Passage of the Day

From: What Is an Image?
W. J. T. Mitchell (jstor.org)
T HERE HAVE BEEN times when the question "What is an image?"
was a matter of some urgency. In eighth- and ninth-century
Byzantium, for instance, your answer would have immedi-
ately identified you as a partisan in the struggle between emperor
and patriarch, as a radical iconoclast seeking to purify the Church of
idolatry, or a conservative iconophile seeking to preserve traditional
liturgical practices. The conflict over the nature and use of icons, on
the surface a dispute about fine points in religious ritual and the
meaning of symbols, was actually, as Jaroslav Pelikan points out, "a
social movement in disguise" that "used doctrinal vocabulary to ra-
tionalize an essentially political conflict."' In mid-seventeenth-century
England the connection between social movements, political causes,
and the nature of imagery was, by contrast, quite undisguised. It is
perhaps only a slight exaggeration to say that the English Civil War
was fought over the question of images, and not just the question of
statues and other material symbols in religious ritual, but less tangible
matters such as the "idol" of monarchy and, beyond that, the "idols
of the mind" that Reformation thinkers sought to purge in themselves
and others.2
If the stakes seem a bit lower in asking what images are today, it is
not because they have lost their power over us, and certainly not
because their nature is now clearly understood. It is a commonplace
of modern cultural criticism that images have a power in our world
undreamt of by the ancient idolaters.3 And it seems equally evident
that the question of the nature of imagery has been second only to
the problem of language in the evolution of modern criticism. If
linguistics has its Saussure and Chomsky, iconology has its Panofsky
and Gombrich. But the presence of these great synthesizers should
not be taken as a sign that the riddles of language or imagery are
finally about to be solved. The situation is precisely the reverse: lan-
guage and imagery are no longer what they promised to be for critics
and philosophers of the Enlightenment-perfect, transparent media
through which reality may be represented to the understanding. For
modern criticism, language and imagery have become enigmas, prob-
lems to be explained, prison houses which lock the understanding
away from the world. The commonplace of modern studies of images, in fact, is that they must be understood as a kind of language;
instead of providing a transparent window on the world, images are
now regarded as the sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance
of naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting,
arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological
mystification....
I. The Family of Images
Two things must immediately strike the notice of anyone who tries
to take a general view of the phenomena called by the name of im-
agery. The first is simply the incredible variety of things that go by
this name. We speak of pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, dia-
grams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, pat-
terns, memories, and even ideas as images, and the sheer diversity of
this list would seem to make any systematic, unified understanding
impossible. The second thing that may strike us is that the calling of
all these things by the name of image does not necessarily mean that
they all have something in common.It might be better to begin by
thinking of images as a far-flung family which has migrated in time
and space and undergone profound mutations in the process.