âAs ifâ: Situating the Pictorial Turn
Neal Curtis
Antony Gormley, LIFE, 2008, © the artist.
W. J. T. Mitchell first proposed a âpictorial turnâ in an article published in ArtForum in 1992, which would later appear as the opening chapter of his highly influential book Picture Theory (1994). While the idea of a âpictorial turnâ resists any easy and simple definition due to its place within a broad set of theoretical and practical concerns regarding images, words, discourses, visuality, objects, media and institutions, it registers the fact that currently âpictures form a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiryâ (1994: 13). In the supposed age of the spectacle âwe still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about themâ (13). The pictorial turn, then, posits the need for a âpostlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the pictureâ (16), much as Mitchellâs earlier book, Iconology (1986), had sought to wrest the icon away from the hegemony of the logos. The pictorial turn thus sits within the much larger project of critical iconology that Mitchell has been publicly pursuing since the publication of his study of illuminated poetry in Blakeâs Composite Art (1978).
Most recently, his book What do Pictures Want? (2005) is a further attempt to pursue that rediscovery. The question in the title demonstrates that up until now we have wanted to know âwhat pictures mean and what they do: how they communicate as signs and symbols, what sort of power they have to effect human emotions and behaviourâ (29), but we have not yet asked what they actually desire, a question that is essential to any âfundamental ontologyâ (68) of images and pictures. But to assume that pictures and images want something is also to assume that they are alive. As Mitchell points out, the âconcept of image-as-organism is, of course, âonlyâ a metaphor, an analogy that must have some limitsâ (10), but it is also a necessary metaphor, âan incorrigible, unavoidable metaphorâ (54), not simply because, as in Mitchellâs The Last Dinosaur Book (1998) they can be shown to have a âsocial lifeâ, but because in our everyday dealings with pictures we often perceive them as possessing some sort of spirit or carrying a certain power. In this sense, to borrow a phrase from Bruno Latour, we have never been modern.
This phenomenon whereby we relate to pictures and images as if they were alive is taken seriously in What do Pictures Want? because, for Mitchell, it is the next step in taking pictures seriously. This question becomes explicit in that book, but that does not mean it has not suggested itself to Mitchell throughout his writings â see for example the moment in Picture Theory where he gives Magritteâs La trahison des images a voice, or two (1994: 68â69). This also means that What do Pictures Want? cannot be said to have finally discovered the question proper to the ontology of pictures and images, rather the book simply marks the point at which Mitchell takes this question up as his central theme. In other words, the âas ifâ that takes pictures to be analogous to living organisms simply refocuses the question of âseeing asâ that has been a recurring motif throughout the past three decades of Mitchellâs diverse writings.
Having said that, the âas ifâ can be used as a prism through which to view Mitchellâs work as a whole, encapsulating what he calls âthe four fundamental concepts of image scienceâ (2008) that comprise his critical iconology: the pictorial turn; the metapicture; the image picture/distinction; and biopic-tures. To these four (a limit Mitchell imposes in order to intimate how the question of what pictures want, or the issue of the animated object is a symptom that Freud, via Lacan, might help us understand, but not master) I would like to add a fifth, namely the totem. This is the concept that most fully captures the fact that the life of images is a social life central to the production of what we call worlds. But to return to the first of the concepts, the pictorial turn, it has already been said that it reflects the fact that the problem of pictorial representation âpresses inescapably nowâ (1994: 16). However, it is also something that has happened throughout history, from the invention of artificial perspective to the invention of photography, and, according to Mitchell, could even be seen in the Israelitesâ turn away from Moses and their worship of the golden calf (2008). But the âas ifâ structure, most famously set out by Kant in his Critique of Judgement (2000), is itself evidence of this recurring turn, for what is Kantâs critical project if not in some regard a turn to pictures and depicting. Having set an abyss between theoretical and practical reason, he presented judgement as the bridge that permits us to think freedom analogically, as symbol or type. Freedom and other ideas of reason, such as justice, cannot be determined, but reflection provides rules for thinking justice as if it were blind, or famously to represent a monarchical state ruled according to law as âa body with a soulâ, but a despotic state as âa mere machine (like a handmill)â (Kant 2000: 226). Kantâs aesthetic philosophy, then, is absolutely central to the contemporary pictorial turn, but also demonstrates the historical recurrence of such âturnsâ.
