Notes on chapter 1 in Mitchell's Picture Theory

Mitchell suggests that a shift in intellectual and academic inquiry and discourse is occurring (circa 1994) and he calls this shift “the pictorial turn” (11).  Beginning with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and residing in Peirce’s semiotics, Derrida’s “grammatology, Frankfurt School’s investigation of modernity, mass culture, and visual media, and Foucault’s power and knowledge contentions, philosophical inquires and discourses in the human sciences have noticed and interrogated how images and pictures play a fundamental role in the construct of social reality and identity. 

Mitchell, it appears, sets out to explore various disciplines to show how pictures and images have shaken the foundation of their philosophies and methods.  In The Pictorial Turn essay (Mitchell notes that Picture Theory really feels like a compilation of essays), Mitchell focuses on Art History and (Marxist) Structuralism, first focusing on Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer.  In this book, Crary investigates Art History’s emphasis on the spectator (as proposed by Panofsky), particularly in thinking about renaissance art, and attempts to develop an essentialism and scientific approach to visual cultural experience.  Crary posits that artistic modernism in the 1870s and 1880s enabled a different kind of observer, one who is embodied with vision from discursive, social, and technological relationships (Picture Theory 19-20).  This relationship developed with the outset of the camera obscura (the modern idea circa 1820) and created a sense of objectivism of the world.  Yet, Mitchell points out that Crary’s claim that “there was no single nineteenth century observer, no example that can be located empirically” is flawed in that we do have access to what nineteenth century people liked to look at, what they thought about what they saw, and how they described what they saw.  In addition, race, class and gender were as important as ever to understanding how people engaged with images and pictures.  In other words, Crary reduces the spectator to a determined and universalism that engages with visual culture.

After showing that Crary does not offer a new lens through which to critique pictures and images and continues an essentialist approach, Mitchell returns to two critics and/or philosophers: Panofsky and Althusser.  Each critic suggested scenes in which epistemological approaches to visual experience offer a “science of images,” a way (as I think Mitchell is saying) to identify empirically where iconology and ideology function. In Panofsky’s example, the scene of one person greeting another, and, as part of recognition, tipping the hat engenders a way to read perspective.  In Althusser’s example, ideology as interpellation works in a (mis)recognition when one knocks on another’s door or identifies and shakes another’s hand in the street. In both scenes, we have recognition through “sciences”: “Panofsky’s science of images (iconology) and Althusser’s science of (false) consciousness (ideology)” (30).  Mitchell further elaborates, “the main importance of recognition as the link between ideology and iconology is that it shifts both ‘sciences’ from an epistemological ‘cognitive’ ground (the knowledge of objects by subjects) to an ethical, political, and hermeneutic ground (the knowledge of subjects by subjects, perhaps even Subjects by Subjects)” (33), and extends his point that he wishes to have a more critical iconology, a better way “to picture theory,” a different lens through which to see/read subjects and objects as they engage with each other and themselves. “It [iconology or critical iconology] does not rest in a master-code, an ultimate horizon of History, Language, Mind, Nature, Being or any other abstract principle, but asks us to return to the scene of the crime, the scene of greeting between Subjects―between the speaking and the seeing Subject, the ideologist and the iconologist” (30).  In revisiting such scenes like Panofsky’s and Althusser’s, and rather than proposing a metanarrative or a particular empirical Universalism, we might be able to explore further what it is that pictures do and how we can picture a better theory of visual culture and experience.

Interesting quote: “There is an ancient tradition, of course, which argues that language is the essential human attribute: “man” is the “speaking animal.”  The image is the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the “dumb” animal, the child, the woman, the masses” (24).

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print