The Palgrave Handbook
of Image Studies
Edited by
Krešimir Purgar
The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies
“Krešimir Purgar has assembled a striking collection of essays on Image Studies. I have
not been able to stop reading them. They cover a huge range and represent intelligent
and well informed opinions containing important topics of interest to all its students.
Anyone interested in this relatively recent field of study will find access to some of its
essential methods and theories.”
—Keith Moxey, Barbara Novak Professor Emeritus, Barnard College/Columbia
University, New York
“Enormous and fundamental collection: histories, essential theories, interdisciplinary
connections and many main thinkers. A must have for all interested in images.”
—Oliver Grau, Center for Image Science, Danube University, Krems
Krešimir Purgar
Editor
The Palgrave
Handbook of Image
Studies
Editor
Krešimir Purgar
Academy of Arts and Culture
Josip Juraj Strossmayer University
Osijek, Croatia
ISBN 978-3-030-71829-9
ISBN 978-3-030-71830-5
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5
(eBook)
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Between the Creation and Disintegration of Images
Krešimir Purgar
Part I
Essential Histories
1
21
The Concept of the Image in the Old and New Testaments
Michael Shaw
23
Mimesis and Simulacrum in Aristotle and Plato
Nickolas Pappas
37
Iconoclastic Disputes in Byzantium
Konstantinos Giakoumis
51
Perspective, Space and Camera Obscura in the Renaissance
Ian Verstegen
75
Immanuel Kant and the Emancipation of the Image
Mojca Kuplen
93
Formalism and Kunstwissenschaft: The “How” of the Image
Andrea Pinotti
109
Aby Warburg and the Foundations of Image Studies
Steffen Haug and Johannes von Müller
131
Early Interactions of Static and Moving Images
Mirela Ramljak Purgar
147
v
vi
CONTENTS
Iconoclasm and Creation of the Avant-Garde
Nadja Gnamuš
167
Planarity, Pictorial Space, and Abstraction
Jeffrey Strayer
187
The Postmodern Image
Luca Malavasi
203
Digital Images and Virtual Worlds
Rebecca Haar
221
The Martian Image (On Earth)
Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie
233
Part II
247
Fundamental Concepts
Intentionality, Phantasy, and Image Consciousness in Edmund
Husserl
Claudio Rozzoni
249
Aura, Technology, and the Work of Art in Walter Benjamin
Žarko Paić
265
Image and the Illusion of Immanence in Jean-Paul Sartre
John Lechte
281
Trait, Identity, and the Gaze in Jacques Lacan
Andrei Gornykh
295
Symbolic Exchange and Simulation in Jean Baudrillard
Gary Genosko
313
Historicity of Observing and Vision in Jonathan Crary
Łukasz Zaremba
327
Male Gaze and Visual Pleasure in Laura Mulvey
Patricia Stefanovic and Ana Gruić Parać
343
Reality, Fiction and Make-Believe in Kendall Walton
Emanuele Arielli
363
CONTENTS
vii
The Technical Image in Vilém Flusser
Dario Vuger
379
Im/pulse to See in Rosalind Krauss
Filip Lipiński
395
The Power of and Response to Images in David Freedberg
Maxime Boidy
415
Part III
431
Frequent Subjects
Ontological Dispute: What Is an Image?
Andrea Rabbito
433
Representation and the Scopic Regime of (Post-)Cartesianism
Donal Moloney
449
The Iconic (In)difference
Pietro Conte
467
Seeing-as, Seeing-in, Seeing-with: Looking Through Pictures
Emmanuel Alloa
483
Varieties of Transparency
John Kulvicki
501
Photographic Images in the Digital Era
Koray Değirmenci
515
Images and Invisibility
Øyvind Vågnes
533
How to Make Images Real
Wolfram Pichler
547
Images and Ethics
Asbjørn Grønstad
557
The Beholder’s Freedom: Critical Remarks on the “Will to See”
Mark Halawa-Sarholz
575
viii
CONTENTS
Surveillance and Manipulation Versus Networking and Sharing
Elio Ugenti
589
Mobile Images
Gaby David
609
Part IV
623
Related Disciplines
Phenomenology of the Image
Harri Mäcklin
625
Visual Semiotics
Angela Mengoni
641
Literary Iconology: Tropes and Typologies
Liliane Louvel
655
French Theory: Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Iris Laner
671
Anglo-American Theory: Representation and Visual Activism
Andrea Průchová Hrůzová
687
German Theory: Bildwissenschaft and the Iconic Turn
Žarko Paić
703
The Image and Neuroaesthetics
Matthew Rampley
719
Visual Sociology
Carolina Cambre
735
Images and Architecture
Vlad Ionescu, Maarten Van Den Driessche, and Louis De Mey
759
What is Design Theory?
