Mitchell what do pictures want pdf

Clearly images have value and generate surplus-value, sometimes quite significant value as art auctions, copyright legal battles, and advertising budgets indicate. Yet Mitchell also suggests, signaling the quasi-irony of his title and quest, that perhaps pictures want nothing of us, but nonetheless we should consider them as living beings, try to comprehend them on their own terms, situate them within their life-histories and environments, study their effects and after-life, and try to detect their mysteries.

Indeed, both idolaters and iconoclasts attest to the vitality and power of images. Idolaters, who fetishize art works, artifacts of media culture, advertising images, celebrities or the like, demonstrate the power of images in our society, an almost taken-for-granted assumption of art history and cultural studies which indeed helps legitimate the disciplines.

Iconoclasts too testify to the power of images in our culture, as when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist temples in Afghanistan. The picture was merely that—a photograph. The act was recorded as another image on Saturday Night Live, creating a media spectacle of an iconoclastic attack on the Pope. This would be a mode of criticism that did not dream of getting beyond images, beyond representation, of smashing the false images that bedevil us, or even of producing a definitive separation between true and false images.

On the whole, Mitchell succeeds in convincing readers to take pictures seriously, and his categorical distinctions are useful and enlightening, his analyses often brilliant, and the scope of the project is highly impressive, but we must admit some reservations about his occasional positioning images as subaltern and gendered 29f, 34ff, 46, passim.

Nor are images in general gendered, although they certainly can be in some discourses or instances. Is eliciting a reaction the same as desiring one?

We are not sure, however, that pictures can demand equal rights, as it is generally groups of oppressed people that demand rights, but we would agree that images are as important as words in our contemporary society and are equally worthy of our attention.

Yet capitalism with its Moloch-like greed and unrestrained consumption of finite natural resources like oil, points to the possibility of a collapse of our ecosphere, as Al Gore and critics of global warming remind us. In a digital culture, culture, technology, and even human and natural life are up for grabs, generating new types of texts, cultural forms, people, and images, providing critical cultural and communication theorists an ever-expanding agenda.

In this project of engaging the contemporary, we can thank W. Mitchell for helping us along the way, grasping the importance of the visual and the need to take pictures seriously.

Records of Facts or Records of Mystification? Constructing Images of the Other s to s ed. Download PDF. They are ghostly semblances that materialize before our eyes orin our imaginations. Youslide back and forth between verbal and visual notions of the image, between graphic, pictorial symbols on theonehand and metaphors, analogies, and figurative language on the other. Does the question, what do pictures want?

Yes, with qualifications. I've discussed the nature of the verbal image and textual representation at ength in Tconology and Picture Theory. All the tropes of vitality and desire we apply to visual works of art are transferred and trans- erable to the domain of textuaity. Itisasif the bicth of an image ean- not be separated from its deadness. You ask us to believe that pictures have desires, but you do not explain what desire is. What theory of desir are you working from?

How is desire to be pictured? What model, theory, or image of desire is operating inthe desire of pictures I this human desire, and if so, what is that? This question deserves an esy al titel, whichis proved by the nex chapter. Some might argue, of course, that desire is invisible and unzepresentable, a dimension of the Real that remains inac cessbleto depiction, Wemightbe ableto talk about, orat least talk arownd, desire with the technical languages of psychoanalysis or biology, but we can never see, mac less show, desire in itself.

Itisboth the body and the weapon that wounds the body, both an agent the archer and the instrument the bow and arrow. Is desire a symptom or atleast a result of image-making,and the tendency of images, once made, to acquire desices oftheir own, and provoke them in others?

Related Interests Aesthetics Paintings. Rodrigo Flores de Camposanto. Madi Manolache. Leonardo Izoton Braga. Andy Andrei. Paul Miers. Fabrizio Migliorati. Wes Aelbrecht. Andrea Plos. Ross Wolfe. Amanda Anindita Kirana. Marcos Arraes. Armando Cypriano Pires. Joao Francisco Figueira. Geovana Ibarra. More From Mia Kisic. Mia Kisic. Aboubacar Sompare. Popular in Visual Arts. Raymart Calosa. Rosel Dagala. Minh Tu Nguyen. It is also right there on the surface, in the infinity of aspects that a line or color or blurred erasure can provoke.

Think here of Leonardo's advice. Mitchell: What do pictures want? Of course this infinity of potential aspects in a picture is rarely experienced. Most images pass by and through us so quickly that we scarcely notice them. They are fast food for the eyes, and mostly junk food. But some of them demand more attention, and even the trivial or overlooked ones have this potential waiting to be tapped. The approach I am proposing with the metapicture is thus quite compatible with Mieke Bal's appeal for a return to the "close reading" of images though I'm sure she would want to interrogate the model of reading itself and raise the question of what we mean by reading, and whether the image is perhaps always opening up a threshold of the unreadable and even the indecipherable.

