gottfried boehm thomas mitchell two letters culture theory

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Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: TwoLettersGottfried Boehm & W. J. T. MitchellPublished online: 21 Dec 2009.

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Culture, Theory & Critique, 2009, 50(2–3), 103–121

Culture, Theory & CritiqueISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis

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Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters

Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. MitchellTaylor and FrancisRCTC_A_424181.sgm10.1080/14735780903240075Culture, Theory & Critique1473-5784 (print)/1473-5776 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis502-3000000July-November [email protected]

Abstract In this exchange of letters, Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T.Mitchell explore the intellectual paths that brought them to simultaneouslyadvocate an ‘iconic turn’ and a ‘pictorial turn’ respectively. They trace theemergence of the study of images through art history and philosophy andconsider the diversity of images and the array of issues and ideas that cometogether under the topic of ‘iconology’ and ‘pictoriality’. On the way theydiscuss the use and treatment of images in the human and natural sciences,the history of aesthetic styles, the possibility of a physics of the image, thestatus of iconoclasm, and how the idea of a turn might equate to a paradigmshift in Western philosophical thinking.

Dear Tom,

Has the ‘science of images’ begun to write its own history much too early,before it knows what it is or what it can be? One could misunderstand HansBelting’s Viennese Colloquium, which sought to take stock of the field, assuch an attempt. There, however, the matter was one of unwritten and futurebooks, rather than an observation on what had already been achieved. Never-theless, the ominous talk of the pictorial and/or iconic turn is nearly unavoid-able when we discuss our own work. Indeed, although the terms refer back tothe beginning of the 1990s, they designate more generally the attempt togauge the legitimacy of our own work in actu. It therefore seemed appropriateto direct questions at the two of us as the coiners of these terms – questionsreceived with mixed feelings, given that there is no lack of ‘turns’; they belongto the jargon of the science and to its marketing.

Although quickly proclaimed, it is yet to be determined how much thisnew kind of scientific questioning – whether related to materials or also tomethods – is actually worth. The ‘turn’ vacillates between what Thomas S.

Antony Gormley, ORIGIN OF DRAWING IX, 2008, © theartist.

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104 Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell

Kuhn termed a ‘paradigm’ and the attitude of a rhetorical twist that recallslast fall’s fashions. Given this situation, it might prove useful to followthrough on the request for information and to respond in two letters, fromBasel to Chicago and back. I do not associate this undertaking in any waywith quarrels over chronological priority, since at this point it is quite obviousthat we agree, despite our differing intellectual presuppositions and scientificgoals, with the assessment that the image question touches on the founda-tions of culture and poses quite novel demands on the field that are not to behaphazardly satisfied. For the ‘image’ is not simply some new topic, butrelates much more to a different mode of thinking, one that has shown itselfcapable of clarifying and availing itself of the long-neglected cognitivepossibilities that lie in non-verbal representation.

À propos chronology: this epistolary exchange will also serve to show thatwe have operated with a very large degree of independence from oneanother, one that in the early years was sustained by mutual ignorance. OnceI finally read your works and got to know you personally, I gained theimpression that two wanderers in a forest had met, wanderers who hadtraversed the same, scarcely-known continent of pictorial phenomena andvisuality, laying surveyor points here and there in order to open up theterrain for scientific discovery, before – as is apt to happen in this type of‘Leatherstocking’ tale – going their own ways again. Luckily, we are not aloneon this journey; other ‘pioneers’ have left behind their tracks, but the days of‘pioneer’ work have long since passed: the fascination with new horizons hasset many heads thinking in the meantime; it nurtures the talk of ‘theory’ or‘science’ that can only prove itself through dialogic and interdisciplinaryexchange.

I

The attempt to make progress on the subject of the ‘image’ was at first, i.e. inthe late 1970s and early 1980s, very lonely work for me indeed; I will return tothese beginnings with a few comments later on. After having achieved suffi-cient security, I attempted to break out of my isolation by compiling ananthology, Was ist ein Bild? (What is an Image?), that was finally published in1994 by Fink Verlag in Munich. I had been working on the anthology since thelate 1980s and it was initially planned as a volume of the ‘Edition Suhrkamp’series, where it had already been scheduled to appear in 1991. I wanted toshow that in philosophy especially, but also in works of modern art, a crypticimage debate was taking place that I hoped to interpret in order to lendvalidity to my own intentions. This debate comprised positions by MauriceMerleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Bernhard Waldenfels,Michael Polanyi, Max Imdahl and others.1

However, conceiving of the image as paradigm was not possible withoutoutlining in one way or another its relation not only to language itself, butalso to the dominant philosophical position. This position, incidentally, was

1 Contributions by Jacques Lacan, Meyer Schapiro and Kurt Bauch were alsopublished from the older discussion.

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Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters 105

shared in different ways by analytical as well as continental philosophy andhad been termed the ‘linguistic turn’ by Richard Rorty in his reader of 1967.The linguistic turn seemed to undermine all attempts to make furtherprogress with the image, unless one was attempting to show that images arethemselves linguistic occurrences, or that they participate in a universalsystem of signs. This route (one that had been presaged by C. S. Peirce andNelson Goodman, but also by French semiotics) was fascinating, but left meunconvinced in the end; less because Jacques Derrida had proffered his inter-esting criticism of ‘logocentrism’, under which an attempt like that of thelinguistic turn to employ language as the ultimate verifier of knowledgecould undoubtedly be subsumed. Rather, I was more concerned with thefissures in that position’s argument, which, although it ascribed everything tolanguage, was not sufficiently able to establish the source from whichlanguage itself could derive the stability of a theoretical foundation. Was thissource also rooted in language? Or could the origins be traced back to another– external – reference, one that allows for the fact that language is embeddedin social, cultural, or anthropological processes? If so, it should be possible todemonstrate the inherent pictoriality of language, which Ernst Cassirer hadearlier reflected upon in employing the concept of deixis (1964: 129).

