The power of images

Twenty-three years after the original publication ofIconology (1986), the publication of this French translation is an event, which is owed to a courageous publisher and two talented translators. This book, the first in a sort of trilogy pursued with Picture Theory (1994) and What do pictures Want ? (2005), has fed for twenty years the expansion of a field of research and teaching called Visual Studies Or Visual Culturefield today fully accepted in the English-speaking academic world and beyond, but most often ignored in France.

What Visual Studies ?

Largely represented among publishers and in the first North American or British university cycles, the field of Visual Studies must be understood as a visual propaedeutics, understood in a more or less wide sense but explicitly designed against media hierarchies, modes, registers, tastes, genres or schools that characterize or characterize the history of art “ traditional ». As such it is linked to the major company to deconstruction of “ cannons »Who has started in the United States since the Reagan-Bush period and in conjunction with the assertion strategies of minorities of all kinds. This field can also be apprehended, in the manner of Cultural Studies with which he has been linked, as a political criticism of culture – criticism nourished by “ French theory But also from the Frankfurt School and Analytical Philosophy. There “ visual culture Here is defined not only as a heritage of images or a library of visual signs but also as a field of social interactions Around imagesfield constantly crossed by power relations linked to conflicts of identities and memories. Learn to “ read “Visual culture, and acquire” visual competence “(Visual Literacy) of which Mitchell speaks is therefore learning to decode any image and all practice of images as a device of power and/or counter-power. Image analysis as such can be reduced to the congruent portion in the textbooks of Visual Culturewhere we will find, however, all of a post-structuralist literature today a little forgotten in France. Such a photographic portrait of native to XIX^e century will have no aesthetic, stylistic, even documentary meaning for this point of view ; On the one hand, the production protocol of this dominating image will be questioned, on the other hand, the ways through which a look, one for oneself, even a memory of the subject could be recovered beyond this image. True anti-authoritarian didactics and “ de-disciplinary », According to another term highlighted by Mitchell in Picture TheoryTHE Visual Studies So immediately question the concepts of conceptual autonomy or formal consistency of an object field to which the art historian, the semiologist or even the mediologist are often used to France. This is why, in the United States itself, some art historians denounce a jumble ofEverything Studies.

Image policy

Iconology occupies, in relation to the development of Visual Studiesa founding and strategic position. As translators write, “ No American work relating to the definition or analysis of the image escapes theses and methods of analysis From this book. However, this book contains neither reproductions nor image analyzes, as Mitchell immediately warns its reader by emphasizing a fundamental terminological distinction of English, today lost in French, between picture (“ picture »Optics, virtual, mental, poetic, conceptual) and picture (“ painting »Material, physical, historically determined. Picture Theorythe second part of the “ trilogy »De Mitchell, is devoted to pictures and the modes under which, as metapicturesthey picturally theorize the image ; but Iconology is devoted to the concept of image. First professor of theory and history of literature at the University of Chicago and the irremovable editor of the prestigious review Critical InquiryMitchell came to the image by text and poetry (William Blake). Despite the title reference to Erwin Panofsky, Iconology does not have much to do with an elucidation program of the meaning of images, ranging from iconic to iconographic and from iconographic to iconological conceived as total cultural horizon of the meaning of such image. As the subtitle “clearly indicates” Image, text, ideology », This book is actually an exploration at the foot of the word letter iconologythat’s to say “ Speech on the image ” Or “ image-discourse “, Where it would almost be necessary to read a simple juxtaposition – or a constitutive antagonism. There “ thesis Central of this book is that the thought of the image cannot be separated from an antagonistic thought of the text or discourse, at least in a Western philosophical tradition going at least to Leonardo da Vinci and whose great moments, explored here in reverse and on the genealogical mode, go from Nelson Goodman and Ernst Gombrich to Lessing and Burke, without forgetting Marx and his analysis of ideology, Mitchell as a kind of image meta-concept. For Mitchell, there can be no semiology or transcendental ontology of the image, since it is entirely determined by a theoretical face-to-face with discourse, and that the concept of image (or painting) draws its philosophical existence from the philosophical history of its antagonism with the concept of language, discourse or poetry. Antagonism of political essence, in the sense that in the couple image / language are reflected all the classic dualities in the thought of power (strong / weak, masculine / feminine, modern / primitive, etc.), as shown in a singularly brilliant and striking way the parallel analysis of Burke’s texts on the sublime and the French revolution, where the same dual figures are alternately used on the aesthetic or political modes in order superiority of England (eloquent, effective and moderate) over France (pictorial, speculative and excessive). If, as Mitchell writes “ Burke and Lessing treat (the image) as the sign of another racial, social and sexual, an object of fear and disdain “(P. 235), that is to say that iconology is constitutionally linked to the great political and social sharing of modernity.

We could do – and we made – various objections to Mitchell: a certain relativism (see on this point the introduction), a certain indifference to concrete objects and the historicity of the historicity of pictures (But on this point the subsequent works complete the genealogy of the concept), and above all perhaps a deconstruction so rigorous of the couple image / language which it leads to a form of essentialism risking to obscure a certain number of practices and traditions-artists, or extra-European-which on the contrary thought of image and language, or image and writing, in a continuum. The fact remains that this French translation is more than welcome, at a time when the “ delay »French criticism pointed out by François Cusset – director of the collection which welcomes this book – is particularly sensitive in the study of art and a fortiori visual. The unprecedented preface that Mitchell adds to this translation, where “are succinctly presented” The four fundamental concepts of image science »From for the most part of the following works in the series (Pictorial Turn Or “ Visual turning “, Image / picture, metapictures, biopictures), can only be to hope that Picture Theoryat least, in turn soon translated.