburgian subject as well. Warburg’s famous text on Luther (Heidnischeantike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten, Warburg 1920/2010) may be considered a founding moment of Media Studies, in which Warburg mobilized the concept of the “image vehicle” discussed above. Warburg established that Protestant political propaganda was facilitated through the medium of prints that moved from northern to southern Europe and vice versa (“as birds do”, to use Warburg’s metaphor). We might also understand the term “vehicle” here as “medium”. Bredekamp’s text was first published in 2008 in the seventh expanded edition of Kunstgeschichte. Eine Einführung (Art History. An Introduction), alongside other, more traditional art historical approaches such as iconography or social art history introduced by specialists in the field. It goes without saying that all these methodological tools have a historical origin; they do not emerge out of the blue as did Pallas Athena out of the head of Zeus. Bredekamp’s approach is therefore presented in Art History. An Introduction as a “canonical” “art historical” method, which also shows just how established the historical study of the image in German art history was at the beginning of the new millennium. The split between Art History and Visual Studies also drew Bredekamp’s attention (see his well-known essay in Critical Inquiry “A neglected Tradition? Art history as Bildwissenschaft” [2003]). This divide can also be observed in the German-speaking world where the field of visual studies is pursued without the slightest sensitivity toward either art historical methods or the history of the discipline itself. As a motto for Bredekamp’s own understanding one might take his answer from his interview with Christopher Wood for Art Bulletin: Art History as a historical science of the image understands art in the sense of the Greek “techne” and Latin “ars”, and I do not see why art history should limit its goals to the high arts. Its object is the study of images in the broadest sense […] A drawing by Galileo, by Leibniz, or by Darwin can be as important for the history of models as that of Raphael for the arts. Both depend on the autonomy of the visual, which is our field. (Wood and Bredekamp 2012, 525)

7   Bildakt and Embodiment Another major direction in Bredekamp’s engagement with image theory is the 2008 founding, together with philosopher John Michael Krois (who died unexpectedly in 2010), of the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung (The Collegium for the Advanced Study of Image Act and Embodiment), which was financially supported by the German Research Foundation. This turned out to be a fruitful collaboration between both disciplines—art history

914 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

and philosophy—around the problem of embodied knowledge and visual experience. Krois worked on the theme of “embodiment” by uniquely combining Ernst Cassirer’s model of symbolic forms, Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy of pragmatism, and research in areas such as robotics (Krois 2011). What Bredekamp achieved in the realm of the image through combining different methodological and theoretical frameworks, Krois accomplished in the area of philosophical thought, following less an analytic than a phenomenological, “embodied” model rooted in continental philosophy. Thus, one perspective highlighted that of the other, generating analytical dimensions that could only be grasped through the collaboration between the two disciplines. Bredekamp’s and Krois’ goal was to open up the possibilities of the image within the image science, the occulocentric nature of which is also at stake. The hand, the speaking mouth (pursued in the work of Jürgen Trabant who joined the Collegium in 2011), and in general the body—all are fundamental to perceiving pictures and interacting with them. The so-called enactive approach aims to situate knowledge and perception as bodily interactions with the world (see Fingerhut et  al. 2013). Here, the fundamental concepts of “image schema” (unconscious bodily movements occurring, for instance, during walking or viewing an image in a museum) and “body image” (conscious perception through the mirror image, e.g.) are fruitful for the understanding and study of images more generally. Krois went so far as to formulate the conviction that to perceive images one does not need one’s own eyes (Krois 2011, 133–160). Bredekamp’s summa of his own image theories is his 2010 book, Theorie des Bildakts, translated into English (among many other languages) as Image Acts. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency (Bredekamp 2018b). It is through this text that one can best understand his contribution to the study of images pursued since his dissertation. In it, Bredekamp elaborates on his model of “Bildakt”: “image-act” or “the image as a weapon” (see his short essay on Palmyra in 2016, Bredekamp 2016a). The central idea of Theorie des Bildakts is that images do not simply illustrate the world but rather construct it through connecting form with content. Importantly, Bredekamp’s model differs from theories such as David Freedberg’s, put forward in The Power of Images (1989), a book to which Bredekamp nevertheless owes a great deal. Theorie des Bildakts ranges across all kinds of images, from neolithic hand axes to bio artifacts; from film, sculpture, and architecture, to automata and tableaux vivants, to images of the now-destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues. It contains, therefore, a musée imaginaire constructed through the course of Bredekamp’s own research itinerary. But what exactly is the main argument of Bredekamp’s Bildakt, which some have derogatorily labeled mystical? Following the speech act theory of John Searle, Bredekamp attributes to the image the role of speaking or acting. This is an effort to register the impact of images on the actions, feelings, and thoughts of human observer/users. Bredekamp traces this image impact in three areas: the schematic, the substitutive, and intrinsic agency. The schematic

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

915

focuses on the mimetic aspect of copying gestures, poses or even images in the sense of tableaux vivants, where forms provoke an imitation of the presented actions. Somewhat relatedly, the substitutive emphasizes the exchange between image and body. In the famous Mandylion of Veronica, for example, the body of Christ—its fluids, dirt and blood—creates the image of his face on the sudarium through indexical bodily contact. The intrinsic image act focuses on the power of form as shaped form. In other words, on the materials used to produce the image, and their intrinsic characteristics (e.g. marble or colour). In this schema, the role of the author remains largely secondary; agency is located primarily in the image itself, the protagonist of Bredekamp’s Bildakt. Here, in addition to Panofsky and Warburg, we also see Bredekamp’s palpable debt to Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl. From the former he adopts the theory of an “art history without names” and Wölfflin’s sensitivity to form. From the latter, he borrows the concept of the independent force and will of art (emblematized in Riegl’s complicated term “Kunstwollen”), as for example in the case of ornament (see Wolf 2012, 185). The question remains, however, to what extent the interaction between the viewer and the image is a constant dialogue between both agents, and how this dialogue undergoes changes in time and space. What is crucial here is not to ask how systematic this work is, but rather to pay attention to the fact that Bredekamp looks at empirical material originating from all kinds of visual spheres. It is not by chance that the 2010 title of Theorie des Bildakts was shortened to Bildakt in the 2015 paperback edition. The latter title is surely more adequate because it draws attention to the very phenomenon of the image-act itself. Everything starts with the description itself that opens up theoretical questions. Theoretical questions are derived from, rather than imposed upon, the object and its description. Bredekamp stresses this as a central point in working, thinking, and engaging with images—study with, on, and through images that underlines a notion of “image studies” in its truest sense. Mobilizing a precise, razor sharp vocabulary, the indistinctiveness and contradictions an image carries are connected to several methodological tools of art history and are embedded within other disciplines in both the humanities and the natural sciences. This fact does not result in vagueness or imprecision but rather in redefinition of art history as an historical image science. The difficulty with translating the German term “Bild” into English is that it includes “image” and “picture”. Initially, this resulted in the inadequate translations of “Bildakt” as “picture act” or later “Image act(s)” (Bredekamp 2014b; 2018b). The question of translation remains a problem. How different English and German semantics work is a question that always interested Bredekamp. He pleaded for multilingualism in art history, that started as a multilingual discipline (Bredekamp 2011).

916 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

8  Current Issues Bredekamp’s engagement with images opened up the boundaries between art, technology, and science—concerns that were also integrated in the work of his friend, the artist Stephan von Huene (1932–2000) (Ex. Cat. 2002). Bredekamp’s interest in challenging these boundaries lies in the very origin of the words “ars” and “techne”, which combine knowledge, technology and artifice. Additionally, his interest in automata and artificial life also emerges as a way of overcoming the divisions between fields, in this case science and technology versus the humanities, or the digital versus the analogue. Bredekamp’s experience in the “ars electronica” in Linz as well as his debates with scholars such as the mathematician and cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the MIT’s Artificial Intelligence laboratory, proved decisive for the formation of his thought. Bredekamp utilized the Albertian definition of an image as a minimum of human intervention (see Bredekamp’s recent contribution to the Festschrift in honor of Gottfried Boehm [2012]). However, this raises the question of images in and from Nature. Bredekamp debated this issue with John Michael Krois, who considered fossils images. More recently, Bredekamp has focused on anthropological studies regarding how apes operate with symbols. Examples such as this demonstrate how the boundaries among nature, the animal, and the human world, as well as our concepts of “art” tend to become more fluid (Bredekamp 2016b; 2017). Here one should also mention Bredekamp’s work on active matter, a subject that has currently received widespread attention (Tibbits 2017). This work connects to his work in the natural sciences and the humanities as a spokesperson of the Humboldt University’s cluster of excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” (together with cultural scientist Wolfgang Schäffner). Here, Bredekamp’s work on the question of image agency encompasses natural materials such as wood, in particular pine trees because of their intrinsic movement in response to temperature changes (Schäffner 2018). This endeavor touches upon the relation between artificial and natural matter. Art History as the History of the Image (Bildgeschichte) continues and systematizes a tradition best represented by Aby Warburg, who referred to himself as a Bildhistoriker (Image Historian). The fact that Humboldt University’s Institute of Art History was renamed the Institute of Art and Image History is programmatically indicative. In the case of an “image history”, this raises the further question as to what kind of an understanding of history this implies. The entanglement of image history with anthropology or philosophy should be resituated within an historical field; this does not, however, mean in a reduction to empiricism, as the work of the Annales school has shown (Burke 1990). In other words: what would be the formative role of cultural history and historical anthropology in the broader study of images? A critical study of the image that does not neglect history, and which uses interdisciplinary premises to sharpen specific problems within the discipline itself, would be a sensible

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

917

programmatic goal. So too would be its value in generating new subjects for other disciplines. Horst Bredekamp’s lifelong engagement with images in the broadest sense of the word has paved the way to new understandings of the image’s nature and potency. From this point of view one will have to simultaneously address this understanding in a critical engagement with the subject. His work has opened new paths regarding both the critical analysis of image practices, and those sociopolitical relations where images appear as tools of visual ideologies, ranging from the hard sciences to the social media and contemporary politics. Herein lies the great potential of Bredekamp’s work for future research.

References Belting, Hans. 1990. Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. München: C. H. Beck. Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Belting, Hans. 2016. “Laudatio auf Horst Bredekamp”. In: Reden und Gedenkworte. Orden pour le mérite. Für Wissenschaften und Künste, Vol. 42, 2013–2014/2014–2015. Göttingen: Wallstein. Beyer, Andreas; Bredekamp, Horst; Fleckner, Uwe, and Wolf, Gerhard (eds.). 2018. Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburgs Vermächtnis und die Zukunft der Ikonologie. Berlin: Wagenbach. Benjamin, Walter. 1963 [1936]. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Bredekamp, Horst. 1973. “Renaissancekultur als Hölle. Savonarolas Verbrennungen der Eitelkeiten”. In: Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks. Ed. by Martin Warnke. München: Hanser. Bredekamp, Horst. 1975. Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte. Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Bredekamp, Horst. 1988. Sandro Botticelli. La Primavera. Florenz als Garten der Venus. Frankfurt/M: Fischer. Bredekamp, Horst; Diers, Michael, and Schoell-Glass, Charlotte (eds.). 1991. Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg. Weinheim: VCH. Bredekamp, Horst. 1991. “‘Du lebst und thust mir nichts’. Anmerkungen zur Aktualität Aby Warburgs”. In: Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds.) Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg. Weinheim: VCH. Bredekamp, Horst. 1993. Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. Die Geschichte der Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst. 1995a. Repräsentation und Bildmagie der Renaissance als Formproblem. München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. Bredekamp, Horst. 1995b. The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. Bredekamp, Horst. 2000. Sankt Peter in Rom und das Prinzip der produktiven Zerstörung. Bau und Abbau von Bramante bis Bernini. Berlin: Wagenbach.

918 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

Bredekamp, Horst. 2001. Florentiner Fußball. Die Renaissance der Spiele. Berlin: Wagenbach (third revised edition). Bredekamp, Horst. 2003. “A neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft”. In: Critical Inquiry, 29 (3): 418–428. Bredekamp, Horst. 2005. Darwins Korallen. Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst. 2006 [1999]. Thomas Hobbes. Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder, 1651–2001. Berlin: Akademie Verlag (third revised edition). Bredekamp, Horst. 2008a. “Bildmedien”. In: Kunstgeschichte. Eine Einführung. Ed. by Hans Belting, Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp, Willibald Sauerländer, and Martin Warnke. Berlin: Reimer (seventh revised and expanded edition). Bredekamp, Horst. 2008b. Die Fenster der Monade. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst. Berlin: Akademie Verlag (second edition). Bredekamp, Horst. 2008c. Galilei der Künstler. Der Mond. Die Sonne. Die Hand. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Bredekamp, Horst; Schneider, Birgit, and Dünkel, Vera (eds.). 2008. Das Technische Bild. Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Bredekamp, Horst. 2009. Michelangelo. Fünf Essays. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst. 2010. Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Bredekamp, Horst. 2011. “Babylonische Sprachvielfalt: nicht Strafe, sondern Anspruch”. In: Welche Sprache(n) spricht die Wissenschaft. Ed.  by Jürgen Trabant. Conference proceedings, Berlin. Bredekamp, Horst. 2012. “Albertis simulacrum im Tal”. In: Was ist ein Bild? Antworten in Bildern. Gottfried Boehm zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. by Sebastian Egenhofer, Inge Hinterwaldner, and Christian Spies. München: Wilhelm Fink. Bredekamp, Horst. 2014a. “The Picture Act: Tradition, Horizon, Philosophy”. In: Bildakt at the Warburg Institute. Ed. by Sabine Marienberg and Jürgen Trabant. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Bredekamp, Horst. 2014b. Der schwimmende Souverän. Karl der Große und die Bildpolitik des Körpers. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst. 2015a. Der Bildakt. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007. Neufassung 2015. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst. 2015b. Galileis denkende Hand. Form und Forschung um 1600. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bredekamp, Horst; Schneider, Birgit, and Dünkel, Vera (eds.). 2015c. The Technical Image. A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bredekamp, Horst. 2016a. Das Beispiel Palmyra. Köln: Walther König. Bredekamp, Horst. 2016b. “Image-Active Design Forms of Animals and Humans”. In: Ex. Cat. +ultra knowledge & gestaltung. Ed. by Nikolla Doll, Horst Bredekamp, and Wolfgang Schäffner for the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Leipzig: E. A. Sehmann. Bredekamp, Horst. 2017. “Early Forms of Articulation”. In: Symbolic Articulation. Image, Word, and Body between Action and Schema. Ed. by Sabine Marienberg. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

  HORST BREDEKAMP 

919

Bredekamp, Horst. 2018a. Berlin am Mittelmeer. Kleine Architekturgeschichte der Sehnsuch nach dem Süden. Berlin: Wagenbach. Bredekamp, Horst. 2018b. Image Acts. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Bredekamp, Horst. 2019. Galileo’s Thinking Hand. Mannerism, Anti-Mannerism and the Virtue of Drawing in the Foundation of Early Modern Science. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Bredekamp, Horst. 2020. Leviathan  – Thomas Hobbes, his embodied state, its contexts and sources. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Burke, Peter. 1990. The French Historical Revolution. The Annales School, 1929–1989. Cambridge: Polity Press. Daston, Loraine and Gallison, Peter 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. Ex. Cat. Kunst um 1400 am Mittelrhein – ein Teil der Wirklichkeit. 1975. Ed. by Herbert Beck, Wolfgang Beeh, and Horst Bredekamp. Frankfurt/M: Liebighaus Museum alter Plastik. Ex. Cat. Stephan von Huene. Klangkörper/Resounding Sculptures. 2002. Ed. by Christoph Brockhaus, Hubertus Gaßner, and Christoph Heinrich. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Ex. Cat. Theater der Natur und Kunst. Wunderkammern des Wissens. 2000. Ed. by Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Bruns, and Jochen Brüning. Berlin: Henschel Verlag. Ex. Cat. Soulèvements. 2016. Ed. by Georges Didi-Huberman. Paris: Gallimard. Fingerhut, Jörg; Hufendiek, Rebekka, and Wild, Markus (eds.). 2013. Philosophie der Verkörperung. Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hamburger, Jeffrey. 2016. “Hans Belting. Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, 1990”. In: The Books that Shaped Art History from Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss. Ed. by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard. London: Thames and Hudson. Hinz, Berthold. 1970. “Der Bamberger Reiter”. In: Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung. Ed. by Martin Warnke. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Hofmann, Werner; Syamken, Georg, and Warnke, Martin (eds.). 1980. Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg.  Frankfurt/M: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Krois, John Michael. 2011. Bildkörper und Körperschema. Ed. by Horst Bredekamp and Marion Lauschke. “Actus et Imago. Berliner Schriften zur Verkörperungsphilosophie”, Vol. II. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Levine, Emily J. 2016. Dreamland of Humanists. Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1927. “‘Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des ‘Schmerzensmanns’und der Maria Mediatrix”. In: Festschrift für Max. J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage. Leipzig: Seemann. Panofsky, Erwin. 1995. Three essays on style.  Ed. by Irving Lavin. New  York: The MIT Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 2012. Galileo Galilei und die Bildkünste. Ed. by Horst Bredekamp. Berlin and Zürich: Diaphanes. Reudenbach, Bruno (ed.). 1994. Erwin Panofsky. Beiträge des Symposions Hamburg 1992. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

920 

Y. HADJINICOLAOU

Raulff, Ulrich. 2014. Wiedersehen mit den Siebzigern. Die wilden Jahre des Lesens. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Schäffner, Wolfgang. 2018. “Active Matter”. In: 23 Manifeste zu Bildakt und Verkörperung. Ed. by Marion Lauschke and Pablo Schneider. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Schmidle, Nicholas. 2013. “A very rare book. The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise”. The New Yorker, December 16, 2013: 62–73. Tibbits, Skylar (ed.). 2017. Active Matter. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Warburg, Aby. 1902. Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum. Leipzig: Seemann. Warburg, Aby. 1920 [2010]. “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten”. In: Id. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Warnke, Martin (ed.). 1970a. Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Warnke, Martin. 1970b. “Weltanschauliche Motive in der kunstgeschichtlichen Populärliteratur”. In: Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung. Ed. by Martin Warnke. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. Warnke, Martin (ed.). 1973. Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks. München: Hanser. Wolf, Gerhard. 2012. “Vom Bildersturm zu Bildkritik und Bildakt. Horst Bredekamps Kunstgeschichte. Eine Laudatio”. In: Intuition und Institution. Kursbuch Horst Bredekamp. Ed. by Carolin Behrmann, Stefan Trinks, and Matthias Bruhn. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Wood, Christopher S. and Bredekamp, Horst. 2012. Iconoclasts and Iconophiles: Horst Bredekamp in Conversation with Christopher S.  Wood. In: Art Bulletin, 4 (94): 515–527. Zumbusch, Cornelia. 2004. Wissenschaft in Bildern. Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk.  Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Lambert Wiesing Yvonne Förster

1   Introduction Lambert Wiesing’s work on images is situated firmly within the tradition of phenomenology. His writings discuss the works of Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty while tackling all aspects of the field of image studies from perception of images to digital images and computer simulations. Developing a phenomenological approach to images means that the question is first and foremost how we perceive images. Phenomenology being preoccupied with the different modes of consciousness asks what discerns the way we perceive images from other modes of perception or consciousness. In this regard, Wiesing does not make a distinction between images as artworks and other types of images. The question is a categorical one: is there a difference between the perception of an image and the perception of things? And if so, what is it exactly that is different? In other words: What is the differentia specifica of the perception of images? One could say that a phenomenology of images is a specific theory of perception that is developed within the larger scope of a theory of perception in general, which Wiesing also tackles in several publications (Merleau-Ponty, epilog, 2003; Wiesing 2014). The second important aspect in Wiesing’s work concerns the variety of image forms. The history of image production is a history of changing forms. Especially with the rise of the digital images, theory is challenged to describe how they relate to paintings or photography. Images as art works also take on very different forms. Some clearly represent scenes or objects, while others are abstract in the sense that they do not represent any kind of object. Wiesing asks for example whether an image that does not show an object, hence a collage or

Y. Förster (*) Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_55

921

922 

Y. FÖRSTER

a monochrome painting, is an image and if so, what does it show? The ways how images make something visible and how these differences can be described is the dominant task in his image theory. The third field of research, besides perception of images and forms of images, concerns the subcategory of images as artworks. Wiesing tackles this question again from a phenomenological perspective. He mentions that one might think that phenomenology is not the best method to deal with art today (Wiesing 2016, 15 ff.). Since the concept of the artwork has been under critique or even partially vanished from the stage of modern art since the beginning of the twentieth century, phenomenology with its hope to return to the things themselves as Edmund Husserl proclaimed, seems not be the right theory. Wiesing holds that in fact the opposite is true. In his writings, he shows that especially a phenomenological analysis can develop an account of images as art in all their varieties. In the following I will present his image theory along the lines of three important topics: First I will develop an account of the main topics of his thinking as presented in his first major work on image theory, The Visibility of the Image ([1997] 2016). This is an in-depth study of the history of formal aesthetics, within which most of the central arguments of his theory are developed. Then I will discuss his account of phenomenology as art theory and discuss liminal forms of images like monochrome images in the light of Wiesing’s theory. Part VI is dedicated to the digital image and its role as facilitator of virtual thought experiments. This is a recurring topic in Wiesing’s writings and represents a unique take on new media and its impact on human thinking. The last part will discuss Wiesing’s position within the larger context of image studies along the lines of his book Sehen lassen (2013).

