The Pictorial Turn

Neal Curtis, Neal Curtis

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317989004
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: History of Art

In 1992 W. J. T. Mitchell argued for a "pictorial turn" in the humanities, registering a renewed interest in and prevalence of pictures and images in what had been understood as an age of simulation, or an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture. However, in what is often characterized as a society of the "spectacle" we still do not know exactly what pictures or images are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.

In this seminal collection of essays, the first to be devoted to the "pictorial turn", theorists from across the humanities and social sciences, representing the disciplines of art history, philosophy, geography, media studies, visual studies and anthropology, are brought together with a paleontologist and practising artists to consider amongst other things the relation between pictures and images, the power of landscape, the nature of political images, the status of images in the natural sciences, the "life" of images, and the pictorial uncanny. With these topics in mind, picture theory and iconology exceed in scope the objects of visual culture conventionally understood.

This book was published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

‘As if’: Situating the Pictorial Turn

Neal Curtis

Antony Gormley, LIFE, 2008, © the artist.

W. J. T. Mitchell first proposed a ‘pictorial turn’ 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 ‘pictorial turn’ 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 ‘pictures form a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry’ (1994: 13). In the supposed age of the spectacle ‘we 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 them’ (13). The pictorial turn, then, posits the need for a ‘postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture’ (16), much as Mitchell’s 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 Blake’s 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 ‘what pictures mean and what they do: how they communicate as signs and symbols, what sort of power they have to effect human emotions and behaviour’ (29), but we have not yet asked what they actually desire, a question that is essential to any ‘fundamental ontology’ (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 ‘concept of image-as-organism is, of course, “only” a metaphor, an analogy that must have some limits’ (10), but it is also a necessary metaphor, ‘an incorrigible, unavoidable metaphor’ (54), not simply because, as in Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book (1998) they can be shown to have a ‘social life’, 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 — see for example the moment in Picture Theory where he gives Magritte’s La trahison des images a voice, or two (1994: 68–69). 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 ‘as if’ that takes pictures to be analogous to living organisms simply refocuses the question of ‘seeing as’ that has been a recurring motif throughout the past three decades of Mitchell’s diverse writings.

Having said that, the ‘as if’ can be used as a prism through which to view Mitchell’s work as a whole, encapsulating what he calls ‘the four fundamental concepts of image science’ (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 ‘presses inescapably now’ (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 Israelites’ turn away from Moses and their worship of the golden calf (2008). But the ‘as if’ structure, most famously set out by Kant in his Critique of Judgement (2000), is itself evidence of this recurring turn, for what is Kant’s 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 ‘a body with a soul’, but a despotic state as ‘a mere machine (like a handmill)’ (Kant 2000: 226). Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, then, is absolutely central to the contemporary pictorial turn, but also demonstrates the historical recurrence of such ‘turns’.

As a part of Kant’s philosophy of judgement the ‘as if’ also incorporates many of the features of a metapicture, defined as a picture ‘used to show what a picture is’ (Mitchell 1994: 35), or a picture that ‘presents a scene of depiction’ (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 ‘Darstellung’ of concept and intuition is usually translated as the ‘presentation’ 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 ‘as if’, 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 Mitchell’s 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 Mitchell’s 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 ‘intellectual property’ 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 Mitchell’s 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 ‘a relationship of likeness or resemblance or analogous form’ that ‘comes to life’ (Mitchell 2008: 18) in a picture.

And so we come back to the question of life, and the last of Mitchell’s 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 — new images that fulfil the a ncient dream of creating a ‘living image’, a replica or copy that is not merely a mechanical duplicate but an organic, biologically viable simulacrum of a living organism. The clone renders the disavowal of living images impossible by turning the concept of animated icon on its head. Now we see that it is not merely a case of some images that seem to come alive, but that living things themselves were always already images in one form or another. (2005: 12–13)

Under this priority of the image, or what Baudrillard called the ‘precession of the model’ (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: ‘as if.’ 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: ‘Perhaps 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 for’ (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 Mitchell’s 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 ‘communal investments’ (2005: 165), or the forming of alternative commonalities, precisely because totems lack the ‘polemical force’ (164) of idols and fetishes.

Using the literal meaning of totem as ‘relative of mine’ (Lévi-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 ‘the 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 animal’ (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, ‘are … “likenesses” or “analogies” that invite more or less systematic correlations of resemblance in a variety of media and sensory channels’ (84).

This is another reason for their uncanniness, and for speaking about them as if they were alive. And to return to the ‘as if’ 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. Kant’s 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 Lyotard’s 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 ‘[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 other’ (1988: 130–31). Here we have a metapicture of the totemic structure of judgement, with the ‘as if’ 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 ‘postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture’, but that within the complexity of the ‘as if’ structure we can find everything that is fundamental to Mitchell’s extraordinarily diverse research.

Responding to the political call above to rethink ‘just what our lives, and our arts, are for’, 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 Mitchell’s 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 other’s 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. Boehm’s meditations on the topic have been central to the development of Bildtheorie, or Bildwissenschaft in Germany. This latter term explains Mitchell’s use of the term ‘image science’, 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...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 "As if": Situating the Pictorial Turn
• 2 Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters
• 3 Do Pictures Really Want to Live?
• 4 The Future of the Image: Rancière's Road Not Taken
• 5 Obama and the Image
• 6 Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Re-enchantment of the World
• 7 Images, Totems, Types and Memes: Perspectives on an Iconological Mimetics
• 8 The Pictorial Uncanny
• 9 Looking at Saying in W. J. T. Mitchell
• 10 Responses to Tom Mitchell's Enquiry into the Life of Images
• 11 What Do Drawings Want?
• 12 What Does Landscape Want? A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchell's Holy Landscape
• 13 The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina
• 14 The Trip to Jerusalem
• 15 Politics: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell
• Index