Oliver Ruf
779
CONTENTS
Part V
Contemporary Thinkers
ix
799
W. J. T. Mitchell
Krešimir Purgar
801
Michele Cometa
Valeria Cammarata
823
Paul Crowther
Elena Fell
841
Hans Belting
Luca Vargiu
857
Klaus Sachs-Hombach
Lukas R. A. Wilde
873
Dieter Mersch
Marcel Finke
889
Horst Bredekamp
Yannis Hadjinicolaou
905
Lambert Wiesing
Yvonne Förster
921
Gottfried Boehm
Rahel Villinger
937
Georges Didi-Huberman
Andrzej Leśniak
951
Index
965
The Iconic (In)difference
Pietro Conte
1
Homo Pictor
The opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A
Space Odyssey is set in a desolate arid region millions of years ago, where a group
of hominids is first seen munching on bushes and meager green plants amid a
herd of tapirs. After being driven away from their water hole by a rival tribe, the
defeated apes huddle together in a dark cave. As night falls, their eyes wide
open make us, the spectators, aware of the countless unknown dangers they are
afraid of: it is a matter of life and death, a Darwinian struggle for survival in
which the fittest rule and the weak die. Overpowered by the fearsome antagonists and deprived of the most essential element to the lives in the desert,
Kubrick’s hero apes seem to be doomed to perish.
At dawn the next day, however, one of them notices a matte black rectangular slab standing perfectly upright among the rocks in front of the cave. Excited
by the abrupt appearance of the towering object, he wakes his mates up and
draws their attention to the enigmatic monolith by repeatedly raising his chin
so as to point at it. All together, the apes chaotically leave the cave, form a circle
around the slab, and start approaching it with extreme caution, flicking out a
finger to touch its surface. Both the animals’ screaming and the unsettling
sounds of György Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna associated with the apes’
tentative approaches to the monolith gradually increase in volume and in complexity, until the hominids finally pluck up the courage to carefully examine the
mysterious object.
P. Conte (*)
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
e-mail: pietro.conte@unive.it
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
K. Purgar (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71830-5_28
467
468
P. CONTE
At this point, the camera takes on the subjective perspective of “Moonwatcher”
(the name traditionally given to the ape leader) and shows the monolith from
an extremely low angle as it aligns with the sun rising at its top and a sliver of
the moon visible above it. Seen from this quite unusual viewpoint, the slab
directs his (and our own) gaze away from his (and our own) terrestrial origins
toward the solar system and beyond, as if this would be his (and our own)
future destination. At the music’s zenith, the film cuts back to the absolute
silence of the desert landscape, where it seems like nothing had really changed.
Yet this is not the case. After showing the ape-men once again ambling around
by a collection of bones, the camera focuses on Moonwatcher scratching about
in search of some edible vegetables, roots, or tubers. The shot of dawn over
monolith is cut back to briefly, immediately after which Moonwatcher seems to
have an epiphany: the animal skeleton, which the ape leader had ignored until
then, suddenly catches his complete attention. As in a state of deep meditation,
he keeps observing it with great care, tilting his head from side to side. He then
lifts a large bone and starts striking—first tentatively, then with greater force
and enthusiasm—the other bones. As he eventually smashes the skull with his
newly fashioned club, two cutaways show a slayed tapir collapsing to the
ground. The crucial importance of the moment is emphasized by the triumphal
fanfare of Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
In the next scene, we see the apes eating meat, the kind of food that they
had not realized had been wandering around all the while as they nearly died
from starvation. They then move back to the water hole, where Moonwatcher,
now able to walk upright, uses his club to bludgeon the leader of the rival tribe
to death and chase off the rest. The victorious alpha male tosses his weapon
into the air, where a monumental match-cut from the bone to an orbiting
space-station propels us forward millions of years (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, screen capture
THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE
469
The first segment of Kubrick’s “epic drama” has been the subject of unending discussion, and it still remains open to multiple interpretations. From the
perspective of image studies, what matters most is that the transition from ape
to human is conceived of as resting upon the ability to see something as something else, a skill provided by imagination, which Plato significantly called eikasia, namely, the faculty of producing eikones. The idea that the imaginative
power of “seeing as” played a key role in human evolution and in the development of cognitive thinking recurs as a veritable leitmotif throughout the scenes,
being first illustrated by Moonwatcher’s use of his chin as a pointing device to
indicate the monolith. With its smooth, jet black, sharp-edged, and perfectly
regular surface, the slab stands out from the surroundings as something alien
to the landscape, an unnatural object that cannot be but the product of a will
and of some form of culture, however enigmatic and indefinite.