In the philosophy of the 20th century one finds repeated attempts at a‘criticism’ of language, related to one another in the way that they locate thegeneration of meaning in acts of viewing (Husserl), in processes of existence(Heidegger), or in vague familial similarities of the concepts, which emerge inthe practice of language play (Wittgenstein). In other words, the iconic turn isnot based on a fundamental opposition to the linguistic turn, but rather takesup the argumentative twist therein and pushes it further. The turn towardsthe image is a consequence of the turn towards language; it adheres to theinsight, possessed of a sophistication I did not want to forfeit and that refer-ences the ‘turn of all turns’, namely to that of Copernicus, as taken up by Kantin the Critique of Pure Reason and which he had taken as the foundation of hisown critical work.2 I am referring here to the insight that reflection on theconditions for knowledge is an indispensable premise of any science that doesnot wish to subject itself to the reproach of a lack of intellectual rigour, e. g. tothat of a naïve objectivism.

The place of the Kantian transcendence of consciousness had long agobeen supplanted by that of language, which in light of the iconic turn had toexpand in order to address the conditions for representation in a broadersense. It turned out that the structural thought of linguistics or the continualreference to the communicative superiority of verbal language had led to anarrowing of what classical philosophy had termed ‘logos’. This was a broadand complex concept that, while not yet encompassing the image, alreadyincluded numbers in addition to speech, and was in general moving towardsopening itself to meaning-generating processes. Understanding the image as‘logos’, as a meaning-generating process, this vision of a non-verbal, iconiclogos was in short my motivation for ascribing paradigmatic meaning to the

2 For the genesis of the ‘Copernican world formula’, see Blumenberg (1965) andmy attempt at transferring it to visual art (Boehm 1995).

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growing interest in the image (or, to be more precise: in pictures) and forspeaking of the iconic turn as a project with a longer perspective. How doimages create meaning? This question serves as my guide, and although theinteraction with the observers is always considered in light of the conditionsof each context, initially, the visible emphasis was certainly placed on the sideof the artefact.3

II

And thus I have outlined the theoretical aspects of the project. For the philo-sophically-educated art historian I understand myself to be, it was not prima-rily a matter of intervening in academic philosophical debates, but rather offormulating those questions to which I had been led by an intense exposure toart and by the practice of art history itself. Those who are fascinated byimages in the most fundamental way, those who have thoroughly examinedand analysed great numbers of them and possess what one could call animage-sense, know with certainty that there is such a thing as an iconic intelli-gence that the artist restores in order to free himself from the demands oflanguage, from canonical texts, or from other mimetic instances, and toestablish evidences of a unique type, also – and especially – in cases involvinge.g. traditional historical images that re-tell the time-worn content of the bible,mythology, or history.

It was not abstract art in the first instance that brought forth meaning forwhich there is no model in reality – although it does so irrefutably – andwhich goes as far as to surpass the known Real. Independent of language,how does this exposition of meaning succeed? What are its objective founda-tions and what comprises its mechanisms? We know as yet much too little,and the little we do know lacks the desired exactitude. The best point ofdeparture for further research seems to me to lie in the immanent order andreflexivity of images themselves, whose riches, whose historical and culturalpotential for change offer unrelenting resistance against premature generali-sations. I can imagine that you had something similar in mind when youspoke of ‘immanent representational practices’ (Mitchell 1994: 14/15). Therecognition of such genuinely iconic meaning is, however, completely uncon-tested on a practical level. Millions of people would not be visiting museumsto look at pictures if they were only being fed what they already knew or hadheard at some point. The desire to recognise is indeed a strong and satisfyinghuman urge, but the same can also be said for curiosity, which can only besatisfied when the boundary of what is already known has been transgressed.On the other hand, appreciation of this image-sense has been a tricky matteron a methodological level and for art history in general, and has remained soto this day. Contradictions have emerged over the course of its history, begin-ning with the opposition of connoisseur and antiques dealer, then of Wölfflin’svisual operations and Panofsky’s pre-textual methodologies, through to

3 For contributions in which the emphasis is on the side of perception see Boehm(1992).

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positions held today, in which the struggle between the visible and thespeakable is fought out.

Essentially, the name icono-logy would be the comprehensive method-ological substitute for what art history is supposed to achieve: theunderstanding and interpretation of the logos of the image in its historical,perception-oriented and meaning-saturated determinedness. Panofsky(whose authoritative reformulation of the term retains validity to this day)adopted the ancient concept of iconologia, and in so doing caused this balanceto shift to the side of textuality, as you yourself have shown in your contribu-tion on the ‘pictorial turn’.4 When the iconic is invoked, it never implies awithdrawal from language, but rather that a difference vis à vis language comesinto play. The image is as far from innocent or immediate as is the eye;instead, it is multifariously connected to the contexts of thought, sex, culture,ideology, and speech – which of course does not mean that it could eversimply be deduced from these contexts. ‘My’ turn is, thus, a criticism of theimage rather than one of ideology.

It is therefore the history of images that motivates the question, ‘what andwhen is an image?’ and presumably also your question, ‘what do pictureswant?’ This history has changed dramatically in two ways and set theprocesses in motion that made a ‘paradigm’ out of the image in the first place.The first aspect concerns the fact that the work of modern artists from themiddle of the nineteenth century onward incorporated the attempt to contin-ually re-define and create the conditions of their own work in very differentways. Following the end of a binding system of genres accelerated by theinvention of photography and motion pictures, a system that formerlydefined the co-ordinates to which images were to refer, which contents of theworld they should thematise, and which cultural mission they were to fulfil.Now, what images should be and how they should look was to be exploredanew by each author. Image criticism and image negation, taking leave of theimage, its end, and the emphasis on a continually new beginning have eversince belonged to the work. These reflections on the image were drivenforward by the artists in their acts of creation in the great laboratory of themodern, into which the individual ateliers had integrated themselves.

The diversity of the pictorial in all its forms in the twentieth centurylends the question ‘what is an image?’ irrefutable legitimation as well as aparticular urgency. This urgency was heightened once again when, towardsthe end of the century, a new practice came about in the form of digital tech-nology that equipped the image with a never before seen flexibility, omni-presence, and usefulness. It has acquired ever greater importance incommunication processes and thus also partially remedies the deficiency forwhich it had so often – justifiably – been taken to task: although capable ofrepresenting meaning, it lacked the ability to function as a medium ofdiscourse on meaning, i.e. to function as a meta-entity. What is completelynew is an emergence of image-generating processes that have led to cognitive

4 Panofsky’s is an iconology in which the ‘icon’ is thoroughly absorbed by the‘logos’ (1994: 28), and ‘to explore the way that pictures attempt to represent them-selves …’ (24).

