Thursday, November 9, 2006

Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want?

Mitchell, W.J.T.. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005.

What Do Pictures Want? is divided into three sections, each devoted to one of Mitchell's key concepts for explaining pictures: image, object, and medium. The book achieves a certain coherence, but because several chapters were published separately as articles, there is some repetition of central ideas.

Mitchell pursues a broadened concept of pictures (xviii), first by working through a thought experiment that accepts their aliveness. He suggests the animism and vitalism of images through the ideas of cloning and destruction, idolatry and iconoclasm, Dolly the Sheep and the World Trade Center. Rather than fitting neatly with the polarized responses to images, however, Mitchell wants us to get beyond the mystical/skeptical dyad (they're alive; they're dangerous, defeat them), to a kind of criticism that makes images resonate without smashing them. Acknowledging the peculiarity of the move to presume that images have a life-force, Mitchell asks us to entertain the fiction so that our encounters with pictures might be enlivened (ultimately, his arguments jibe with posthumanism).

In the second chapter, Mitchell answers the title's question in a variety of ways, eventually, however, proposing that a possible answer is "nothing" (50). The emphasis here is not on a method for reading images but on a richer understanding of their relationality in a complex skein of desires; rather than locating desire in consumption or production, we should locate it in the images themselves. This attribution of desire to images seems like a kind of agentic shift, although I suspect Mitchell would complicate this. His criteria for the living is that it can die. In a Q&A with readers of his manuscript, Mitchell explains that images have a verbal and visual life (55).

In the other chapters on image, Mitchell explores the idea of desire through the double entendre of "drawing" and in connection with Freud's categories of desire (72-74). He also uses idolatry, fetishism, and totemism to classify object-relations. With totemism, we might revalue the image relative to its hypervaluation in the idol and the fetish. Totemism affirms the life of the image and also introduces the idea of scale as it comes between idolatry (large) and fetish (small) [to connect this with networks, see p. 92]. Mitchell discusses each of the terms--idolatry, fetishism, and totemism--more carefully in chapter 9 (188).

In the final one-third of the book, Mitchell addresses media (c. 10.), explaining that image and picture are distinguished by medium. He pushes beyond a strictly materialist reading of media, however, instead preferring to define it as "material social practice" (203). In chapter 10, he introduces and explains ten theses on media (211):

  1. Media are a modern invention that has been around since the beginning.
  2. The shock of new media is as old as the hills.
  3. A medium is both a system and an environment.
  4. There is always something outside a medium.
  5. All media are mixed media.
  6. Minds are media, and vice versa.
  7. Images are the principal currency of media.
  8. Images reside within media the way organisms reside in a habitat.
  9. The media have no address and cannot be addressed.
  10. We address and are addressed by images of media.

Mitchell argues that images, not language, are the principal currency of media (215). I need to spend more time with the chapters in this section.

Other returns: C. 9 discussion of terms; ^Perceian triad of symbol, icon, and index (73); ^Consider Butler's Excitable Speech, speech act, and image (135); ^Networked image (92, 105, and totem, 191).

Key terms: poetics of pictures (xv), pictorial turn (5), metapictures (6, 10), magical attittudes (8), studium and punctum (9), double consciousness (10), visual trope (10), living images (14), animated icons (14), biotechnology (15), global capitalism (15), living symbols (15), iconoclasm (20), creative destruction (21), Benjamin's dialectical image (25), modern attitude (26), personhood of things (30), Medusa effect (36), violence of male "lookism" (45), visual culture (47, 337), dead metaphor (life of tropes) (53), drawing desire (59), magnetism (60), ascesis (63), scopic drive (72), symbolic, imaginary, and real (73), totemism (75), image's surplus value (76), image science (77), materialist hype (77), criticism (81), picture versus image (85), species and specular (86), dead media (90), images at the center of social crisis (94), image as immaterial (97), idolatry, fetishism, and totemism (97), found objects (113), picturesque (114), totem (122), offending images (125), objectionable objects (125), paleontology of the present (124), speech act (135), Foucault's Order of Things (155), object relations (188), totems of the mind (190), medium theory (198), medium as material social practice (203), medium and boundary (204), mystical empiricism (208), new media (212), visual studies (337), showing seeing (355), vernacular visuality (356), interdiscipline (356).