This contrast, epitomized by the monolith, between nature and culture is
also implicit in Moonwatcher’s gesture: the ape leader utilizes his chin as an
index, as a tool to signal his fellow hominids the appearance of the uncanny
new object. In so doing, he makes his own body an image. When someone
points to something, we do not look at the tip of her finger, but rather at the
indicated object. The finger turns into a sign that refers to something different
than itself: freed from its subservience to the most elementary tasks of grasping, holding, and manipulating, it is repurposed to become a pointer (as in the
German word for “index”, that is, Zeigefinger, meaning, literally, the “finger”
that “shows”). A distance from nature and from the most basic needs related
to physical survival is crucial for culture to arise and for an animal to become
human. This distance is first provided by the image, which presents something
and yet, precisely through this “something”, points away from itself to what it
(re)presents. Thus, the performative act of seeing something as something else
requires a simultaneous recognition of similarities and differences between the
two things involved: thanks to imagination, a finger turns into a pointer, while
at the same time it clearly remains what it is—a finger.
The notion that the ability of seeing-as is rooted in the faculty of imagination as the main distinguishing feature of human beings resurfaces in the
famous scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Moonwatcher suddenly realizes
that the bone can be used as a tool. Ontologically, no change occurred in the
object that would alter its true nature: the bone is still a bone. And yet, for the
very first time, it is seen as something else, namely, as a weapon. What emerges
is the possibility of employing a natural thing as something different from a
natural thing. This potentiality, which would then turn into actuality at the
exact moment when Moonwatcher hits his rival, is only granted by the emergence of the human gaze. The birth of technique and, with it, of culture, will
lead humans, in a distant future, to the invention of technology, symbolized in
Kubrick’s movie by the rotating space ship. The match-cut (possibly the most
brilliant in the whole history of cinema) from the bone-as-a-tool to the much
more advanced tool of the vaguely bone-shaped spacecraft gives visual expression to the analogic power of the human mind. To be sure, imagination is the
470
P. CONTE
faculty of producing analogies. And analogy means seeing the same as different,
establishing a caesura between the natural, empirical existence of things and
their possible cultural meanings. Apes evolved into humans as soon as an
embryonic form of culture appears, which is to say, as soon as a distance is
given between securing the immediate needs for survival and accessing the
necessarily mediated domain of meanings.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, this distance is first granted by the development
not of a verbal but of an iconic form of communication, that is, by Moonwatcher’s
ability to turn his own body into an image and to use his chin as an index in a
primordial form of deixis. The “dawn of man”—as the title card of the prehistoric prelude to Kubrick’s masterpiece significantly reads—is the dawn of
homo pictor:
The image is a deeply rooted need of human being as such. Quite elementary
manipulations are enough to make something not simply “occur” but “show”
itself in the undifferentiated continuum of the physical world and disclose a
meaning to the eye […]. The “iconic” is therefore based on a “difference” produced by the very act of seeing. This difference is what makes it possible to see
something as something else, like for instance a few strokes as a figure. To define
something as something is a basic act of conferring meaning—an act that is not
the exclusive prerogative of the linguistic domain, since it extends to the relationship between the eye and the physical world as well. No matter how inconspicuous the threshold between mere thing and visual artefact may seem, a caesura is
in any case established. The physical appearing of something non-physical that
becomes visible in and through that very difference marks the dawn of man. The
human being was born as homo pictor long before he defined himself as zoon logon
echon. (Boehm 2004, 37–38)
2
metaPHor as a Paradigm
To perceive analogies—that is, to see things as something different from simply
what they ontologically are, transforming them into cultural objects—proved
to be essential for human nature as such. First and foremost, the “power of
images” (Freedberg 1989) is the power of performing a cut between the natural and the cultural meaning of things. In contemporary image studies, this
caesura has been labeled “iconic difference”, a notion introduced by German
art historian and aesthetician Gottfried Boehm as the theoretical crux proper of
a genuine “image criticism [Bildkritik]” (Boehm 2011, 170).
One finds the basic idea underlying this concept already sketched out in a
text dating to 1978, Towards a Hermeneutics of the Image, where Boehm begins
to meditate on the “convergent and at the very same time contrasting relationship between what can be defined as the ‘image language’ and the verbal language of communication” (Boehm 1978, 444). In its most general formulation,
iconic difference thus refers to the distinctive features of “image acts”
(Bredekamp 2015), whose performative character cannot be reduced to, or
translated into, the equally performative character of linguistic acts. This is also
THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE
471
the core argument of the so-called iconic turn and of the assumption that
images are to be accorded a specific immanent order, which, though never
implying a withdrawal from language, nonetheless highlights “a difference vis
à vis language” (Boehm 2006a, 12). The main issue concerns whether and to
what extent image “language” should be regarded as analogous to verbal
language.