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processes at the heart of the hard sciences being driven by the iconic, and thefact that the image now plays a role in the day-to-day business of science,which even a generation ago would have been utterly unthinkable.

Thus, the aesthetic realm, which the image had largely been thought toinhabit, was broadened to encompass the discursive and the cognitive. Wasthis not a betrayal of art? Over the last few years, this concern has triggered acertain amount of polemicising. From my vantage point, it is not at all amatter of collapsing e.g. technical into artistic images, or of dissolving theeminence of aesthetic experience into the banality of an image-productioncentred on application. Quite the contrary: whoever is seriously interested incriteria of differentiation cannot avoid exploring the aesthetic locus of experi-ence from the inside as well as out, including its historical and culturalcontexts. How else could one determine a boundary or begin to differentiate?This is exactly what the major artists of the twentieth century have demon-strated for us. I gladly concede that the iconic turn has up until now hardlycontributed to the analysis of aesthetic differences, but I refute emphaticallythat it is incapable of doing so. Other aspects have come to the fore, such asthe rediscovery of the history of science as a history also of images, or thechance, via the image, to re-open a dialogue between the faculties thoughtlong dead, not least between the humanities and the hard sciences. Thischange in perspective is a most significant effect of the iconic turn. Here, theconcept of the iconic acquires the universality that it did not previouslypossess. It is true that the German language does not differentiate betweenpicture und image – the words ‘Bild’ (image) or ‘bildlich’ (pictorial) open up avery broad semantic field. The neologism ‘ikonisch’ (iconic) emphasises thisgeneralisation even further; the image is simultaneously marked as an objectas well as a process, and thus a name is given to the theoretical claim thatassociates itself with ‘turn’.

The words ‘ikonisch’ (iconic) or ‘Ikonik’ (the Iconic) – Max Imdahl tookup the latter and made it his theoretical trademark – therefore have no rela-tion to the ‘icon’ introduced by Peirce as a pictorial sign. This is probablyworth noting for an American reader acquainted with it. However, in theGerman-speaking realm, Peirce’s concept is, if not unknown, then not partic-ularly prevalent either.5

III

These matters were discussed in the anthology Was ist ein Bild? from 1994, inwhich older sources and preliminary works were involved that themselves

5 The concept ‘Ikonik’ was introduced in ‘Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes’(Boehm 1978). Imdahl’s programme is most clearly outlined in: Giotto. Arenafresken.Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik (1980: esp. 84, 99). C. S. Peirce (2000) has alwaysreturned to the designation ‘icon’, whereby the differentiation between the icon on theone hand and ‘index’ and ‘symbol’ on the other was always of great significance. Seee.g. ‘Kurze Logik, Kapitel I’. In ‘Regeln des richtigen Räsonnierens’, this differentia-tion of the icon from index and symbol is itself defined (2000: 429). In the samepassage: ‘Ein Ikon ist ein reines Vorstellungsbild, das nicht notwendig visuell ist …[An icon is a purely imaginative image, one that is not necessarily visual]’.

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touched upon art history and philosophical questions. What they had incommon was the attempt to trace the way in which images create meaningand convince us, the observers. This fact is generally taken for granted, butrequires further clarification. One could view the following case study astaking on this difficult (in that it is all too easily overlooked) problem:Published in 1985 under the title Bildnis und Individuum: Über den Ursprung derPortraitmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance (‘Image and the Individual: Onthe Origin of Portraiture during the Italian Renaissance’), the first draft hadalready been completed in 1972 and was approved for my Habilitation in arthistory at the University of Heidelberg in 1974 (Boehm 1985). The work takesas its main thesis the idea that a new type of portraiture emerged in Italybetween 1470 and 1510 that depicted the subject as a sovereign entity. Onespoke in the secondary literature of the ‘autonomous’ portrait and it thusseemed appropriate to also ascribe autonomy to its subject. What seemedsignificant here for the history of images was the fact that real people werebeing represented, but now with the instruments of a newly invented logic ofrepresentation that conspicuously avoided reference to external texts. Part ofthe significance of the individuals depicted by Antonello da Messina,Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and others is thatthey presented themselves in certain roles and attitudes, but never as therepresentatives of a meaning external to themselves. Why? Because there isno single concept, no verbal expression sufficient to define the autonomousindividual – but it is possible to show, with the means available to the iconic,‘what’ each individual is. The portrait thus becomes the true explication of anew historical concept of human beings. In any case, at that particular pointin time, the peculiarities mentioned above posed great difficulty to art history,not least to the iconographically oriented branch of research that was accus-tomed to using external pretext as a key for accessing meaning and did notreckon with the immediate clarity and meaningfulness of the image itself.

However, it appeared that the invention of a new type of the pictorialpresence of individuals was in myriad ways embedded in the historicalcontext of the time. The difference between this method and that of iconology,as well as that of cultural studies, lies in the analysis of making pictorial logicthe point of departure, now by way of its intrinsic order, for rendering thespecific context accessible. Consequently, I would initiate the ‘complexinterplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies andfigurality’ (1994: 16), as you describe the pictorial turn, at the order of thevisible so as to concentrate on the historical difference that the image opensup. Rendering it as a criticism of ideology or counter-reading Panofsky withAlthusser, as I have found in your conception, seems to me personally to betoo broad an approach.