2   Formal Aesthetics: From Internal Relations of Images to Pure Visibility 2.1   The Infrastructure of Images Images show or present something that is not actually there. The mountain you can see in Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire is visible, but not physically present. Rather it is presented while being absent. How is that possible? Most theories interpret images as signs that represent something else. Phenomenological theories challenge this idea and propose a theory of perception of images instead. Wiesing develops his image theory in The Visibility of the Image (ibid.). This book has become canonical for the history of formal aesthetics and its relation to phenomenology. Wiesing develops a philosophical framework for the interpretation and explanation of new types of images with regard to developments in the history of formal aesthetics. As the title suggests, his considerations are directed at describing images as media for a certain type of visibility—the “pure visibility” of objects appearing

  LAMBERT WIESING 

923

in images. The question to be solved is the following: What are the conditions of possibility for something to become visible in an image without being physically present? And what is the character of an object that is made visible in an image? Is it a sign for something else, a representation of something or as Edmund Husserl or Jean-Paul Sartre would have it: a phantom? What happens, if there is no object to be seen at all? This is the case in abstract or monochrome images. The liminal character of the abstract image is what drives the argumentation in this book. The abstract image is a rather recent form of images that challenges not only the concept of what is an image, but also the concept of art itself. Wiesing sets out to answer these questions by reflecting on the history of formal aesthetics of images in twentieth century. To understand the development of new forms of images within the context of modern art and new media he interrogates the history of formal aesthetics. Formal aesthetics according to Wiesing represents the attempt to investigate the visibility of the image (ibid., 6). Wiesing discusses theories of this tradition from the nineteenth and twentieth century and consequently develops a contemporary aesthetics of images that can accommodate recent developments in art and new media. Starting with Robert Zimmermann (1824–1898), an early proponent of a formal aesthetics who developed and aesthetic theory in analogy to formal logics, Wiesing shows how the idea, that neither beauty nor content defines an artwork, has already been developed in the nineteenth century. Zimmermann has even earlier precursors, especially Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a critic of the idealist aesthetics of his time. Idealist aesthetics holds that the beauty of an artwork is not determined by its form but by its content presented in an adequate style (ibid., 38). Herbart and later more explicitly Zimmermann hold the contrary: Not the adaption of style as a means of expression of a content is the reason for beauty, but the infrastructure, the style as the relation of the different parts of an artwork determine its beauty, or way of expression, if one does not want to speak of beauty. Wiesing then discusses the aesthetics of Alois Riegl (1858–1905), who develops a conceptual framework to investigate the infrastructure of images along the categories of painterly and haptic. These two characteristics are used to describe the transitions amongst the elements of images. To pin the essence of these inner structures down, Wiesing uses two examples that bring the contrast between the two styles of transitions to the extreme: paintings by William Turner (1775–1851) (Fig.  1) and the Belgian comic draughtsman Hergé (1907–1983) (Fig. 2). Both paint “a profile view of a travelling ship” (ibid., 41). Despite of making a very similar object visible, their styles are as different as they can be. The “planimetric infrastructure” (ibid.) is very dissimilar: Turner paints in a very painterly style with smooth transitions and barely defined areas or parts of the painting, while Hergé uses no merging of colors at all. In fact, he separates the areas of color from each other by means of black lines. That means he makes the transition-lines quasi touchable—haptic. By working through the nature of the stylistic structures of images, Wiesing points out how

924 

Y. FÖRSTER

Fig. 1  J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 91 × 121,8 cm; National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

a formal aesthetics is related to formal logic, more precisely to the relational logic. Still, the formal relations being established by logic are not rich enough to capture the texture of images, especially artistic images. Formal aesthetics and relational logic complement each other: Art in Wiesing’s interpretation of Riegl makes logical differences visible, while relational logic makes one think of aesthetic differences (ibid., 67). In the next chapter Wiesing elaborates on the works of Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), who investigates the fundamental principles and constraints of the pictorial form (ibid., 70). Other than the nearly limitless possibility of abstraction in linguistic concepts, images cannot abstract completely from their material substrate. By going through the possible arrangements of elements in paintings such as plane and recession, closed and open forms, multiplicity and unity, clearness and unclearness, Wiesing shows how Wölfflin establishes logical constraints on the way images represent their subjects. He criticizes the emphasis on the logical deducibility of the relations in Wölfflin but agrees on the possibility that their dependency can be deduced: Still, we need to add that although it is not possible to deduce planarity from the linearity of a representation, it is possible to deduce dependency. Linear form in transitions tends towards a planar form of organization, because the overall ­formal impression enables us to see that the image contains only haptic information. The placement of objects behind one another in a representation leads to things on the horizon becoming smaller, due to perspectival foreshortening. A

  LAMBERT WIESING 

925

Fig. 2  Hergé, The cover of the magazine Le petit “vingtième”, announcing “The Adventures of Tin Tin”, 1934, no. 32. Wikipedia (fair use) situation that can only be seen, but not touched, must be represented in this way. (Ibid., 77)

The leading question in this kind of relational logic of images is this: How far can the form of an image be changed for the subject of the image to remain

926 

Y. FÖRSTER

visible? Wiesing compares this way of thinking to the morphing of images by means of digital processing. In his view, formal aesthetics paves the way to an understanding of the possibilities of the pictorial form and hence it is the logical prerequisite of digital image processing (ibid., 80). The relational interdependencies are also discussed for color contrast and color convergence, but it remains an open question whether color can be regarded in the same principal way as immanent pictorial relations are. 2.2   Images as Possible Ways of Seeing In Wölfflin’s theory Wiesing then identifies a topic that will be central to his own thinking throughout the following works: the analogy between representational forms and forms of intuition (ibid., 87). Immanuel Kant’s transcendental aesthetics states that intuitions are structured by principles that are not derived from the objects but by intuition itself. Other than transcendental aesthetics, Wiesing holds that formal aesthetics does not want to explore the conditions of possibility of perception but describes the forms of intuitions in their historical, cultural and even corporeal variety. With recourse to Wölfflin, he argues that “the style of an image determines the condition of its pictorial surface” and “so does the condition of the eye inform the style of a perception” (ibid., 99). The perceiver thus is not conceived of as a disembodied mind, but rather as an embodied, encultured being with varying corporeal and intellectual conditions. This way of conceptualizing aesthetics and the perception of art differs from the Kantian disengaged view of perception. According to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose works influenced Wiesing’s thinking to a great extent, Kant conceptualizes seeing as a way of touching. In that regard, he carries on the Cartesian tradition. Only haptic differences can be translated into numbers and thus be a subject to computation. According to Wiesing, modern science describes perceptual structures only insofar as they are computable or measurable. In contrast to that, formal aesthetics is all about the possibilities and various ways in which the world can be seen. In a Kantian twist, Wiesing states something that may count as programmatic for his own thinking: If perception frees itself from all services and purposes, then the criterion for better or worse ways of seeing disappears, then the role of evaluation und use value of ways of seeing is taken over by purely formal work on its immanent logic. This freedom is not the least of what sustains art: something is shown in order to show that this, too, is a way of showing. (Ibid., 106)

Along the lines of Konrad Fiedler’s (1841–1895) works on formal aesthetics, Wiesing shows how this theory opens up a perspective on art beyond beauty. The formal analysis of images discloses more than what is represented, it discloses the way the objects can be seen. The style of an image does not only make something visible, it is visible itself and hence makes ways of seeing visible.

  LAMBERT WIESING 

927

Seeing something also means that one cannot see how one sees. Fiedler and Wölfflin do not understand images as truthful representations of ways of seeing. There is no ontological claim about the way perceptions exist (ibid., 114). Rather images invent possible ways of seeing and the perception of images influences on how we can perceive the world. The perceiver thus does not see through the image into an only visible world, rather it is a seeing with images. If one for examples sees a landscape in Provence in one of van Gogh’s painting, he or she might perceive the actual sight of that landscape somehow with van Gogh’s eyes: “In this sense even objective perceptions are engaged and suffused with the images that constitute the independent dimension of meaning on conditioned consciousness” (ibid.). 2.3   Style versus Beauty: The Pure Visibility of Images as a Medium of Artistic Reflection With Fiedler, Wiesing develops a third central point that will become important in his work from thereon. This is the step away from an aesthetics that emphasizes content and beauty as a standard to judge artworks by, as for example idealistic positions do. In the perspective of formal aesthetics, it is visibility itself that becomes the main characteristic of images. Fiedler, despite of working earlier than Wölfflin, takes formal aesthetics one step further into modernity. He argues that artworks should neither be judged by content nor by epistemological value (e.g. representing ways of seeing), as Wölfflin still holds. In that regard, formal aesthetics is a strictly non-medial approach: Images are regarded only by their internal structures, not by content. The visibility of images, as Wiesing puts it, is a visibility sui generis (ibid., 161). It is a pure visibility independent of any physical entities. The space that images open to sight is free of any physicality. The tree visible in a painting will not grow or wither. Images establish a realm of visibility that is an independent form of being. They do not create appearances or illusions, but give rise to an independent form of visibility (ibid.). Such an aesthetics does not need to work with a claim to artistic truth. Rather it opens the perspective of images as a field of endless variations of visibilities and the invention of new forms of images. Wiesing takes formal aesthetics as the theoretical path to modern art and digital imagery. In general, he differentiates between static and dynamic images. In his analysis of four different types of visibility he brings up a new topic: the fixity or respective dynamic or freedom of visibility in images. This topic leads directly to the discussion of the status of digital images and computer simulations. 2.4   Varieties of Images Wiesing argues against the idea that film frees images from their fixity. A fish portrayed in an easel picture is frozen, the medium does not allow for any movement. The visibility of the fish is dissociated from its physicality, it is

928 

Y. FÖRSTER

isolated from any physical underpinning. In film Wiesing goes on quoting Robert Musil, the fish can swim, its visibility is set free. That according to Wiesing is not quite right, since the medium of film determines the movements of the visible objects completely. In that sense movement does not yet loosen up the fixity of pure visibility. This only happens with the advent of the digital image. A fish portrayed in the medium of the digital is a third category beyond static and dynamic pure visibility: it is “manipulable pure visibility” (ibid., 133). That means computers let the perceiver interact with the image and manipulate it. The digital image of a fish for example can be manipulated for various purposes: Be it to generate new versions of fish-images or to subject the fish to digitally enabled variation. In his more recent book on Artificial Presence (2009) Wiesing stresses that the digital images enhance our ability to imagine possible scenarios beyond the capacities of the human mind. The digital image allows for countless variations and thus the perceiver becomes an active user. In that regard, digital images are fundamentally different from dynamic images in films. The digital image becomes more emphatically a being of its own kind, it gains a form of reality that transcends pure visibility that is entirely fixed or determined by the medium. Wiesing goes one step further and discusses computer simulations as yet a fourth category of pure visibility, one that reintroduces physicality and interaction into the image. The prime examples here are videogames and computer simulations as epistemic means of research. Simulated visibility becomes a virtual reality (Wiesing 2016, 136) that obeys its own laws and exhibits a life of its own. This strand of argumentation becomes even more relevant with computer simulation based on self-learning algorithms. Wiesing ends his investigations into the history of formal aesthetics with an inquiry into the relation of phenomenological reduction and formal aesthetics on the basis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908–1961) work. This analysis leads up to the liminal form of abstract paintings and their way of open designation without denotation (ibid., 184). The central problem with regard to liminal forms of images such as abstract or monochrome ones and even video clips is how to conceptualize their ways of showing. Wiesing discusses the option of treating those kinds of images like a formula that is not a sign for something but rather only describes the “form of a possible sign” (ibid., 187). How phenomenology contributes to a theory of images and the topic of liminal forms of visibility will be discussed with regard to more recent works in the next sections.

3   Phenomenology of Images: Enriching Image Theory Through Reduction Phenomenology is the prevailing method of thinking in Wiesing’s work and he links it conceptually to formal aesthetics, which reduces images to their infrastructure (ibid., 157). This methodological step remains unconceptualized within formal aesthetics, but is in depth reflected in phenomenology. Wiesing’s

  LAMBERT WIESING 

929

approach can be seen as a hybrid of formal aesthetics and phenomenology. The latter does not only afford a methodological approach but also a more detailed analysis of images as objects of perception. Other than the Husserlian reduction of contents of consciousness to the acts of consciousness, the phenomenological reduction with regard to images leads to the surface of the image. That surface stands between the perceiver and the image object or subject. The act of reducing or suspending our everyday convictions about existence and the mode of being of things, the world and ourselves, the phenomenological epoché brings phenomena into view that otherwise stay hidden or unthematic. Wiesing uses Husserl’s phenomenology of the image to broaden the horizon of formal aesthetics and introduce the topic of perception into the theory of images. According to Husserl, consciousness of images is a special kind of perception, other than Jean-Paul Sartre, who holds that is a special kind of imagination (Wiesing 2007, 43 ff.). Husserl describes the perception of images as conflict of two types of perception: the perception of the image as material object and the depicted image that appears on that surface. What makes objects appear in images is the style. Style as the infrastructure of images is set into an analogy with ways of seeing, with processes of perception. Analyzing styles thus means researching structures of perception and imagination (ibid., 58). The topic of perception of images is deepened in Wiesing’s recurring work on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty holds that perceiving is necessarily an embodied act of a subject that first and foremost is a body situated in an environment and that means the perceiver is just as visible as the objects of her perception. Seeing as an embodied act always entails a way of seeing that includes the perspective one takes toward an object, the bodily state one is in, the memories triggered by the situation, and much more. The principle of perception as being situated not only in time and space but in a much more complex situation can be described as tainting perception, giving it a certain style. Perception just like images has an internal structure, a syntax. This syntax is not exhausted by the Kantian forms of intuition. Merleau-Ponty gives a rich description of the embodied and embedded perceiver and her becoming with the objects of perception. Seeing thus is a dynamic, individual phenomenon of an embodied person (ibid., 71). With Merleau-Ponty, Wiesing argues that describing the style of images is describing a potential way of seeing. And this is precisely what can be seen in images if one does not only pays attention the depicted object but the style of an image. In this sense images contribute to the investigation of the visible world (ibid., 76). In his investigation of the liminal forms of images such as abstract and monochrome paintings or collages, Wiesing takes phenomenological approaches as starting point. With Merleau-Ponty he argues that there is more to see in an image than the object depicted. The style can be analyzed with no regard to the object: the vectors, lines, depth—the whole sum of entangled and intertwined elements form a net of pure relations (Wiesing 2016, 173) that can be analyzed as the foundation of the pure visibility constituted through an image. In changing the perspective, Wiesing holds that abstract paintings

930 

Y. FÖRSTER

should be genetically interpreted from the perspective of paintings that show objects: Abstract paintings show forms that could be used to show or depict objects (ibid., 174). They are a peak into the ontological foundations of purely visible objects. In that regard, abstract paintings do something similar to phenomenological investigations: they make structures visible that underlie the visibility of pictorial objects and thus they use reduction to arrive at those basic structures just as phenomenology uses epoché to arrive at the basic acts of consciousness. The question when an image is to be considered art can also be answered along the lines of phenomenological theory. Wiesing argues that artworks are never perceived for what they are (e.g. a material object hanging on a wall) but for their excessive qualities that lead attention beyond the pure materiality. Works of art like Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire are not perceived in order to get information about the landscape or because of its objective materiality. Rather, artworks from the perspective of phenomenology need to meet two criteria: One is that something is not simply taken for what it is, for example, the painting as colorful surface, but for something else, for example, a landscape in Provence on a summer noon. Secondly, according to Wiesing there needs to be an experimental take to it. Artworks in his view show possibilities of sensory experiences and ways of presentation. The question in art thus would be: And how else could something be made visible? Artistic practice is thus likened to Husserl’s eidetic variations—the attempt to understand being more fully through intellectual variation. The difference to Husserl’s original idea of the eidetic variation is that Wiesing does not claim that art arrives at an understanding of essences. It is much more about opening up possibilities and doing experiments, whose results have not been determined beforehand (Wiesing 2007, 125).

4  Enhancing Imagination by Means of Images Wiesing’s approach to images is always closely linked to the idea that the realm of pure visibility is a playground for imagination. He explicitly defends formal aesthetics from the accusation to miss out on many essential aspects of images for the sake of reduction to the infrastructures of their surfaces. To some extend this criticism has a point: aspects like institutions, social and cultural practices and also the history of art are not as relevant in formal aesthetics as in other theories. The strength of the phenomenological approach as Wiesing defends it, lies in the ability to account for novel forms of art in general and images in particular. He takes images as a materialized form of thinking, which especially holds true for artworks (ibid., Chapter VI) as well as for digital images (ibid., Chapter I and Wiesing 2009). Here, art is conceived of as a meditation on potential visibilities. And those visibilities in turn open up a fast field for perceptual variation. Wiesing explains that images in particular share with perception the intuitive availability of content. With thinking they share the irreality of the intentional object. Another analogy between images and thinking is the

  LAMBERT WIESING 

931

fact that both equate, to speak with Friedrich Nietzsche, things that are not equal (Wiesing 2007, 34). A concept can stand for a huge variety of different individuals, like the concept of a leaf for a huge variety of actual leaves. The visible forms on the surface of an image have a similar function. Just like concepts they are aim at something they are not. Colors and forms are synthesized in order to show something else or beyond themselves: an object that is purely visible such as a painted leaf. In this sense images represent a form of thinking or reflection in the medium of pure visibility. When it comes to digital images this becomes even more clear. A computer simulation is a pictorial means to do research. The visualization of complex dynamics produces a pure visibility with an agency of its own. The visualized process must follow certain constraints, or as Wiesing would frame it: its own physicality. By introducing an open and complex dynamic with a certain set of rules, one can carry out experiments for the sake of gaining new knowledge exclusively within the realm of the visual. The appealing feature of new media is not necessarily the production of new visibilities, as Wiesing pointed out in one of his lectures, it is a new capacity of imagination. Many would hold that digital images are indeed new form if visuality, but that is not the decisive point here. Rather the digital image gives the user an unprecedented medium to enhance human imagination beyond its own limits. Architects for example can render most complex architectures and whole environments and climate research can simulate weather on a planetary scale.