In this respect, Boehm’s theory of the iconic difference owes much to
German philosopher of art Konrad Fiedler (Boehm is the editor of the twovolume German edition of Fiedler’s essays on art and aesthetics (Fiedler 2001))
celebrated as “perhaps the only author to have paved the way for a hermeneutic
of the image by insisting on the necessity of a logic of the visible” (Boehm
1978, 446). As has been pointed out (Majetschak 1997), Fiedler’s doctrine
developed through a close dialectical confrontation with Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s expressivist theory of verbal language, according to which words
do not merely constitute a nomenclature of labels for concepts that would be
offered ready-made to the mind by the self-sufficiency of perception, and the
function of language is not limited to merely attributing conventional tags to
already existing ideas that should, in turn, be regarded as mental copies of
already existing “things in themselves”. Humboldt’s philosophy has no room
for the copy-theory of knowledge. Language is not merely designative, for it
continuously produces new forms (and therefore new concepts) that would not
come into being without it. As “the generative organ of thought [das bildende
Organ des Gedankens]” (Humboldt 1836, 151), language grants us access to
the world sub specie linguistica. Far from being the mere “adventitious or epiphenomenal outward manifestation or garb of thought for the utilitarian purpose of communication” (Aarsleff 1988, XIX), language is understood here as
an original (or, to put it with Humboldt’s follower Ernst Cassirer, as a symbolic) form through which man actually constructs the world. In this sense,
each language engenders nothing less than a specific worldview, so that the
differences between languages are to be explained in terms of different worldviews: “The interdependence of thought and word makes it clear that languages are not really a means to represent the already-known truth, but rather
to discover the previously unknown truth. The difference between one language and another is not one of sounds and signs, but one of worldviews”
(Humboldt 1820, 255).
In his most important essay, Concerning the Origin of Artistic Activity
(1887), Fiedler takes his cue from the Humboldtian notion of language and
from the idea that words cut up the chaotic, undifferentiated synthesis that the
mind draws from sensory experience, thus securing the existence itself of concepts. Thanks to language we do gain access to reality—not to reality in itself,
though, but rather to linguistic reality. The marvel of language, Fiedler concludes, is not that it “means a being, but that it is a being” (1887, 1: 120). Yet
the same holds true for all other domains of human spiritual activity, including
art. No reality can be given to the human mind that is not linked to a specific
form, be it of words, tones, or images. And just as the different languages do
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not merely say one and the same pre-constituted world, but each of them calls
into being a different world, so the different art styles do not represent, in a
more or less perfect way, a pre-existing reality, but each of them gives birth to
a different reality. Fiedler applies Humboldt’s conception of language as a formative energeia to the realm of visuality and to seeing as a creative, perpetually
structuring, form-giving activity that does not make available outside reality in
itself, but a purely visual experience of reality that arises only from and for the
eye and possesses distinctive qualities which are not to be found in any other
kind of sensory experience.
Such qualities are nothing other than light and colors, which in the ordinary
perceptual processes give rise to an incorporeal, extremely unstable, elusive
world that we can only momentarily and precariously grasp. Artistic activity is
a spiritual-bodily process that makes it possible to progress from the confusion
and indefiniteness of the natural process of vision to the stability and exactitude
of its external expression. As a consequence, this conception undermines the
whole notion of mimesis as just a copy-making of an already existing reality.
The creative process that begins with ordinary seeing and only through the
artist’s hand leads to the shaping of expressive forms does not aim to slavishly
reproduce or transcript external reality “as it is”. On the contrary, it consists in
making visible—in different and ever-changing ways—the process of visibility
itself: “It is only through the activity of the artist that the visibility of a visible
thing frees itself from that thing and now appears as an independent, autonomous structure” (Fiedler 1887, 192).
To sum up, verbal language and image “language” have in common that
they both transform the “raw” material of naturally given things so as to create—literally—a cultural, human world where “the crude character” of natural
objects disappears and the material is “forced to deny and disavow its very
nature” (Barasch 1998, 129). Such transformative power which is the hallmark
of all symbolic forms is precisely what Boehm describes as the fundamental
structure at the basis of both words and images, which therefore share “a very
same figurality [Bildlichkeit]” (1978, 447).
This image-character inherent to the iconic as well as to the verbal domain
of human expression is best illustrated through the notion of the metaphor,
which is not to be interpreted as simply the rhetorical device by which a characteristic of one object is ascribed to another, different but at the same time, in
a certain way, similar to it. On the contrary, Boehm uses the concept in a far
more radical sense in order to stress that any language (i.e., language as such) is
originally and unavoidably metaphorical. To be sure, this comes as the logical
conclusion of Humboldt’s argument that words result from an autonomous,
creative activity of constant shaping and reshaping the chaotic wealth of sensory intuition into a linguistic form. Metaphors as figures of speech are in this
sense only a particular case of the essentially metaphorical nature of language
tout court. In the monumental Introduction to his treatise on the Kawi language, Humboldt remarked that metaphors, which had “wonderfully captured
the youthful sensibility of earlier ages”, become over time “so worn out in daily
THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE
473
use that they scarcely continue to be felt” (Humboldt 1836, 87). Friedrich
Nietzsche would reiterate this in his short essay On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense, where he described language as originating from a process of
“transference [Übertragung]”: “A nerve stimulus is transferred into an image:
first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor”
(Nietzsche 1873, 82). From this perspective, any concept is but the residue of
a primitive process of transference, that is, of an original metaphorical activity
(trans-ferre being the Latin equivalent for the Greek meta-pherein). The formation of metaphors is presented as “the fundamental drive” of human
nature (88).