The above-mentioned study fueled my ambition to further pursue thelogic of images on a theoretical level as well. I was encouraged in this under-taking by Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had mentored me in the craft of philos-ophy, and who – contrary to widespread belief – never intended to restricthermeneutics to a linguistic basis. This seems to contradict the often-citedpassage from Wahrheit und Methode: ‘Sein, das verstanden werden kann, istSprache (Being, in as far as it can be understood, is language)’ (Gadamer 1986:478). For Gadamer, ‘language’ was an entity that encompassed manifestations

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of meaning like those achieved by music, the symbol, dance, or, for thatmatter, the image. Gadamer did make some progress towards an elaborationof these translingual aspects, even if he never ultimately reached that goal.His own passion was unquestionably channeled into the interpretation ofpoetry; he did not consider himself competent enough in other arts. I wastherefore sure that an attempt at a hermeneutics of the ‘image’, as it thenappeared in a jointly-edited volume, did not provoke resistance on his part,but rather his critical interest.6

That text is a sort of snapshot of the beginning of those attempts, whichthen later solidified around the iconic turn. Many problems, perhaps toomany, are touched upon there, and suggestions for solving them are hintedat. My fundamental motive was, of course, the challenge of protecting imagesfrom linguistic heteronomy, whether by way of iconological references or ofekphrases, which themselves do not illustrate the difference between thespeakable and the visible. At the same time it was not at all a matter ofcompletely demarcating images from language. The point of departure wasmuch more one of demonstrating that linguistic communication is indeedcapable of deciphering images. For this purpose, I have employed the modelof a mutual translation that not only aims at talking about images, but that inreturn is able at any time to verify whether a word has ‘struck home’ byproofing it against the original, i.e. the image (Boehm 1978: 455). Thus it hasbecome clear that images themselves already possess their own ‘light’ and donot function merely as mirrors of the external meanings that they reflect. Justas a side note, I would like to mention that I was concerned even then withinvestigating language with an eye to an implicit deictic power, a pictoriality,which later fueled my resolve to shift the linguistic turn further towards theiconic (Boehm 1978: 451, 455, 468).

At the core of these considerations was the intent to understand imagesin view of an implicit processuality, of an ‘iconic difference’, with whose helpmeaning can articulate itself without borrowing from linguistic models (suchas that of syntax) or from rhetorical devices (Boehm 1978: 461).7 Giving thisvisual and non-verbal logic a verifiable argumentative form, without fallingvictim to the alternative of either a ‘general’ science of the image (such as oneof a semiotic character) or of a conceptually blind close reading, has remaineda leading aim ever since. The intelligence of images lies in their respectivevisual order, but the question remains open as to how this order is to beunderstood, which rules it follows, and how much concrete individuality itpossesses. What was always helpful at the time was the critical comparison ofthe model of the ‘image’ and the model of the ‘statement’. One finding result-ing from this comparison was that, in the case of images, their ‘facts’ or‘contents’ can never be differentiated from the modalities of their appearancein the way that a sentence is able to differentiate the changing characteristicsof a stable subject, to ‘state’ them (Boehm 1978: 450). Images enter into themost intimate relationships with processes and potentialities, such that one

6 See note 5 (Boehm 1978: 444–71).7 On the concept of ‘iconic difference’, originally in ‘Bildsinn und Sinnesorgane’

(Boehm 1992: 50).

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gets the impression that the prevailing conceptual oppositions with whichscience and criticism have hounded images, such as e.g. form and content,signified and signifier, inner and outer, the sensory and the concept, etc.always came too late, as if the image had established itself in anotherlogical world that we do not know according to its rules. How could we?Given that traditionally, Western thought did not conceive of images ascapable of their own power of illumination, the question regarding theirorder was superfluous.

A final remark on this essay concerns the latter-mentioned considerationof the image-blindness of older European science, which naturally does notimply that Europe would not otherwise have developed a rich culture ofimages encompassing various logics of production and reception. If oneanalyses the way in which the constitution of meaning was assigned tospeech or to signs, it becomes clear that – up until Ferdinand de Saussure andbeyond – it is the rule-bound relation of the elements to one another that bringsabout an inner realm, as it were, of linguistic meanings, against which evenwriting itself remains something superficial that basically does not participatein this meaning (Boehm 1978: 447). Here, the image retreats even further fromthe self-reflexivity of language into a completely external realm in whichmeaning is absent, unless language – or perception – places it there fromwithout or bestows the image, moonlike and inextricably melded with itsmaterial matrix, with solar lucidity.

Seeing through the Paragone being fought out between the twins of imageand language, or in other words, understanding the intrinsic reliance of thelinguistic turn on the iconic turn was thus already a dominant theme in thisphase. I freely admit that in at least one place, this essay took off on certaintangents that I could not yet avoid at the time. The nature of these tangentsinvolved conceiving the iconic order following the pattern of Ferdinand deSaussure’s lateral phonemic organisation, and consequently of a linguisticmodel, in which I had been encouraged by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’sventures.8 In any case, I hope to have remedied these deficiencies with thetheory of ‘iconic difference’.

You see, then, how one remains the prisoner of once-conceived funda-mental ideas. Looking back, one is inclined to ascribe an objective conse-quence or even a necessity to its development. The best treatment for this typeof blindness is dialogue, of course, and I await with bated breath the medicinethat will reach me from Chicago.

March, 2006

[Translated by Jennifer Jenkins, Pacific Lutheran University]

References

Boehm, G. 1978. ‘Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes’, in H.-G. Gadamer and G. Boehm(eds), Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp.

8 See Boehm (1978) sections V and VI. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2003: 111–75).

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Boehm, G. 1985. Bildnis und Individuum. Über den Ursprung der Portraitmalerei in der ital-ienischen Renaissance. München: Prestel.

Boehm, G. 1992. ‘Bildsinn und Sinnesorgane’. In Neue Hefte für Philosophie und Sehen.Hermeneutische Reflexionen, in Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Jahrgang 1.

Boehm, G. (ed). 1994. Was ist ein Bild? München: Fink Verlag.Boehm, G. 1995. ‘Eine kopernikanische Wende des Blickes’. In Sehsucht. Über die

Veränderung der visuellen Wahrnehmung. Göttingen: Ed. Kunst- und Ausstellung-shalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 25–34.

Blumenberg, H. 1965. Die Kopernikanische Wende, Frankfurt/M.Cassirer, E. 1964. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 2nd edition. Darmstadt: Band I.Gadamer, H.-G. 1986. Wahrheit und Methode. In Hermeneutik I, Gesammelte Werke. Last

edition. Tübingen: Band 1.Imdahl, M. 1980. Giotto. Arenafresken. Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik. München: Fink

Verlag.Merleau-Ponty, M. 2003. ‘Das mittelbare Sprechen und die Stimmen der Schweigens’.