5   Images and the Philosophy of Perception The idea that new media enhances human cognitive capabilities is a commonplace in philosophy of media. Bernard Stiegler for example argues that technology has always shaped human cognition (Stiegler 1998). He argues that every development in the evolution of human cognition has been linked to more or less complex technologies. This makes for a very broad concept of technology that includes the forming of cognitive groups, the development of the capacity to share intentionality (e.g. understanding the pointing of a finger as an attempt to guide the attention of others toward an object). Michael Tomasello on the other hand argues that those capacities have emerged within human cognitive evolution as social and cultural practices (cf. Wiesing 2013, 10). That can as well be seen as a social technology from which arise certain higher capacities like having a concept of the mind, language and storytelling. Storytelling again can be regarded as a tool or technology to enhance imagination, similar as Wiesing claims it for images: Stories allow to imagine possible states of affairs and even possible or impossible worlds just as images invent possible ways of seeing. Whether one defines that as a form of technology or as a social practice is to be debated. In any case, there is a difference to Wiesing’s theory: the lines of reasoning just presented tell a story about the genesis of consciousness and perception. It is of no importance if one speaks of a biological evolution or a socio-cultural techniques—both tell a story of the origin and development of

932 

Y. FÖRSTER

human capacities. Wiesing aims at another point: he does not take origins into view. His theory is not a theory of the evolution of human imagination by means of images. Quite on the contrary, he argues in his works on The Philosophy of Perception. Phenomenology and Image Theory (2014) that there is no gain in looking at the evolution or neuroscience of perception if one wants to understand it from a philosophical perspective. In this work, which in German bears the peculiar title Das Mich der Wahrnehmung. Eine Autopsie (“The me of perception. An Autopsy” (my translation)), is somewhat difficult to read in translation, since the way Wiesing uses language is important for his theory. That is the case in a few of his more recent publications, such as Sehen lassen. Die Praxis des Zeigens (2013). His take on the philosophy of perception radicalizes a thought of Merleau-Ponty, who argues that the categories of subject and object are a priori given, but emerge from a primordial contact of living beings and their surroundings. Subject and object thus are procedural categories. Living beings are shaped by their environment just as a niche or an environment only becomes one, if an organism is embedded in it. Merleau-Ponty describes subject and object as co-emergent specifications of a primordial undifferentiatedness. Nevertheless Merleau-Ponty backs this idea by engaging in a dialogue with biology and neuroscience of his time. Wiesing takes a far more categorical approach and argues that philosophy should not work with models in a way science does and quite a few philosophers too. He especially criticizes the infamous myth of the given as well as its counterpart, the idea that perception is always mediated by interpretation. Both theories in his view use models (that in principle are not means of truth-finding and can only be falsified, never verified) to explain perception and this is a problem: “In philosophy, a model is a ground for discussion, but never the satisfying result of a philosophical refection. A discussion may begin with models, but it may not end there” (Wiesing 2016, 13). His theory of perception holds that the existence of perception is the ground from which we must build every theory. This is how he arrives at the peculiar title—the me of perception: In his view perception has primacy over the subject. The perceiving subject only becomes through the reality of perception. He calls this way of thinking inverse transcendental philosophy, whose task is “to describe exactly the specific force specific intentional experience exerts on me” (ibid., 128). At this point he turns back to image theory, which he mentions in the title of his work The Philosophy of Perception and comes to a surprising conclusion. Images that figure as enhancers of imagination throughout his writings here become a means of pausing human perceptive involvement. Perception always entails a subjective perspective, being temporarily simultaneous with the events of perception, being bodily situated and embedded in the perceptive world. Perception is always a form of engagement with a situation. Images are different. The perceiver is not embedded in the world portrayed by images and is not subjected to their internal constraints, contents or events:

  LAMBERT WIESING 

933

As intense as artificial participation in a strange and intangible reality may be, the state of viewing images remains an inner-worldly pause in participation, because the viewer, although he can sympathize with events in the image, is always relieved of the obligation to take a personal part in the pictorial event. (Ibid., 153)

The pure visibility of images is thus of a different quality than the visibility of other, physically present things. The purity of this visibility and the freedom from physical constraints of the depicted object are characteristics of the image itself. With regard to the perceiver there is yet another difference: the perception of images does not exert the same force to participate or to engage as in real-world perceptions. We can take a pause from the affordances of perception while looking at images. This view however is controversial since contemporary image studies in Germany predominantly stress the power of images and hence a form of agency of images.

6   Images and Agency Wiesing’s most recent book dedicated to images, Sehen lassen. Die Praxis des Zeigens (2013), is a study concerned with the concept of pointing/showing or letting see (sehen lassen). With his argumentation, Wiesing develops a middle ground between evolutionary theories of the act of showing and phenomenological ones. He holds that the former is not a theory of showing per se. Rather, evolutionary biology treats acts of showing or pointing to something as one step toward the evolution of higher cognitive capacities like language (ibid., 10). Phenomenological theories on the other hand describe such acts as a human capacity sui generis which is different from language. Wiesing himself holds that there is at least a similarity with language, when something is shown to someone, as it happens in images: there are rules how images can show something or let someone see something (ibid., 14). Those rules are cultural forms of indication. The central question concerning images is: who is showing what to whom and by what means? To answer such a complex question Wiesing firstly reflects on three possible positions on how images can show something: the theory of images as constituting illusions (ibid., 55 ff.) and the phenomenological theory (Edmund Husserl, Günther Anders, Jean-Paul Sartre, to name a few) of images as producing phantoms (ibid., 66 ff.). The third approach he calls new mythology of images. In this category, he subsumes theories that hold that images themselves have a certain form of agency. That means images are understood as affecting the attention or gaze of the beholder and are thus seen as performing or indicating themselves. Wiesing then proceeds to several in-depth analyses of different kinds of images and their forms of indicating or presenting visibilities. From a comparison of pointing with fingers and showing by means of images he discusses central perspective, images in museums, photography and the relation of images, indexes and signs. With this study, he offers an original contribution to the recent discussion on the power or effectiveness of images in image studies. Given the

934 

Y. FÖRSTER

predominance of images in media and especially in social media, the question of how images unfold their effectiveness is important. Wiesing discusses this school of thought under the heading of the new mythology of images. When he speaks of myths or mythology there is criticism on the horizon. Just as he criticizes the myth of the given in his philosophy of perception he also criticizes the idea of images as possessing a certain form of agency. Wiesing makes very clear that in his view it is always someone showing something by means of images. Crossing out that someone from the equation means building a myth of non-human or object agency. Even if such a way of putting things is mostly metaphorical, Wiesing holds that such an anthropomorphization of images is a symptom of a bigger theoretical tendency to ascribe human capacities to other objects or organs. This is especially ubiquitous in neuroscience or neurophilosophy, where the brain is attributed with agency, emotions and cognition that are all human capacities, not capacities of an organ that the brain itself is (Förster 2017, 165 ff.). Wiesing formulates his critique of theories that ascribe agency to images by discussing two central positions. Firstly, one can argue that showing is not necessarily an act: Günter Figal (2010) for example holds that images show objects without possessing agency (ibid., 83). Showing or letting see (sehen lassen) is according to Figal possible without ascribing agency to an image. Wiesing argues that there are two ways of showing: One is pointing (pointing to something or guiding one’s attention toward an object), or showing as presenting something (ibid.). Both, he argues against Figal’s theory, are necessarily forms of agency. The second line of thought is discussed by using Horst Bredekamp’s theory as an example for the idea that despite the danger of an object-magic (Dingmagie) (ibid., 84) scientific theories need to accommodate the fact that images act. Bredekamp (2017, 282) argues for a right to life for images. Images according to this theory are ethical subjects. Wiesing holds against such a theory that it always is and only can be the producers of images that show or make the recipient see something by means of images. Such a clear-cut distinction of producer, media and recipient is not always tenable. That can be exemplified with scientific images such as fMRI images. Those images are results of computational processes, hence there is no producer with the intention of creating a meaningful image present. These images nevertheless create a scientific reality with implications for human self-understanding, scientific and political practices. Similar problems arise with images and memes in social media. In this case image theory faces the problem of images that have no traceable origin or any fixed meanings. The whole debate about fake news is one indicator of the political dimension of pictorial rhetoric that needs to be captured theoretically (Förster 2019, 176 ff.). In such cases, image theory needs to integrate an analysis of complex medial structures. The question of pictorial agency thus can be shifted to a wider scope of interactive medial complexes. Wiesing’s own theory has great merit in describing the plurality of pictorial forms and ways of presenting. His focus on the visibility of image as a visibility sui generis opens up a huge field of potential inquiries into the development of

  LAMBERT WIESING 

935

pictorial expression and its relation to language and other forms of expression. His work situates image theory within the larger context of philosophy of perception. In this regard image theory bridges the gap between intuition and concept, between pure visibility and symbolic signification.

7   Further Reading For a phenomenological inquiry into the world of comics, there is a short work by Wiesing and Balzer on the invention of comics (2010). A rather new study that is not so much concerned with images but put the phenomenological method to use on the topic of luxury has been published in 2019. Wiesing’s most recent book Ich für mich (2020) is the logical result of his scholarly biography: there he puts the pictorial categories of painterly and haptic to use in a phenomenology of self-awareness. He asks, in what way I am given to myself and explains this giveness as a style that can be described like an image. Such an endeavor shows how far reaching the impact of image studies can be.

References Balzer, Jens and Wiesing, Lambert. 2010. Outcault. Die Erfindung des Comic. Bochum and Essen: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag. Bredekamp, Horst. 2017 [2010]. Image Acts. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency. Translated by Elisabeth Clegg. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Originally published as Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Förster, Yvonne. 2019. “Artificial Intelligence. Invisible Agencies in the Folds of Technological Cultures”. In: The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence. Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms. Ed. by Andreas Sudmann.  Bielfeld: Transcript. Förster, Yvonne. 2017. “Effects of the Neuroturn: The Neural Network as a Paradigm for Human Self-Understanding”. In: The Human Sciences After the Decade of the Brain. Ed. by Jon Leefmann and Elisabeth Hildt. London and San Diego: Elsevier. Figal, Günter. 2010. “Bildpräsenz. Zum deiktischen Wesen des Sichtbaren”. In: Zeigen. Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, Christian Spies, and Sebastian Egenhofer. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Das Primat der Wahrnehmung. Ed. and epilogue by Lambert Wiesing. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wiesing, Lambert. 2020. Ich für Mich. Phänomenologie des Selbstbewusstseins. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Wiesing, Lambert. 2019. A Philosophy of Luxury. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Wiesing, Lambert. 2016 [1997]. The Visibility of the Image. History and Perspectives of Formal Aesthetics. Trans. by Nancy Ann Roth. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Originally published as Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes. Geschichte und Perspektiven der formalen Ästhetik. Frankfurt/M and New York: Campus Verlag.

936 

Y. FÖRSTER

Wiesing, Lambert. 2014 [2009]. The Philosophy of Perception. Phenomenology and Image Theory. Trans. by Nancy Ann Roth. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Originally published as Das Mich der Wahrnehmung. Eine Autopsie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Wiesing, Lambert. 2013. Sehen lassen. Die Praxis des Zeigens. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Wiesing, Lambert. 2009 [2005]. Artificial Presence. Philosophical Studies in Image Theory. Trans. by Nils F. Schott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published as Artifizielle Präsenz. Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Wiesing, Lambert. 2007. Phänomene im Bild. München: Wilhelm Fink.

Gottfried Boehm Rahel Villinger

Gottfried Boehm (b. 1942) is a German art historian, philosopher and founding director of the SNF research center (NCCR) “Bildkritik/Iconic Criticism” (eikones) at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Since the mid-nineties, his work on the question of the image has made a relevant contribution to the development of Bildwissenschaften (Image Studies) and to a consequent transformation—especially to a shift in theoretical and methodological approaches— of art history and related academic disciplines in the German speaking world. Boehm’s approach to images, for which he coined the term “iconic criticism”, is influenced by phenomenology, hermeneutics, literary theory and continental philosophy since Immanuel Kant. It is characterized by an insistence on the singularity of images and the binding of any research into the “logic” of images to historical examples. This article introduces Boehm’s work along the line of three related key concepts: iconic turn, iconic criticism and iconic difference. Boehm received a doctorate in philosophy in 1968 from the University of Heidelberg, where he had studied with and written his thesis on perspective in early modern art and theory under the supervision of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The influence of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and its relation to the history of philosophy remain noticeable throughout all of Boehm’s later works, in which the author pursues his development of “iconic criticism” in close connection to different strands of academic philosophy. Central to this approach is a critique of philosophy’s so-called linguistic turn in the twentieth century. Boehm, who has always primarily understood himself as an art historian (Boehm and Mitchell 2009, 106), obtained his final academic qualification (the German “Habilitation”) in art

R. Villinger (*) University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_56

937

938 

R. VILLINGER

history in 1974 and later became professor of art history at the Universities of Bochum and Gießen in Germany, and then from 1986–2012 at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Nevertheless, his arguments proceed from a theoretical standpoint that the history of philosophy had taught him; and that particular standpoint is—within the landscape of philosophy, interdisciplinary aesthetics and image theory today—by no means self-evident.

1   From Critical Turn to Iconic Turn Boehm’s answer to the question “What is an image?”, that his by now canonical 1994 anthology first posed explicitly cannot be adequately understood unless one takes its philosophical background into account—the background from which Boehm came to ask this question in the first place. Boehm’s historical-­critical approach to a conception of “the” image—as a singulare tantum—goes all the way back to Kant’s “Copernican turn”. That is, it presupposes the insight that empirical reality is not given independently of human subjectivity and its sensible conditions of experience. In twentieth century phenomenology, in Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer, perhaps the most influential figures in Boehm’s writing, this Kantian thought is extended further to the extent that human subjectivity is now recognized as embodied, plural (always already related to others) and historical, mediated by historically changing cultural norms and symbolic forms. In his quest for the image, Boehm rejects ordinary language realism, the “naïve objectivism” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009, 105) which assumes that images are isolable objects of a certain kind given within an overall stable order of the real that is adequately and sufficiently analyzable independent of any consideration of the changing historical, medial and sensible conditions of human experience that have brought forth and shaped the world we inhabit (Boehm 2007, 202–204). Images of all kinds belong to this world and to these conditions, and the relations of these images to that which can be called reality is therefore not a simple ontological matter. Boehm’s approach implies, firstly, that images have the power to change, impoverish or enrich the world and the way we perceive the world—the author speaks with Gadamer of a “Zuwachs an Sein” (“increase of being”, Boehm 1978, 451; Boehm 1994, 332). Second, in the course of (art, media, and intellectual) history, the production and reception of images itself brings forth changing conceptions of the image and its relation to reality, and image theory should not ignore these self-conceptions inherent in any image. We will return to this below, when we shall see why Boehm considers the term “iconic criticism”—as opposed to for example, “image theory” or “visual studies”—the most appropriate term for any theoretical and/or other scholarly approach to images. In its most fundamental sense, a historical “iconic turn”—according to Boehm—thus goes back to Kant and to the history of ideas since Kant. With regard to continental philosophy and Western intellectual history more generally, it begins to take place at the end of the eighteenth century, when Kant

  GOTTFRIED BOEHM 

939

argued against G. W. Leibniz that human sensible intuitions (“Anschauungen”), that is, the concrete forms of perception of objects in space and time, are fundamentally irreducible to concepts. For this reason, human imagination in Kant assumes an indispensable epistemic power which mediates between forms of intuition and concepts of logic in bringing about a coherent experience of a world governed by objective laws of science. Anything that we might encounter as an object in this world is thus itself already image-like, a product of human imagination: it is a piece of bare and brute materiality, and yet clearly appears as some thing, presents itself already synthesized, spatiotemporally unified, imbued with a meaning that transcends sheer materiality. As Kant argued against Leibniz—and herein lies the key relevance of his critical philosophy for Boehm’s iconic criticism—this meaningfulness of objects of experience is not reducible to conceptual (logical) meaning. The history of thought after Kant further advances the position that meaning and the production of meaning cannot be completely subsumed under a universal logic of concepts but always retains an irreducible metaphorical, iconic or figurative aspect—important stations along this path being Early German Romantic theory, Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphorology, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernst Cassirer, French phenomenology, Hans Blumenberg and especially the reception of Kant’s ontological and epistemological account of imagination from Fichte to Heidegger and Gadamer. In this sense, the term “iconic turn” denotes a development of a certain line of philosophical thought that had already begun more than two hundred years ago. Its core ideas have crucially influenced the development of modern art and modern art’s critique of a reductive concept of image as mere re-presentation (Abbild) of an independently given reality. In the continental tradition of philosophy and poetics since 1800, iconic artifacts are, like metaphors of language and other figures of rhetoric, understood as poietic, as producers of reality rather than its secondary copies (Boehm 1994, 15–17). However, what Boehm means by “iconic turn” incorporates several—at least five, I suggest—different yet interconnected layers of sense. In addition to and in direct continuation of the above, it also means a turn after or in reaction to the so-called linguistic turn (Rorty 1967), which is most often dated to around the beginning of the twentieth century. For Boehm, the line of critical thought that constitutes an iconic turn both criticizes shortcomings of and pushes further insights that led to positions generally subsumed under the idea of a linguistic turn, such as for example, the positions that all thought and meaning (what ancient Greek philosophy called “logos”) has a linguistic structure, that there is no reality—or at least no reality that we can objectively investigate—beyond or independent of language and that philosophy can therefore be nothing else than an investigation and critique of language. For Boehm, it is a fundamental metaphysical mistake, historically traceable to Plato’s Republic, to conceive of an image as a merely illusive or deceptive (and thus inferior) representation (Abbild) of an object that already exists independently of and prior to the image. Such an account conceives of image as

940 

R. VILLINGER

analogous to the metaphysical conception of the appearance of a permanent substance or being, which is expressed in linguistic propositions that attribute predicates to substances (‘S is P’). According to this traditional metaphysical view, the ever-changing sensible appearances of empirical objects are distinguishable from their substantial being. Think, for example, of how a tree appears differently in winter (without leaves) and summer (with leaves), but can nevertheless be referred to throughout the year as the same identical tree. The analogous conception of an image, for Boehm, is fundamentally flawed, because the being and logos of an image rests on the very indistinguishability between its being and its appearance (Boehm 1978, 450–453). According to Boehm, the being of a visual, iconic artifact just is (inseparable from) its permanent transition (Übergang) into appearance. It is a temporal process of visual presentation. Thus, a picture “is” nothing but and nowhere but (in) the process of a transition of anything that may be contained “in” the picture—into visible appearance. (Boehm, at least in his early essays, nevertheless resists abandoning the terminology of a “being” of iconic appearance with reference to pictures, as he wants to emphasize that an image is not an entity inferior to reality, a realm of deception or mistaken illusion, Boehm 1978, 450). In this way, the logos of the image escapes the logos of propositional language. It ultimately belongs to a common metaphorical, figural and pictorial basis of human culture through which meaning was established in image practices long before the conceptual distinctions of metaphysics came to shape the now predominant scientific view of reality. The iconic turn thus criticizes the linguistic turn by arguing that reality is not constituted through linguistically structured logical language alone, but that it also includes irreducibly imaginary aspects, meaning created in the sensible field of visibility. The iconic turn can thus also be said to push further certain insights of the linguistic turn, for example, by arguing that language itself cannot be reduced to logic or to a closed system of discrete linguistic signs but is itself always already made up of images: rhetoric, figurative speech and so on. As Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Blumenberg and others have argued, philosophical concepts are founded on metaphors (Boehm 1994, 13–14). Jacques Derrida’s critique of “logocentrism” can also be understood as an example of a productive iconic criticism of the linguistic turn (Boehm and Mitchell 2009, 105). In a historical context in which the philosophy of language, literary theory and deconstruction were flourishing, Boehm “wanted to show that […] a cryptic image debate was taking place […] that comprised positions by [in addition to authors mentioned above, RV] […] Hans Jonas, Bernhard Waldenfels, Michael Polanyi, Max Imdahl and others”, such as Jacques Lacan and Meyer Schapiro (Boehm and Mitchell 2009, 104)—all of whom Boehm chose as contributors for his 1994 anthology Was ist ein Bild? (What is an image?), on which he had been working since the mid-eighties. For since the late seventies, the guiding question of Boehm’s own writings had already become: “How do images create meaning?” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009, 106) This question, as Boehm understands it, presupposes as certain that images do

  GOTTFRIED BOEHM 

941

have a proper, genuine and irreducible way in which they create meaning, that is, that there is a genuinely iconic logos, a way images produce meaning that cannot be reduced to the structure of a linguistic proposition (‘S is P’): Those who are fascinated by images in the most fundamental way, those who have thoroughly examined and analysed great numbers of them and possess what one could call an image-sense, know with certainty that there is such a thing as an iconic intelligence that the artist restores in order to free himself from the demands of language, from canonical texts, or from other mimetic instances, and to establish evidences of a unique type. (Ibid.)