"The book as a whole, then, is about pictures, understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements" (xiii).

"A picture, then, is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality" (xvii).

"The philosophical argument of this book is simple in its outlines: images are like living organisms; living organisms are best described as things that have desires (for example, appetites, needs, demands, drives); therefore, the question of what pictures want is inevitable" (11).

"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" (13).

"Computers, as we know, are nothing but calculating machines. They are also (as we know equally well) mysterious new organisms, maddeningly complex life-forms that come complete with parasites, viruses, and a social network of their own. New media have made communication seem more transparent, immediate, and rational than ever before, at the same time that they have enmeshed us in labyrinths of new images, objects, tribal identities, and ritual practices" (26).

"In short, we are stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomology" (30).

"What is the moral for pictures? If one could interview all the pictures one encounters in a year, what answers would they give?" (35).

"The question of what pictures want certainly does not eliminate the interpretation of signs. All it accomplishes is a subtle dislocation of the target of interpretation, a slight modification in the picture we have of pictures (and perhaps signs) themselves. The keys to this modification/dislocation are (1) assent to the constitutive fiction of pictures as 'animated' beings, quasi-agents, mock persons; and (2) the construal of pictures not as sovereign subjects or disembodied spirits but as subalterns whose bodies are marked with the stigmata of difference, and who function both as 'go-betweens' and scapegoats in the social field of human visuality" (46)

"What pictures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea of virtuality adequate to their ontology" (47).

"Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language" (47).

"What pictures want in the last instance, then, is simply to be asked what they want, with the understanding that the answer may well be, nothing at all" (48).

"There is simply no getting around the dialectics of life and death, desire and aggression, in the fundamental ontology of the image" (68).

"Images are also, in common parlance, mental things, residing in the psychological media of dreams, memory, and fantasy; or they are linguistic expressions ('verbal images') that name concrete objects that may or may not be metaphoric or allegorical" (84).

"Images are 'kinds of pictures,' classifications of pictures. Images are, then, like species, and pictures are like organisms whose kinds are given by the species" (85).

"We live in the age of cyborgs, cloning, and biogenetic engineering, when the ancient dream of creating a 'living image' is becoming a commonplace" (96).

"Totemism, in fact, is the historical successor to idolatry and fetishism as a way of naming the hypervalued image of the Other. It also names a revaluation of the fetish and idol. If the idol is or represents a god, and the fetish is a 'made thing' with a spirit or a demon in it, the totem is 'a relative of mine,' its literal meaning in the Ojibway language" (98).

"My main point is simply to suggest that the question of images and value cannot be settled by arriving at a set of values and then proceeding to the evaluation of images. Images are active players in the game of establishing and changing values" (105).

"Totemism allows the image to assume a social, conversational, and dialectical relationship with the beholder, the way a doll or a stuffed animal does with children" (106)

"For another key to the found object is its tendency, once found, to hang around, gathering value and meaning like a sort of semantic flypaper or photosensitive surface" (118).

"If images are life-forms, and objects are the bodies they animate, then media are the habitats or ecosystems in which pictures come alive" (198).

"The difference between an image and a picture, for instance, is precisely a question of the medium. An image only appears in some medium or other--in paint, stone, words, or numbers. But what about media? How do they appear, make themselves manifest and understandable? It is tempting to settle on a rigorously materialist answer to this question, and to identify the medium as simply the material support in or on which the image appears" (203). [A medium is more: "material social practice"]

"Media can fit on both sides of the system/environment divide: they are a system for transmitting messages through a material vehicle to a receiver; or they are a space in which forms can thrive[...]" (208).

Related sources:
Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1912. Trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993.
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
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