In C. Bermes (ed), Das Auge und der Geist: Philosophische Essays. Hamburg: Meiner.Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Peirce, C. S. 2000. Semiotische Schriften. Volume 1. Edited by C. J. Kloesel and Helmut

Pape. Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.Rorty, R. (ed). 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Dear Gottfried,

Thank you for the generous spirit of your letter. I think you are absolutelycorrect that the relation of the ‘pictorial versus iconic turn’ is not one ofpriority, but of a parallel wandering in the forest. Now that we have strayedinto the same clearing and have a chance to compare our itineraries, perhapswe will both have a chance to re-orient ourselves. I want to respond to fivethemes that I see in your letter – the question of image-science, the figure ofthe ‘turn’, the nature of our respective intellectual formations, our conver-gences on the same concepts and theorists, and the divergences in ourapproaches.

1. Image science: I agree with you that it is too early for image science to writeits history, in the sense of reaching its end. But it is not too early to write ahistory in medias res, or at least to record our respective itineraries throughthis labyrinth. We are clearly, not at the beginning, but somewhere in themiddle of things, uncertain at this point what sort of science a science ofimages would be. The very word ‘science’ has such different connotations inEnglish and German that we would need to head off possible confusionsright at the outset. In English, the historical and interpretive disciplines arerarely granted the honorific title of ‘science’, which is reserved for the ‘exact’or ‘hard’ or ‘experimental’ sciences, where proof, demonstration, andquantification are essential criteria. Of course there are intermediate cases,‘historical’ sciences such as paleontology, which involve a strong emphasis oninterpretation.

I suspect that, for you, the relevant science is hermeneutics, the study ofthe way images make meaning in human history. But there would be other

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sciences: semiotics and the formal conditions of meaning; psychology,phenomenology and cognitive science, and the study of conditions of percep-tion and recognition of images; rhetoric and media theory, focusing on thecirculation and power of images, as well as the technical innovations in mediathat transform the very conditions under which images appear to us. Andthen there are what in English we call the hard or exact sciences – mathemat-ics, physics, and biology. You remark on ‘the fact that the image now plays arole in the day-to-day business of science, which even a generation ago wouldhave been unthinkable’. I would like to hear more about this claim, becausemy intuition would have been rather different. I think images have alwaysbeen crucial to science, but then we would want to specify which kinds ofimages (models, diagrams, perspectival pictures, photographs?) and whichkinds of science (physics, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology andmedicine, geology, paleontology?). It strikes me that images have alwaysbeen critical to mathematics, at least since the invention of geometry (think ofSocrates’ demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem to the slave boy in thePhaedo). And surely chemistry has always worked with scale models ofmolecules, astronomy with charts and maps. The discovery of the structureof DNA would not have been possible without a combination of micro-photography and sculptural modeling.

More fundamentally, I wonder if you would agree that images might notjust ‘play a role’ of subservience or instrumentality within the exact sciences(as ‘illustrations’ or models), but themselves might be seen as targets or objectsof these sciences. I think we need to ask, in other words, not only whatspecific ‘image of science’ we are working from, and not only how imagesserve as instruments in the work of science, but also what mathematics, phys-ics, and biology might contribute to the ‘science of images’.9 Is there not amathematics of the image that links it to questions of form, symmetry, andquantification of intensities? Doesn’t the emergence of new forms of the digi-tal image produce a new relation of iconicity and numeracy in our time?10

And isn’t the mathematics of the image in fact as old as measurement,perspectival representation, and notions of formal resemblance, congruence,and repetition in ornament?

Shouldn’t we also ask whether a science of images could also be a physicalscience, attentive to the materiality of images, the chemistry and even (accord-ing to James Elkins (2000)) the ‘alchemy’ of paint? (Could it be that some of thetraditional hostility to images in science has to do with the powerful role ofimagery in pseudo-scientific thinking, not to mention superstition and magic?)The whole domain of the photographic image is currently undergoing a tech-nical and physical transition from a chemical basis to an electronic and compu-tational support, with numerous implications for the ontology of the image.Some observers believe (mistakenly, in my view) that the claims of realism,truth, and naturalness of the chemical-based photograph are irretrievablycompromised by digitisation. But even if this argument is incorrect, it seems

9 See my essay ‘Image Science’ in Huppauf and Weingart (2007).10 I would want to insist, at the same time, on the antiquity of the digital image in

graphic technologies that precede the invention of the computer, in practices such asthe art of mosaic.

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clear that something has changed as a result of the technical revolutions inimage production and circulation.11

A physical science of images already exists, of course, in the longtradition of forensic connoisseurship and archaeology. But a physics of theimage (like the physics of matter and energy proper) would surely have toengage with the peculiarly immaterial character of the image, the way imagescirculate across media, transcending any single material support while at thesame time never appearing except in some material support, even if it isnothing more than embodied memory. That, I take it, is why iconoclasm issuch a paradoxical and impossible project, why the destruction of an imageis almost never successful in making an image disappear. On the contrary, thephysical destruction of an image, like the splitting of an atom, seems to havethe result of unleashing even more image-energy, beginning with the specta-cle of destruction itself.

I have also, as you know, been involved in trying to think through theimplications of a ‘life science’, or biology, of images. In what sense are imageslike organisms? Why do figures of vitalism and animism continually hauntthe discourse on icons, so that they seem not only like imitations of a life thatis somewhere else, but themselves something like life-forms? Why do ourmetapictures or ‘images of images’ tend to treat them as if they were co-evolutionary organisms like viruses, capable of reproduction, mutation, andevolution? Why do images seem to have ‘a life of their own’? Shouldn’t we beexploring the implications of a vitalist art history? Would it go back tothe work of scholars like Henri Focillon and Bergson, as well as forward tothe work of a neo-vitalist such as Deleuze, and beyond itself into the life-sciences proper, where the phenomenon of cloning has made all theancient myths about the creation of ‘living images’ now seem like real techni-cal possibilities?

So as you can see, I completely agree with your sense that, whatever thepictorial turn involves, in our time it certainly must mean a new relation withscience and technology that will expand the field of hermeneutics, andperhaps burst it open.