As is well known, the idea that language is essentially metaphorical was later
taken up by Hans Blumenberg, who made it the cornerstone of his theoretical
system. Interestingly, the father of “metaphorology” (Blumenberg 1960)
draws a parallel between his own way of interpreting metaphors and the notion
of “symbol” as outlined in the 59th section of the Critique of Judgement, where
Immanuel Kant crucially observed that
in language we have many indirect presentations modelled upon an analogy
enabling the expression in question to contain, not the proper schema for the
concept, but merely a symbol for reflection. Thus the words “ground” (support,
basis), “to depend” (to be held up from above), to “flow” from (instead of to
follow), “substance” (as Locke puts it: the support of accidents), and numberless
others, are not schematic, but rather symbolic hypotyposes, and express concepts
without employing a direct intuition for the purpose, but only drawing upon an
analogy with one, i.e. transferring the reflection upon an object of intuition to
quite a new concept, and one with which perhaps no intuition could ever directly
correspond. (Kant 1790, 180)
It should now come as no surprise that in the introductory essay to What Is an
Image?—a multiauthor volume standing as a milestone in the debate on the
iconic turn—Boehm refers precisely to Kant, Humboldt, Fiedler, Nietzsche,
and Blumenberg to make clear what the common trait is between the verbal
and the iconic. The emphasis on the necessarily figural character of language is
meant to highlight that there is no logos without images. But how is it that metaphor, a notion that seems to pertain solely to the linguistic domain of human
expression, can be taken as nothing less than “the fundamental model of figurality” and hence as a synonym for the concept of iconic difference? Why should
it be considered as a means “to shed light on the true essence of images”
(Boehm 1994, 28)?
3
a Fundamental contrast
Boehm argues that both words and pictures participate in the notion of “contrast” which lies at the core of the metaphor as the poietic juxtaposition of
terms that are not usually associated with each other. Such a combination
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P. CONTE
unpredictably generates a unity that discloses new constellations of meaning
precisely through the contrast between the single terms that make up the metaphor. In this sense, the metaphor itself appears as a paradoxical harmonic dissonance, a construct that manages to reconcile seemingly incompatible
elements without, however, hiding their original incompatibility. This is where
the similarity between the linguistic and the iconic lies. Images, too, are characterized by a fundamental contrast that Boehm (1994, 30) describes as nothing less than the “birth ground of iconic meaning”: it is the contrast thanks to
which “a piece of coloured surface can provide access to unprecedented sensory and spiritual visions”, so that “something becomes something to be looked
at” (21).
In this case, iconic difference refers to the opposition between the material
support or vehicle (Träger) of the image and the meaning or sense (Sinn) that
emerges in and through that vehicle. It is related to the fact that, just as we
have learned from Kubrick’s movie, “actual reality can be seen as something
different from what it is […]. Matter turns into meaning” (Boehm 2004, 52).
As Boehm repeatedly points out, the logos of images is essentially based on
such a generation of a surplus of sense:
Whatever an artist aimed to represent in the twilight darkness of prehistoric caves,
in the sacred context of icon painting, or in the inspired space of the modern
atelier owes its existence, its shareability and its powerful effect to the specific
optimization of what we call “iconic difference”. This is both a visual and a logic
power that is characteristic of all images, which belong to the material culture and
are invariably inscribed into physical matter, yet at the same time disclose a meaning that goes beyond the sphere of mere physical reality. (Boehm 1994, 30)
This surplus of sense with respect to physical reality is what characterizes the
image as a “real irreality”, “a thing and at the same time a non-thing, something halfway between actual reality and the immateriality of dreams” (Boehm
2004, 37). All images draw their meanings from an operation of “covering”
the physical support and making it somehow invisible or transparent; and it is
only through this “devisualization” that a different meaning—a meaning that
has no material referent—can be visualized. The act of making something invisible creates a new, specifically iconic visibility, which is grounded (and here we
come to a new formulation of the notion of iconic difference) in the mutual
relationship and sense-generating contrast between opacity and transparency of
the medium. This peculiar form of making visible cannot be properly “said”; it
can only be experienced (and, therefore, produced) by the activity of the eye.
