This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of Basel] On: 07 Sept em ber 2015, At : 08: 55 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Culture, Theory and Critique Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rct c20 Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw Emmanuel Alloa Published online: 01 Sep 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Emmanuel Alloa (2015): Iconic Turn: A Plea f or Three Turns of t he Screw, Cult ure, Theory and Crit ique, DOI: 10. 1080/ 14735784. 2015. 1068127 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 14735784. 2015. 1068127 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . 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Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Culture, Theory and Critique, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1068127 Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Emmanuel Alloa Abstract In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. The image, a new paradigm? Within a decade, they had completely disappeared from the urban scape of New York: I am referring to the characteristic yellow ‘WALK/DON’T WALK’ traffic lights, familiar to anyone who has ever been exploring New York by foot, but also beyond, given its bold presence in so many movie pictures and TV series. Introduced in the 1950s, the sturdy boxes were recognisable from afar, flashing their unambiguous message to the metropolitan rambler. To walk or not to walk: the Manichean imperative left little space for questioning and exerted a form of domineering coercion on any pedestrian’s mind. Not on every pedestrian’s mind, however, as it eventually became clear. Among the crowds of global visitors to the city, many who were unfamiliar with English were found to be unable to understand the message, however unmistakeable it had first seemed to the local’s mind. In the late 1990s, the authorities decided upon a major shift, replacing the old boxes with newly designed ones, where the text lines would be replaced by pictographs. Starting in 1999 and over the next decade, all the old boxes were slowly but firmly substituted by a new kind of traffic lights where the WALK tag would be traded for a striding figure in profile, while the DON’T WALK tag would be turned into a hand turned palm-forward, reminiscent of a # 2015 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 2 Emmanuel Alloa policeman’s hand directing traffic. Today, it is said that in some remote parts of Queens, a couple of relics of the old age are still to be found, but that otherwise, the deep shift from text to pictographs, from language to image, is complete (Figure 1). The change in New York’s traffic light policies was not necessary for one to understand that deep modifications have lately been ongoing in society’s modes of communication. Many have claimed that we now live in a visual age, in a time thoroughly designed and shaped by images. But as often happens, the uncontested consensus hides a reality which is far less obvious than it seems. W.J.T. Mitchell lucidly observed that today, images have a status that oscillates strangely between that of a paradigm and that of an anomaly (Mitchell 1994: 13). On the one hand, it would seem indisputable that our lives are now determined by visuality and its screens to a degree that was unimaginable until recently. On the other hand, contemporary thinking (philosophy, theory, critique) still seems to be imperfectly armed for confronting a reality that cannot be interpreted on the basis of a text or (to say the least) understood as one of its extensions. The voices of W.J.T. Mitchell in America and Gottfried Boehm in Europe played a decisive role in revealing the difference between this phenomenon and the methodologies available for describing it (see their correspondence in Boehm and Mitchell 2009. The differences in their approaches have been highlighted by Moxey 2008; Curtis 2010). Nevertheless, it is this very difference that makes the heuristic value of the so-called ‘iconic turn’ (Boehm) or ‘pictorial turn’ (Mitchell) uncertain. When the Boehm and Mitchell coined their respective formulas in slightly different and independent ways, it remained unclear if this diagnosis referred to a change of society or if it were a merely epistemological turn within the thinking process; in other words, if this ‘turn’ regarded the exponential increase in forms of visual communication – that is, the emergence of new objects or a hermeneutic turn – that is, a change in the way of thinking and seeing. If in fact the iconic turn can be exemplified in a technological change that produces an increase of visual Figure 1. LED Pedestrian Traffic Lights, New York. Credit: E. Alloa. Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Iconic Turn 3 artefacts but does not modify the theory that describes them, the image can have no other status than that of an anomaly; a sort of hybrid object, vitiated by a constitutive hubris that impedes its particular placement within the consecrated forms of knowledge, halfway between an ontology of the object and a semiotics of the sign. Yet, what are the conditions that need to be met – it would be tempting to ask Mitchell and Boehm – in order to truly speak of a paradigm shift? On what basis can we affirm that an image is not a supplementary object, but rather becomes a vector, a medium or a decisive operator for our contemporary practices and for our forms of knowledge? The difference that has just been described does not appear to be specific to the question of images, but rather is characteristic of any paradigm shift. The so-called ‘linguistic turn’, whose name is now associated with Richard Rorty and his edited volume (Rorty 1967), certainly doesn’t refer to the emergence of new forms of language or a transformation within language, but rather an unprecedented awareness of the fact that the linguistic dimension is omnipresent at every level of social life and that we cannot seriously think of a kind of social life deprived of any linguistic dimension. Yet epistemic turns – paradigm shifts, as Thomas S. Kuhn called them – can have different ranges: on a restricted scale, the epistemic turn concerns the emergence of a new science or discipline, while on a broad scale, it refers to a change in viewpoint, where all objects observed by the sciences in the past are now considered from a new perspective. In this sense, the linguistic turn can be considered from the point of view of a differentiation within disciplines (and the emergence of ‘linguistics’ as a new specific field of investigation) while the anthropological turn, which took place about a century and a half earlier brought about anthropology as a new discipline. Yet, it can also be asserted that the true range of the anthropological turn is missed if reduced to the emergence of a new discipline. This was Foucault’s argument: the emergence of the human as a new ‘episteme’ is not so much about the emergence of a new object; human sciences are not sciences that have humans as their object, but rather sciences that consider all other objects from an anthropological point of view, through the ‘human’ vector so speak. In a similar fashion, the linguistic turn reaches well beyond the simple inauguration of a new object of study, whose specificity has not yet been perceived, but rather constitutes a metatheory or a ‘metaphilosophy’ (Rorty 1967: 1), as it compels us to reflect on the medium of each reflection. Today, we are faced with some urgent questions: Is it possible to think in a non-anthropological manner (this is the question posed today by what is known as ‘speculative realism’)? Is it possible to think on the basis of a grammar different from that of propositional language? Is an image really more than a simple object of some regional discipline? Can the image, instead of being conceived as a reduplication of the world, be thought of as an access to the world and as a medium of the world? Is there something like a visual thinking or, more exactly, a thinking with and according to images? Within the humanities, a growing number of voices tend to give a positive answer to these questions. Admittedly, however, this overall sea-change has not yet produced a general institutional consensus, with some minor exceptions. While in the US new curricula of visual culture studies are being implemented, the German-speaking world has experimented with the Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 4 Emmanuel Alloa introduction of a new ‘science of images’, the Bildwissenschaft (see for instance Sachs-Hombach 2005). While in the American context, it is the notion of ‘visual culture’ which has been heavily contested for its various implications, especially the abolition of the difference between ‘art’ and ‘visuality’ (see the famous October ‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’ (1996); see also Elkins et al. 2015). In the German context, it is not so much the levelling of artistic and non-artistic images which has raised objections, but the institutionalisation of the new discipline. The first response that comes to mind is that such a discipline has of course already been created, and even more than once. In the twentieth century, the founding of a ‘science of images’ – an ‘iconology’ – is associated with the name Erwin Panofsky (Bredekamp 2003). Yet, one needed to wait till 1967 (a preface to the French edition of Iconography and Iconology) for Panofsky to acknowledge openly that his iconology project was indebted to what Aby Warburg once called Ikonologie – although, as Giorgio Agamben recalled, Warburg never gave a definitive name to his science (Agamben 1975) – but also to the entire seventeenth-century tradition of the Iconologia (Panofsky 1967: 3–4). To study the sciences of images is not a whimsical idea of the twentieth century: already in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia from 1603 (Ripa 1603), there is an attempt to single out the elements of painting in order to make them ‘readable’; that is to say, to make all that persuades ‘through the eye’ comparable with that which persuades ‘through words’, as it is exemplified by the allegory of beauty and its ‘clouded’ face (Figure 2). ‘The science of images is easy . . .’ It is significant that the majority of iconological encyclopaedias of the seventeenth century aim to isolate figures that are able to have the same definiteness of letters or words, immutable elements that can circulate and be rearranged into new pictorial syntagms. The image is subordinated to the text in all respects and cannot be thought independently of it. In Ripa’s Iconologia, the icons do not have a logic of their own; they are to follow the model of the text: they are supposed to be as literal as possible. In the twentieth century, Erwin Panofsky stands for the attempt to reinitiate the iconological project on new grounds, freed from its literalist bias. The first move consists in simply turning the ‘iconology’ of his predecessors into ‘iconography’, hence making the term ‘iconology’ available for a semantic redefinition. The iconological level will both name the third and highest level of Panofsky’s analysis – that of meaning – and the project as such. His attempt of freeing the image from the literalist bias and demonstrating that it is worthy of the logos too will ultimately end in cementing the literalist bias even more firmly, as we shall see subsequently. But in the meantime, one should not forget that Panofsky’s first, anti-textual move was seen by his contemporaries as a direct attack on philology and its supposed prerogatives. When in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, originally released in 1948, he writes that only literature possesses an autonomous structure (eine autonome Struktur) and that only literature is the bearer of ideas (Träger von Gedanken), the great philologist Ernst Robert Curtius appears to be directly addressing Panofsky and Warburg (paradoxically, he dedicates the book to the latter). 5 Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Iconic Turn Figure 2. Cesare Ripa, ‘Allegory of Beauty’ in I Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi, Rome: L. Facij, 1603, no. 15. The author goes on to say that to read Pindaric poems can be a hassle, but to observe the frieze of the Parthenon is not; a book is a text – we must understand it, otherwise we fail; there is nothing enigmatic about images (nichts Unverständliches). Curtius concludes: ‘knowing pictures is easy compared with knowing books’ (Curtius 1973: 15). The programmatic version of Iconography and Iconology, published by Panofsky (after a preliminary draft in German from 1939) in the year 1955 Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 6 Emmanuel Alloa (Panofsky 1955), can be interpreted as an attempt to confer dignity to the new science of images, by demonstrating that images are by no means conspicuous or obvious, but rather they conceal infinite textual references – just like a book. And yet, it is Panofsky’s very effort to ennoble the iconic – as this essay attempts to argue in the following pages – which will ultimately give rise to a renewed subordination of the iconic to the discursive. For Panofsky, the image is always an allegory, in a broad or, better yet, etymological sense: the image never has an intrinsic sense, but rather it expresses something different from itself, and in this sense it is allegorical, from the Greek all’agôreuein, literally, ‘to speak of something else’. At the expense of a long tradition that from Panofsky can be traced back to Renaissance treatises whose objective was to make images speak (take, for example, Gabriele Paleotti and his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images from 1582), and which define iconology as the study of its discourse, and of the silent prose of pictures – granted that the classic formula of ut pictura poesis can be reinterpreted within this context – the current iconic turn seems not so much to seek a rehabilitation of the discursivity of the image, but rather to point out its figural power. When reading the French translation of Panofsky, it would appear that Michel Foucault had been tempted to limit the field of discourse and its analysis (with which, it goes without saying, Foucault was already associated): in his review of Panofsky’s writings published by Bernard Teyssèdre and of the translation of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, he in fact affirms: ‘Discourse and figure have their specific ways of being’ (Foucault 1994 [1967]: 622). Or, stated in different terms: answering the question of if an image constitutes an anomaly or a paradigm involves understanding if the image is a different modality of discourse or a modality different from discourse. The latter is a modality which, when taken seriously, could give rise to unprecedented perspectives on meaning and its operations. If, as Rorty saw it, the linguistic turn is measured also by the fact that the very way of thinking has changed, then we are left wondering what would happen to thinking at the very moment it stops denying its indebtedness to images. As Paul Valéry had already rightly noted: ‘Philosophers have a great taste for images: there is no trade that requires more of them, although philosophers often hide them under dull-gray words’ (Valéry 1983: 58). Different scenarios can be outlined: (1) The iconic turn as archaeology: If we follow Nietzsche in considering that many concepts are metaphors whose origin we have simply forgotten, the iconic turn can be understood as an archaeology of those images still operative in the most abstract concepts; an archaeology of the figural dimension