For Boehm, the presupposition of an “iconic intelligence” is certain because it is based on visual experiences that anyone fascinated by and acquainted with images has had. It is thus Boehm’s work experience as an art historian that led to his personal and professional “iconic turn” in the late seventies, when he first tackled the difficult question of how to address and describe an iconic logos in his monumental essay “Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes” (Boehm 1978). As we shall see in the course of what follows, this essay already develops the key concept of iconic difference as well as almost all of the other central conceptions of Boehm’s iconic criticism. And as we shall also see, Boehm’s particular way of approaching the image-quest, his specific “method” (which is at the same time not a method, or at least not to be mistaken as a “transparent ideal of a method”, Boehm 1978, 444) of iconic criticism is developed here and elsewhere through an intimate exchange with core authors and conceptions of literary criticism, such as (theories of) Nietzsche, Benjamin, Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida, and others. It is a common feature of both literary criticism and iconic criticism, a feature which distinguishes both from academic philosophy and other strands of theory, that their arguments develop out of an analysis of singular artworks or other cultural artifacts, from one or more particular texts or images or other materials, and that they let this or these work(s)—at least in part—speak for themselves. (If the art of both literary and iconic criticism consists in the talent and ability to—not only, but always also—let artworks speak for themselves, one may add that this is intimately dependent upon what Boehm in the passage quoted above calls an “image sense” and what one could, analogously for the study of literature, call a “poetic sense”). This brings out a fourth and central meaning of the term “iconic turn” in Boehm. For Boehm, it is art history itself, and in particular the history of modern art from the nineteenth century to contemporary art, which has explicitly turned to the question “What is an image?” (Boehm 1994, 326–327). Modern art has placed this question at the heart of its—both iconoclastic and image-restoring—image practices, which reveal a “transformed iconicity” and may thus correct a too narrow conception of an image construed for example, on the model of the Renaissance panel painting (Boehm 1994, 36–38). The task of iconic criticism and of any proper image theory that may be derived from it is, according to Boehm, inseparable

942 

R. VILLINGER

from a study of (the history of) image art and of an analysis of an “iconic turn” inherent in this art and its history itself. While most of Boehm’s own writings do not emphasize the intimate connection of an iconic criticism immanent in images to the historical, social, global, and/or cultural context in which these images were produced and received, he would not deny that an analysis of this connection belongs to iconic criticism in its fullest interdisciplinary and contemporary sense (this point is reflected in several research proposals for the SNF/NCCR “Iconic Criticism” at the University of Basel). This, finally, leads up to the last—if also in the author’s own writing the least important—sense of the term “iconic turn” in Boehm: it denotes the global cultural and medial turn that began after 1945 (with an increase in visual advertising, the development of TV as a mass medium, etc.) and has accelerated since the end of the twentieth century through the unprecedented increase in the volume of images and other virtual realities that are now part of a digitalized world.

2   How Images Create Meaning: The Iconic Logos Boehm has tackled his guiding question—“How do images create meaning?”—in different articles and essay collections since 1978 (see e.g. Boehm 1983; 1985; 1989; 2008; 2010; 2017). In answering the question, he time and again proceeds from an analysis of singular image examples, often from an analysis of works of modern art such as paintings by van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Mondrian, or Tobey. Part of this strategy and part of Boehm’s argument itself is to show the reader—to make the reader see—with images and through images, how images actualize their genuinely deictic potential: their power to establish a logos of an irreducibly non-predicative type. Image theory must verify its arguments through singular image examples because the iconic creation of meaning is fully accessible only in the act of perception (Boehm 2007, 34–36, 52; Boehm 2011, 173): We cannot merely think images; we can ultimately only see how an image produces its view of reality. This does not imply a kind of idealism according to which the meaning of an image would be entirely subjective, up to the viewer. However, as we shall discover below, on Boehm’s account it implies the insight that an image awaits its beholder, that it has assembled a unique iconic potential that awaits realization through the eye—an actively seeing eye—of the viewer: “It is only the seen image that has in truth fully become image” (Boehm 2007, 49). As opposed to other kinds of media, images “do not exist as general technologies but in a characteristic singularity” (Boehm 2007, 36). That is to say, each image unfolds its iconic intelligence in a particular, unique way. Nevertheless, it is possible to speak “in indeterminate generality” (Boehm 2011, 170) of the image, to delineate the structure of an iconic logos in general terms. Boehm proposes to do this with the concept of “iconic difference”, which denotes the deictic form of organization inherent in any iconic artifact (Boehm 2011, 171). It is this form that makes an image an image—and indeed

  GOTTFRIED BOEHM 

943

any artifact or technical product that fails to establish the potential of such difference cannot count as a proper image (wirkliches Bild) on Boehm’s account. Iconic difference is a visible difference or “contrast” that develops and articulates itself temporally, as a “continuous discontinuity” or “transition” (Übergang) between the simultaneously perceived, opaque, and impenetrable material “ground” (Grund) of an image and its indefinitely many discrete and distinguishable elements, which can only be perceived in succession. Such elements may be, for example, single brush marks or spots of paint on a canvas, formally analyzable aspects such as perspective, proportional relations, or different identifiable (parts of) depicted objects. The “ground” of an image, by contrast, is that indefinite totality of a visual artifact which is perceived by the gaze as simultaneous and impenetrable—as a mere unthematic field, as an indeterminate, sheer sensible materiality, which, taken simply as such, could mean nothing at all. Whenever we see an image, we always already perceive one within the other: distinguishable elements of an iconic artifact within an indeterminate sensible materiality. According to Boehm, an image is the visible appearance of a particular, determinate meaning within the continuous indeterminacy of a sensible field, configured through a particular interplay of the visually distinguishable, discontinuous elements in it. It is the core thesis of Boehm’s iconic criticism that any image generates a contrast between an indistinguishable ground and distinguishable elements such that the something (x) which the image makes visible, that which becomes apparent or emerges in it, is not given, empirically identifiable and stable, but always already something other than what a merely recognizing (wiedererkennender), identifying gaze would suppose. In other words, what an image shows is its iconic difference—in some sense a gap or “fissure” (Riß), positively formulated: a transition—between what it would have seemed to show and what it actually shows. A veritable image thus shows or (deliberately!) hides or plays with the fact that its meaning or pictorial object is by no means a simple and self-evident matter of fact, but that the very establishment of such meaning or object involves highly intricate presuppositions—a principally infinite iconic potential or logos that escapes any reductive definition of the image as a mere reiteration or copy of something antecedently given (such as e.g. the definition “image i depicts object p”). Even though there are of course images that depict antecedently given objects—such as for example, the series of Cézanne’s paintings of the pigeonry near Aix—an image shows always more and other than simply that. The meaning of an image is therefore not dependent on the subjectivity of the beholder; she does not project it onto the image. Nevertheless, precisely because images surprise us, because they “do not elongate the flights of reality in which we act, but stand out and step out towards the viewer”, they “enter a dialogue” (Boehm 2011, 174) with her: looking at her, reversing her view, inviting an interaction. As Boehm formulates it, the actively seeing eye “is in the image” or partakes in the “event” of the image, because an iconic difference “has antecedently created a place for the viewer” (ibid.) there.

944 

R. VILLINGER

Boehm’s iconic “contrast” or “difference”, which tears open a space for different, changing configurations of sense to manifest themselves, is thus not the difference between the material vehicle of an image (Bildträger), such as for example, canvas and paint, and its purely immaterial or unreal “unwirkliches” object (Bildobjekt). Boehm rejects the latter differences, which play a constitutive role in many image theories, from Edmund Husserl to Lambert Wiesing or most recently Wolfram Pichler and Ralph Ubl (2014). Iconic difference in Boehm’s sense is not a dualistic conceptual distinction (material/immaterial or real/unreal), but properly to be understood as a temporal and visual “event” (Ereignis) awaiting and awakened by the embodied eye of the viewer. Just like the opaque ground of an image, its visually distinguishable elements, which are silhouetted against the ground in a changing, oscillating manner, cannot be fully separated from their materiality—nor could they ever completely rid themselves of their imaginary dimension—think for example, of the perceptible physicality of color application. In some images, it is precisely the materiality of paint that stands out, that becomes apparent and meaningful. In these cases, the iconic logos of the image have arranged to show just that. For Boehm, modern art is particularly capable of showing iconic difference as such, to make precisely its iconic potential stand out. In the same way, it is often overtly occupied with posing the question “What is an image?”, thus pushing the spectator to confront this question. Modern art therefore both challenges and facilitates iconic criticism in an extraordinarily helpful manner. It can be said to criticize itself, to contain within itself its own iconic criticism and image theory: “Modern art offers itself as an incomparable workshop of knowledge, which allows us to critically question the conventional concept of the image” (Boehm 1994, 327). This is certainly one, if not the main reason for Boehm’s intensive study of modern artworks. However, it is by no means an exclusive definitional criterion of “modern” art. In images of any culture and any historical time period, iconic difference can be laid bare or be hidden (Ubl 2017, 12). And indeed the very fact that different image cultures exist, each with their own history, presupposes, in Boehm’s account, the possibility or power of images “to each articulate iconic difference differently, to make it come out more or less strongly or even to neutralize it” (ibid.).

3  The Visibility of Time In his preface to an anthology of essays by Boehm, Ralph Ubl states that he believes “the most important thesis” of Boehm’s entire work on images is that “[i]mages are temporal entities (Gebilde)” (Ubl 2017, 10). In light of the account of iconic difference above, we can now see why this is not so far-fetched. Images are temporal entities—what is that supposed to mean? One can approach a first answer to this question by clarifying what it does, in Boehm’s account, not mean. Clearly, images are physical objects subjected to decay, objects that exist in measurable time. And clearly, they are also results of a

  GOTTFRIED BOEHM 

945

measurable timeframe of artistic production as well as occasions for a measurable temporal (psychological and/or cultural) process of reception. While all of this is indisputable, it is not, however, what Boehm’s account of an essential temporality of images is getting at. The time of an image, moreover, cannot be reduced to the fact that images may well depict temporal actions—a point that famously fascinated Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Rather, as Boehm argues, images themselves primarily unfold and structure time. They are eminently forms of time, not merely forms subjected to or forms existing in time, and also not merely forms that may represent time. As seen above, iconic difference in Boehm is itself a temporal transition, a temporal process of configurating sense through the contrast between pictorial ground and pictorial elements. For the actively engaged beholder of “strong” images—in Boehm’s terminology, these are, as opposed to “weak” images, images whose iconic potential has not been annihilated (see more on this below)—this results in the experience described above: what an image shows, the meaning it creates, is always already other than what one would have identified it as. Thus, images are essentially temporal entities because the very difference that constitutes and endows them with their deictic intelligence is a temporal one. The position can thus also be formulated in terms of an indistinguishability between the being as such (Sein) of an image and the temporal-­ visual appearance (Erscheinung) of a certain configuration of sense in it. Boehm’s remark, that “the event [of iconic difference] […] implies the space of history” (Boehm 2011, 173) must accordingly be understood in light of this essential temporality of images, too. In the passage cited, Boehm does not simply intend to remind the reader that contents of pictorial representation, artistic forms, and styles, iconology and iconography change through the course of time and differ from culture to culture. Rather, the point is that all of these historical and cultural changes are inseparable from changes in the ways and manners of images to organize their iconic potential of representation and thus from changes in the very conception of iconicity (Bildlichkeit) that each image negotiates in a unique way. What this implies for art historians and critical image studies is a certain methodological imperative of historical research: Images are not simply subject to an “outer” history within which they can be located and which has supposedly changed and continues to change them—the artistic practices that produced them, their forms and styles, their contents and objects, and so on—through time. If this were the case, one could simply derive the art history of any culture from the general history of this culture, from events or developments (like wars, territorial expansions, invasions, new technical developments, scientific, political and other cultural revolutions etc.) that may in principle be conceived of as extrinsic to or at least to a certain degree as independent of the existence of any individual image. The mistake of this narrow conception of art history or image history is that it neglects the power of images to write history themselves—both their (art, media, and image) history and the general history of human culture. Instead, Boehm’s account demands not to ignore factual

946 

R. VILLINGER

history, but to always also read the historical knowledge inscribed in the iconic logos inherent in that image itself. This perspective first of all invites research into historical communication from image to image(s)—a conception of art history as a kind of iconic criticism where the agents of this criticism are the images themselves, which return to their older predecessors in order to cite them, to adapt, change, revert or otherwise criticize not only their forms, styles, objects and manners of representation but also their very conceptions of iconicity. Second, Boehm’s position offers the possibility of discovering that images have anticipated, pre-formed and effected far-reaching changes in human culture (or even perhaps the emergence of human culture as such) as well as more specific historical events and developments. Third, it offers the possibility to read from an image a different account of the past (different from how history has so far recounted it, but possibly correct) and/or plausible alternative accounts of how history might have developed (even if it did in fact not develop that way).

4  Strong Images and Weak Images From this point of view, we can return to Boehm’s rejection of the idea of an image as a mere re-presentation (Abbild) or “substitute” of an antecedently given object or meaning. This rejection is intimately connected to Boehm’s distinction between “strong” and “weak” images and respective “strong” and “weak” image practices, that is, a distinction between different ways images are produced, understood and used (Boehm 1994, 35, 342). Strong images overtly articulate and reflect their potential for iconic difference while the iconic difference of weak images has been almost or entirely neutralized or suppressed. Boehm therefore also refers to weak image practices as “iconoclastic” (Boehm 1994, 35), as they tend to destroy that very power of iconic appearance that constitutes the being of an image as such. First of all, Boehm concedes that it is sometimes “methodologically necessary and legitimate” to conceive of and consequently use an image as a “substitute”, for example, as a mere document or testimony of the meaning of some event, action or state of affairs that has not been “established” (begründet) through the image itself but already existed prior to and independent of this image (Boehm 2007, 42). Think, for example, of how photographs can function as evidence in legal trials. Note however that this use of images often presupposes that the meaning of an image has not been changed through the form and manner of its iconic representation, but has remained untouched by it, identical to its prior reading. Boehm further concedes that this conception is by far “the historically most successful and most common image practice”—and perhaps unavoidably so (Boehm 2007, 43). For Boehm, though, it also amounts to “the weakest” (ibid.) possible use and conception of images. For it is a practice that understands and uses images as mere duplicates of an allegedly given and stable reality. It thus neglects the insight that iconic artifacts, like all cultural artifacts that have established a manner of representing human reality,

  GOTTFRIED BOEHM 

947

never merely duplicate antecedently established meanings of that which they represent. They neglect the insight that the artifact’s way of re-presenting an object or a historically factual state of affairs also changes or even establishes the meaning intrinsically connected to that object or state of affairs in the first place. This position does not amount to the view that there are no historical facts and thus no historical truths, and that everything is relative to presentation and interpretation. The position does, however, insist on the truth that all facts that may count as facts in a political, cultural, and scientific world stand in need of interpretation. Otherwise, they would mean nothing at all to us, for they would not even be intelligible—they would be nothing but brute material somethings. Ideally, however, the interpretation (of the relevance and meaning of a “fact”) would be established through practices of supplying scientific evidence, contested, reasonable arguments leading to consensus within a broad community—and would not be dependent on the arbitrary perspectives of individuals or groups. In the specific case of images and the meaning(s) they generate, this means that those cases where images are being used as representations of facts call for iconic criticism: a discussion of the highly diverse ways in which the image in question may be read, and an overt explication of the unique power of this image to establish the meaning it conveys on its own terms. For this reason, Boehm argues that weak image practices are “iconoclastic”. This is remarkable since perhaps most “images” that exist today in the digital world would count as “weak images” in Boehm’s sense, that is, as images whose iconic potential has been annihilated. What has been intentionally or unintentionally destroyed or neutralized in these images is their iconic difference, an iconic logos that makes the real power of an image overtly visible: to affect and change the world we inhabit. This power is by no means innocuous. Boehm’s iconic criticism is eminently political in this way: a critique of ideology and image-propaganda formulated on a very general and fundamental theoretical level.

5  Iconic Criticism and Literary Criticism: The Paradox of Translation Boehm’s 1978 essay “Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes” (On a Hermeneutics of the Image) overtly addresses the methodological challenge central to his conception of an iconic criticism: How can one study, speak, and write in language about a logos of supposedly non-linguistic kind? Indeed how can one even set out to demonstrate that the intelligence of non-verbal images is in fact, in a relevant and recognizable way, different from verbal language, if the only means available to do so must employ verbal propositions? Isn’t the aim of iconic criticism here revealed to be impossible from the outset in its circular, unfounded presupposition of that which it is supposed to prove? The first part of Boehm’s answer to these challenges has already been briefly discussed above. The only way to prove the existence of iconic difference and

948 

R. VILLINGER

its deictic way of establishing meaning in a visual field is through the exemplary—referencing individual image examples (pictures). It requires the openness and willingness of the reader or listener to actively follow the exemplary demonstration with a “seeing eye”. As Boehm puts it in a later article that still speaks of a “hermeneutics” of seeing with reference to methodology (Boehm 1992): The strategy of our argument is aiming at an articulated relation between eye and language, which carefully weighs their difference and kinship. The mute logos of the image will not really let itself be penetrated by the logos of speech, but both nevertheless belong to a common universe of shaded sense in which comprehension finds no end. Images are comprehensible in principle, and yet there is no sufficient translation of their visibility. They are addressed to the gaze which is capable of visually realizing them. (Boehm 1992, 55)

In reflecting on the “mute logos” of images, we are confronted with a certain undeniable limit to verbal language. There is no complete or sufficient linguistic substitute for the iconic logic of visibility. Ultimately, “we can only really experience and make visible” the iconic “ground” of pictorial sense “in” an image (Boehm 1978, 469). Boehm nevertheless presupposes in his arguments the certain if as yet “uninterpreted factum” (Boehm 1978, 467) that iconic artifacts not only are meaningful to us, but that we also can communicate our experience of an image and its iconic logos with the help of verbal language: Any “successful interpretation” (gelungene Interpretation) of a picture that others can follow and approve of demonstrates this factum. In contemplating and interpreting images, we always, if unwittingly, “make use of a secret comparability of image and language […], [which] is the ground of the possibility of the [intersubjective] communication about the matter [i.e., about an image, R.V.]” (Boehm 1978, 444). Boehm goes on to argue that this certain, if “secret comparability of image and language”, should be conceived of as a relation of translatability between two different kinds of media—between the “language” of visual images and verbal language (see ibid.). Insisting on this kind of translatability does not amount to negating the irreducible and irredeemable difference between verbal language and visual logos (see Villinger 2017). Even though no image can be fully translated into language—such that one could be in a position to produce a sufficient linguistic substitute of a picture—it is possible to translate between the two media so that the differences between original and translation are not erased but “preserved” (aufgehoben, Boehm 1978, 467), as Boehm argues with reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator”. This possibility of translation rests on a “common ground” shared by both media (Boehm 1978, 454–455, 468): a realm of cultural sense-production anterior to the logos of propositional speech (‘S is P’), which attributes

  GOTTFRIED BOEHM 

949

predicates (appearances) to real substances (being). It belongs to the “prehistory of thought and of becoming consciousness” (Boehm 1978, 469). It is the realm of metaphorein, of metaphoric, that is, figural or iconic transitions between being and appearance prior to any possible distinction between the two (i.e. between being and appearance). The aim of an “iconic turn”—especially if understood as an emergent focus of Boehm’s own work since the late seventies and of a broader academic field in the humanities since the turn of the century—thus includes opening up new perspectives on and inviting further research into the preverbal foundations of human culture (Boehm 2007; Boehm and Mitchell 2009). Any “successful” and communicable interpretation of an image—that is, a translation between the logos of iconic visibility and the logos of verbal language, as outlined above—also necessarily implies the translation of this ground or foundation. The translation thus at the same time preserves the difference between pictorial and verbal language and reveals (translates) their common metaphoric ground: the metaphoricity of both verbal and pictorial sense. According to Boehm, there is a test for any interpretation of a picture as to whether it has achieved this end. The interpretation amounts to a genuine translation in this twofold sense (preserving difference while revealing the commonality of both media) if and only if the direction of the translation is reversible, that is, if it is, at any moment of the interpretation, possible to translate not only from pictorial into verbal sense but also the reverse: from a verbal assertion into the deixis (showing) of a visibility. “Re-translation into the original medium of the image” is the only way of testing “whether the language of interpretation has landed on (getroffen hat) (i.e., has hit on or found the right expression, RV]” (Boehm 1978, 456).

