What Does Tom Mitchell Want?

By Jeremy Gilbert-RolfeNovember 14, 2015

Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics by W. J. T. Mitchell

A MAJOR FIGURE in the development of the area referred to generally as Cultural Studies, W.J.T. Mitchell is one of those responsible for the extent to which, where we once studied art and poetry in terms of internal structure and historical development, we now bring their relationship to a larger, present context into view. Mitchell wants to discuss and describe how we experience (imagine) the world through images and as an image. He brings up Martin Heidegger’s idea of the world as picture to say that, like him, he is thinking not in terms of a picture of the world but of the world conceived and grasped as a picture.


Mitchell can be tough. In one of the essays in his newest book, Image Science (University of Chicago Press, 2015), he talks about Palestine, and the essay, inter alia, discusses Joshua’s instruction to the Israelites not only to kill everyone in sight but also to destroy everything they find in the Promised Land that is an image. The Israelites, we might say from looking at things right now, were acting like ISIS, and Israel, the original monotheistic state, like ISIS built itself upon total eradication of the past. Mitchell didn’t say this when he gave the lecture about it at my school a few years ago, but I imagine he would have, had ISIS existed at the time. The essay is about ethnic cleansing and how defeating a people involves also eradicating their idols, but Mitchell departs to some extent from the thesis of the piece to give a complicated reading of Nicholas Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod, Palestine (1630). The complication involved is that Mitchell, in addition to suggesting that Poussin was himself in one sense an idolater — of classicism — also suggests he may, for reasons having to do with the political-religious thinking in the1630s, possibly be considered an anti-Semite. No one gets off any hooks.


The plague Poussin paints was visited (as they say) on the Philistines by God, as a punishment for defeating the Israelites and stealing the Sacred Arc, shown in the painting along with the Philistines’ own idol, which has been damaged in the fray. He is good at presenting the complicated nature of socio-historical contexts, and how a term will occur differently in one part of the overall image than in another. One of the terms Mitchell has invented through which he seeks to do his analysis is “Metapicture,” which he defines as a picture containing other pictures, or a large thought that contains others that qualify and elaborate it, as in his use of Poussin’s painting. Mitchell is persistently exciting in the way that he brings images together to build a logical description of a historical situation that is not reductive or simplified.


He has discussed much of the theoretical content of Image Science in previous books, but here Mitchell seeks to fold his thinking more completely into science. I say “more completely” because the science in question is William Blake’s, who has always been present in Mitchell’s writing and to which influence or inspiration I’ll return. Mitchell also approaches things through semiotics, which is fairly scientific to begin with. Mitchell defines what he does in relation to the discipline of art history, and his own work as being at


the convergence of three distinct fields of study that reside upon its borders, provoking, stimulating, and sometimes threatening its identity as the “history of works of art”: (1) iconology, the study of images across media, and especially of the interface between language and visual representation; (2) visual culture, the study of visual perception and representation, especially the social construction of the field of visibility and (equally important) the visual construction of the social field; and (3) media studies, specifically the emergent field known as “media aesthetics,” which aims to bridge the gaps between technical, social, and artistic dispositions of media.


Having said it is where they converge, Mitchell goes on to say these “fields are, in some sense, outside the boundaries of art history, constituting its horizon or frontier, while at the same time providing a necessary and sometimes dangerous supplement to its work.”


He uses the terms of the visual arts to introduce his book. The world picture to be conceived and grasped is a representational one, imagined or imaged in terms of figure and ground, of drawing in other words. The introduction describes Image Science as consisting of eight chapters on the figure and eight on its ground. Mitchell says that iconologists find themselves concerned with drawing because it is there that one finds the “inscription of a boundary,” where figure is delineated from ground, form from context, or the thing from its environment. (Derridean that he is, he would surely also readily agree that boundaries divide but also connect.) His use of the word “inscription” is something of a giveaway. As a representational picture, the image of the world we seek to grasp is made out of signifiers, which lead directly to others that need not be visual at all, and Mitchell is adamant about this:


First, the very notion of purely visual media is radically incoherent, and the first lesson in any critical account of visual culture should be to dispel it. Media are always mixtures of sensory and semiotic elements, and the so-called “visual media” are mixed or hybrid formations, combining sight and sound, text and image.