of thinking. Hans Blumenberg’s vast project of a ‘metaphorology’ can be seen as such an archaeological endeavour, that is to read the philosophical tradition as a tradition not only of logical concepts, but also a tradition of metaphors. Some of these metaphors, says Blumenberg, have an ‘absolute’ status, not so much in the sense that they are fundamental or anthropologically eternal, but ‘only that they prove resistant to terminological claims and cannot be dissolved into conceptuality’ (Blumenberg 2010 [1960]: 5). This does not mean, however, that these metaphorical Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Iconic Turn 7 images cannot be replaced by others or corrected by a more precise one: this is why metaphors have a history, and that writing a metaphorology is an archaeological undertaking. What Blumenberg has started for philosophy and what is now being taken up by others, who investigate the rhetoricity and metaphoricity of the philosophical tradition (Konersmann 2011), is currently also taking place in other fields which are supposedly mainly non-visual, such as law or economics, but also in history, political theory, or science studies, proving the extent to which knowledge is indebted to images (to name but a few: respectively Jones and Galison 1998; Mirowski 1994; Burke 2001; Stolleis 2009; Brandt 2013; Breidbach 2013). (2) The iconic turn as poetics: to see by means of images. In addition to psychologists who, like Rudolf Arnheim (2004), have taken an interest in visual thinking, there are also many artists who have explored the possibility of thinking by way of figures, a poetics of images. In this sense, MerleauPonty was able to justly speak of painting as a ‘figured philosophy’ (Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1961]: 129). In the field of cinematographic expression, it was Sergei Eisenstein who, together with psychologist Lev Vygotsky, explored the possibilities of non-discursive thinking. This non-discursive, sensorial based thinking he called ‘sensual thinking’, and which functions by way of images (Eisenstein 1966 [1942]). In yet another area, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams can be similarly understood as an attempt to clarify the logic of dream images which, characterised by the principle of condensation and translation, creates forms that cannot be traced back to verbal logic. The question of form is, therefore, not limited to a poetic or aesthetic problem, but rather it brings into play the possibility of morphological and metamorph(olog)ical knowledge. (3) The iconic turn as epistêmê. According to the Platonic opposition, scientific knowledge (epistêmê) differs from opinion (doxa). But the difference becomes less clear when examining the semantics tied to this science which, as a kind of contemplation aimed at identifying the form or eidos of things, is never able to entirely detach itself from the visual field, but rather is brought to the level of the mind’s eye, or the Cartesian oculus animae. While with Husserl and in the framework of what he called ‘eidetic phenomenology’, the eidos was refastened to the dimension of the doxa, from which it had been isolated, the eidetic becomes stuck within the trap of identifying knowledge. Within the iconic turn, a renewed interest in the morphê, the appearance of form, morphology and its metamorphoses, seems to extend the question of the eidos beyond a merely formal recognition of patterns or types (see Pinotti 2001; Vercellone 2006). According to the German art historian Max Imdahl, whose founding work in the field of image theory has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, images do not only require a ‘recognizing gaze’ (wiederkennendes Sehen), which is capable of ‘reading’ the visual alphabet and its rhetorical figures; oftentimes, images force us to see in a different way, to see the way in which we see (this is what Imdahl calls ‘seeing gaze’, sehendes Sehen) and, consequently, to generate a new kind of ‘cognizing gaze’ (erkennendes Sehen) (Imdahl 1980: 88, Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 8 Emmanuel Alloa 99). In this sense, it has been suggested that the iconic turn redefines the very meaning of the word epistêmê. Or to rephrase this in yet a different way, drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s compelling formula which seems to summarise this shift towards an epistêmê of the non-identical: ‘Learning how to see is unlearning how to recognize’ (Lyotard 2011 [1971]: 151). For Gottfried Boehm, we might only speak of an iconic epistêmê, provided that we revisit ‘one of the oldest foundations of European science’, which involves attributing meaning and truth only to that which can be expressed in the form of propositional phrases; and we can speak of a paradigm of images only when we stop ‘relating schemes of iconic sense’ to ‘already preestablished forms in verbal language and other systems of signs and symbols’ (Boehm 2007: 78–79). This is why the simple statement of intent – most likely pronounced under the influence of the technological transition towards an increasingly visual culture – to dedicate oneself to the image is certainly not sufficient, and the classic Panofsky model continues to prove