2. Turns: I share your mixed feelings about the fashionable repetition of the‘turn’ as a received idea that, ‘like last fall’s fashions’, can be accepted withoutquestion. The notion of the pictorial turn as a straightforward replacement oflanguage by pictures, books by television, is the sort of reductionism thatproduces bad history and aesthetics. But I wonder if you could clarify yourintentions in putting the case as a preference for the turn as Kuhnian ‘para-digm shift’ as opposed to the ‘rhetorical design’. I think the differencebetween a change of paradigm and a change of rhetorical design or ‘trope’ isnot quite so sharp as you are assuming. My sense is that a paradigm is, asFoucault argued, a trope, or ‘figure of knowledge’ within a discipline. Butthere is no doubt that a pictorial turn has also occurred at the level of popularperception, in relation to new technologies of production, distribution, and

11 See my article, ‘Realism and the Digital Image’, in Baetens and van Gelder(2006).

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consumption of images. That is why, as a student of mass culture andtechnical media, I have wanted to treat the ‘fashion’ version of the pictorialturn with some measured respect, as an object of historical investigation, andnot just as the ephemeral jargon of marketing. Or, more precisely: isn’t it thecase that marketing, along with fashion and style themselves, is a legitimateconcern of art history, and of image science, as theorists from Adolf Loos toRoland Barthes have taught us?

So I have consistently treated the pictorial turn, both as a contemporaryparadigm shift within learned disciplines (one that treats non-verbal represen-tations with a new kind of respect – the movements in philosophy andlanguage theory that you document), and as what I call ‘a recurrent trope’ thatoccurs when a new image-repertoire, or a new technology of image-productioncreates widespread anxiety, a kind of ‘iconic panic’ usually accompanied byhand-wringing and iconoclastic gestures. As I put it in Picture Theory, the picto-rial turn involves both the ‘disciplines of the human sciences and … the sphereof public culture’ (1994: 11). This is why I have argued that ‘pictorial turns’ haveoccurred before, and have invariably involved some interplay between theworlds of learning and the public sphere, from Plato and Aristotle’s reflectionson the arts of image and opsis, to the invention of oil painting and perspective,to the invention of photography. (I have also suggested that a pictorial turnmay not necessarily depend upon a new technology, but could be the productof a social movement based in the fear of a new image. Pictorial turns, in myview, are often noticed first by iconoclasts who express alarm and horror overthe onset of a threatening ‘world picture’, as is notably the case with Heidegger(2002), who equates the onset of the ‘world as picture’ with the dominance ofmodern technoscientific rationality.) Again, if I may quote from my originalessay on ‘The Pictorial Turn’:

What makes for the sense of a pictorial turn, then, is not that we havesome powerful account of visual representation that is dictating theterms of cultural theory, but that pictures form a point of peculiarfriction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry.The picture now has a status somewhere between what ThomasKuhn called a ‘paradigm’ and an ‘anomaly’, emerging as a centraltopic of discussion in the human sciences in the way that languagedid: that is, as a kind of model or figure for other things (includingfiguration itself), and as an unsolved problem, perhaps even theobject of its own ‘science’. (1994: 13)

My sense is that one fruitful area for continued discussion, then, would be therelation between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘popular’ versions of the pictorialturn. What precisely is the difference between a paradigm and a rhetoricaltrope, between a changing episteme and a change in fashion (or better, instyle, which traditionally has been given a more respectable status than theephemerality of ‘mere’ fashion, and which has played an absolutely centralrole in art history). Are the emotions of iconoclasm and iconophilia confinedonly to the popular, mass-culture version of the pictorial turn, or do they alsoappear within philosophical discourse itself, from Plato’s suspicion of thearts, to Wittgenstein’s anxiety over the ‘picture’ that ‘held us captive’?

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3. Formations: I am interested that you describe your early work in this field aslonely. It makes me realise just how sociable and widely supported myresearch has been from very early on. One of my mentors in graduate schoolat Johns Hopkins was Ronald Paulson, the great Hogarth scholar who hadmade his own ‘pictorial turn’ from literature to the visual arts. Anothermentor was Jean Hagstrum, whose classic text, The Sister Arts (1987),provided a wonderful primer on the many twists and turns that govern therelations between verbal and visual expression. The community of scholar-ship around the poet and painter William Blake, who was the subject of myPhD dissertation and first book, Blake’s Composite Art (1978), was resolutelyinterdisciplinary, linking not only literature and art history, but the history ofprinting, engraving, and etching, emblem books, illuminated manuscripts,and traditional iconography. My apprentice work with Blake gave me astrong sense of the practical, material aspect of both the verbal and visual arts,along with an appreciation of the way images circulate across periods andmedia, acquiring new forms and meanings.

Perhaps your sense of isolation stems from your starting point in philoso-phy and hermeneutics, where the attitude toward art and image research wasless welcoming. My entry into philosophy was more belated, and waspreceded by a long apprenticeship in the philosophically-minded art histori-ans, Panofsky, Wölfflin, Focillon, Meyer Schapiro, and Gombrich, and (later)Norman Bryson, as well as pioneers of studies in media and visual culturesuch as Marshall McLuhan, William Ivins (Prints and Visual Communication,1969), and Rudolf Arnheim. When I came to philosophy ‘proper’, it was by avery oblique route, through Derrida, Foucault, and post-structuralism, andthrough Anglo-American philosophy in the work of Nelson Goodman andCharles Sanders Peirce. Only later did I begin to engage with German philos-ophy, and then primarily by way of Wittgenstein (on the one hand) and thetradition of Marxist Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, on the other. Atthe same time, my sense of the stakes of literary and cultural research moregenerally were being formed by figures such as Northrop Frye (whosewriting style remains a model for me), as well as by Roland Barthes, EdwardSaid, and Fredric Jameson.

The other crucial event in my formation was my arrival at the Universityof Chicago in 1977, where I found a welcoming group of scholars interested inworking across the boundaries of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts.We organised a research collective known as ‘The Laocoön Group’ in homageto Lessing’s pioneering text. The Laocoön group included such scholars as theprodigious medievalist Michael Camille; the Byzantinist Robert Nelson (withwhom I taught courses in ‘Image and Text’ and ‘Art Historiography’); thetheorist and historian of photography Joel Snyder (we co-taught courses in‘Style and Representation’ and ‘American Photography’, and he still providescritiques of every word I write). I also worked with Beth Helsinger, a scholarof nineteenth century British literature and visual art (with whom I taught aseminar on the English painter J. M. W. Turner); Margaret Olin, an expert inGerman art historiography, and in photography, monuments, and memory;and Elizabeth O’Connor Chandler, with whom I organised a conference on‘Landscape and Power’ that later became the focus of another whole field ofresearch for me. Many other distinguished scholars passed through this

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group at various times, including Gayatri Spivak, Tom Crow, Joe Conners,and Barbara Stafford. This group, long since disbanded, continues to live inspirit at Chicago, enabling conversations between the social and naturalsciences and the humanities. Above all, it continually staged for me veryconcrete and theoretically sophisticated versions of ‘turns’ from words topictures, the sayable to the seeable, and back again.