In this regard, Boehm’s theory of the iconic difference puts forward a radical criticism of iconology as the traditional way of describing and explaining
images. As systematized by Erwin Panofsky in his highly influential essay
Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art
(1939), the iconological method of art historical interpretation famously rests
on three different levels or “strata”. In the pre-iconographical description of
THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE
475
the work of art, pure forms—that is, “certain configurations of line and colour,
or certain peculiarly shaped lumps of bronze or stone, as representations of
natural objects” (Panofsky 1939, 28; emphasis added)—are identified as carriers of primary or natural meanings, the so-called artistic motifs. In the second
level, that of iconography, a name is given to the subject(s) portrayed on the
basis of one or more written sources. In this case, it is the interpreter’s task to
detect the “themes or concepts” (29) that the artwork is meant to instantiate.
In the third and final level, iconology focuses on the fact that any particular
representation embodies far more general principles that reveal “the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion—
qualified by one personality and condensed into one work” (30).
Clearly enough, both iconography and iconology aim at reading the meaning of a given image by referring to something external to the image itself.
While the former makes use of written sources to recognize the depicted scene
and the characters involved, the latter focuses on the particular way in which
that scene and those characters are represented to shed light on the cultural
milieu of a certain period in a certain place. Iconography deals with the “stories
and allegories” (29) underlying the image, and iconology has to do with the
symbolic values embodied by the image. The crucial point is that in both cases
the meaning of the image—what it has to “say”—is clarified by means of something other from the image itself, with the result that Panofsky’s hermeneutics
is dominated by a fundamental heteronomy whereby the text to which an
image refers becomes, literally, its linguistic pre-text: the image would be nothing but the re-presentation of something that would already exist before and
independently of the image itself.
It is precisely this anti-Fiedlerian conclusion that Boehm aims to challenge
as he points out that
those who are fascinated by images in the most fundamental way, those who have
thoroughly examined and analysed great numbers of them and possess what one
could call an image-sense, know with absolute certainty that there is such a thing
as an iconic intelligence [ikonische Intelligenz] that the artist restores in order to
free himself from the demands of language, from canonical texts, or from other
mimetic instances, and to establish evidences of a unique type, also—and especially—in cases involving e.g. traditional historical images that re-tell the timeworn content of the bible, mythology, or history. (Boehm 2006a, 11)
The notion of “the iconic” is here brought to the fore as the backbone of a
specific image logic insurmountably different from the logic of verbal language.
In order to make clear what is at stake, in 1978, Boehm coined a new term,
Ikonik, a noun meant to describe image thinking as the autonomous, productive ability of the gaze. This concept was subsequently taken up by Boehm’s
friend and colleague, Max Imdahl, who made it the crux of his art theory. After
emphasizing that “iconic” comes from eikon just as “logic” comes from logos,
thus insisting on the urgent need for a specific logic of the visual, Imdahl argues
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P. CONTE
that any true understanding of the image qua image must lead to the recognition of not only what happens within the representation but also how it happens. In a way, this had already been underlined by Panofsky himself (1915,
466) as he had stated that “‘form’ (however general it may be) plays a fundamental role in the sphere of ‘content’”, its “stylistic meaning” being also part
of the content-values. According to Imdahl, however, to admit that form and
content, syntax and semantics, are nothing but two sides of the same coin does
not, per se, mean to solve the problem, for all depends on what is meant by
“form” and “content”. The notion of form which Panofsky alludes to is the
mimetic reproduction of reality, and this does not exhaust, from Imdahl’s perspective, the complexity of the formal aspects of an image.
The very same lines, the very same colors that are at the core of the iconographic “recognizing gaze [wiedererkennendes Sehen]” can also be the object of
a “seeing gaze [sehendes Sehen]”, if only they are no longer understood as mere
vehicles of a pre-determined content, but rather as simply what they are,
namely, lines, directions, spots of color, in a word, visual fields of forces. The
formal aspects of an image are in themselves meaningful not because they refer
to something else that might be also, and perhaps better, expressed in words,
but because they bring out aspects and relationships that are purely iconic,
non-predicative, hence not fully translatable into verbal language. Images ask
viewers to not only recognize a given content but also and foremost focus on
how their gaze works: “Learning how to see is unlearning how to recognise”
(Lyotard 1971, 151). Importantly, Imdahl describes these two different forms
of gaze not as mutually exclusive but rather as complementing each other so as
to generate a new form of “cognizing gaze [erkennendes Sehen]” (Imdahl 1980,
92) that, though never forgetting Panofsky’s methodological lesson, seeks to
integrate it with an explanation of the specifically iconic ways through which a
given image impacts upon the beholder. As Boehm (1995, 30) argues, to
ignore such logic of the images is to fail to recognize their power and, with it,
their irreplaceable meaning: “We lose sight of the fundamental otherness
[Andersheit] of the image with respect to verbal language insofar as we focus
solely on the iconographic identification of the content of pictures. […] To
describe an image must mean more than just to reverbalise its linguistic
content”.