its tight limitations. About ten years ago, James Elkins introduced a catalogue of Ten Ways to Make Visual Studies More Difficult (Elkins 2003). In the wake of Elkins, this essay would also like to suggest – albeit much more modestly – certain potential shifts within the field of iconology as it has been established in order to apply this injunction of Lyotard’s, and to make the study of images less ‘recognizable’ and obvious. Thus, three shifts, turns or tropisms: the iconological turn to symptomatology, the turn from the extensive to the intensive and the turn from the indicative to the subjunctive. How to make the science of images more difficult From iconology to symptomatology Pre-texts for meaning Erwin Panofsky pioneering achievement was the elaboration of a method to describe images independently of their artistic value. This method, as it is known, received the name ‘iconological method’ and has proven to have launched an historical-artistic study of typologies of images that had not been appreciably considered up until that point, such as non-Western images, mass images and images in motion. In fact, Panofsky not only dedicated one (semi-humoristic) article to the Rolls-Royce radiator (Panofsky 1963), he also wrote an essay on cinema (Panofsky 1985 [1934/36]). Karl Mannheim, on the other hand, applied the iconological method in the sociological field, and the analysis of the cinematographic image developed by Roland Barthes, arranged on three levels, undoubtedly presents noteworthy similarities to the Panofskian model. But the attempt to demonstrate the stratification – and, therefore, the depth – of the image, which allowed for its epistemological ennoblement before those who, like Curtius, had already disqualified it, compels even Panofsky to hypothecate the iconological investigation from the start: only and exclusively ‘profound’ images will be acceptable, that is, images that refer (like books) to some meaning that precedes them and which they do nothing but depict. According to a method that has already been tested for other classic works, this involves finding the texts (if not the text) that allow for the reconstitution of the meaning of a work. Iconic Turn 9 Dürer’s engraving from 1499, known as The Justice, which depicts a male figure with an illuminated face, appears to be a radically new iconographic invention, which distances itself from the classical representations of justice disguised as a blindfolded female subject (Figure 3). Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 According to Panofsky’s famous analysis however, Dürer’s engraving is not an inventio per imaginem, as one might think. Rather, the engraving constitutes the faithful pictorial transposition of a text written a century and a half prior, the literary source Panofsky returns to, that is, the Repertorium morale by Petrus Berchorius, which establishes an equivalence between Christ and the sun (Sol Iustitiae). Dürer knew this text – Panofsky concludes – as it had been printed by his godfather Koberger in 1489 (Panofsky 1970 [1921]: 277). Figure 3. Albrecht Dürer, ‘Sol Iustitiae’, 1499. Copper engraving, 105 × 76 mm. Quoted after: Adam Bartsch, Le peintre graveur, Vienna : J.C. Degen, vol. VII, 1808, p. 93, n8 79. Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 10 Emmanuel Alloa Among the many that could be mentioned here, this simple case proves how in Panofsky’s iconology, the image is not considered as such – for its chromatic or formal characteristics, for instance, as it was in the Viennese school of Alois Riegl or Konrad Fiedler – but rather for its referential structure. Panofsky demonstrates that even a Rolls-Royce’s radiator refers to classic art (to Palladian architecture, to be more precise). And in 1966, when he sees the feature film L’année dernière à Marienbad, he is not interested in the radical invention of the form of temporal sequences that French filmmaker Alain Resnais introduces, but tries to trace back the avant-gardist screenplay written by RobbeGrillet to an elegiac poem by Goethe (Heckscher 1995 [1969]: 186–87). As Panofsky eloquently puts it, the meaning of the image is a ‘documentary meaning [Dokumentsinn]’ (Panofsky 2012 [1932]: 478). The image is documentary insofar as it is the result of a document which allows the image to become intelligible: through the pre-text of the image, the image becomes readable for the viewer. Readability Max Imdahl was among those who emphasised the intrinsic limitations of the iconological method: ‘For Panofsky, the image – be it artistic or not – is nothing but the injunction of a seeing of recognition, which identifies objects’ (Imdahl 1980: 89). Panofsky himself seems to have been conscious of his problematic ‘textualism’. In pre-modern painting, a female figure offering a peach is to be identified as the incarnation of Veritas. Yet, when dealing with Auguste Renoir’s Peaches, a still life, Panofsky says that ‘we cannot hunt for a Figure 4. Auguste Renoir, ‘Peaches,’ 1881 – 1882. Oil on canvas, 38 cm × 47 cm (15 in × 19 in.). Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie. Iconic Turn 11 Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 text to disclose the allegorical meaning of the fruit’ (Panofsky 2012 [1932]: 468) (Figure 4). Once more, the meaning of an image transcends the image: even a work that belongs ‘to the “type” of the still life without meaning [Typus des bedeutungsfreien Stillebens]’, Panofsky presumes, must have a meaning – it may be a symptom of ‘the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion’ (Panofsky 1939: 7). Renoir’s peach, then, is the expression of a certain world-view at a certain historical-cultural moment, observable in various impressionist paintings. The German medievalist Otto Pächt, who was among the very first critics of Panofsky, claimed that the entire project of iconology is permeated by a ‘hidden symbolism’ (Pächt 1956: 278). ‘It is paradoxical’, observes Pächt, that in an era in which psychology has permitted the scientific study of the realm of the unconscious and of the preconscious, we can insist on reducing the most masterful pictorial creations to mere visual shells of philosophemes, ideograms or symbolizations of rational meanings. (Pächt 1987 [1977], 374) Policies of meaning The most systematic critique of iconology however has been put forward by French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, who sees in Panofsky’s Neoplatonism not only an attempt to exorcise the uncontrollable energies of the image, but also a reluctance to accept the fact – highlighted by Warburg – that iconological analysis should favour a ‘methodological amplification [methodische Grenzerweitung]’ of disciplinary borders, that is not frightened by the ‘policing stance [grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit]’ (Warburg 1999 [1912]: 5641) of the palisades that continue to separate various forms of knowledge. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, we must rethink the value of one of Panofsky’s definitions of iconology: that of a ‘history of cultural symptoms [Geschichte kultureller Symptome]’ (Panofsky 1939: 18). If little attention has been paid to this ‘symptomatology’, it is most likely due to the fact that Panofsky is quick to add ‘cultural symptoms, or “symbols” in general [Symptome, oder allgemein “Symbole”]’ (Panofsky 1939: 18), immediately relating the study of images to Cassirer’s symbolic forms. Nevertheless, if the science of images can have a sense today, perhaps it would be worthwhile to rethink the value of the term ‘symptom’, by disassociating it from a philosophy of symbolic forms and bringing it back to its original context, which is that of clinical records. From the extensive to the intensive Overdetermination According to Sigmund Freud, a symptom is characterised by its constitutive ‘overdetermination’ (Überbestimmtheit), i.e. the fact that as a such, the 1 On the same topic, see also Didi-Huberman 2002; 2005 [1990], ch. 3. 12 Emmanuel Alloa Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 symptom is not a direct expression of a cause, but is rather determined by numerous causes at once and can therefore not be traced back to a single one. In its overdetermined, saturated condition, it makes the very possibility of causal determination shaky. The memory-images or dream-images Freud treats as symptoms are not simply traces that relate to a real event that precedes them; it is the very idea of linearity and causality that is once again called into question by symptomatology: if anything, the connection between the symptom and the cause resembles a pronged line or more precisely a branched system of twisted and interlaced lines. It has nodal points at which two or more threads meet and from there on proceeds as one; and as a rule several threads which run independently or which are connected at various points by side-paths, debouch into the nucleus. To put this in different words, it is remarkable how often a symptom is determined in several ways, is ‘overdetermined’ [überbestimmt]. (Freud 1895: 290) A symptom, therefore, is not a point, but a crossroads, an entanglement, a condensation, permeated by powers that are sometimes even opposite one another. If this is true and if an image is always already an entwinement rather than a casual trace, then it is no longer possible to follow a single thread and, accordingly, apply the ‘evidential paradigm’, theorized by Carlo Ginzburg (which, for that matter, does not hide its criminological inspiration) (Ginzburg 1979). Freud’s symptomatology can by no means be reduced to Morelli’s historical-artistic method, which seeks to identify the author of a work or the actual cause of a symptom, because a symptom already constitutes a re-articulation against the backdrop of numerous factors. Within a symptom, literally, things that are heterogeneous among themselves ‘happen together’ or ‘co-incide’ (syn-ptôma). This is why a symptom cannot be related to a superior order, but rather is fundamentally singular and remains tied to the event. Symptom In this sense, symptomatology is distinguished from a classificatory nosology, such as the one introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by scientists such as Boissier Sauvages de Lacroix and his Synopsis of Methodical Nosology (1763) or Thomas Sydenham, who suggested that all diseases could be classified the same way as botanists classify plants. Following Carl Linnaeus, the principle is that