This interdisciplinary atmosphere, when coupled with my editorship ofCritical Inquiry, made it impossible for me to feel isolated in my work. Never-theless, I think I know what you mean in saying that the topic of ‘images’ was‘very lonely work’, especially in the kind of single-minded attention we havegiven to it. The topic of imagery was very definitely out of fashion in the liter-ary world when I turned to it. When I edited The Language of Images in 1980,and published Iconology in 1986, I felt as if I had embarked on the intellectualequivalent of Ahab’s search for the White Whale in Melville’s Moby Dick.Iconology opened, in fact, with a confession of failure: I had to admit that ‘abook which began with the intention of producing a valid theory of imagesbecame a book about the fear of images’ (1986: 3). Even as late as 1994, just twoyears after I had published ‘The Pictorial Turn’ in ArtForum – an essay whichbegan, by the way, as a review of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer(1991) and Christopher Wood’s translation of Panofsky’s Perspective asSymbolic Form (1992) – I began to explore a totally new and unexpected ques-tion, namely, what do pictures want? This question, which still feels a bitbizarre to me, even while I am convinced of its pertinence and necessity, defi-nitely had an isolating effect, and I still remember early readers at Octobermagazine (like Hal Foster) telling me that this was the wrong question to beasking (though Annette Michelson was much more reassuring). Lately, a fewkind souls have been telling me that perhaps I was on to something after all.

4. Intersections. Perhaps this is the appropriate point to comment on some ofthe places where we have crossed paths in our intellectual wanderings.Certainly Rorty’s ‘linguistic turn’ (1967, 1979) was a crucial common referencefor us, and I am inclined to agree with you that at least one version of thepictorial turn is a direct outgrowth of this development. It was inevitable thatwhen language became the paradigmatic object of philosophy, replacing (asRorty summarised it) ‘ideas’ and ‘things’, that images would soon be on thehorizon as well. We are I think firmly on the same ground in thinking that it isthe role of images as a ‘significant other’ to language that most often providesthe master terms for a pictorial turn. For you, it is primarily a question oflanguage (and images) as philosophical concepts; for me, it is philosophy plusthe visual arts and cinema, popular belief, mass culture, politics, and ideol-ogy. The word-image relationship had, in addition, become for me a kind ofprofessional identity, first in my work on Blake’s poetry and painting, andlater in a more generalised form that found a congenial home in IAWIS (theInternational Association for Word and Image Studies) and its journal, Word& Image. For you, I gather, the turn from words (in philosophy) to the imagewas occasioned primarily by an engagement with modernist painting, anencounter that for me came somewhat later, and by an oblique route throughthe writings of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, and the works of thefirst generation Minimalist artist, Robert Morris.

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The fact that Rorty’s account of the linguistic turn was accompanied byhis own version of iconoclasm and iconophobia, his well-known argumentagainst mimetic and pictorialist epistemology in Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature, was therefore what struck me most powerfully about Rorty’s position.The appearance of Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes in 1994 confirmed my growingsense that philosophy as such had a deeply engrained suspicion of the image.Gilles Deleuze’s casual remark in The Logic of Sense (1993) that ‘philosophy isalways an iconology’ struck me as a highly ironic recognition of this fact,which surely would be denied by most philosophers. (I think your remarks,Gottfried, on the openness of Gadamer to the visual arts are highly significantin this regard, and I have recently been reading his 1992 essay on ‘Art Worksin Word and Image’).

I am struck by one common intellectual space that you have visited, andwhere I have taken up a kind of residence, and that is the work of NelsonGoodman and C. S. Peirce. You characterise their work as attempts ‘to showthat images are themselves linguistic occurrences or that they participate in auniversal system of signs’. I have a somewhat different take on their work, infact, precisely the opposite. What fascinated me about Peirce was his placingof the icon in the position of ‘firstness’ in the world of signs (with indices as‘secondnesses’ and symbols as ‘thirdnesses’). In other words, it was Peirce’sresistance to taking the symbolic (or the verbal) as the foundational momentof semiotics, and his insistence on the phenomenon of the ‘qualisign’, the signthat signifies by virtue of its inherent sensuous qualities, that attracted me.Similarly, although Goodman’s major work on the theory of symbols is enti-tled Languages of Art (1988), I was struck by Goodman’s denial that ‘language’in the sense given it by Saussure or Chomsky was the master paradigm for hisaesthetics. Instead, if I understand Goodman correctly, he was urging a theo-retical reflection on signs and symbols that began with their non-verbal, non-arbitrary, and even non-conventional qualities, most notably the properties ofdensity and repleteness of inscription, and the semantic structure of exempli-fication (as a kind of inverse denotation). In short, I was attracted to Goodmanand Peirce because I thought they had gone well beyond the linguistic turn,and were providing the foundations for a positive science of the pictorialturn. When I return to Saussure in the light of Peirce, I am struck by Saus-sure’s need to characterise the ‘signified’ in pictorial terms in the famousdiagram of the sign. Your own wish ‘to demonstrate the inherent pictorialityof language’ with the aid of Cassirer (whose concept of ‘symbolic forms’ wasalways inspiring for me as well) strikes me as an important common thread inour efforts to locate the pictorial turn – but perhaps as a kind of pictorialreturn – of the repressed.

