15 After the Pictorial Turn

An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell

Krešimir Purgar

KREŠIMIR PURGAR: I would not like to be discouraging, but I think we

should start with the most difficult questions, or perhaps a multitude
of questions, regarding the nature of images  – what they are and
how to understand them. In my opinion, it is both revelatory and
confusing reading; for instance, a chapter from the volume What Is
an Image?, one of the Stone Art Theory Seminars organized by James
Elkins:  more precisely, the discussion on the ontology of image(s).
Addressing this topic, several respectable scholars (including your-
self) presented many possible answers to it. But several contributors
to this book [W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Theory: Living Pictures] remind
us that the image/icon (and the pictorial turn for that matter) are,
according to you, a discursive formation, therefore an entity and
an event without ontological basis. Does the question “what is an
image?” have any relevance today, except for broadly delimiting the
area of our interest for images?
W.J. THOMAS MITCHELL: I think this question always has relevance, and
always will, precisely because images are not static, fixed entities, but
historical, discursive, and even evolutionary phenomena that change
their nature in relation to new situations. Asking “what is an image?”
is rather like asking the question “what is life?”. Neither question
admits of a final, scientific definition (and by the way, who believes
anymore that science provides anything like final answers? Science is
always provisional and progressive, no matter how “settled” a par-
ticular paradigm may be). As you know, I  regard the question of
the image as very closely related to the question of life, of the living
thing. Classically, images are “imitations of life”. They can represent
living things. Sometimes they even simulate them very precisely, as in
automata, robots, and cyborgs. And they can depict entire life-worlds
in the phenomenon of the world picture.
But I  suspect that the philosophically hard-core question of the
“ontology of images” is well above my pay grade. So my rejoinder
would be to reverse the question and ask: what is our image of ontol-
ogy? Is it true that “discursive entities” have “no ontological basis”?
Or is ontology itself a discursive formation within philosophy that
obsessively examines the question “what is …?” What pictures of
being do we take for granted when we assert that something exists,

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 After the Pictorial Turn 265
or when we claim that a picture is a true or false representation of an
existing thing, or a true representation of a nonexistent thing, e.g., a
mythical being, a chimera? Is there any sense in saying that there can
be an incorrect picture of a unicorn? I think there is a sense to such
a statement, and it reveals an interesting point about the relation of
images and ontology. Images are traditionally associated with mere
appearance, with imaginary beings, shadows, phantoms, dreams, and
illusions. They seem not to exist in quite the same way that objects
and things exist. And yet they are not nothing. They are essential
features of our being in the world. What would human beings be
without images? Very poor, bare, forked animals, I’m afraid, like
King Lear stripped naked in the storm. Plato may inaugurate ancient
ontology by contrasting the cave filled with images to the reality of
the Forms in the sunlit real of true being, but he has to admit that
we cannot live out in the sun, but must reside in the cave of our bod-
ies, senses, and appearances. Even more profoundly, he admits that
his model of human existence in the allegory of the cave is nothing
but a “strange image”. So images produce a kind of crisis in the very
notion of ontology, a science of being, of what “really, truly, actu-
ally exists”. They present a phenomenon at the edge of being and
nonbeing, at the border between reality and fantasy. In other words,
they are located precisely where human beings find themselves, in the
zone of determinate indeterminacy and fatal choices that we call life
and history. Wittgenstein noted that “a picture held us captive” inside
a certain metaphysics that dreamed of positive knowledge. But like
Plato, he did not explain how we could escape that captivity. I sus-
pect that our picture of ontology as a method of getting at true exist-
ence by way of philosophical reflection is precisely the prison that
holds us captive. That is why I agree with Deleuze that philosophy
is better off when it starts with iconology rather than with ontology.
KP: How would you connect (or would you at all) your concept of the
pictorial turn, together with the fortune it made during the last two
decades, with the success of visual studies at large? Do you think
the pictorial turn needed visual studies in the same way as, let’s say,
avant-garde art or modernism needed art history to put them into
perspective; is our disciplinary organization of knowledge always in
need of some overarching idea or foundation that explains the nature
of a whole epoch?
TM: I am not sure that I grasp the premise of this question, but here is
a stab at an answer. I suspect that the function of the pictorial turn
was to give visual studies a sense of its own historicity among the
disciplines, in much the same way that the linguistic turn provided a
new paradigm for philosophy, but also for the history and archaeol-
ogy of discourses pioneered by Foucault. In fact, it was Foucault’s
archaeological model of the “sayable” and “seeable” as historical