I urge this practice, not as is sometimes feared because I have a magical or mystical view of images, but because I am seeking a clear-sighted analysis of the nature of pictures, one that is willing to explore its object with rigorous phenomenological or psychoanalytic or semiotic or socio-historical modes of interpretation.

But I do not see any of these modes of analysis as a uniquely privileged metalanguage for the understanding of pictures. And the aim of the metapicture is to create a critical space in which images could function, not simply as illustrations or "examples" of the power of this or that method, but as "cases" that to some extent generally unknown in advance that might transform or deconstruct the method that is brought to them.

The widest implication of the metapicture is that pictures might themselves be sites of theoretical discourse, not merely passive objects awaiting explanation by some non-pictorial or iconoclastic master-discourse. In relation to the domesticating tendencies of semiotics, for instance, with its taxonomies of signs and sign-functions, I like to think of the image as the "wild sign," the signifying entity that has the potential to explode signification, to open up the realm of nonsense, madness, randomness, anarchy, and even "nature" itself in the midst of the cultural labyrinth of second nature that human beings create around themselves.

I put this in terms of the following analogy roughly paraphrased : "when it comes to images, then, we are in something like the position of savages who do not know where babies come from. We literally do not know where images come from, or where they go when or even if they die.

I don't think we can properly understand images without some reckoning with vitalism and animism. And I do not mean by this some kind of regressive return to primitive thought, but as Levi-Strauss so often insisted a taking account of the persistence of the "savage mind" at the dialectical heart of whatever we mean by the modern. I would also want to urge that we not see this exclusively in anthropomorphic terms, as if the vitalistic or animated character of the signs and symbols we create around us could be exhaustively described in terms of personification or prosopopoeia.

Certainly, the conceit of the "desiring picture" or the "animated icon" may involve an analogy with human attributes, but the features of vitality, animation, and desire at minimum, appetite also permeate downward, into the animal and vegetable kingdoms. This is why, in What Do Pictures Want? I want to stress the non- or inhuman desires of images, and explore the neglected concept of totemism with its emphasis on natural iconographiesplants, animals, and even minerals, including fossils, of course , in addition to the more familiar and anthropocentric concepts of fetishism and idolatry.

My aim in What Do Pictures Want? So, while I like very much Mieke Bal's concept of "art that thinks," I don't want to begin with the assumption that it always thinks like us. The principles of vitalism and animism require that we also take account of what are sometimes called "lower" forms of consciousnessmere sentience, for instance, or sensuous awareness, responsiveness, as well as forms of memory and desire. What we call thinking in images or in living things goes deeper than philosophical reflection or self-consciousness.

Animals remember. And most of human consciousness is pre- or unconscious. The nervous system is not the only system in our bodies that can learn. There is also the immune system, which learns to recognize and deal with an staggeringly large number of alien organisms in the life of any individual, and which works through a mechanism of copying, mimesis, and reproduction of antibodies that are symmetrical "twins" of the antigens they combat.

Do you think of yours and Bal's alternative as symptomatic in any way for how things are turning around, with the increase of interdisciplinary work being done in the humanities? I hope they are more than symptomatic. My aim is to be diagnostic and even more challenging to create prognoses or interventionist strategies both in pedagogy and research. From the standpoint of disciplinarity, this means something more than the familiar invocation of "interdisciplinarity," which in my view is a bit too safe and predictable I've argued this elsewhere in an essay entitled "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture".

I prefer a notion of image science and visual culture as sites of what I want to call "indisciplinarity," moments of breakage, failure, or deconstruction of existing disciplinary structures accompanied by the emergence of new formations to some extent this is probably a reflection of my long-standing attraction to anarchist theories of knowledge, the sort pioneered by Paul Feyerabend.

It is clear, to begin with, that images do not belong exclusively to any single disciplinenot semiotics, or art history, or media studies, or even cultural studies if it is a discipline.

Their study compels us to be interdisciplinary at a bare minimum, just as paleontology requires that its researchers be geologists, biologists, anatomists, and artists. Perhaps we could return, then, along the lines of these thoughts, to how a critical engagement with the object has to address what we initially referred to as the iconoclasm of some of the "grand narratives" of cultural theory in recent years? I think that many of the modernist master-narratives say of Marxism, psychoanalysis, or of modern art and philosophy were iconoclastic in very fundamental ways.