As a part of Kantâs philosophy of judgement the âas ifâ also incorporates many of the features of a metapicture, defined as a picture âused to show what a picture isâ (Mitchell 1994: 35), or a picture that âpresents a scene of depictionâ (Mitchell 2008: 19). Mitchell is interested in metapictures in order to see if their self-referential or self-analytic nature can provide a second-order representation that might show us something about pictures. The picture that Kant offers of the business of judgement is the placing of a concept beside an intuition to produce a cognition (Kant 2000: 78). This âDarstellungâ of concept and intuition is usually translated as the âpresentationâ of the concept and intuition side by side, a process in which the imagination (Einbildungskraft) is essential. Where a rule for this Darstellung is given, the imagination is simply reproductive, providing a direct presentation; where there is no determinate rule for the presentation, as with judgements of beauty, the imagination is productive and inventive, providing indirect presentations through the use of the âas ifâ, as noted above. This Darstellung,then, which also means a depiction or a portrayal, offers us a reflexive image of our cognitive imag(in)ing, and in this sense might be seen as a metapicture.
However, to do justice to Mitchellâs concepts we would need to pull apart image and picture that have collapsed into each other here, something that the German word Bild does not really permit. What is crucial to understanding Mitchellâs long engagement with pictures is that they are not images, or that pictures are instead the material support (painting, sculpture, photograph) for the image that appears there, an image that can move between any number of pictures and media. Mitchell writes:
You can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image. The image seems to float without any visible means of support, a phantasmatic, virtual, or spectral appearance. It is what can be lifted off the picture, transferred to another medium, translated into verbal exphrasis, or protected by copyright law. The image is the âintellectual propertyâ that escapes the materiality of the picture when it is copied. The picture is the image plus the support; it is the appearance of the immaterial image in a material medium. (2005: 85)
This distinction, then, is the third of Mitchellâs fundamental concepts, and if we were to take the above example of imagining justice as if it were blind, then the picture would be the statue of a blindfolded woman, Lady Justice (carrying other images of justice, a sword and a pair of scales), that stands on top of the Old Bailey, as well as numerous other courts of law. An image, then, is âa relationship of likeness or resemblance or analogous formâ that âcomes to lifeâ (Mitchell 2008: 18) in a picture.
And so we come back to the question of life, and the last of Mitchellâs fundamental concepts: the biopicture, which is also the latest version of the pictorial turn (Mitchell 2008). Treating pictures as if they were alive is necessary because of their uncanny presence. Pictures and images are anxiety inducing not just because they seem to be animated, but also because they threaten to collapse the boundary between truth and falsity, reality and illusion. Enter the human clone.
The clone signifies the potential for the creation of new images in our time â new images that fulfil the a ncient dream of creating a âliving imageâ, a replica or copy that is not merely a mechanical duplicate but an organic, biologically viable simulacrum of a living organism. The clone renders the disavowal of living images impossible by turning the concept of animated icon on its head. Now we see that it is not merely a case of some images that seem to come alive, but that living things themselves were always already images in one form or another. (2005: 12â13)
Under this priority of the image, or what Baudrillard called the âprecession of the modelâ (1983: 32), what image will the clones be modelled on? In Kantian terms there is no rule for determining a judgement regarding the nature of humanity, it can only be thought reflexively, via analogy: âas if.â And yet each clone, as an individual biopicture, must be the carrier of an image, or bioimage. The questions are which image of humanity will prevail and who will decide what will be the model for the future? This, of course, is a political question. As Mitchell puts it: âPerhaps this moment of accelerated stasis in history, when we feel caught between the utopian fantasies of biocybernetics and the dystopian realities of biopolitics, between the rhetoric of the posthuman and the real urgency of universal human rights, is a moment given to us for rethinking just what our lives, and our arts, are forâ (2005: 335).