References Boehm, Gottfried. 1978. “Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes”. In:  Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften. Ed.  by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gottfried Boehm. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Boehm, Gottfried. 1983. “Mythos als bildnerischer Prozess”. In:  Mythos und Moderne. Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion. Ed.  by Karl-Heinz Bohrer. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Boehm, Gottfried. 1985. “Mnemosyne. Zur Kategorie des erinnernden Sehens”. In:  Modernität und Tradition. Festschrift für Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed.  by Gottfried Boehm, Karlheinz Stierle, and Gundolf Winter. München: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 1989. “Im Horizont der Zeit. Heideggers Werkbegriff und die Kunst der Moderne”. In: Kunst und Technik. Gedächtnisschrift zum 100. Geburtstag von Martin Heidegger. Ed. by Walter Biemel and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Boehm, Gottfried. 1992. “Sehen. Hermeneutische Reflexionen”. Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1: 50–67. Boehm, Gottfried (ed.). 1994. Was ist ein Bild? München: Wilhelm Fink.

950 

R. VILLINGER

Boehm, Gottfried. 2007. Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 2008. “Augenmaß. Zur Genese der ikonischen Evidenz”. In: Movens Bild. Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, Birgit Mersmann, and Christian Spies. München: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 2010. “Das Zeigen der Bilder”. In:  Zeigen. Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren. Ed.  by Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Christian Spies. München: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 2011. “Ikonische Differenz”. Rheinsprung 11  – Zeitschrift für Bildkritik, 1: 170–178. Boehm, Gottfried. 2017. Die Sichtbarkeit der Zeit. Studien zum Bild in der Moderne. Ed. by Ralph Ubl. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried and Mitchell, W.  J. T. 2009. “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters”. Culture, Theory & Critique, 50 (2–3): 103–121. Rorty, Richard (ed). 1967. The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pichler, Wolfram and Ubl, Ralph. 2014. Bildtheorie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Ubl, Ralph. 2017. “Vorwort”. In: Die Sichtbarkeit der Zeit. Studien zum Bild in der Moderne. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm and Ralph Ubl. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Villinger, Rahel. 2017. “Der Übersetzer der Bilder”. In: Die Sichtbarkeit der Zeit. Studien zum Bild in der Moderne. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm and Ralph Ubl. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.

Georges Didi-Huberman Andrzej Les niak ́

Georges Didi-Huberman (born in 1953 in Saint-Étienne) is a French scholar, directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His work spans many disciplines including philosophy, art history, anthropology; the common point of his works is the interest in images conceived and understood as a transdisciplinary object of research. Didi-Huberman’s published work consists of more than forty volumes and numerous articles. A significant part of George Didi-Huberman’s work is devoted to questioning the most fundamental assumptions of art history. Thus, his endeavor can be called—in reference to Michel Foucault’s influential L’archéologie du savoir— “the archaeology of knowledge of the image”. The French scholar develops an archeological critique of disciplines in which image is the main object of knowledge; he researches the history of notions, discourses, and ways of writing about images. In Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (published in English as Confronting Images: questioning the ends of a certain history of art) he examined the discourse of art history and its metaphysical assumptions; he demonstrated very clearly that the discipline’s “tone of certitude” is based on a forgetting of its history. The noble discipline is analyzed as a discourse creating superficial and illusory categories of knowledge, unable to answer in a proper manner to the experience of the visual. Didi-Huberman questions both “components” of art history as discipline: It should go without saying that the element of history, its inherent fragility with regard to all procedures of verification, its extremely lacunary character, ­particularly

A. Leśniak (*) The Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_57

951

952 

A. LEŚNIAK

in the domain of manmade figurative objects—it goes without saying that all of this should incite the greatest modesty. The historian is, in every sense of the word, only the fictor, which is to say the modeler, the artisan, the author, the inventor of whatever past he offers us. And when it is in the element of art that he thus develops his search for lost time, the historian no longer even finds himself facing a circumscribed object, but rather something like a liquid or gas expansion—a cloud that changes shape constantly as it passes overhead. (Didi-Huberman 2005, 2)

It is not surprising that such a radical challenging of epistemology of art history would lead the French thinker to call into question the prevalent ways of thinking and writing about the visual. His endeavor is marked in its entirety by this sort of distrust outlined above: a distrust that touches both the object of inquiry and the conditions of possibility of knowledge. In Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images, Didi-Huberman examined the temporal model of art history as well as proposed his own solution to the problem of historicity of experience. The discussion is focused on the problem of anachronism which is considered—at least by those historians that adhere to positivist principles of method—a sin of historical practice. It consists of merging of objects or events belonging to heterogenic temporalities; in this view, every anachronistic interpretation of the past is essentially false because it explains what belongs to a particular moment in time with a reference to an incompatible context. Didi-Huberman has an opposite vision of things. According to him, historical knowledge is only possible as a result of anachronic experience, of temporal contamination. As a consequence, it is also necessary to rethink epistemic procedures of those disciplines in which images are objects of cognition. Images belong both to the past (as they usually come from contexts unavailable to us) and to the present (when they are experienced, interpreted…). Hence, writing about images ought to give an account of temporal complexity of visual experience. Only anachronic history exists; it means that to realize what “historical life” is—it is Burckhardt’s phrase—one needs to base historical knowledge on more complex models of time, on multiplying memories, on fibers of heterogeneous times, on rhythms recomposed with different speeds. (Didi-Huberman 2000, 39)

Anachronism, instead of being historian’s cardinal sin, becomes the condition of possibility of historical research. Instead of avoiding anachronism, he chose to reevaluate it in order to elicit its positive epistemic effects: the effective rendering of experience of images (and of every object belonging both to the past and the present time), and interpretational openness. Didi-Huberman’s way of writing challenges more standard poetics of image history and theory. In his view, images can never be exhausted by philosophical concepts or art-historical descriptions.

  GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 

953

Of course, the experience must be upheld, contextualised, historicised, theorised. But I know that in the end, the image will remain there, irreducible, in front of me. Neither knowledge (as many historians think) nor the concept (as many philosophers think) will ever quite grasp it, subsume it, resolve it, or redeem it. The image passes us by. […] Writing about images means above all writing. It means expressing in spite of everything that which initially appears to be an experience of the inexpressible. It is writing the inexpressible, or something based on it, while preserving it. (Potte-Bonneville, Zaoui 2006, n.p.)

Didi-Huberman’s way of working is thus twofold: on the one hand, he acknowledges the necessity of creating knowledge, of developing intellectual tools in order to grasp what is real. On the other hand, he considers images to be objects that resist cognition. The irreducibility of visual experience is a challenge both to the way of writing about images and to the most general epistemic assumptions of the human sciences. At the same time, one has to admit that Didi-Huberman’s poetics can easily be considered excessive. Stijn De Cauwer rightly asks about the relation between the stylistic effects of writing and the necessity of holding on to the object of research: Doesn’t Didi-Huberman, with his love for expressions such as “making images dance” and “the art of the sleepwalker”, his interest in Bataille’s informe, Marcuse’s “political Eros” and Eisenstein’s “Dyonisian” montage, his views on “galloping” images and images as “butterflies”, threaten to lose himself in the pathos he believes images can transmit? How can the right balance between imagination and the empirical search for knowledge be maintained? (De Cauwer 2018, 137)

De Cauwer’s concerns are legitimate but I believe that it is fair to say that Didi-­ Huberman takes the risk of stylistic extravagance precisely because he tries to convey in his work the particularity of image and attempts at founding his interpretations on singular visual experiences. Didi-Huberman avoids generalizations; He follows here the steps of Michel Foucault whose distinct way of structuring his books consisted of—among others—commencing them with expanded analyses of singular objects: be it institutions, works of art, or events. Didi-Huberman seems to be even more radical in this respect as he only follows the work of images considered as particular, material objects. Hence, his poetics is not subordinated to some general theory, but is in every case a singular response to the experience of the visual. Images are thought to have theoretical qualities; they are not reduced to mere illustrations or objects of analysis, but are figures organizing interpretations and generating notions. Even his most theoretically advanced volumes dealing with the discipline of art history are crystallized around analyses of particular objects. In Devant l’image the interpretations of Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Fig. 1) and Vermeer’s View of Delft (Fig. 2) prefigure the necessity of rethinking the complexity of painterly representation and make the reader think about images in Freudian, or—to be precise—symptomatic terms.

954 

A. LEŚNIAK

Fig. 1  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 73.5  ×  112  cm; Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

Didi-Huberman shows that iconological interpretation of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is built not only upon linking the image with the mythological story which is considered to be its source, but also upon forgetting about the materiality of the painting and, the necessity of deciding what it is in the painting that lets us identify the figurative scene as a representation of the mythological Icarus. In French thinker’s view, the scraps of white paint in the right bottom corner of the painting—considered from the iconological standpoint as representing either foam of sea waters or feathers falling of Icarus’ wings— are in fact undecipherable. Their sheer materiality does not lend itself to any unequivocal reading; on the contrary, they question its very possibility. Similarly, Didi-Huberman points at details of Vermeer’s Lacemaker (Fig. 2). The thread is depicted in a way that resists interpretation; the materiality of paint dominates the depicted figure. […] this vermilion thread becomes, strictly speaking, unidentifiable, save as painting-­in-action; its form is dominated by its material, and its status as representation by the quasi, in which dimension it is precarious, neither distinct nor clear: it is perhaps “thread-like,” but it is not painted “like thread”; it is painted like paint. (Didi-Huberman 2005, 255)

Didi-Huberman unveils the logic of the dialectical contradiction which is at work at the very surface of the image. The traces of paint, bound to represent threads, question the very work of representation. Their materiality is considered by the French thinker as an agent that undermines the process of

  GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 

955

Fig. 2  Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker, ca. 1669–1671, oil on canvas, 24 × 21 cm; Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons (in public domain)

figuration. Emmanuel Alloa has described the logic of Didi-Huberman’s critique of iconology and the extrication of the sensible from the order of the language: […] iconology looks to the eikon for the confirmation that it has achieved parity with the logos and thus proceeds, whether one likes it or not, with yet another necrosis of the visible, reducing the visible to the sayable […]. Didi-Huberman goes on to emphasize another type of resemblance, determined not by the adaequatio of the sensible to the intelligible form, but by a somehow formless resemblance to which Georges Bataille alluded (La Ressemblance informe): lateral resemblance, resemblance of decomposition, resemblance without clear outlines and hence without recognition (La Ressemblance par contact). (Alloa 2018, 106–107)

In Alloa’s view, Didi-Huberman aims at constructing another type of relation between image and language. While iconology is based on the domination of the sayable, the French author attempts at finding the moments of discontinuity in this seemingly unequivocal paradigm. In his view, the exchangeability of the visible (le visible) and the legible (le lisible) is often troubled by the experience of the visual (le visuel), that is, of images that cannot be reduced to what is signified.

956 

A. LEŚNIAK

The analyses of Vermeer and Breughel are at the core of Didi-Huberman’s discussion of art-historical ways of looking and thinking. His critical approach is only made possible by relying on detailed readings of images. However, the crucial role of particular objects and their singular interpretations is even more striking in case of his books and writings on contemporary artists. Series called Fable of the place (Fable du lieu) is comprised of several volumes; each of them is devoted to an artist. But they do not resemble art historical monographs. Didi-Huberman abandons art-historical conventions in order to write in response to particular experiences. Hence, the text becomes less bound by academic conventions, more personal, and its theoretical frame tends to be very closely related to the particular visual experience narrated in the text. He does not use any preconceived theoretical frame, but constructs it in accordance with the visual object. And it is only in the frame of this strategy that Didi-Huberman puts flesh on notions: for example in L’homme qui marchait dans la couleur (Didi-Huberman 2001), devoted to James Turrell, he refers to one of his most effective ideas—to anachronism. Turrell’s works—in particular Blood Lust from 1989—are confronted with medieval pala d’oro from St Marco basilica in Venice; French thinker’s interpretation focuses on these works’ ability to create space filled only with color, and, thus, to convey absence. In Didi-­ Huberman’s view, absence is here rendered present both in contemporary work and in space created several hundred years ago. His personal account of visual experience contributes to a redefinition of the notion of installation. It is used not only to describe Turrell’s work, but also to change the way one can think of pala d’oro: the anachronistic operation consisting of using the notion of installation in an unusual context amounts to change in our understanding of the medieval object and in the range of the notion of installation itself. Didi-Huberman’s importance for the study of images also stems from the fact that he has reworked in a very original way the relation of visuality and the political. It is a logical consequence of his early criticism toward certain ways of functioning of the discipline of art history, or, the politics of art history. In his view, the reverence for the discipline is grounded in its ability to produce and accumulate knowledge, as well as in its role as a base of institutional system of museums, galleries, fairs, and biennials. But it also means that art history is the “cogwheel and guarantor of an art market that never stops outbidding itself”. (Didi-Huberman 2005, 2). As such, it is thought to exercise authority: to construct hierarchies, to consolidate particular ways of producing knowledge, to define and strengthen borders between itself and other discursive fields. In later works of Didi-Huberman the distance toward the discipline and the questioning of its politics—albeit still present—gives way to the questioning of politics in a larger sense. In his view, it is important to find alternatives both to direct political engagement and disengagement in the academic field, and, more precisely, in the field of image studies. The former position tends to reduce the object of inquiry to a simple tool of political action; the latter squanders the political potential of the image itself. One might say that the French thinker adopts here a realist perspective,

  GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 

957

namely, the one that takes into account the very conditions and possibilities of action that are at stake in the social position of an academic. Didi-Huberman is thus very reticent about political engagement; in his view, the only effective political strategy consists of critical interventions: interpretative operations inducing affective responses. Hence, image studies are not to be considered a prelude to any kind of political action; instead, their political value might well stem from their very center. Working with images, interpreting and reinterpreting them, is the only way a scholarly practice can be political; every interpretation (and every gesture of mounting, of sensible work with images) can be a political intervention in the sense that it enables the viewer to take position in respect to social reality: “Images can set us apart from action, but they place us right in the heart of fear. Or at least they underline, draw, and accentuate fear” (Potte-Bonneville and Zaoui 2006). Even if direct political action cannot be advocated in case of an academic, working with images enables critique or critical intervention. It makes us understand, feel, and empathize with the subjects of political actions. This perspective seems to be shifting in some of the projects of the end of the past decade (Didi-Huberman 2016; 2019). As Stijn de Cauwer has noted, In his most recent works, including the Soulevements exhibition, Didi-Huberman has focused his attention on gestures indicating the desire to rise up against a situation of oppression. The pathos expressed by these gestures is not only the desire for an uprising but also mourning the victims of oppression and exploitation, the failure of an uprising and the transformation of sadness about oppression into revolutionary indignation. (de Cauwer 2018, 140)

Didi-Huberman’s slight change of focus does not mean, however, that his attitude toward engagement has drastically changed. He has not renounced to work with images; on the contrary, he still intervenes within the realm of the visual and questions the possibility of any direct activism in his area of expertise. His particular position in regard to the question of the political is outlined in analyses of politically engaged contemporary artists. I would argue that his ideas are not only formulated or inscribed in dialogue with them, but emerge as responses to their practices (Leśniak 2017). The French scholar writes about political interventions: formal experiments, especially montage, considered as a means of questioning the unity of meaning of the image. Montage consists of decontextualization and recontextualization of the visual and as such, it amounts to avoiding the totalitarian use of images. Instead, it enables the viewer to construct his own position without the danger of subordination to particular political program. The very idea of political intervention stems from Harun Farocki’s visual strategies; in Remotages du temps subi, Didi-Huberman interprets several films by the German artist and underlines the effects of mounting and editing (Didi-Huberman 2010, 71–195). In a commentary to a well-known Images of the World and Inscriptions of War (1988), he points out Farocki’s ability to demonstrate the logic of visuality subordinated to the state

958 

A. LEŚNIAK

apparatus. The German director studied here aerial views of the vicinity of Auschwitz concentration camp made during the World War II by the allies. But the camp itself was not spotted as proof of its existence was not the aim of the mission. The photographers and the analysts were looking for the exact location of IG Farben factory; the camp, with details revealing the presence of inmates, such as footpaths in the snow, went unnoticed. The subordination of the visual to the state-controlled technical apparatus of viewing is further demonstrated by mounting: archival images are arranged against visuals showing the mechanisms of aerial reconnaissance systems. Didi-Huberman comments on the constellations of images built by the filmmaker underlining their epistemic efficacy. Mounting makes them readable; filmmaker’s procedure is considered by the French thinker as a condition of readability of the visual. Similarly, Didi-Huberman seems to consider his own role as an extension of filmmaker’s work; his intervention consists of making images even more readable. His comments can be called minimal or frugal; he does not interpret the visual with the help of any pre-existing theoretical stance, but develops the meanings already present in filmmaker’s work. Similarly, this strategy is evident in his comments to Farocki’s Respite (2007) (Fig. 3). The film itself is a montage of archival materials made in Westerbork, Nazi transit camp situated in the Netherlands during the World War II, by one of the inmates. The director only used the original archive material and added several captions. Farocki makes the archive material more readable, but he does not settle for a single interpretation of it. The captions make the images easier to understand, but at the same time, they introduce interpretational uncertainty. For example, a sequence showing inmates playing football is captioned “Are these prettifying images?”. Thus, it is clear that director’s minimal intervention

Fig. 3  Harun Farocki, Respite (40 min.), 2007, screen capture (fair use)

  GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 

959

results in making the sequence both more legible (because the caption directs the viewer’s attention toward the question of representation of Nazi camps) and more problematic (because it questions at least some of the potential reading of the sequence). Didi-Huberman’s comments follow this strategy: they make filmic images more legible but at the same time point at multiplicity of meanings of the visual. Didi-Huberman’s intellectual project is firmly rooted both in the general tradition of Western critical thought, and in a more narrow field of post-­ structural French humanities. He develops crucial critical approaches to visuality: Freudian symptomatology, Benjamin’s reflection on the image, and the work of Aby Warburg, among others. The particularity of his own stance is that he does not only refer to well-established concepts, ways of thinking and beaten paths, but finds critical possibilities in marginal discourses, and texts of apparently secondary importance. He follows the steps of French thinkers who in the 1960s and 1970s created, developed, and—finally—criticized the structuralist ways of thinking about visuality, namely Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch, two philosophers and art theoreticians working at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Their respective projects transgressed the borders of the discipline of art history; they had both explored particular visual objects, their proper ways of creation of meaning, and their theoretical or reflexive value. Louis Marin, who in the 1960s was a member of Groupe de recherches sémio-­ linguistiques led by Algirdas Greimas, aimed at transforming the humanities according to the model of linguistics. Art history was also the target of this attempt. Still dominated in France by positivism and iconology, it was supposed to introduce the semiological perspective in order to make it universal, scientific, and objective. The interpretation of images was to be rendered possible thanks to establishing the possibly most universal model of representation in painting as a practice of creation of meaning. But this scientific ambition associated with structuralism has quickly faded as it did not survive the confrontation with the variety of historical forms of art. Thus, Marin develops more self-reflexive practice of analysis of historical forms of representation (Marin 2006). Modern representation was considered by Marin as rooted in history; as a consequence, its theory ought to be based on descriptions of representation as a particular, historically present, material object. Along with Damisch (and many other prominent scholars, for example Daniel Arasse, Mieke Bal, Rosalind Krauss and others) he began to use the term “theoretical object” to describe material, visual objects that possess theoretical qualities; in other words, they enable reflection as they make apparent—thanks to their sheer materiality—the complexity of representation. Although Didi-Huberman does not refer to Louis Marin or Hubert Damisch very often (the references and citations of texts by these authors are scarce), one cannot overlook striking similarity of their respective ways of thinking. He continues Marin’s attempt to rethink the relation between history, theory, and materiality and conceives of images as particular and material conditions of

960 

A. LEŚNIAK

possibility of meaning, reflexivity, and history. Didi-Huberman remains rooted in the semiological tradition in the sense that his scholarly endeavor concerns the ways in which art, images, or the visual create meaning and question our pre-established notions. To be clear, he is not a semiologist per se. But one might say that Didi-Huberman draws the most radical consequences possible from critique of structuralism initiated by Marin and Damisch. Following them, he not only asks about the very possibility of knowing images, but also privileges singular visual objects as focal points of the experience of history and of theoretical reflection. Important characteristics of Didi-Huberman’s work are his attempts at reinterpreting crucial elements of modern critical thought. He rereads the texts of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno to uncover their critical potential in the domain of images. The reference to psychoanalysis enables the French scholar to rethink the status of knowledge of the image. His questioning of the discipline of art history consists of recognizing the necessary uncertainty in the very process of creating knowledge. In Devant l’image, his most important work, he relies heavily on psychoanalysis to build a model of knowledge on the image in which visuality is not entirely subjected to what is visible, thus readable. The relation between the visual and the visible had been determined by the modern perspective in which images are necessarily subordinated to text or language. For Didi-Huberman, it is this perspective that needs to be questioned, and, ultimately, overturned. And it is precisely my hypothesis that the history of art, a “modern” phenomenon par excellence—because born in the sixteenth century—has wanted to bury the ancient problematics of the visual and the figurable by giving new ends to artistic images, ends that place the visual under the tyranny of the visible (and of imitation), the figurable under the tyranny of the legible (and of iconology). (Didi-­ Huberman 2005, 8)

Iconology is here the guilty party; Panofsky’s version of the discipline is considered by the French scholar as unnecessarily reductive. In Didi-­ Huberman’s view the squandering of Aby Warburg’s legacy and vision of art historical and anthropological practice has defined the fate of modern art history as a discipline in which the complexity of visuality has been lost, reduced, or subjected to the model of pre-iconographical description, iconographical analysis, and iconological analysis. Images have become readable cultural signifiers. And psychoanalysis is precisely the language that permits to construct a viable theoretical alternative. This is why Didi-Huberman uses the figures from the field of psychoanalysis describing the work of dream images: the logic of symptom, displacement, and condensation, among others. The Freudian model of interpretation (along with its Lacanian version inspired by structural linguistics) becomes a frequently featured source of theoretical findings and explanations.

  GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 

961

Recovering two fields of knowledge, art history and psychoanalysis, Didi-­ Huberman creates the aesthetics of symptome, i.e. aesthetics that takes into account the overdetermination of the image. Overdetermined image is the image whose meaning is not closed or unambiguous, but open. Image possesses multiplicity of meaning; just like a network, it multiplies the possibilities of its readings. (Hagelstein 2005, 86)

The notion of “aesthetics of symptome” coined by Maud Hagelstein does not refer to any precise aesthetical doctrine, but to what one might call a general inclination of Didi-Huberman’s theorizing of the image. He does not use the figures from the psychoanalytical repertoire to subordinate the interpretation of images to a Freudian or Lacanian theory; instead, he superimposes several notions describing the work of dream on the discourse concerning visuality in order to introduce indeterminacy. Thus, psychoanalysis finds itself here to be highly instrumentalized: its notions are used as handy tools. They are meant to replace the very stable interpretative schemes fixed by iconology in the midst of the twentieth century and still in use today. In Didi-Huberman’s perspective, Panofsky’s method, as I have suggested above, consists of subjecting images to their textual sources. Hence, the metaphor of stability seems very plausible: visuality (as an object of reading) is entirely dependent on the texts that had been on its origin. Thus, it is logical that the French thinker’s critical strategy constructed in order to overthrow the supposedly dominant order of iconology is based on using discursive figures referring to instability, change, ripping, and rupture. Katia Hanza notes that the notion of symptom is employed by him to convey a certain mobility of the signifying process that is at stake in images. She says: “Didi-Huberman uses the notion of “symptom”, in terms of a “movement” that can account for the alternations of meaning operating surreptitiously in works of art” (Hanza 2014, 44). According to Hanza, the fundamental element of the psychoanalytic dictionary is used by Didi-Huberman to refer to the way in which meaning is created in art. Art’s work of representation needs to be read with respect of its instability and evanescence. Another crucial inspiration for Didi-Huberman’s conception of image is the work of Aby Warburg—both his textual corpus and the Mnemosyne Atlas. According to Didi-Huberman, the writings of German art historian should be considered a crucial alternative to dominating models of temporality in art history. Warburgian notion of survival—an answer to the question concerning the return to antique forms in the Renaissance period—transgresses the usual ways of modeling art-historical time. Formed within the context of Renaissance studies—a field associated by definition with revival and innovation—Warburg’s concept of survival assumed a ­temporal model for art history radically different from any employed at the time. He thereby introduced the problem of memory into the longue durée of the history of motifs and images: a problem that (as Warburg himself observed) transcends turning points in historiography and boundaries between cultures. (Didi-­Huberman et al. 2003, 273)

962 

A. LEŚNIAK

From Didi-Huberman’s standpoint, Warburg’s work presents a remarkable alternative to well-established ways of thinking in art history. Its eccentricity consists of questioning the borders of the discipline (especially its formalist incarnations) by adopting the anthropological perspective and sketching the necessity of establishing “nameless science”: a project aimed at describing the unconscious substrata of culture at large. Warburg’s hermeneutic circle can thus be figured as a spiral that moves across three main levels: the first is that of iconography and the history of art; the second is that of the history of culture; and the third and broadest level is that of the “nameless science” to which Warburg dedicated his life and that aims to diagnose Western man through a consideration of his phantasms. (Agamben 1999, 98)

One can say that Didi-Huberman follows the path of Warburg in the sense that he abandons the narrow categories of formalist and iconological art history in favor of a larger view. Warburg considered art history incapable of answering the most fundamental questions of the development of art in history. Similarly, Didi-Huberman tries to fracture the limits of art historical practice because—still largely dependent on iconological model or on positivist epistemology—it is unable to do justice to the work of the visual. Warburg’s categories are thus reinscribed by the French theorist in other contexts: for example, the notion of survival is used to underline the necessity of taking into account both the longue durée of the life of images, and the dimension of the collective unconscious. The texts of Walter Benjamin are also a frequent source of theoretical findings in the oeuvre of Didi-Huberman. Along with Warburg and Freud, the German thinker remains a constant inspiration; the questioning of the temporal model of art history, mentioned earlier, is firmly rooted in Benjamin’s attempt at reclaiming the complexity of the experience of time. As Benjamin says, the works of art are characterised by “specific historicity” [spezifische Geschichtlichkeit]: it cannot be discovered “in an extensive way”, thanks to a story of causes and effects, or a family story, as in Vasari’s case. It cannot be reduced to natural history. It deploys in many threads, “in an intensive way. (Didi-Huberman 2000, 87)

One might say that Didi-Huberman is in constant search of visual intensities: of images that at the same time reveal in a very specific way their historicity proper and let us grasp the sense of what is happening before our eyes. The Benjaminian notion of “dialectic image” signifying a constellation of the present and the past is referred to very often in the writing of the French scholar. Didi-Huberman’s perspective and writing poetics situate him off the center of the most prominent image studies’ discourses as of today. On one hand, his philosophical inquiries concerning the very possibility of knowing the visual make him drift further and further apart from the usual areas of interest of art

  GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 

963

historians, at least those representing the mainstream of the discipline. On the other hand, one could not classify him as belonging to the field of visual culture studies: even if he is greatly indebted to the critical tradition, his extraordinary emphasis on singular material objects as conditions of possibility of theoretical reflection is incompatible with generality and previsibility of interpretative models prominent in visual culture studies. Instead, his position is closely related to those contemporary thinkers who have broadened the scope of art-­ historical research and have embraced a more anthropologically oriented point of view: Hans Belting, Marie-José Mondzain, or Giovanni Careri. The particularity of Didi-Huberman’s reflexion on images is at the same time his attention to the material, to details of the visual, and the generality of his enquiries. He asks the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of images without assuming any stable philosophical position. What interests him is at the same time ontology and epistemology of images: how do images live and how can we know them. His work is groundbreaking for contemporary humanities and image studies in particular because he undermines the fundamental certainties reigning in the discipline of art history. The consequences of Didi-Huberman’s work for the field of image studies are of utmost importance. What is crucial is that he offers a new model of knowledge of images; a model which is not based on a general theory of image, but one entirely dependent on writing practice and particular experiences of the visual. In so doing, he fits well in some of the main development trends of humanities after post-structuralism: distrust of strong, univocal theoretical perspectives, emphasis on transgressing disciplinary borders, attention to the poetics of writing, and of knowledge creation. He does not only declare these principles or directions, but applies them in a radical way.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. “Aby Warburg and the nameless science”. In: Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. Ed. and trans. by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Alloa, Emmanuel. 2018. “Phasmid Thinking”. Angelaki, 23 (4): 103–112. De Cauwer, Stijn. 2018. “Searching for fireflies”. Angelaki, 23 (4): 133–149. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2000. Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Minuit. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2001. L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur. Paris: Minuit. Didi-Huberman, Georges. et al. 2003. “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time”. Common Knowledge, 9 (2): 273–285. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/41437. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images: questioning the ends of a certain history of art. University Park: Penn State University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2010. Remontages du temps subi. L’œil de l’histoire 2. Paris: Minuit. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2016. Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes. L’œil de l’histoire 6. Paris: Minuit. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2019. Désirer désobéir. Ce qui nous soulève, 1. Paris: Minuit.

964 

A. LEŚNIAK

Hagelstein Maud. 2005. “Georges Didi-Huberman: une esthétique du symptôme”. ∆αίμων. Revista de Filosofía, 34: 81–96. Hanza, Kathia. 2014. “Images and Symptoms: Georges Didi-Huberman’s Studies on Art”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 45 (1): 38–48. Leśniak, Andrzej. 2017. “Images Thinking the Political: On the Recent Works of Georges Didi-Huberman”. Oxford Art Journal, 40 (2): 305–318. Marin, Louis. 2006. Opacité de la peinture – Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu and Zaoui, Pierre. 2006. “Worrying about each image. Interview with Georges Didi-Huberman”. Vacarme, 37. https://vacarme.org/article1352.html [accessed 18 November 2019].

Index

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 2D stimuli, 503 8 and 1/2, 358 9/11, 316 2001: A Space Odyssey, 469 A Absolute science, 275 Abstract art, 3 Abstract expressionism, 187, 396 Abstraction, 67 Abstract Photography, 527 Abu Ghraib, 577 Achilles, 37 Action Painting, 112 “Acti/passivity,” 683 Active/male pleasure, 348 Acts of positing, 896 Actual fact, 436 Adam, 31 Adorno, Theodor W., 123, 275 Advertising images, 170 Aesthetic act, 441 Aesthetic attitude, 721 Aesthetic autonomy, 167 Aesthetic experience, 271 Aesthetic formalism, 93 Aesthetic game, 438 Aesthetic imprimatur, 852 Aestheticization of politics, 271

Aesthetic response, 720 Aesthetics of invisibility, 536 Aesthetics of symptome, 961 Aesthetic subconscious, 852 Affective consciousness, 286 Afterimages, 154, 333 Agoraphobia, 113 Aisthesis, 890 Aisthetic effects, 576 Ai Weiwei, 170 Alberti, Leon Battista, 81 Albertian perspective, 290 Alberti’s window, 330 Ale ̄theia, 634 Alfonso V the Magnanimous, 831 Algerian War of Independence, 569 Algorithmic culture, 523 Algorithmization, 236 Alhazen, 332 Al-Qaeda, 814 Altamira, 6 Amnesty International, 583 Amon-Re, 31 Ampofo, Akosua Adomako, 749 Anachronism, 952 Anachronistic interpretation, 952 Anachronization, 6 Analytic Cubism, 187 Anamorphosistic mirror, 331 Anatolikon, 57 Ancien régime, 168

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5

965

966 

INDEX

Ancient Egypt, 440 Anders, Günther, 933 Angelopoulos, Theo, 562 Animism, 837 Annunciation, 85 Anterior finality, 318 Anthropomorphism, 578 Anthropomorphization of images, 934 Anti-Albertian, 452 Anti-art, 184 Anti-transparency, 508 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 562 Apergasia, 47 Apollo, 704 Apparatus, 222, 335 Apparition as such, 274 Apparition event, 274 Apparition of a distance, 274 Appearance, 43 Appearance of things, 273 Appearing, 13 Appel, Helene, 449 Apprehension, 95 Appropriation, 6, 185 Aquinas, St Thomas, 30, 151, 559 Arab, 55 Arab optics, 77 Arab Spring, 816 Arasse, Daniel, 959 Arbitrariness, 641 Arbitrary signs, 434 Archintermediality, 662 Architextuality, 662 Archival images, 958 Archpictoriality, 662 Argumentation theory, 874 Aristotle, 37–49, 332 The Arnolfini Wedding, 17 Ars, 916 Ars electronica, 916 Ars moriendi, 827, 831 Art and Language Group, 659 Artavasdos, 60 Art history, 2 Artificial intelligence, 707 Artificial presence, 715 Artistic agency, 424 “As if” behavior, 368 Aspect-seeing, 483

Aspectuality, 487 Assmann, Alaida, 781 Associative visual agnosia, 720 Assyrian kings, 24 Astrology, 136 Aufhebung, 271 Augmented Reality, 236 Aura, 265 “Auraticizing,” 270 Autoimmunity, 818 Autoimmunity image, 818 Autonomous ego, 295 Auto-teleology of art, 169 Avant-garde, 114 B Baban, Sara, 569 Babylonian astrology, 139 Babylonian god, 26 Bacon, Roger, 332 Balzac, Honoré de, 436, 491 Bamiyan buddhas, 423 Banham, Reyner, 772 Banksy, 6 Banville, John, 662 Barnes, Julian, 661 Barth, Karl, 31 Barthelme, Donald, 203 Bataille, Georges, 122, 406, 953 Bauhaus, 234 Bauman, Zygmunt, 602 Baumgarten, Alexander, 560 Bazin, André, 562 Bearer of the gaze, 347 Bechdel, Alison, 539 Beck, Herbert, 907 Becoming-visible, 635 Beholder, 76, 138, 438 Beholder’s consciousness, 446 Beholder’s share, 487 Bellotto, Bernardo, 665 Benammar, Hanan, 569 Bentham, Jeremey, 560 Benveniste, Émile, 77 Bergman, Ingmar, 562 Beuys, Joseph, 266 Bigelow, Kathryn, 214 Bildbewusstsein, 478, 626

 INDEX 

Bilderatlas, 136 Bildkritik, 470 Bildlichkeit, 472 Bildobjekt, 370, 626 Bildphilosophie, Netzwerk, 875 Bildsubstrat, 626 Bildsujet, 626 Bildtheorie, 716 Bildung, 112 Bildungsroman, 13 Bildwissenschaft, 1, 703 Bing, Gertrud, 140, 142 Binocular subject, 331 Biological metaphor, 817 Biopictures, 816–819 Biopolitics of images, 811 Bioterrorism, 819 Biovisual, 566 Bipolar images, 819 “Bivalence” theory, 492 Black box, 212, 792 Black Box Theatre, 557 Black Lives Matter, 699 Blade Runner 2049, 5 Blas, Zach, 542 The Blue Rider, 116 Blumenberg, Hans, 829, 939 Blurred vision, 46 Böcklin, Arnold, 112 Bode, Wilhelm von, 136 Body image, 914 Boll, Franz, 136 Bonestell, Chesley, 242 Botticelli, Sandro, 135 Boullée, Etienne-Louis, 767 Bourgeois society, 183 Boyarsky, Alvin, 773 Breillat, Catherine, 562 Brener, Alexander, 184 Bresson, Robert, 562 Breughel, Peter, 828 Brewster, David, 154 Brockhaus, Heinrich, 135 Brown, Michael, 698 Brueghel, Pieter, 188 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 81, 450 Brunner, Emil, 31 Buckley, Craig, 773 Buddha, 905

967

Bulatov, Erik, 179 Burch, Noel, 354 Burckhardt, Jacob, 134 Burgin, Victor, 193 Bush, George W. Jr., 816 Byzantine Empire, 56 Byzantine iconoclasm, 59 Byzantium, 52 C Calder, Alexander, 729 Calle, Sophie, 409 Calvin, John, 30 Camera apparatus, 347 Camera obscura, 75–89 Camera pen, 617 Camera phone, 614 Cameron, James, 16 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 665 Canonical humanism, 562 Carbone, Mauro, 825 Careri, Giovanni, 963 Carnevale, Fra, 237 Cartesian geometry, 526 Cartesian perspectivalism, 449 Carthesian perspectivalism, 331 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 525 Cassirer, Ernst, 86 Castration, 302 Castration complex, 353 Cave paintings, 877 Cerebral achromotopsia, 720 Chafee, Richard, 765 Chagall, Marc, 663 Chairomen, 38 Champaigne, Philippe de, 652 Chapel degli Scrovegni, 9 Chaplin, Charlie, 340 Character-focalizer, 667 Charcot, J.-M., 338 Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen, 765 Charlie Hebdo massacre, 558 Chernobyl disaster, 535 Chiaroscuro, 86 Chiasm of gazes, 899 Chirico, Giorgio de, 764 Choice of visibility, 605 Christ, 30, 59

968 

INDEX

Christianity, 421 Christ in Majesty, 8 Christ Pantocrator, 8 Chromatic categories, 650 Chromatic features, 503 Chromaticism, 723 Cinematic time, 277 Civil Right Movement, 689 Classicism, 833 Cloning, 819 Clonophobia, 427 Close, Chuck, 464 Clytemnestra, 43 Coecke van Aelst, Pieter, 763 Cognitive bias, 722 Cognitive studies, 838 Cognizing gaze, 476 Cole, Teju, 537 Coleman, James, 409 Colonial regimes, 689 Colonna, Francesco, 659 Color-Field Painting, 187 Communicative function, 879 Computer games, 374 Computerized tomography (SPECT), 724 Concealedness, 634 Conceptual art, 187 Conceptual boundary, 200 Conceptual consciousness, 96 Conceptual idealism, 188 Conceptual investigations, 180 Conceptualism, 409 Concours d’émulation, 767 Concrete Photography, 527 Consciousness, 249 Consciousness of conflict, 628 Consolo, Vincenzo, 661 Constantia Augusta, 57 Constantine IV, 57 Constantine V, 60 Constantine VI, 60 Contour, 307–309 Conventional-natural, 288 Conventional photography, 519 Cook, Peter, 773 Copernican change, 909 Coppola, Francis Ford, 829 Corbusier, Le, 769

Corporeal phenomenology, 842 Costello, Diarmuid, 398 Council at Hieria, 60 Counter-discourse, 675 Counterfactual, 505 Countervisuality, 697 Cranach, Lucas, 160 Cratylus, 42 Creatio ex nihilo, 704 Creolisation, 694 Crick, Odile, 912 Critical iconology, 708 Critical media theory, 387 Critique of iconism, 641 Cropping, 522 Cross-media approach, 168 Cubism, 114 Cult festivity, 266 Cultic devotion, 143 Cultural continuum, 148 Cultural memory, 133 Cultural perception, 5 Cultural symptomatology, 802 Cultural wars, 689 Culture-as-image, 708 Culture-as-text, 708 Cybernetics, 383, 791 Cyborg, 16 D Dada, 181 Daguerre, Louis, 154 Daguerreotypy, 149 Daly, César, 769 Danielewski, Mark Z., 656 Darwin, Charles, 910 David, Jacques-Louis, 194 De Anima, 41 Death masks, 865 Decalogue, 27 Deceit, 793 “De-centredness” of the subject, 844 Deceptive, 793 Deceptive representation, 939 De Certeau, Michel, 742 Deckard, Rick, 13 Decolonise This Place, 699

