That might be what Deleuze called the “image of thought,” which enables (metaphysical) pursuit of the truth but predetermines the whole possibility of thinking.įor Mitchell, “hypericons” means “figures of figuration, pictures that reflect on the nature on the nature of images,” and “Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, Foucault’s Las Meninas, Lessing’s Laocoon. It is mostly what philosophers have strategically used to picture (represent) their idea. Though Mitchell does not develop fully this concept in both books, he uses it in a specific way to indicate the “the temptation to see ideas as images” such as “Plato’s cave, Aristotle’s was tablet, Locke’s dark room, Wittgenstein’s hieroglyphic,” which “provide our models for thinking about all sort of images – mental, verbal, pictorial, and perceptual”(Icon 6). Mitchell creates a couple of new theoretical concepts to explain this complicated and diverse relationships or junctions between picture and theory: However, his aim “has not been to produce a ‘picture theory’ (much less a theory of pictures), but to picture theory as a practical activity in the formation of representations”(6). Here the relation between words and images is more interactive and even more intermingled. And his main argument is that “the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts” (Picture 5). As an extension of Iconology, now he “investigates the interactions of visual and verbal representation in a variety of media, principally literature and the visual arts” (Picture 4-5).
In Picture Theory, Mitchell repeats almost the same discussion on the relation between images and words but with a slight variation. Furthermore, the place where we stand in the realm of representation deeply related with other problem such as recognition of the world and expression of the self – “the relationship between words and images reflects, within the realm of representation, signification, and communication, the relations we posit between symbols and the world, signs and their meanings”(Icon 43).
The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a “nature” to which only it has access (Icon 43).Īnd the relation between them are literally political in the sense that we tend to consider them “as a struggle for territory, a contest of rival ideologies”(Icon 43).
The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves around itself. In other words, he focuses on the way of representation in which thoughts have constructed, while looking into the theoretical history of pictures.Īlthough he acknowledges the gulf between the image (“the sign that pretends not to be a sign masquerading as … natural immediacy and presence”) and the word (“the artificial, arbitrary production of human will that disrupts natural presence”), his investigations in these books are concentrated on the dialectic relation between them: Instead of just pointing out the difference between them, praising or devaluating the visual images, he pays attention to the dialectic relationship between material images and mental images. What is an image? What is picture? Rather, what is the relationship between image and idea, image and word, the visual and the verbal, or the visible and the sayable? What is the relation of pictures and language? Is the one superior to the other, or each of them belongs to the different realm? The thing that Mitchell surpass other contemporary visual studies scholars – especially in art history – in his Iconology and its companion book, Picture Theory, is that his questions are not limited to the visual, usually understood, material (pictorial or artistic) images.
0 kommentar(er)