4
toward iconic indiFFerence
So far, we have been focusing on the distinction between the verbal and the
visual order, mostly in relation to the iconic turn. Yet when looking at the many
examples given by Boehm over decades in order to explain what his notion of
the iconic difference accounts for, one cannot fail to notice that the German art
historian has more and more insisted on the great variety of meanings that the
“basic ambivalence” at the core of the iconic can assume when applied to different contexts and considered from different perspectives. Indeed, ikonische
Differenz seems like an umbrella term (cf. Richtmeyer 2017) or a heuristic tool
THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE
477
that can be used in conceptually multifarious variants “without being captured
into a theoretical overall system” (Boehm 2004, 16). So, in one case, it refers
to the contrast between figure(s) and background, “between an encompassing
overall plane and what it includes as internal events” (Boehm 1994, 30).
Elsewhere, it indicates the phenomenological opposition where one or more
“thematic focuses” capturing our attention relate to a surrounding “unthematic field” (Boehm 2004, 48–49). Or it can designate the antithesis
between the scenic simultaneity of the image and the linguistic successiveness
typical of both spoken and written language:
The image establishes a perceptible contrast between the surface and the properties recognisable on it, between a “one-after-the-other [Nacheinander]” and an
“all-at-once [Aufeinmal]” which, unlike in texts or pieces of music, reveals its
presence in a flash (although one may well plunge herself in the study of details).
(Boehm 1995, 30)
Furthermore, ikonische Differenz can also describe the fundamental “indeterminacy”, “ambivalence”, or “vagueness” that is a positive and distinctive property of all images, whose power of generating meaning “does not transpire
according to the pattern of predication (S is P), but rather according to one of
qualitative perception of that which reveals itself in iconic difference” (Boehm
2006b, 228).
This brief overview clearly reveals the wide variety of meanings that the concept of iconic difference can cover. And yet, as Boehm himself underlines, the
notion has to be primarily referred “not to single phenomena but to the conditions of the medium itself” (1994, 29). In other words, iconic difference is
meant to describe the image as a medial phenomenon, that is, as a peculiar way
of mediating experience. Without a medium, there is no image.
In this specific sense, iconic difference designates the essential distinction
between a given picture and its visual environment, that is, between reality in
the flesh and the peculiar irreality (or quasi-reality) of the image world. The
mediateness that defines all images qua images goes hand in hand with their
separateness from the real world. Traditionally, this separateness has been
ensured by some kind of framing device, be it the frame of a painting, the pedestal of a statue, the theater stage, the borders of television, cinema, and mobile
phone screens, or the so-called institutional frames like museums and art galleries. All these frames are but visual instantiations of the theoretical principle
according to which the image is to be conceived of as a caesura, as a cut from
the everydayness and “fleshiness” of the real world. The frame delimits the
pictorial space—it is the gatekeeper of the image world. To access this world,
one needs a pass, so to speak, which ultimately amounts to adopting the right
aesthetic attitude, namely, the attitude of contemplation, pretense, and making
as-if: “All picture frames define the identity of the fiction” (Stoichita 1993, 90).
Significantly, “contemplation” comes from the Latin templum, which means
the area of sky or land demarcated and consecrated by the augur for the taking
478
P. CONTE
of auspices. According to Servius (ad Aen. I, 446), templum is the same word
as the Greek temenos, from temno, “to cut off”. To con-template something is
to circumscribe—that is, to frame—a certain surface from the field of the visible in order to endow it with a special significance, to “consecrate” it.
In this case, iconic difference is a label for the possibility of distinguishing
between images and non-images, between fiction and non-fiction. As a matter
of fact, the double regime of picturality consists in the very fact that an image,
just to be an image, must rest on a difference—however little it may be—
between pictorial object and pictorial presentation: “The image displays something, and in doing so it displays itself” (Boehm 2001b, 16). Or, to put it with
Martin Seel (2010, 177–78), “the picture not only contains certain appearances (of colour and form), it refers to its own internal references. It is through
this reference to its appearing that it first becomes a picture”.
Now, precisely the mediatedness and separateness that have been traditionally recognized as the sine qua non of all images are being increasingly challenged by two different kinds of iconic phenomena. The threshold, established
by the frame, which keeps the fictional world of the image apart from fleshand-blood reality, can be trespassed from two different points in two opposite
directions: from the image world to the real world, or vice versa.