 INDEX 

Decolonization, 570 Deconstruction, 671–684 Decontextualization, 6 Defamiliarization, 172 De-figuration, 172 De-formation, 172 De-historicization, 867 Deixis, 77 de Kooning, Willem, 189 Deleuze, Gilles, 111 Delisle, Guy, 540 del Monte, Guidobaldo, 75 Demachy, Pierre-Antoine, 763 Dematerialization of the media, 276 Demens-ludens-sapiens, 441 Demons, 54 Demus, Otto, 857 Denis, Claire, 564 Denkraum, 138 Denoted image, 676 De Palma, Brian, 214, 591 Depicting function, 631 Derain, André, 729 Desacralization, 182 Descartes, René, 76, 84 De Sica, Vittorio, 562 Design science, 787 Design theory, 779–796 Desire of the gaze, 900 de Stijl, 174 Destruction of relics, 174 Deuteronomy, 25 Dewey, John, 560 Diachronic leap, 7 Dick, Philip K., 383 Dictatorship of transparency, 605 Différance, 678 Digital age, 516 Digital image, 928 Digital image processing, 926 Digitalization, 225 Digital revolution, 516 Digital wizardry, 522 Dinomania, 813 Dinosaur, 811 Diorama, 154 Diotima, 47 Dirty realism, 775 Disappearance, 270

Disappearance of art, 275 Disappearance of the real, 209 Disappearance of the subject, 321 Disciplinary boundaries, 7 Discontinuous nature of art, 197 Discourse analysis, 138 Disegno, 759, 790 Disembodied perception, 332 Dispositif, 674 Disruption, 168 Divine image, 25 Divine prototype, 54 Divine revelation, 28 Division of the gaze, 899 Djabbery, Ali, 569 Doctrinal controversy, 56 Doctrinal religious, 56 Dogme 95, 562 Doisneau, Robert, 355 Dolly the Sheep, 814 The double, 439 Double articulation, 642 Double consciousness, 695 Doubled representation, 695 Double gaze, 899 Double objectness, 370 Doubling of consciousness, 258 Dracula tales, 68 Drexler, Arthur, 765 Drift of meaning, 891 Drones, 610 Duchamp, Marcel, 182 Duke of Urbino, 237 Dumont, Bruno, 564 Dürer, Albrecht, 194, 288 Durkheim, Emile, 744 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 829 Dutch painting, 454 Dutch visual culture, 330 Dystopia, 518 E Eastern Christianity, 8 Eastern icon, 862 Eco, Umberto, 288 Ecology of images, 23 Economy of attention, 585 Economy of visibility, 585

969

970 

INDEX

Ecophenomenlogy, 240 Edison, Thomas, 150 Effigies, 865 Ego, 296 Egocentrism, 298 Ego-ideal, 306 Ego libido, 348 Eidetic, 283 Eidetic categories, 650 Eiffel Tower, 492 Eikasia, 469 Eikön, 24 Einfühlung, 116 Eirini the Athenian, 60 Eisenman, Peter, 773 Eisenstein, Sergei, 953 Ekphrasis, 660 Ek-stasis of materiality, 894 Electra, 43 Eliade, Mircea, 34 Emblematic meaning, 879 Embodied simulation, 837 Emoji, 611 Emotional capitalism, 605 Empathy, 116 Emulation, 37 Enargeai, 660 “End of art,” 275 End of photography, 521 Energeia, 472 Enframing, 279 Enlightenment, 764 Ennead, 42 Entropy, 383 Enunciatee, 652 Episteme, 240 Epistemic images, 704 Epoché, 929 Era of art, 860 Era of image, 861 Eratostratos, 422 Ereignis, 266, 270 Erlebnis, 271 Ernst, Max, 402, 403 Erreger, 626 Eruditi, 55 Eschaton, 28 Essential temporality of images, 945

“Eternal present,” 279 Ethical imagination, 560 Ethical turn, 561 Ethnographic inquiry, 738 Eucharistic meal, 301 Euclid, 332 Euclidian geometry, 526 European Middle Ages, 554 Eusebius of Caesarea, 57 Euthydemus, 43 Evans, Walker, 738 Event, 269 Event aesthetics, 889 Event (Ereignis), 714 Evocation, 285 Evolutionary aesthetics, 838 Evolutionary media theories, 875 Exchange of gazes, 899, 900 Existential phenomenology, 633 Exodus, 28 Explanatory seeing, 802 Exposure preferences, 522 Extinction Rebellion, 699 F Fabian, Johannes, 754 Facies, 792 Factual fact, 436 Factual intersection, 375 Fantasy, 302–303 Farocki, Harun, 409 Fascism, 272 Fechner, Gustav, 338 Female Action Hero, 360–361 Feminist film critique, 343 Feminist film studies, 681 Fetishism, 837 Fetish (Madeleine), 351 Feuerbach, Anselm, 112 Fictional intersection, 375 Fictionalization, 550 Figal, Günter, 934 Figural, 661 Figuration, 661 Figurative, 661 Figurative formants, 647 Figurative semiotics, 647 Figure-form, 404

 INDEX 

Figure/ground differentiations, 882 Figure-ground relation, 193 Figure-image, 404 Figure-matrix, 404 Figure of nothingness, 321 Film studies, 681 Finestra aperta, 83 First Gulf War, 597 First World War, 136, 597 Flash use, 522 Flatbed picture plane, 114 Flatness, 114 FMRI scans, 722 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 656 Form, 55 Formal aesthetics, 922 Fourth screen, 613 Fra Angelico, 9 Frank, Robert, 737 Frankenthaler, Helen, 189 Free beauties, 102 Free harmony, 105 The free play of imagination, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 291 Freudian symptomatology, 959 Freyermuth, Gundolf F., 226 Furiosa, 360 Futurist manifestos, 769 G Gabo, Naum, 771 Gad, Urban, 162 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 937 Galilei, Galileo, 910 Galle, Philip, 763 Gallese, Vittorio, 825 Game of chance, 390 Game world, 367 Gandy, Joseph, 766 Garner, Eric, 698 The Gaze, 305 Gaze, 77 Gaze of surveillance, 590 Geertz, Clifford, 781 Gegenwärtigung passim, 251 Gehlen, Arnold, 711 General image science, 873 General Language Science, 877

Generative aesthetics, 791 Genesis, 28 Geneva Conventions, 582 Geometric abstraction, 190 Geometry of the visible, 238 Géricault, Théodore, 494 Gerke, Friedrich, 857 Gerung, Matthias, 829 Gesamtkunstwerk, 911 Gestalt, 112, 297 Gestalt psychology, 880 Gestalt theory, 119 Gestell, 279, 383 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 135, 152 Giacometti, Alberto, 403 Gift of visibility, 897 G.I. Jane, 360 Giotto di Bondone, 9 Givenness, 636 Glances, 77 Glaucon, 43 Glissant, Édouard, 540 Godard, Jean-Luc, 562, 828 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 154 Golden calf, 25 Goldschmidt, Adolf, 136 Gombrich, Ernst, 288 Google Street View, 236 GoPro, 610 Gorgias, 437 Gosling, Ryan, 12 Gramsci, Antonio, 683 Graphic images, 806 Graphikê, 45 Graven images, 23 Greek Antiquity, 559 Greenbergian Modernism, 193 Greengrass, Paul, 594 Griffith, D. W., 564 Gris, Juan, 729 Groys, Boris, 272 Guadet, Joseph, 768 Guardi, Francesco, 665 Gwynne, Nell, 420 H Hadid, Zaha, 773 Hagelstein, Maud, 961

971

972 

INDEX

Hall of mirrors, 507 Hamilton, Linda, 360 Hamilton, Richard, 772 Hamon, Philippe, 658, 825 Handke, Peter, 827 Haneke, Michael, 562 Hanser, David, 323 Hanza, Katia, 961 Hardimage, 237 Hardy, Tom, 360 Hashiguchi, George, 739 Hashtags, 611 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 334 Hebrew culture, 24, 31 Heidegger, Martin, 209, 265 Heim, Michael, 226 Heise, Carl Georg, 142 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 338 Hemorrhage of images, 204 Heracles, 704 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 923 Hermeneutics, 707 Hermeneutics of suspicion, 48 Hertz, Mary, 135 Heterochrony, 2 Heterotopia, 675 Hieroglyph, 160 High art, 710 High modernism, 272 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 111 Hine, Lewis, 740 Historia, 862 Historical anthropology, 866 Historicity of art, 860 Historicization, 6 History of images, 132, 860 Hitchcock, Alfred, 344 Hobbes, Thomas, 559, 910 Hobbyhorse, 366 Hodgson, Barbara, 656 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 834 Hogarth, William, 829 Holbein, Hans, 188, 292 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 829 Hollein, Hans, 772 Holocaust, 539 Holographic projections, 11 Holy Cross, 59 Holy Eucharist, 60

Holy Grail, 266 Holy Sepulcher, 67 Holy Spirit, 28 Holz, Hans Heinz, 906 Homeostasis, 301 Homer, 38 Homo ludens, 441 Homo sapiens, 439 Homotopical order, 675 Hood, Gavin, 599 Hopper, Edward, 483 Horace, 659 Host medium, 436, 864 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 471 Hussein, Saddam, 597 Hyperimmersive turn, 226 Hyperpictoriality, 662 Hyperreal, 319 Hyperrealistic turn, 227 Hypertext, 662 Hypervisible, 537 Hypo-icon, 662 Hypopictoriality, 662 Hypostasis, 68 Hypotyposis, 660, 665 I Icarus, 954 Icon, 53, 434, 682 Iconic artifact, 943 Iconic “contrast,” 944 Iconic difference, 473 Iconic evidence, 496 Iconic “ground,” 948 Iconic indexicality, 523 Iconic in-Difference, 476–480 Iconic intelligence, 475, 941 Iconic logos, 942–944 Iconic potential, 947 Iconic power, 575, 578 Iconic simultaneity, 5, 599 Iconic turn, 205, 708 Iconic twofoldness, 895 Iconism, 286–290 Iconocentrism, 753 Iconoclasm, 52 Iconoclastic controversies, 53 Iconoclastic disputes, 56

 INDEX 

Iconoclastic impulse, 168 Iconoclastic revelation, 174 Iconodules, 53 Iconographic analysis, 804 Iconography, 8, 644 Iconolatres, 53 Iconological interpretation, 804 Iconology, 435 Iconology 3.0, 825 Iconomachy, 52 Iconophiles, 53 Iconophobia, 27 Iconotexts, 659, 823 Iconotheques, 828 The Ideal City, 239 Identifying gaze, 943 Idol, 25, 53 Idolatry, 417 Illusion of immanence, 281–293 Illusion techniques, 224 Image act, 416 Image agency, 416 Image anthropology, 709 Image-as-difference, 13 Imageless, 201 Image/magie, 439 Image-maker, 675 Image-making, 53 Image–medium–body, 857 Image object, 253, 626 Image of God, 23 Image ontology, 704 Image/picture, 3 Image schema, 914 Image science, 3 Image’s fabric of appearance, 845 Image studies, 3 Image subject, 254, 626 Image-substrate, 626 Image/text, 809 Image-text/image text, 809 Image trouble, 902 Image vehicle, 907 Imagic turn, 874 Imaginary oscillation, 297 Imaginatio, 251–256 Imaginatio (Imagination), 252 Imagineering, 494 Imaging consciousness, 281

973

Imaging knowledge, 285 Imago, 296–297, 862 Imago Dei, 25 Imdahl, Max, 475 Imitation, 37, 285 Immanentism, 283 Immanent realism, 518 “Immanent transcendence,” 274 Immaterial similarity, 435 Immersive tool, 764 Imperial China, 739 Imperial complex, 693 Impressionism, 114 Incantation, 290–293 Incestuous drives, 295 Incestuous fantasy, 405 Incorporation (Verkörperung), 712 Index, 682 Indexicality, 515 Indicator, 434 Information aesthetics, 791 Information industry, 206 Information technology, 206 Informe, 122 Instagram, 603 Installation art, 407 “Instant shot,” 278 Instigator, 626 Intentional acts, 478 Intentionality, 249 Inter, 792 Intermedial transposition, 662 Interpassivity, 385 Interpictoriality, 661 Interpreting-as, 488 “Intersemiotic transposition,” 658 Intersubjective, 671 Intertextual, 715 Intracortical, 725 Intrinsic agency, 914 “Intuitive presentifications,” 252 Invisibility, 533–543 IPhone, 615 IR imagery, 600 Irreducibility of visual experience, 953 Islam, 421 Isomorphism, 210 Israel, 24 Iterability, 678

974 

INDEX

J Jagnow, René, 504 Jakobson, Roman, 323 James, William, 338 Jastrow, Joseph, 485 Jesus, 66 Jesus Christ, 491 Jetztzeit, 279 Jewish eschatology, 265 Jewish Kabbalistic, 265 Jian Jun Xi, 184 Jim Crow laws, 751 Joe, Immortan, 360 John VII, the Grammarian, 62 Johns, Jasper, 114 Johnson, Phillip, 774 Jonas, Hans, 940 Josipovici, Gabriel, 663 Jouissance, 298 Judaism, 421 Judd, Donald, 176 Judeo-Christian scriptures, 30, 34 Juliet of the Spirits, 356 Justi, Carl, 134 Justinian I, 63 K Kafka, Franz, 829 Kahn, Phillipe, 614 Kaiserpanorama, 340 Kaleidoscope, 154 Kandinsky, Wassily, 103 Kanji, 435 Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Guido, 120 Kêlêsis, 43 Kennedy, John F., 689 Kentridge, William, 409 Kepler, Johannes, 87, 139 Khmer Rouge, 905 Kiarostami, Abbas, 562 Kierkegaard, Søren, 560 King, Martin Luther, 689 King Nebuchadnezzar, 26 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 152 Kitsch, 407 Kitzinger, Ernst, 857 Klee, Paul, 111, 268 Klein, Yves, 179

Kleist, Johann von, 829 Kline, Franz, 13 Knowledge consciousness, 286 Koffka, Kurt, 119 Köhler, Wolfgang, 119 Kracauer, Siegfried, 562 Krueger, Myron, 226 Kruger, Barbara, 321 Kubrick, Stanley, 467 Kultbild, 906 Kunstbild, 906 Kunstkammer, 909 Kunstwissenschaft, 109–124, 710 Kunstwollen, 110 L Labrouste, Henry, 767 Lamprecht, Karl, 134 Lange, Dorothy, 738 Language games, 703 Lanier, Jaron, 225 Lascaux Cave, 440 The Last Judgement, 8 Latent formalism, 109 Laterna magica, 272 Latour, Bruno, 85 Lavinia Fontana, 79 The lawfulness of the understanding, 99 Lawfulness without a law, 102 Lederberg, Joshua, 245 Ledoux, Claude Nicolas, 767 Lee, Spike, 216 Leibniz, Gottfried, 496 Lely, Peter, 420 Leo III the Isaurian, 57 Leonardo da Vinci, 6, 332 Lequeu, Jean-Jacques, 767 Les Immateriaux, 207 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 121, 426 Lethe, ̄ 634 Letting see, 933 Levine, Neil, 765 Levine, Sherrie, 400 LGBTQI groups, 689 Libeskind, Daniel, 773 Libidinal energy, 404 Ligeti, György, 467 Likeness, 25

 INDEX 

Likeness-making, 53 Limits of the symbolic, 891 Lincoln, Abraham, 39 Linear perspective, 75 Linguistic bias, 874 Linguistic sign, 641, 673 Linguistic turn, 708 Liquid interface, 751 Liquid Surveillance, 601–605 Lissitzky, El, 771 Literary Iconology, 655–668 Literary theme, 632 Little Hans, 303 Littlewood, Joan, 772 Live-streaming, 610 Locus of images, 864 Locus of the body, 865 Logocentricity, 381 Logocentrism, 711 Logos of propositional language, 940 Logos of the image, 940 Longinus, 66 Loos, Adolph, 770 Lucian, 659 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 770 Luhmann, 785 Lumière, August, 444 Lumière, Louis, 444 Lumet, Sidney, 563 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 171 Lund, Ketil, 569 Luther, Martin, 30, 138 Lynch, David, 214 Lynn, Greg, 774 M Macabre dances, 831 Mach, Ernst, 338 Machine vision, 234 Mad Max: Fury Road, 360 “Make-believe” activity, 363 Making-visible, 897 Malcolm X, 689 Male desire, 347 Malevich, Kazimir, 12 Malraux, André, 828 Man-computer symbiosis, 227 Mandylion of Veronica, 915

Manifest formalism, 109 Mannheim, Karl, 752 Manovich, Lev, 85 Mansfield, Katherine, 666 Mantegna, Andrea, 708 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 428 Marduk, 31 Marées, Hans von, 112 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 150 Maria of Hungary, 763 Marker, Chris, 593 Marque, 678 Mars Direct, 242 Mars One, 242 Martian image, 243 Martin, Agnes, 191, 400 Martin, Jean, 659 Masaccio, 81, 450 Masculinization, 352 Masina, Giulietta, 357 Masquerade, 344 Masseka, 25 Material dispositif, 894 Material ontology, 844 Material turn, 143 Mathematising perception, 336 Matisse, Henri, 292 Mattenklott, Gert, 906 Mauss, Marcel, 314 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 183 McKenzie, Lucy, 449 Medial act, 629 Medial difference, 893 Medialogy, 867 “Media-saturated” society, 205 Mediated sociality, 590 Mediatic postmodernity, 205 Mediating presentation, 97 Mediation, 688 Medici, 135, 911 Medio-centric narratives, 334 Meier, Richard, 773 Memes, 611 Mémoire involontaire, 278 Menand, Louis, 203 Mendes, Sam, 594 Mental images, 62, 805 Mental projections, 845 The me of perception, 932

975

976 

INDEX

Mere form, 100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 111 Mesnil, Jacques, 136 Meso-America, 35 Metalanguage, 649 Metamorphosis, 437 Metaphor as interface, 785 Metaphysics of presence, 677 Metapictoriality, 662 Metapictures, 811–816 Meta-textual, 715 Methodological constructivism, 874 Michael I Rhangabes, 62 Michaelis, Adolf, 135 Middle Ages, 861 Military-industrial complex, 693 Mill, John Stuart, 560 Milo, Sandra, 357 Mimêma, 38 Mimesis, 12 Mimetic signs, 434 Minimalism, 187 Minimal vivacity, 368 Minsky, Marvin, 916 Miró, Joan, 103 Miró, Juan, 659 Mirror “double,” 304 Mirror neurons, 837 Mirror of events, 321 Mirror of reality, 516 The Mirror Stage, 296–299 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 691 Mitchell, Joan, 189 MMS, 617 Mnemopictoriality, 662 Mnemosyne Atlas, 133 (M)obile snapshots, 609 Modern Art, 680 Modern formalism, 111 Modernism, 151 Modernist painting, 335 Modernity, 329 Modes of consciousness, 251 Moggach, Deborah, 656 Mona Lisa, 6 Mondrian, Piet, 103 Monet, Claude, 189 Monge, Gaspard, 75 Monochrome, 190

Monstrative practices, 897 Montandon, Alain, 659 Moonwatcher, 468 Moore, Demi, 360 Morphe, 54 Moses, 421 Motion-and-rest, 278 Mount Sinai, 27, 421 Multimedial mode, 157 Multimedia revelation, 435 Musil, Robert, 928 Musk, Elon, 242 Mutilation of nature, 172 Mysterio, 51 Myth, 748 Myth of Narcissus, 439 Myth of Pygmalion, 439 Myth of the given, 932 N Nachleben, 134 Najafi, Babak, 601 Nameless science, 962 Narcissistic identification, 306 Narcissus, 479 Natural consciousness, 2 Naturalization, 79 Natural signs, 434 Natura naturans, 704 Natura naturata, 704 Nature-culture, 288 Nazism, 272 Near Eastern cultures, 24 Necessity of embodiment, 893 Nehamas, Alexander, 48 Neo-avantgarde, 182 Neo-Freudists, 295 Nerlich, Michael, 659 Netflix, 613 Networked society, 205 Networking, 589–606 Neuroaesthetics, 719–730 Neurohumanities, 720 Neurological theory, 726 Neurophilosophy, 934 Neuroscience, 7, 824 Neutrality modification, 627 New Art History, 401