The urgency with which Mitchell expresses the need to dispel any idea of purely visual media may be explained by his being a semiotician. Every signifier must have a signified, and that’s an idea (a concept,) not something one may see. What you see leads immediately to words that describe or are suggested by it, and these connect it as a thought to other thoughts (signifieds) which have some resemblance to it, or something else in common with it. This is, I think, the basic idea of the “metapicture.” He talks about visual images, but it is their interpretation and context which joins their components to one another, the level at which they function not sensorily so much as semiotically. The model offered by semiotics is in this regard not the imagination as such, unstable between perceptions and conceptions, but a field of concepts alone — signifieds whose contents may be compared while being seen as mutually active. And, I think, read rather than stared at. In the fields that Mitchell says converge on traditional art history, the visual also gives way pretty quickly to the invisible idea(s) it is there to represent.


As with the essay on ethnic cleansing, Mitchell is concerned with images of the world we have now. Though he brings up Heidegger in his introduction, he says the image science he wants to propose is “the science of Freud rather than Heidegger, giving us an array of contesting and contested world views rather than ‘the world as picture’.” Mitchell’s world is made of two varieties of contesting and contested views, one of which roughly corresponds to what in his introduction he calls the figure, and the other to the ground. The figure is a matter theoretical contestation, the ground political. I think, for reasons that have everything to do with Blake, he is at his best when it is the ground that concerns him most. All the essays in this book which deal with political circumstances, especially ones which derive or devolve around the question of demarcation, which he describes as central to his approach in his introduction, bring art and thinking to bear on historically present facts to draw out (as it were) the complexity of the situation imaged, in all that it seems to invoke and imply, intellectually and also morally.


As with another friend of mine, Dave Hickey, I think Mitchell may be at his best when writing about something adjacent or tangential to art and literature. My favorite essay of Hickey’s is about Liberace, and I think Mitchell’s book about the dinosaur (which I also reviewed) shows his method at its most effective.[1] In both cases this is because not needing to make a case about art or literature frees them to concentrate on the image without too much discussion about the medium. With dinosaurs, rather than famous pictures or books, Mitchell is able to start with the image and allow it to exfoliate into the ground which defines it, in terms that remain convergent with, but on the borders of, concerns like how to think about the history of painting or the novel.


This seems appropriate given what he says he wants to do. Following his definition of the analysis he wants to perform as being on a world imaged as different areas of contest with multiple perspectives involved, he goes on to say that:


Image science is a science that not only uses images as aids to understanding, as in the accounts of form provided by mathematics, the pictures of matter and energy provided by physics, or the ideas about life provided by biology. It also puts images themselves under scrutiny as formal, material, and quasi-living entities, “imitations of life,” that are subject to a natural as well as a cultural history. It is a science that conceives its object as a borderline entity located at the crossroads between nature and culture, language and perception, figures and grounds.


In several of the chapters in the first part of the book Mitchell develops this idea thoroughly, although a few questions emerge that remain unanswered. He invokes Goethe’s “sympathetic empiricism,” which calls for an identification with the object being analyzed that is experiential. Martin Jay, a writer of whom Mitchell approves, points out that Goethe does not dwell on experience too long before moving to the discursive or interpretive, and I wonder whether Mitchell may not be said to do the same at times. Mitchell says image science touches on hard science, but in practice he seems to me to risk neglecting it in a way that can hurt his argument. In particular, when arguing for the idea a technology might be seen to articulate or depend upon, he can lose sight of how the present feels through wanting to link it to its past.