The first movement is best exemplified by hyperrealistic figures. Even
though they are the non plus ultra of representational pictures, they do their
utmost to trick the viewer into believing (if only for a moment) that they are
perceiving reality in the flesh, not just its representation. The fusion of image
and prototype can make the beholder unaware of pictorial differentiation,
which is a necessary condition for experiencing something as a representation
of something else. In order to achieve maximum transparency and convey the
impression of non-mediateness, hyperrealistic pictures must dissimulate all elements that might betray their nature as representational artifacts. Take, for
instance, the paradigmatic example of wax figures: as pointed out by Edmund
Husserl (not coincidentally a source of great inspiration to Boehm), they present perceptual appearances of human beings that coincide so perfectly with the
human beings depicted that the “moments of difference” between the image
and its sujet cannot produce “a clean-cut and clear consciousness of difference;
that is to say, a secure image consciousness” (1904–1905, 44). In this case, the
notion of iconic difference does not refer to merely the physical differences
between (1) the medium and the image that appears in or through it, or
between (2) the image and its referent. On the contrary, it also alludes to the
difference between two intentional acts, perception (Wahrnehmung) on the
one side, pictorial consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) on the other. Here “the
question of iconic difference becomes the question of the perception of difference” (Purgar 2015, 166): an image must be recognized as an image, that is,
one must be aware (perceptually aware) of a certain difference between the
image and what appears in (or through) it. Now, the objective of hyperrealistic
pictures is to conceal precisely their being pictures: they are aimed to leave the
fictional dimension of representation and enter our real-life environment. To
THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE
479
reach this goal, they must not be displayed in a context that could reveal what
they strive to conceal, namely, their representational status. And given that
frames are among the most conspicuous “moments of difference”, for they
“say” to the beholder: “What you see in here is but an image”, we can conclude that hyperrealistic pictures and trompe l’œil in general require to be set
out of frame. A wax figure is more likely to trick the viewer if it is placed on top
of the museum staircase or among the shelves of the bookshop rather than
inside an exhibition room behind a velvet rope.
If they succeed in deceiving the onlookers by passing themselves off as fellow human beings, hyperrealistic figures are no longer images, for they do not
show any iconic difference whatsoever, and therefore turn mimesis into perfect
mimicry: “The image is neither the non-different simulacrum nor the selfdisappearing camouflage; rather, it is the difference of the imaginary” (Boehm
2007, 39). This is where Boehm’s reflections meet the traditional criticism of
mimesis as a process of duplicating reality. Contrary to “weak” images, such as
wax figures, “strong” images—that is, images in the truest and only proper
sense of the word—must provide the represented sujet with an “increase in
existence [Zuwachs an Sein]” (Boehm 1996).
However, crossing the borders of the frame, and thus the boundaries of
representation, can also proceed in exactly the opposite direction as hyperrealistic figures, that is, from the real world to (or, more precisely, into) the image
world. The ultimate goal of this second movement is to “pull” viewers into the
image, plunging them in self-consistent virtual worlds. Throughout the history
of mankind, the dream of immersion has resurfaced countless times, as attested
by myths, legends, and science fiction narratives, from the allegory of Narcissus
falling in love with his own reflection on a water surface only to drown in the
attempt to reach it, to the famous thought experiment of the “brain in a vat”
proposed by Daniel Dennett (1978), taken up by Hilary Putnam (1981), and
adapted into film by the Wachowski sisters with The Matrix (1999).
Yet immersion is far from simply a matter of dreaming or imagination, as
demonstrated by the stunning development of interactive virtual environments
that elicit in the experiencer a strong feeling of being incorporated into alternative realities which convey the impression of immediateness, presentness, and
framelessness heretofore regarded as the exclusive prerogative of flesh-bound
reality (Pinotti 2017; Conte 2020). Boehm seems to allude to this fact as he
observes that
electronic simulation techniques make representation turn into a perfect as-if, so
much so that Postmodernism tended to see the difference between image and
reality itself as dwindling: factum and fictum converge. The media industry’s hostility towards images is unbroken, not because it forbids or prevents the production of images, on the contrary: because it unleashes a flood of images whose
fundamental tendency is towards suggestion, towards an iconic replacement of
reality. This tendency has always been based on concealing the limits which are
inherent in iconicity itself. The much-invoked new age of the image is, indeed,
iconoclastic. (Boehm 1994, 35)
480
P. CONTE
Fig. 2 Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld, 2016, screen capture
Both hyperrealistic pictures and immersive virtual realities aim to conceal their
being “nothing but images”, striving for a zero degree of iconic difference:
they tend toward iconic indifference. And at this point, one may be reminded
of the scene of the TV series Westworld where one of the main characters,
before entering an uncanny “amusement” park designed to allow wealthy visitors to live out their most perverse fantasies with hyperrealistic androids, asks
one of the hostesses whether she herself is a real person of flesh and blood. Her
(or perhaps its) answer leaves no room for further inquiry: “If you can’t tell the
difference, does it matter?” (Fig. 2).
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