 INDEX 

New Left, 689 Newman, Barnet, 179 New Testaments, 23–35 Nicaea II Council, 60 Niccol, Andrew, 601 Nicéron, Jean-Pierre, 75 Nicodemus, 66 Nielsen, Asta, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 473 Nikephoros I of Constantinople, Patriarch, 58 Noé, Gaspar, 562 Noema, 289, 629 Noeme, 289 Noesis, 289, 629 Non-coded, 676 Non-existence, 808 Non-iconicity, 805 Non-normative, 676 Non-objective works of art, 196 Non-positing representations, 627 Non-presentational, 631 Non-representational, 674 Normative power, 604 Normative representations, 310 Novak, Kim, 351 Novelli, Pietro, 831 Nudity, 419 O Object “a,” 303 Objectification, 77 Objectivation, 235 Object-magic, 934 Object-sign, 647 “Object theory” of images, 492 Objet irréel, 293 Observer, 159 Obtuse meaning, 677 Occupy movements, 816 October questionnaire, 328 October Revolution, 171 Oculocentric, 330 Oedipus Complex, 345 Oedipus stage, 304 Old Masters, 1 Old Testament, 24 Ontological discontinuity, 199

Ontological otherness, 10 Opacity, 200, 474 Operative iconicity, 494 Operative images, 497 Opsis, 47 Optical images, 807 Optical/painterly, 112 Optical unconscious, 268, 402 Orders of simulation, 317–319 Organic abstraction, 189 Orthodoxy, 8 Ouspensky, P. D., 266 Overcoming, 271 Overdetermination, 961 Over-visibility, 636 Owens, Craig, 400 P Pächt, Otto, 120 Paglen, Trevor, 238 Paić, Žarko, 12 Paik, Nam June, 214 Painting, 396 as a sign system, 642 Pala d’oro, 956 Paleolithic, 439 Paleontology of screens, 838 Pandemic, 535 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 425 Panopticon, 594 Panoptic surveillance, 542 Panorama, 149, 222 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 772, 773 Pappas, Nickolas, 37 Paradigm shift, 784 Paradox of fiction, 371 Paradox of materiality, 893 Paradox of self-inclusion, 893 Para-field, 746–749 Paralyzed look, 311 Parapictoriality, 662 Parergon, 679 Parrhasius, 457 Parthenon, 284 Passive/female pleasure, 348 Pathé Frères, 157 Pathosformel, 110 Pathos Formulas, 133

977

978 

INDEX

Patriarchal ideology, 345 Paul, 32 Paul IV, Patriarch, 60 Pauline anthropology, 34 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 288 Pentecost, 28 Perceptio (Perzeption), 252 Perception (Wahr-nehmung), 252 Perceptive deceit, 443 Perceptoid signs, 878–881 Perceptual consciousness, 436 Perceptual images, 807 Perceptual object, 201 Perceptual space, 851 Performative appearance, 698–700 Performative surveillance, 542 Performativity, 896 Peripheral awareness, 489 Perrault, Claude, 765 Perzeptive Phantasie, 259 Peter Parker, 51 Petrach, 659 Phaedrus, 42 Phallic stage, 344 Phallus, 303–304 Phantasm-making, 53 Phantasms, 256 Phantasy, 249–261 Phantom, 923 Phenakistiscope, 149 Phénomènes saturés, 636 Phenomenology, 1, 625–637 Philip of Macedonia’s, 660 Philosophical visualistic, 876 Photius of Constantinople, Patriarch, 58 Photo-elicitation, 747 Photographic time, 277 Photographic universe, 380 Phototexts, 823 Phrenology, 719 Phryne, 661 Physical image, 253 Physisches Ding, 626 Pia Maria Roll, 557 Picasso, Pablo, 402 Pichler, Walter, 773 Pictogram, 880 Pictorial acts, 880 Pictorial allusion, 850

Pictorial appearing, 716 Pictorial immersion, 221 Pictorialization (Verbildlichung), 252 Pictorial media (Bildmedien), 861 Pictorial modulations, 664–668 Pictorial object, 4 Pictorial predication, 874 Pictorial rhetoric, 934 Pictorial sublime, 842 Pictorial turn, 205, 328 Picture information, 276 Picture-making, 503 Picture objects, 879 Picturesque, 664 Pictures still-as-differences, 16 Piero della Francesca, 86, 648 Pirandello, Luigi, 825 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 762 Pisu, Mario, 357 Pixar, 215 Pixel revolution, 522 Pixels, 464 Places of indeterminacy, 630 Planarity, 187–202 Planimetric infrastructure, 923 Plantation complex, 693 Plastic contrasts, 649 Plastic semiotics, 646 Plato, 37–49, 292 Play of sensations, 100 Plessner, Helmuth, 711 Pliny’s, 457 Plotinus, 41 Plutarch, 37 Poetics, 38 Pointillé, 455 Polanyi, Michael, 940 Political iconography, 143 The politicization of art, 271 Politics of art history, 956 Pollock, Jackson, 13, 103 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 564 Pop-art, 406 Pornography, 419 Positron emission tomography (PET), 724 Posner, Roland, 781 (Post-)Cartesianism, 449–461 Post-digital drawing, 775

 INDEX 

Post/disciplinary, 746–749 Post-hermeneutic, 889 Posthumanism, 240 Postindustrial society, 382 Postman, Neil, 602 Post-medium condition, 407 Postmodern Art, 680 Postmodern condition, 204, 407 Postmodernism, 203 Postmodern visuality, 204 Post-painterly abstraction, 396 Post-panoptic, 322 Post-panopticon visuality, 693 Post-photographic, 380 Post-photography, 521 Post-pictorial, 809 Post-politics, 243 Poststructuralism, 407, 671–684 Poussin, Nicolas, 421 Powell, Michael, 349 Power-knowledge, 334, 674 Power relations, 672 Power structures, 691 Pozzo, Andrea, 13 Predication, 874 Pre-ideological, 676 Premediation, 598 Pre-Oedipal plenitude, 347 Pre-predicative, 885 Pre-Raphelites, 665 Presence vs. absence, 677 Present (gegenwärtig), 252 Presentational, 631 Presented object, 631 Presentification, 370 Presentified (vergegenwärtigt), 252 Presentness, 846 Presumption of virtuality, 849 Price, Cedric, 772 Primal patricide, 301 Primal phenomenon, 436 Principles of generation, 365 Priority of the semantic, 891 “Profane illumination,” 270 Pro-filmic space, 158 Pro-gram, 235 Prographein, 234 Propositional content, 881 Props, 364

Prosopagnosia, 720 Prosthesis, 158 Protestant Reformation, 866 Proto-installations, 411 Proto-photomontages, 770 Prötotokos, 34 Proust, Marcel, 305 Psalm, 66 Psalters, 63 Pseudo males, 360 Pseudomorphism, 123 Psychic expression, 135 Psycho, 349 Psychoanalysis, 295 Psycholinguistics, 727 Pueblo Indians, 135 Pure feeling, 178 Pure visibility, 111, 922–928 Purgar, Krešimir, 12–13 Purposeless beauty, 102 Purposiveness without purpose, 94 Q Qualitative leap, 436 Qualitative structure, 632 Quatriglio, Costanza, 593 Quattrocento, 450 Quentin Beck, 51 Quiddittas, 714 Quodittas, 714 Quodlibet, 461 R Rabbit-duck, 487 Radical anthropology, 428 Raphael, 16 Ratio difficilis, 287 Rationalization, 79 Rauschenberg, Robert, 114, 463 Ray, Man, 771 Readymade, 182 The real, 317 Real irreality, 474 Reality TV, 322 Real time, 229 Rear Window, 358 Reciprocity, 805

979

980 

INDEX

Recognizing gaze, 476 Reconnaissance, 958 Reconstructed aspect, 631 Re-enactment, 348 Reeves, Keanu, 392 Referent, 288 Referentiality, 517 Re-flective gaze, 899 Reflexivity of the gaze, 899 Reformation, 30 Reformed theology, 30 Regulated appearance, 698 Reinhardt, Ad, 176 Rejlander, Oscar, 665 Relational logic, 924 Relation of contemplation, 269 Renaissance, 23, 861 Renoir, Jean, 562 Repetition, 300–301 Replicant K, 12 Repraesentare, 433 Representation, 16, 93 Representational relevance, 880 Republic, 42 Responses to images, 417 Responsible representation, 690 Retinal gaze, 206 Reversibility, 316 Reverte, Arturo Perez, 661 Revolutionary art, 171 Reygadas, Carlos, 562 Richardson, Mary, 424 Richter, Gerhard, 828 Riefenstahl, Leni, 564 Riggs, Ransom, 656 Rilke, Reiner Maria, 827 Rimbaud, Arthur, 266 Ripa, Cesare, 827 Rivette, Jacques, 565 Rockatansky, Max, 360 Rodchenko, Alexander, 179 Rodin, August, 400, 827 Roll, Pia, 570 Romanticism, 151, 827 Rorschach inkblot, 490 Rossellini, Roberto, 562 Rossi, Aldo, 773 Rotation argument, 504 Rothko, Mark, 13, 103, 292

Rowe, Colin, 768 Rushdie, Salman, 661 Ruskin, John, 560 Ryman, Robert, 191 S Sacred images, 61 Sacrifice, 302 Sado-masochistic flagellation, 302 Saint Augustine, 559 St Dionysios the Areopagite, 60–61 St. Eirene in Constantinople, 63 Saint Ildefonso, 762 St John, 152 St John of Damascus, 58 St Maximos the Confessor, 61 St Sophia in Constantinople, 63 St Theodore of Studion, 58 Salazar, 591 Sander, August, 738 Sanquirico, Alessandro, 764 Satrapi, Marjane, 539 Saturated phenomena, 636 Savonarola, Girolamo, 906 Saxl, Fritz, 136 The sayable, 577 Schediázein, 790 Schema, 55 Schematic, 914 Schematic formation, 630 Schifanoia, Palazzo, 134 Schinkel, Friedrich, 767 Schlafer, Heinz, 906 Scholasticism, 225 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 560 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 16 Schweitzer, Albert, 560 Schwitters, Kurt, 771 Scopic drive, 836 Scopic entelechy, 568 Scopic regime, 78, 331 Scopophilia, 344 Scopophilic instinct, 348 Scott Brown, Denise, 772 Scott, Ridley, 13, 207, 601 Screen, 3, 305–307 Scripture, 31 Sculpture, 397

 INDEX 

Searle, John, 914 Sebald, W.G., 656 Second commandment, 424 “Second nature,” 267 Sedlmayr, Hans, 120 Seduction, 315 The seeable, 577 Seeing-as, 483–497 Seeing gaze, 476 Seeing-in, 255, 483–497 Seeing-with, 483–497 Self-destructive machines, 170 Self-presence, 673 Self vs. other, 677 Semantic surface, 193 Semi-face, 443 Semi-observation, 443 Semiological discourse, 645 Semiosis, 647 Semiotic operations, 217 Semiotic turn, 650 Semi-person, 443 Semi-reality, 442 Sense of indexicality, 524 Sensibilia, 554 Sensorimotor exploration, 222 Septuagint, 32 Serlio, Sebastiano, 763 Serpent-Ritual, 139 Serra, Richard, 398 Server farms, 243 Seurat, Georges, 492 Seventh Ecumenical Council, 57, 58 Severi, Carlo, 825 Sexuality, 419 Shaw, Michael, 23 Shekinah, 28 Shklovsky, Viktor, 172 Showing-itself, 898 Shroud of Turin, 528 Sight, 47 Signe, 678 Significant form, 104 Signification, 674 Signified, 716 Signifier, 716 Signifying substance, 398 Signs, 716 Signs of words, 434

Sign theories, 892 Similitude iconism, 286 Similitudo, 29 Simmel, Georg, 743 Simondon, Gilbert, 379, 494 Simonides, 37 Simpliciores, 55 Simulacral, 315 Simulacrum, 37–49, 53, 211 Simulated visibility, 928 Simulation, 210, 313–325 Single occurrence, 268 Singularity, 268 Singular paradigmata, 902 Sistine Madonna, 16, 835 Skiagraphia, 45 Slavery, 693 Small, Albion, 736 Small, David, 539 Smartphone, 615 Smithson, Alison, 772 Smithson, Peter, 772 SMS, 618 Snapchat, 612 Soane, Sir John, 766 Social Darwinism, 751 Society of image, 212 Society of the spectacle, 205 Soderbergh, Steven, 535 Softimage, 234 Soleimani, Qasem, 598 Sophist, 42 Sorcery, 319 Sousveillance, 557 Spectator, 337 Spectatorship, 345 Specular triumph, 360 Speech acts, 416, 880 Spider-Man, Far from Home, 51 Spiegelman, Art, 539 Spiritualism, 173 Spivak, Gayatri C., 684 Split Gaze/Look, 310 Standardised reality, 282 Static-moved image, 147 Steinberg, Leo, 114 Steir, Pat, 189 Stella, Frank, 402 Stephanos, 66

981

982 

INDEX

Stereoscope, 149 Sternbild, 138 Sternzeichen, 138 Stewart, Jimmy, 351 Stigmata, 68 Still-image, 852 Stirling, James, 773 Storytelling, 931 Straightforward consciousness, 257 “Straight” photographs, 518 Strauss, Richard, 468 Strong images, 946 Structural transparency, 511 Stucco angel, 317 Studium, 677 Subaltern, 570 Subconscious of visual representation, 853 Subcutaneous, 404 Subdivision of images, 806 Subject-dependent temporality, 199 Subjectification of seeing, 329 Subjectum, 235 Sublimation, 304 Subsemiotic mark, 651 Substitution, 373–376 Substitutive, 914 Sumphuton, 38 Superego, 402 Superimage, 814 Superimposition, 236 Superintelligence, 240 Surface as site, 194 Surveillance culture, 541 Surveillance society, 541 Surveillance state, 541 Sur-visibilité, 636 Sutherland, Ivan, 229 Symbol, 682 Symbolic, 295 Symbolic exchange, 313–325 Symbolic form, 86 Symposium, 47 Synopticity, 496 Systems of surveillance, 334 T Tableau, 17 Tableau vivant, 665

Tactile/linear, 112 Taliban regime, 422 Tanguy, Yves, 188 Tarasios, Patriarch, 60 Tatoo, 299–300 Taut, Bruno, 769 Tautological, 682 Techne, 916 Technical images, 211, 379 Technical imagination, 218 Technik, 266 Technique, 266 Technocentric narratives, 334 Technocratic ideology, 213 Techno-habitat, 852 Technological iconoclasm, 11 Technological reproducibility, 266 Technology, 267 Techno-scientific culture, 217 Technoscientific prosthesis, 208 Technosphere, 12, 271, 717 Telemorphosis, 322 Telereality, 324 Temporal entities, 944 Temporality, 397 Temporalization, 677 Temporal-visual appearance, 945 Temunah, 25 Terminator, 16 “Text/image” alliance, 659 Textolatry, 828 Texture, 503 Thanatos, 314 Thaumatrope, 154, 336 Theatrical automaton, 317 Theatricality, 397 Themata, 55 Theodora, 57 Theodotos Melissenos Kassiteras, Patriarch, 62 Theophany, 27 Theophilos, 57 Theoretical object, 959 Theoroi, 40 Theory of judgment, 250 Theosophy, 173 Thera volcano, 56 Theron, Charlize, 360 Thirty Years’ War, 137 Thoma, Hans, 112

 INDEX 

Thorwald, Lars, 358 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 468 Timaeus, 42 To-be-looked-at-ness, 348 Topological categories, 650 Topology of aura, 274 Total disillusion, 322 Totemism, 837 Trabant, Jürgen, 914 The Trait, 304–309 Transcendental aesthetics, 926 Transfiguration, 315 Transformed iconicity, 941 Transhuman population, 243 Transparency, 77, 199, 286, 474 Transparency perception, 511 Transperceptual space, 850 Transpictoriality, 661 Trinity Fresco, 84 Triumph of Death, 827 Trompe l’oeil, 222 Truthfulness, 516 Tsarist Russia, 170 Tschumi, Bernard, 773 Tselem, 24 Turner, J. M. W., 189, 292 Turrell, James, 956 TV verité, 322 The Twin Towers, 314 Twitter, 603 Twofoldness, 489 Twombly, Cy, 191 Typenatlas, 140 Tzara, Tristan, 771 U Uccello, Paolo, 188 Unary trait, 299 Unconcealedness, 634 Unconscious, 295 Unconscious desires, 348 Understanding-as, 489 Ungers, Oswald Mathias, 768 “Unintentional memory,” 278 Unmentionable, 428 Unreality, 629 Usener, Hermann, 906 Ut, Nick, 558 Ut pictura poësis, 113, 657

V Van Doesburg, Theo, 771 Van Doetecum, Joannes, 763 Van Doetecum, Lucas, 763 Van Eyck, Jan, 17 Van Gogh, Vincent, 372 Van Goyen, Jan, 110 Vanishing points, 80, 230, 450–451 Van Zanten, David, 765 Vasari, Giorgio, 84, 764 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 766 Veduta, 761 Velázquez, Diego, 293 Venice Architecture Biennale, 773 Venturi, Adolfo, 136 Venus, 79 Verbal denotation, 644 Verbal images, 807 Verisimilitude, 444 Verspohl, Franz Joachim, 906 Vertigo, 349 Victimal aesthetic, 320 Videogames, 221 Vidor, King, 349 Vienna school, 120 View, 77 Villeneuve, Denis, 11 Virgin Mary, 85, 762 Virtualization, 225 Virtual reality, 928 Virtual spaces, 224, 591 Visibility, 46, 589, 690 Visibility sui generis, 927 Visible surface, 193 Vision, 80 Visual activism, 687–701 Visual culture, 3 Visual dialectics, 591–597 Visual essentialism, 328 Visualicity, 743 Visual ideology, 908 Visualism, 754 Visuality, 4 Visualizations, 4 Visual order, 645 Visual perception, 3 Visual pleasure, 157 Visual semiotics, 641–653 Visual sociology, 735–754 Visual-spatial dysgnosia, 720

983

984 

INDEX

Visual studies, 3, 222 Visual subcultures, 331 Visual text, 643 Vitality, 160 Vital sensation, 117 Vitruvius, 775 Von Braun, Wernher, 242 Von Huene, Stephan, 916 Von Schlosser, Julius, 111 Von Trier, Lars, 562 Voyeurism, 345 Vraisemblance, 517 Vredeman de Vries, Hans, 761 W Wahrnehmung, 478 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 940 Walton, Kendall, 3 Warburg-Haus, 143 Ware, F. C., 656 Warnke, Martin, 143, 906 War on terror, 593 Watteau, Antoine, 662 Ways of Seeing, 557 Weak images, 946 Weber, Max, 743 Weibel, Peter, 321 Weimar Republic, 142, 739 Weltanschauung, 117, 210 Werkbund, 783 Wertheimer, Max, 119 Western metaphysics, 711 Western painting, 114 Westworld, 480 Wharton, Edith, 665 Wigley, Mark, 774 Wilder, Billy, 563

Will to Know, 577 Will to See, 577 Wind, Edgar, 142 Window metaphor, 81 Wireless broadband networking, 228 Wiwimacher, 303 Woodcuts, 148 Woolf, Virginia, 358 Workmanship, 47 Work world, 367 World-disclosure, 637 World-image, 386 World-obscuring, 637 World Trade Center, 316 World Wide Web, 615 Worshipping, 26 Wunderkammer, 831 Wundt, Wilhelm, 338 X X-ray images, 912 Y Yahweh, 25 Young-Girl, 696 YouTube, 613 Yuan Cai, 184 Z Zaourar, Hocine, 320 Zemeckis, Robert, 215 Zeuxis, 457 Zimmermann, Robert, 923 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 188, 449