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 266 Krešimir Purgar
“strata” that made the relations of language and visuality intelligible
to me. I am not sure whether the pictorial turn needed visual stud-
ies, or visual studies needed the pictorial turn to launch its sense of
itself as a research program. In either case, both concepts worked to
expand the field of art history, or more precisely, to return art history
to its most ambitious origins in the work of encyclopedic scholars
like Aby Warburg. As for art history’s relation to the avant garde,
I think the latter did much more for the former. The avant garde in
the arts was one of the principal vectors that drove all of the “turns,”
pictorial, linguistic, or otherwise, that have characterized the modern
evolution of culture. That, and the shock of new technologies and
revolutionary political movements, made it clear that the human spe-
cies had turned a corner – in fact several corners – and required a
rethinking of both foundational concepts and over-arching ideas – a
new architecture of the human condition.
KP: In your “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science” of 2008,
you mention key points essential for understanding the contempo-
rary culture of images: image/picture dichotomy, the pictorial turn,
metapictures and biopictures. You presented them in a very concise
way for the purposes of a lecture format, but do you think it is pos-
sible to build out of them (and out of other important topics) sort of
a theory of visual studies? Or, would you rather stick to “… visual
studies [as] not merely an indiscipline or dangerous supplement to
the traditional vision-oriented disciplines, but an interdiscipline that
draws on their resources and those of other disciplines to construct
a new and distinctive object of research”.1 Personally, you emphati-
cally stick to that claim (“If anyone is hardcore visual studies, it’s
me!”, you said in Farewell to Visual Studies2). But, generally speak-
ing: is visual studies today, compared to its early days, more ready
to become institutionalized, is it in a danger of losing its inter- or
nondisciplinary status? And if it loses it, what would this mean?
TM: Visual studies has already become institutionalized. It now has depart-
mental or programmatic status at universities all over the world, and
it is deeply woven into existing departments of art history, cinema
and media studies, anthropology, and cultural studies. It is very hard
to generalize about what all this means. I  am delighted, of course,
that younger scholars continue to use it as an opening to all kinds
of new research in fields as diverse as psychology, cognitive science,
and political theory, as well as the history and philosophy of science.
It is clearly not just a “cultural studies” subfield, and it its still evolv-
ing. I hope it is not yet declining into obsolescence, but I feel that it
has perhaps moved beyond its adolescence. One of the most exciting
developments from my point of view is the way it helped to spawn
“countermovements” such as sound studies, which often began with
a polemical complaint about the “privileging of vision”. As Hannah

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 After the Pictorial Turn 267
Higgins’ essay [Chapter 12] in this volume shows, the proper study
of vision entails a renewed attention to acoustical worlds, and a new
focus on tactility as well. Vision is not everything, and its historic sta-
tus as the “sovereign” sense has provoked a healthy rebellion among
the other members of what Hegel called the “theoretic senses.” Ears,
eyes, and hands remain, for all their technical prostheses in digital
media, touch screens, and virtual reality helmets, the sensuous foun-
dations of human experience. Visual studies helped to open our eyes
to this, and its work is not finished.
As for my “four fundamental concepts”, I am sure that there are
more to come. They provide one starting point that has borne fruit,
but I do not think of them as the end point in any sense.
KP: In one of your earlier interviews, you said that you’d appreciate a
critique that would “dismantle the entire structure of the arguments”
that you have been building, mentioning that arguments presented
in What Do Pictures Want? regarding a vitalist/animist theoreti-
cal model for images actually “might have gone too far” [see the
interview with Grønstad and Vågnes, Chapter 10, this volume]. As
you are probably aware, Janet Wolff in her article “After Cultural
Theory:  The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy”3 is trying
to do just that. Evoking “the turn to affect” and “the (re)turn to
phenomenology(and post-phenomenology)”, she is arguing that “at
stake is the status of critical theories of culture – sociological, herme-
neutic, semiotic, interpretative – which are in some cases explicitly
rejected”. Following David Freedberg, she acknowledges that images
may indeed have power, but that power is “socially, culturally, per-
haps politically” accorded to them and not inherent to them. She
then makes reference to your relativization of your own “animistic”
theory of images when you call your theory “constitutive fiction”,
adding that “Mitchell is clear that ‘what pictures want certainly does
not eliminate the interpretation of signs’ ”.
Here I have two questions for you: is hers a kind of argument that
you wished for, and what do you think of this “phenomenological
turn” that Janet Wolff discerns? Is it a next new big thing, after grand
theories and theories of representation? Are authors like Lambert
Wiesing and Martin Seel on the German side and Paul Crowther on
the Anglo-American side creators of a new phenomenology of pic-
tures that now draws on both Hans Belting’s anthropology of images
and on your desiring pictures, as much as it draws on the classical
phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty?
TM: I think Janet Wolff identifies an interesting strand in recent theoreti-
cal work on images – she calls it a phenomenological, neurological,
and (paradoxically) a magical or animistic view of images, one that
tends to minimize interpretation and the use of historical and politi-
cal context in the understanding of images. But I don’t think Wolff