I note that Derrida is another common reference for us, but I suspectonce again that we read him in very different ways. You characterise him asparticipating in ‘the linguistic turn to employ language as the final instance ofknowledge’, a ‘position which, although it ascribed everything to language,was not sufficiently able to establish the source from which language itselfcould derive the stability of a theoretical foundation’. My introduction toDerrida was through Of Grammatology with the Laocoön Group and GayatriSpivak in 1978, and it was a thoroughly anti-linguistic Derrida that we read.My sense was (and still is) that Derrida is a philosopher of the graphic version

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of the pictorial turn, that the ‘spacing’ of writing, inscription, and the graphictrace, and the early history of writing from pictograms to hieroglyphics washis foundational archive. Later Derrida has been, for me, the philosopherof mediality and spectrality, from Spectres of Marx (1994) to Echographies ofTelevision (2002), his colloquy with Bernard Stiegler. The deconstruction oflogocentrism, in other words, was for me another way of exposing the hierar-chy of language over images in philosophy, and of overturning that hierarchyin the most dramatic way. (One could note a similar turn in Goodman fromlanguage issues to questions of inscription, tracing, marking, and the humblestforms of exemplification in things like carpet samples. Derrida also led meback to Blake’s ‘wondrous art of writing’ as a scene of the graphic-iconic turn).

I am sure you are right, by the way, that Max Imdahl’s concept of theiconic (to which you trace your use of the word) has ‘no relation to the “icon”introduced by Peirce as a pictorial sign’. Or at least no relation in the sense ofhistorical influence, especially if you are right that Peirce’s concept was (or is)unknown in the German-speaking realm.12 But I wonder if there is not ahidden conceptual resonance between Peirce and Imdahl on the icon as a‘firstness’, a phenomenological apprehension of immediate sensuous quali-ties as the foundational moment in aesthetics, epistemology, and semiotics,not to mention in Panofsky’s version of the first stage of iconological interpre-tation (the pre-iconographic moment of sensuous encounter). I don’t knowImdahl’s work very well, but I gather that his concept of the iconic is based in‘the direct phenomenal experience of the plastic/formal structure of anartwork’, a notion that is remarkably similar to Peirce’s iconic ‘firstness’.13

Perhaps you were put off by Peirce’s elaboration of the icon as a ‘sign byresemblance’, which seems to lead directly to notions of pictorial realism,mimesis, and iconography. But it’s important to note, then, that the icon canonly work as a sign in this way when it has become associated with the othertwo sign-functions, namely the index and the symbol, which link it to deixisand language. It would also be crucial to reflect on Peirce’s insistence thaticonicity of this latter sort is not exclusively visual or pictorial, but can occuracross the media and sensuous modalities. Algebraic equations, for instance,are icons in Peirce’s sense.

5. Divergences. I have already gone on far too long, but it might be useful toconclude with a few remarks about the differences in our approach to theiconic/pictorial turn. You have already signaled this by saying that your‘“turn” is … a criticism of the image rather than one of ideology’, and that my‘counter-reading’ of ‘Panofsky with Althusser’ is, for you ‘too broad anapproach’. This strikes me as an accurate assessment of your own hesitationabout treating the pictorial turn in the expanded field of social and politicalissues. But I think the difference is more complex than simply a ‘broad’

12 My impression is that the neglect of Peirce is now ending for some Germanscholars. I have been especially impressed with the work of John Krois of HumboldtUniversity in Berlin, who provided a short seminar on Peirce to our BildwissenschaftGroup at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in January and February of 2005.

13 E-mail correspondence, 30 May 2006 with Whitney Davis, chairman of the ArtHistory department at the University of California, Berkeley.

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approach to the subject as opposed to a more restricted or focused approach.My aim in bringing together Panofsky and Althusser, iconology and ideol-ogy, was definitely not to subject the study of the image to pre-fabricatedideological criticisms. My aim was rather to show the mutual constitution oficonology and ideology, by tracing the conceptual history of ideology fromDestutt de Tracy’s ‘science of ideas’ in the French Revolutionary period, toMarx’s figure of the camera obscura of ideology, to Walter Benjamin’s elabora-tion of the camera and photography as the pictorial turns of modern ‘mechan-ical’ production of images and homogeneous commodities.14 When I stagedan imaginary meeting between Panofsky and Althusser around the ‘recogni-tion scene’ in my essay on ‘The Pictorial Turn’, it was not with the idea ofproducing only an ideological critique of Panofsky, then, but also an icono-logical critique of Althusser, a demonstration that the very notion of ideologywas grounded in a specific image-repertoire. My aim was to explore ‘thecommon space’ occupied by Panofsky and Althusser, namely the ‘scene ofrecognition’ as ‘the link between ideology and iconology’ that ‘shifts both“sciences” from an epistemological “cognitive” ground (the knowledge ofobjects by subjects) to an ethical, political, and hermeneutic ground (theknowledge of subjects by subjects)’ (1994: 33). Little did I know when I wrotethat sentence that I was already asking the question, what do pictures want? aquestion which is modeled on the intersubjective encounter, on scenes ofacknowledging as much as of knowing, and above all on the intuition that theproblem of understanding the image is deeply linked with the understandingof the Other. Perhaps this hermeneutic ground is the place where, finally, ourtwists and turns through the world of pictures come together.

In any case, thank you again for the opportunity to ‘compare notes’ onour respective wanderings through the labyrinth of images and imagescience. I hope this is not the end of our dialogue, but just the beginning.

Very best wishes,

Tom Mitchell

June, 2006

References

Baetens, J. and van Gelder, H. (eds). 2006. Critical Realism in Contemporary Art. Leuven:University of Leuven Press.

Crary, J. 1991. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the NineteenthCentury. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.Derrida, J. 1994. Spectres of Marx: State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New

International. London: Routledge.Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. 2002. Echographies of Television. Cambridge: Polity Press.Elkins, J. 2000. What Painting Is. London: Routledge.

14 This genealogy is sketched out in Mitchell (1986: 160–208).

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Goodman, N. 1988. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. London:Hackett.

Hagstrum, J. H. 1987. The Sister Arts: Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetryfrom Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heidegger, M. 2002. ‘The Age of the World Picture’. In Off the Beaten Track.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57–85.

Huppauf, B. and Weingart, P. (eds). 2007. Science Images and Popular Images of Science.New York: Routledge.’

Ivins, W. 1969. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Jay, M. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French

Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.Mitchell, W. J. T. 1978. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. New

Jersey: Princeton University Press.Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed). 1980. The Language of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago

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MIT Press.Rorty, R. (ed). 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University

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gottfried boehm thomas mitchell two letters culture theory

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