This call for reflection on who we are, how we should live, and even what we should become, evokes what I would designate as the fifth of Mitchellâs fundamental concepts: the totem. This is not something we should treat alone, but, after Mitchell, it should be triangulated, or set into relations with the idol and the fetish. The clone can be taken as representing all three. As an idol, the clone reflects our sense of mastery and self-worship, the scopic drive to see ourselves perfected, or idealised. As a fetish it is representative of our obsession with power and our desire for the Other. It is the sublimation of technology into a theology. Alternatively, as a totem, the clone represents a more modest kinship with technology. It says nothing more than we are our technology; and in the related field of genetic engineering we clearly see our kinship with (dependency on and belonging to) animals and even plants, a hybridity for which Donna Haraway (1991) is the supreme advocate. We can therefore see why the totem is so important to Mitchell, because it offers possibilities for alternative âcommunal investmentsâ (2005: 165), or the forming of alternative commonalities, precisely because totems lack the âpolemical forceâ (164) of idols and fetishes.
Using the literal meaning of totem as ârelative of mineâ (LĂ©vi-Strauss in Mitchell 2005: 98), Mitchell offers at least two crucial ways to think the image and the totem. The first is to consider the totemic image. In line with sociological thinking since Durkheim, the totemic image draws imaginary and conceptual connections between diverse objects in order to produce a collective representation of the family, group or tribe. It is world-producing. For Mitchell the totem is âthe ideological image par excellence, because it is the instrument by which cultures and societies naturalize themselves. The nation becomes ⊠rooted in a soil, a land, like a vegetative entity or a territorial animalâ (101). The second way to think the image and the totem is to recognise that images have a connective function in keeping with the way in which the totemic affinities connect diverse objects in and to a community. We have already seen above how images transfer and translate between media: an image can move from a painting, to a television, to a wall, to a book, to a mobile phone, quite often mutating and evolving on the way. Images, then, âare ⊠âlikenessesâ or âanalogiesâ that invite more or less systematic correlations of resemblance in a variety of media and sensory channelsâ (84).
This is another reason for their uncanniness, and for speaking about them as if they were alive. And to return to the âas ifâ structure that is our theme here, the picture that Kant offers of the faculty of judgement is totemic precisely in the sense just set out, but it takes someone with the interpretive subtlety of Jean-François Lyotard to reveal this totemic structure. Kantâs philosophy, his Copernican revolution, is most readily represented by the three critiques and the tripartite division of the theoretical, the practical and the aesthetic. In Lyotardâs idiom, these are incommensurable genres of discourse that judgement is tasked with linking together on the occasion of each and every thought. Judgement, Lyotard argues, does not have a particular object, it has a milieu and this milieu can be thought of as a sea in which â[e]ach genre of discourse would be like an island, [and] the faculty of judgement would be, at least in part, like an admiral or like a provisioner of ships who would launch expeditions from one island to the next, intended to present to one island what was found ⊠in the otherâ (1988: 130â31). Here we have a metapicture of the totemic structure of judgement, with the âas ifâ producing relations and making connections amid heterogeneity. My contention is, therefore, that treating images as if they are alive is not only crucial for a âpostlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the pictureâ, but that within the complexity of the âas ifâ structure we can find everything that is fundamental to Mitchellâs extraordinarily diverse research.
Responding to the political call above to rethink âjust what our lives, and our arts, are forâ, the contributions gathered here from the diverse fields of political philosophy, media studies, the plastic arts, paleontology, anthropology, aesthetics and visual culture, are various attempts to explore the powers of reflection (judgement, imaging, imagining, thinking) to invent, create and traverse. They either address Mitchellâs work directly, or use one specific aspect of it to launch their own rethinking of pictures, images and life, together with the social and political implications of such thinking. The collection opens with an exchange of letters between Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell that took place in 2006, and is published here for the first time in English. The exchange considers how the iconic and the pictorial turns relate to each other; what are their points of convergence, how might they differ, and how the two thinkers, without knowing each otherâs work, arrived at a similar set of concerns at roughly the same time, a situation not unlike the fabled meeting of Braque and Picasso who had independently developed the style that came to be known as Cubism. Boehmâs meditations on the topic have been central to the development of Bildtheorie, or Bildwissenschaft in Germany. This latter term explains Mitchellâs use of the term âimage scienceâ, which has emerged directly out of his dialogue with Boehm and other German art historians including Hans Belting and Horst Bredekamp. Wissen-schaft is, of course, generally translated as science, but it is not reducible to either the positivist or empiricist definition that dominates the Anglo- American use of the term. Wissenschaft should therefore be understood in a more speculative sense, and when used by Boehm should be taken to indicate the broader terms of scholarship or knowledge. This opening section of position statements is then completed by two papers emerging f...