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 268 Krešimir Purgar
provides the focused critique that I was hoping for. She tends to lump
me with a very broad and schematically described group of thinkers,
while admitting that I don’t quite fit her pattern since, despite my flir-
tations with animism, I am so clearly still interested in interpretation,
and in political and social contexts for images. I also consider myself
a phenomenologist, but of a very eccentric sort in that I do not allow
phenomenology to prevent me from using Freud or Marx or Lacan
or Benjamin to unpack the lives of images. I also want to explore a
phenomenology of media that grows out of Marshall McLuhan and
Friedrich Kittler. Belting’s anthropology of images is important for
me, but so is Fraser and Durkheim on totemism, and Michael Taussig
on mimesis. Iconology has always worked best for me when it has
functioned as a promiscuous gathering of ideas, ancient, modern, and
postmodern, a bricolage of methods, frameworks, and questions.
The best critique of my work is Jacques Rancière’s marvelous essay,
“Do Pictures Really Want to Live?”.4 This essay is all that any author
could dream of. It is rigorous, comprehensive, and detailed, betray-
ing a thorough knowledge of my work, and tracing very precisely the
trajectory of my arguments. Rancière has some reservations about
my claim that the invention of cloning has produced a new form
of image-making that literalizes the ancient dream of fabricating
a living image (anticipated in myths of creation, including golems,
Frankenstein’s monster, and the robot and cyborg). He claims that
“the reign of the image comes to an end at the point where a body is
the replica of a body in flesh and bone. The cloned sheep is no longer
an image”.5 It looks to me as if this is where I part company with
Rancière, and I have laid out some counterarguments in “The Future
of the Image”, my essay that follows his in The Pictorial Turn. It
may well be that our debate is finally a question of sensibility more
than one of logic, for Rancière seems prepared to concede that, for a
great variety of images, it is enough to say that it is “as if” they were
alive, and wanted things. Our debate would then come down to a
far-reaching discussion of the relation between literal and figurative
meaning, between real and imagined entities, and ultimately perhaps
between what Wittgenstein distinguished as “seeing” and “seeing
as”. At the end of this debate I think there would be a strong conver-
gence and agreement between us on the need to think through the
ontology of images in terms of life and desire, not to mention factors
of affect, emotion, cognition, and re-cognition. As for the clone, I can
only say that if it looks like an image, walks like an image, behaves
like an image, and (most important) produces in us the same kind of
sense of the uncanny elicited by an image, then I think we have to
call it an image.
Rancière is not the only one to have offered a stimulating critique
of my work. Norman Macleod (also in The Pictorial Turn) provides

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 After the Pictorial Turn 269
a very strong dissent on precisely the issue that I am prepared to con-
cede to Rancière, namely, the escape hatch provided by the “as if”.
Macleod, a distinguished biologist, and one of the world’s leading
researchers in micro-paleontology, thinks that I  am being too cau-
tious and hesitant in retreating from a strong claim for the relation
of images and life-forms. Macleod seizes on my analogy between
the picture/image distinction, on the one hand, and the specimen/
species distinction on the other. He points out that the proper object
of biological science (or of any science, for that matter) is not really
the individual specimen, but the class of things to which that speci-
men belongs. The botanist does not study a tree, except insofar as it
belongs to a very large group of related and differentiated entities
known as trees. And as a paleontologist, he notes that the real subject
of paleontology are the fossilized images of life-forms; the actual liv-
ing forms are extinct, therefore not available to direct observation.
More important, he suggests that the best definition of an image is
similarity plus reproducibility, exactly the same criteria that apply
to species. He concludes therefore that the image, understood as the
name, likeness, and reproductive capacity of a specimen, is exactly
the object of the life sciences. He chides me (very nicely) then for
being too tentative and cautious, and urges that iconology (the gen-
eral study of images) embrace its scientific character and recognize
that biology proper is nothing but the study of images of life-forms –
how they appear and how they propagate. I  have put my toe very
hesitantly into these deep waters in my latest book, Image Science
(Chicago, 2015).6
Finally, I would say that a whole range of friends, colleagues, and
students have provided all the ruthless criticism that anyone could
ask for. My editorial group at Critical Inquiry, especially Lauren
Berlant, Bill Brown, Françoise Meltzer, and Joel Snyder, never lets
me get away with anything. And if I started naming all the students
who have found ways to set me straight or turn me onto a new path,
I  would have to fill up many pages. In fact, many of them, along
with the translators who have labored so hard to make sense of my
thought in other languages, are in this very volume. This seems like
the right place to thank them.
KP: Your books and articles in the last five years or so show your deeper
interest in the politics of images in a stricter sense. How would you
explain your engagement in commenting on political movements
and the role pictures play in them? Is it because today images are
more decidedly linked to visibility and to the outcome of any politi-
cal endeavor (hence the need for this type of intellectual scrutiny)?
Or is your interest in protest movements, “the arts of occupation”,
motivated by the belief that real authenticity in images today can
only be found outside institutions or even against them – literally on

