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) © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 18th Construction, 1915, oil on canvas, 53 × 53 cm. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; photo by Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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 472 P. CONTE 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 474 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 476 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). reFerences Aarsleff, Hans. 1988. “Introduction” to Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (1836), VII–LXV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barasch, Moshe. 1998. Modern Theories of Art 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky. New York: New York University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1960. “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie”. Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 6: 5–142. Boehm, Gottfried. 1978. “Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes”. In: Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften. Ed. by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gottfried Boehm. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Boehm, Gottfried. 1994 [2006]. “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder”. In: Was ist ein Bild? Ed. by Gottfried Boehm. München: Wilhelm Fink. Boehm, Gottfried. 1995. “Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache”. In: Beschreibungskunst-Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer. München: Wilhelm Fink. THE ICONIC (IN)DIFFERENCE 481 Boehm, Gottfried. 1996. “Zuwachs an Sein: Hermeneutische Reflexion und bildende Kunst”. In: Die Moderne und die Grenze der Vergegenständlichung. Ed. by HansGeorg Gadamer. München: Galerie Klueser. Boehm, Gottfried (ed). 2001a. Homo Pictor. München: Saur. Boehm, Gottfried. 2001b [2012]. “Representation, Presentation, Presence: Tracing the Homo Pictor”. In: Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. Ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, and Bernhard Giesen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Boehm, Gottfried. 2004 [2007]. “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder”. In: Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 2006a [2010]. “Letter to W.J.T. Mitchell”. Trans. by Jennifer Jenkins. In: The Pictorial Turn. Ed. by Neal Curtis. London and New York: Routledge. Boehm, Gottfried. 2006b [2009]. “Indeterminacy. On the Logic of the Image”. In: Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image between the Visible and the Invisible. Ed. by Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf. New York and London: Routledge. Boehm, Gottfried. 2007. “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens. Deiktische Wurzeln des Bildes”. In: Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Boehm, Gottfried. 2011. “Ikonische Differenz”. Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik, 1: 170–78. Bredekamp, Horst. 2015 [2018]. Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency. Trans., ed., and adapted by Elizabeth Clegg. Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter. Conte, Pietro. 2020. Unframing Aesthetics. Milan and London: Mimesis International. Dennett, Daniel C. 1978 [1981]. “Where am I?” In: The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Mind and Soul. Ed. by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. New York: Basic Books. Fiedler, Konrad. 1887 [2001]. “Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit”. In: Schriften zur Kunst, 2 vols. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, vol. 1. München: Wilhelm Fink. Fiedler, Konrad. 2001. Schriften zur Kunst, 2 vols. Ed. by Gottfried Boehm, vol. 1. München: Wilhelm Fink. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1820 [1822]. “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung”. In: Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aus den Jahren 1820–1821. Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1836 [1988]. On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. Trans. by Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund, 1904–1905 [2005]. “Phantasy and Image Consciousness”. In: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Trans. by John B. Brough, ed. by Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer. Imdahl, Max. 1980 [1996]. Giotto—Arenafresken. Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik. München: Fink. Kant, Immanuel. 1790 [2007]. Critique of Judgement. Trans. by James Creed Meredith, ed. by Nicholas Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 482 P. CONTE Lyotard, Jean-François. 1971 [2011]. Discourse, Figure. Trans. by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Majetschak, Stefan. 1997. “Die Sprachlichkeit der Kunst. Konrad Fiedlers Sprach- und Kunsttheorie im Lichte der Sprachphilosophie Wilhelm von Humboldts”. In: Auge und Hand. Konrad Fiedlers Kunsttheorie im Kontext. Ed. by Stefan Majetschack. München: Wilhelm Fink. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1873 [1990]. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”. In: Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Trans. and ed. by Daniel Breazeale. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1915. “Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst”. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 10: 460–67. Panofsky, Erwin. 1939 [1955]. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art”. In: Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in and on Art History. Garden City and New York: Doubleday & C. Pinotti, Andrea. 2017. “Self-Negating Images: Towards An-Iconology”. Proceedings 1: 1–9 (https://doi.org/10.3390/proceedings1090856). Purgar, Krešimir. 2015. “What is not an Image (Anymore)? Iconic Difference, Immersion, and Iconic Simultaneity in the Age of Screens”. Phainomena. Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, 24 (92–93): 145–170. Putnam, Hilary. 1981 “Brains in a Vat”. In: Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richtmeyer, Ulrich. 2017. “Ikonische Differenz”. Image, 26: 82–94. Seel, Martin. 2010. The Aesthetics of Appearing. Trans. by John Farell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stoichita, Victor I. 1993 [2015]. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting. New, improved, and updated edition. Trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen. London and Turnhout: Brepols.