They tended to treat images as the object of destructive critique, of critical operations that would dispel their power, eliminate them from consciousness, and smash them once and for all. Ideology critique, for instance, was consistently portrayed as a practice of emancipation from a false consciousness depicted as a repertoire of seductive and false images.

Ditto for psychoanalysis and its relation to imagination and fantasy. The history of philosophy, from Plato's banishment of the artist to Richard Rorty's "linguistic turn," resolutely set its face against the image. As Wittgenstein put it, "a picture held us captive, and we could not get outside of it. What has happened in our time, I think, is that this pervasive iconophobia and iconoclasm has become itself the object of a second-order set of metapictures.

Martin Jay's book, Downcast Eyes, was a fundamental breakthrough in putting the anti-ocularcentric philosophical tradition under a magnifying glass. And if I started listing the number of books on iconoclasm in the last thirty years, from David Freedberg, say, to Marie-Jose Mondzain and Dario Gamboni, we could fill up many pages of this interview.

These attempts to "depict iconoclasm" if I may put it that way are symptomatic of what I've called "the pictorial turn," the treatment of the attack on images, not as an automatically reliable strategy, but as itself a cultural phenomenon that needs critical reflection and theorizing. As you know, I derive this strategy from Nietzsche's preface to Twilight of the Idols, where the greatest philosophical iconoclast of them all proposes a method of dealing with idols that sounds at first like traditional image destruction.

Nietzsche tells us that he will "philosophize with a hammer," striking not at temporary idols, but at the "eternal idols" that have mystified the entire philosophical tradition. What is sometimes forgotten is that he goes on to elaborate the metaphor of the hammer, depicting it not as an instrument for destruction, but for "sounding the idols.

This dazzling metaphor which is in fact a philosophical image, a theoretical picture has at least two implications: the first is that Nietzsche does not aim to destroy the eternal idols how could he, since they are eternal? He aims, in other words, to break only the silence that is so characteristic of idols.

The other implication is that the sounding is dialogic or dialectical: by exchanging the hammer for a tuning fork, Nietzsche suggests that it is not only the idols that are sounded, but the critical discourse that is brought to them.

I see this implication as deeply connected to the notion argued at some length in What Do Pictures Want? Pictures, by contrast, material objects that are the bearers of images, can of course be destroyed; but the image survives that destruction, and often becomes even more powerful in its tendency to return in other media, including memory, narrative, and fantasy.

The act of destroying or disfiguring an image, as Michael Taussig argues in Defacement, has the paradoxical effect of enhancing the life of that image. An image is never quite so lively as in the moment when someone tries to kill it. Of course, your analogy between images and living organisms in What Do Pictures Want?

What is the response you've had so far? The best question that has been raised is: what are the limits of this analogy? Where does it run out of steam?

And I have to confess that I don't know the answer to this question, partly because the theory of analogy as my colleague Barbara Stafford has shown is so deeply woven into the problem of images and pictures as such. One interesting limit is reached, I think, in the question of where images come from, and where they go.

Should we postulate, for instance, that images in contrast to pictures, the specific, concrete, material supports or embodiments of images can "neither be created nor destroyed" as the physicists used to say of matter and energy? At this point we are engaged in speculative suppositions, which I think of as probes to test the limits of an analogy. Art historians, of course, are quick to point out and I am quick to acknowledge that the analogy between images and living organisms is not really a new idea.

If there is novelty in what I am proposing, it is in the universality of the claim, especially my argument that the idea of the image as life-form cannot be sequestered in the savage mind, or in the minds of children, neurotics, etc. And it's not that I believe we could somehow overcome this double consciousness with some sort of therapeutic critical method, and settle for one side of it. My argument is that the so-called primitive or savage or superstitious view of images as life-forms was also accompanied by a fair amount of skepticism and critical realism.

The best test-case for this is the attitude of children toward images, especially the host of "transitional objects" Winnicott such as dolls and stuffed animals. Parents know very well that children know that their dolls are not really alive, that they are "only pretending" and playing however vividly--with the conceit of talking horses and dolls that wet this is why my own kids never seemed very impressed with dolls that "really" wet their pants.

But we forget this lesson when we engage in what I call "secondary beliefs," or "beliefs about the beliefs of other people," in which we attribute to them a literal belief in what we, with our superior modern, enlightened consciousness, know to be "merely" figurative beliefs.

The classic instance of this is the attribution of promiscuity and cannibalism to idolaters. Promiscuity and cannibalism may be out there, but I don't think we can posit a necessary relation between them and idolatry, which is just the overestimation of the importance of an image, as seen from the point of view of a devout iconoclast, who projects a fantasy of what an idolater "must believe. Nothing I'm saying would deny the possibility of a psychotic as opposed to the normal neurotic relation to images.