For example, in writing about digital technology and the claims made for it, Mitchell shows how the digital is not new but part of a long tradition of how to think visually and make images. He can do this, though, only by concentrating on the idea rather than the technology. The fact that digital images are made of numbers rather than being analogical records of what they represent does not interest him as it does others. He goes so far as to say that, “Unless we are programmers, we are not really interested in the digits in the digital image.” I found this opinion surprising when I came to it, given that he had earlier brought up C. P. Snow’s 1950s book on how there are two cultures, in which science is separated from the arts by its interests and methodology — plus the snottiness of humanist intellectuals — and implied he meant to do something about that gap by bringing the scientific into the discussion, rather than assuming its exclusion.


However, when he says that what runs under the digital image cannot concern us very much unless we’re programmers, this does not sound like closing that gap, but the reverse. Besides reminding me of my classics teacher’s rejection of Snow’s argument back in the fifties, it is also where Jay’s criticism of Goethe seems applicable to Mitchell’s approach as well. It does not seem like an attitude that will make the world be more available rather than less in terms of our understanding how it works. The world we seek to grasp feels different than it did 40 years or so ago. Over the course of Mitchell’s career, the assumed relationship between photography and the world has changed for artists in a specific respect, and for all of us generally. Digital technology is why. Certain things we knew to be the case have become more like what they might be than they were before. For example, there have been people who denied photographic evidence’s veracity since before men landed on the Moon, as there were on that occasion as well. However, the digital is a game changer in how we think about photography and the photographed. We used to assume that the difference between photography and painting was that photography couldn’t make things up. What was shown had to have been there, even if tampered with after it had become an image, while a painting could be wholly dreamed up. Photography was about its relationship to nature as an index that was mechanical, which meant that people could cheat, but only by altering what was there to begin with, but that is no longer necessarily or straightforwardly the case. Now, the origin is more likely to be in the computer than in nature, at least to the significant extent that what goes on the screen has as much or more to do with animation and sourcing on the web than documenting the real through recording it. As for the rest of us, it seems to me to make a difference that the photographic image no longer has to do with a lens that mechanically imitates the human eye. Both the video image that shows what’s behind my car when I reverse, and the one that visualizes images from far outer space, are just the result of transcribed numbers, and this can’t help but have changed how the world feels. The very near and the very far are the same kind of image. The scope of the visual is at once extended and rendered into interpretation through non-visual terms at every level. Regardless of whether much of it could be photographed the old fashioned way, that is not what we now choose to do; and we take this for granted that its relationship to what it depicts is the interpretation of a computer rather than an index that is mechanical in its veracity.


One would think Mitchell might find this more interesting than he does. For an image to end up in a book, it first becomes a logarithm; even more evidence of his opinion that there’s not much that’s visual about the visual. His relative lack of interest is perhaps the result of semiotics’ general lack of interest in perception, of signifiers with vague rather than clearly historical signifieds. These last are what are most important to image science, which is primarily concerned with history as political struggle, seen from an inherently socialist perspective.


Mitchell’s devotion to Blake is a sign (both index and icon, as he might say) of the socialist aspirations of his work. “Image science is neither a ‘hard’ nor a ‘soft’ science — neither physics nor sociology — but a ‘sweet’ science that pays as much attention to the observer as to the observed, to the subject as to the object, to framing.” Image Science is built around sweet science’s study of the “role of images in producing forms of understanding and pictures of reality.” If a distant ancestor of the ambition might be Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the expression “sweet Science” comes from a poem of Blake’s, in which a primordial but also possibly materialist messiah seeks:


In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science


For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now


The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns


One might describe Mitchell as a Blakean semiotician — it is semiotics that he seeks to turn into a “sweet science.” Mitchell wants science to play its part in an intellectual war in which the dark religions show few signs of defeat. In his version, “Sweet science engages in intellectual wars of critical research into the possibility of a peaceful and humane future, as well as the truths of nature.” This is a reminder of the last verse of Blake’s Jerusalem, where the fight to be undertaken is specifically described as intellectual:


I will not cease from mental fight,


Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand…


The goal being to build Jerusalem. It is a socialist goal. More than anyone else’s, Mitchell’s work seems to me to succeed that of Raymond Williams, whom he mentions and who similarly made a great contribution to the field we now call Cultural Studies. Williams was a Marxist and indeed a member of the Communist Party, while Mitchell is of the ʻ60s, a leftist without an exclusive interest in, or indebtedness to, Marxism — just as involved with Freud and Nietzsche as with Derrida and Hegel; or with Marshal McLuhan, Nelson Goodman, and Gilles Deleuze. But he shares Williams’s goals for criticism and indeed society, and methods that seek to get at material reality through metapictures. 


In an essay on the Marxist notion of base and superstructure and its problems with describing cultural signs or objects, Williams advised that “we should look not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice.” [2] Mitchell places a great deal of emphasis on the methods and mediums in which images may be found, and — possibly following Jacques Derrida, to whom he acknowledges a great debt — goes to some lengths to insist that images may neither be invented nor disappear, there always being a precursor while the image, not being a thing, is eternally available to memory. Criticism is a (materialist) matter not only of practice rather than product, but of what the product itself is doing in practice; what it produces as much as what produced it.


Blake’s Jerusalem is well known in Britain, used as it is by both Methodists and the Church of England, the one seeking a Jerusalem quite like Blake’s, the other thinking of something more like a nicer version of what we have now, with a royal family, but where everyone can afford to dress properly and there aren’t germs. And many atheist socialists know all four verses better than many Christians, as it is sung in full at the end of the British Labour Party’s annual conference, along with, but after only the first verse of the Red Flag. Jerusalem’s first two verses ask rhetorical questions to which the answer is no, and the second and last two declare the will to do something about it: we shall arm up and get on with building Jerusalem ourselves. Mitchell’s critical attitude and way of working are similarly straightforward. A professor, he likes to ask rhetorical questions to which he has at least most of the answer. What Do Pictures Want? is the title of an earlier book by Mitchell, in which he pursues some questions of intersubjectivity that lead one to understand that looking at a picture is more like sharing space with a person than a chair, some of which material returns here. This book goes the other way. It is about what Mitchell wants out of the image, using every available means, with a view to developing a way of viewing or reading that will help to improve things. The world picture he seeks to grasp is unlike Heidegger’s, or Freud’s, in that his writing is always at some direct level a call to action as much as to analysis. All the situations pictured here are political crises, or about intellectual crises about how to deal with crisis. Williams’s dad was a signalman on the railways; this was handy as he was a trade union organizer, and his job gave him telephonic access to everyone he needed to be in touch with throughout the railway network. I have wondered whether this was a factor in Williams’s prescience with regard to electronic technology and other cultural developments before most in his generation. I have no idea what formative influences might have led Mitchell to Blake and the implications of that, but once there, and with a similar view towards getting Jerusalem built, he has carried forward the thinking of Williams and that earlier generation while making it address new questions. In Image Science, we get a good sense of what he wants the image to do, and some brilliant examples of it, together with an arsenal of semiotic sub-categories to use in our own struggle against the dark religion.


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[1] Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, (1998,)” CAA Reviews (caareviews.com 28 May 1999).


[2] Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980) p.48. First published in New Left Review (November-December, 1973.)


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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is a painter who also writes about art and related matters, both on his own and with Rebecca Norton, as the collaborative Awkward x 2. His books and other writings include Beyond Piety (1995) and Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999).

LARB Contributor

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is a painter who also writes about art and related matters, both on his own and with Rebecca Norton, as the collaborative Awkward x 2. His books and other writings include Beyond Piety (1995) and Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999). A Guggenheim Fellow in Painting, he was the 1988 recipient of the College Art Association’s Mather Award for Art Criticism and of NEA Fellowships in art and criticism. He is a Professor in the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. For more please go to jeremygilbert-rolfe.com and awkwardx2.com.

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