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 270 Krešimir Purgar
the streets? Can visual imagery, flown out of various Occupy move-
ments, find any serious theoretical reflection other than within visual
studies? Is this type of ad hoc popular viral imagery the perfect alibi
for visual studies to further establish itself in showing interest in ver-
nacular visuality? Is this the road you’ve personally taken “after the
pictorial turn”?
TM: Actually, I think my interest in images has always been political, and
grounded in what I would call “vernacular theory”, a reflective prac-
tice that trusts ordinary language to provide a rough guide, or at least
a starting point, for understanding the world. My first book, Blake’s
Composite Art, was devoted to an artist who was among the radi-
cal revolutionaries of his era, the period of the French Revolution.
I  saw Blake as a political artist of the highest order, relentlessly
satirizing the atrocious conditions of his time  – the dominance of
vicious, exploitative empires, the reign of patriarchal religions that
rationalize the tyranny of the patriarchal family and monarchical
government. At the same time, Blake was a visionary and utopian
prophet of the highest order, positing an awakened humanity that
would throw off its chains and fulfill the potential of our species
to build “Jerusalem”, the shining city of our dreams, in “Englands
green and pleasant land”, and then throughout the world. Blake’s
poetic and pictorial images rank, in my view, with the greatest works
in the English language, with Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer,
Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot, and with the major visual artists of any era.
His central commitment as a radical humanist was to the power of
the human imagination, the power of invention, creativity, and (of
course) quite literally the faculty that makes human beings capable
of producing and finding images. His medium for accomplishing
this work was a “composite art” – of words and images, poetry and
painting, in illuminated books – that echoes the great masterworks
of the medieval illuminated manuscript, while looking forward to
the advances in technology that would make possible the work of
the pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists, the Surrealists, and to the work
of the visionary artists in all the technical media of our digital age.
All of my work as an iconologist begins with Blake, and particularly
with his critique of rationalist philosophy and the reign of doubt and
abstraction. My notion of “image science” takes its cue not from a
merely positivist or empiricist standpoint (though I would acknowl-
edge the great achievements of both these traditions), but from
what he called “sweet science”, the kind of recognition expressed by
Einstein that scientific theory itself is framed and elaborated in terms
of metaphors and images. This form of “higher reason”, a wisdom
which goes beyond mere calculation, is itself a political commitment
of the sort Blake expresses when he concludes this epic poem, The
Four Zoas, by prophesying a time when “the war of swords, and the

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 After the Pictorial Turn 271
dark religions are parted / and Sweet Science reigns”.I think that the
political has continued to be a major thread in my work on images,
then, straight through all the subsequent work, from Iconology,
which works its way through the iconological figures (the camera
obscura and the fetish) in Marxism, to Picture Theory (where the ide-
ological implications of the “pictorial turn” were first worked out), to
Landscape and Power (grounded in my work on imperial and colo-
nial landscapes), to The Last Dinosaur Book (a critical and histori-
cal investigation of the totem animal of modern capitalist culture).
The more recent work on war, racism, and activist politics, then, has
simply focussed that early work on particular political issues more
precisely. And yes, I think these issues, and many more, provide the
right home for visual studies, and of course for art history, literary
criticism, media studies, and the humanities more generally. I would
not rule out institutions such as museum, galleries, and movie houses,
but iconology and visual culture also need to live “on the street”
as you suggest. For me, the best slogan for visual studies would be
“to the barricades” that separate disciplines into noncommunicative
enclaves. Specialization is fine. In fact there is something quite special
about seeing the world. But it is not all there is, and it needs to learn
how to see more, and to see beyond seeing.

Notes

1 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2

(2002): 165–181.
2 James Elkins, Gustav Frank and Sunil Mangani (eds.), Farewell to Visual
Studies (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
3 Janet Wolff, “After Cultural Theory:  The Power of Images, the Lure of
Immediacy”, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2012): 3–19.
4 Jacques Rancière, “Do Pictures Really Want to Live?”, in Neal Curtis (ed.), The
Pictorial Turn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
5 Ibid., 35.
6 W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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