of an exhaustive classification of all there is, according to the principle of binary opposition (dihairesis), which leaves nothing out. To know means to know the causes, and to reconstruct the unidirectional chain of derivation. To Boissier Sauvages or Sydenham, just as to Linnaeus, the task was to elaborate a comprehensive synopsis which would embrace the entire field of their objects and which would be organised around the principles of identity, contradiction and of the excluded middle (either A or not-A, tertium non datur). The Synopsis of Medical Nosology aimed at establishing the entire arborescence between causes and diseases, making the symptom the Iconic Turn 13 Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 effect of an unambiguously identifiable cause (Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix 1763). A straight line runs between these taxonomical nosologies and current psychiatric manuals, such as the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association 2013) the principle being the positioning within an arborescence of possible epidemics, as the Isagogê of Porphyry and his followers, who had tried to represent graphically (arbor porphyriana) the ontology of derivation generally associated with Aristotle (Figure 5). Figure 5. Arbor porphyriana. From Boethius, Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, III.3, in Opera varia. Pars I. Venice: Forlivio 1497. Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 14 Emmanuel Alloa Degree, not pedigree As we have attempted to illustrate elsewhere (Alloa 2011a), the iconic turn cannot consist of the restoration of the ancient ontological question of the Greek ti esti, or ‘what it is’, by applying it to the image-object: iconicity is not a specific difference that delimits a class of entities or signs. Iconicity couldn’t possibly be a specific difference, for a simple reason: it is not an extensive dimension, but an intensive one. It is impossible to delimit the field of images because, according to the circumstances, it may be necessary to consider that not only paintings, photographs or frescoes, but also diagrams, reflections, metaphors, hallucinations, monochromes, films, installations and sculptures are images. Incidentally, this is the reason for which Umberto Eco’s proposal to consider iconicity as a subcategory of the sign is problematic, since, according to Eco, a sign is everything which can be used for the purpose of lying: seeing as though the reflection in a mirror will never show anything other than what is in front of it, the reflected image cannot lie and, therefore, is not a sign (and, consequently, if it is not a sign, it cannot be iconic) (Eco 1984). It is urgent to expel these remains of Porphyrianism from the contemporary debate on the image: iconicity is not to be reduced to a semiotic subcategory and degree is not a matter of pedigree. When is an image? In his theory of the imaginary, Jean-Paul Sartre suggests that this ontology of extension be substituted by another concept: that of ‘family’ (Sartre 2010 [1940]2). There is a family relationship among images, but whether or not the third cousin can still consider himself a member of that family depends on the circumstances. Following this suggestion, we might affirm that iconicity is a matter of degree, not of essence, and that the question of degree is not a matter of belonging, but rather of intensity. Furthermore, in the shift from extensive to intensive, we might be inspired by the move made by Nelson Goodman with respect to the question of aesthetics. To the traditional question, what is art?, the American philosopher substituted the question, when is art? – rather than giving a substantial definition of art, Goodman suggests a circumstantial approach, i.e. to take the presence of certain conditions as a hint that we are very likely to be in the presence of an artwork (Goodman 1988 [1977]). These conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient, they should rather be thought of as ‘symptoms of the aesthetic’, says Goodman. These symptoms provide no definition, much less a full-blooded description or a celebration. Presence or absence of one or more of them does not qualify or disqualify anything as aesthetic . . . Symptoms, after all, are but clues; the patient may have the symptoms without the disease, or the disease without the symptoms. (Goodman 1988 [1977], 68) 2 An interesting comparison could be made between the Sartrean notion of the ‘family of images’ and Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’. Iconic Turn 15 Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 In a similar manner, when faced with the pervasive return of that which Paolo Fabbri once called ‘ontalgia’, i.e. the nostalgia for returning to an identical ontical core of things, it may prove useful to substitute the question, what is an image? with a more incidental question, such as when is an image? (and, on a second level, with a question like when does an image become an artistic image?). This obviously implies considering an image not only as a vehicle of ideal or semantic content, but also as a matrix of feelings. As Bergson points out, in order to understand what a certain pain is, it takes little to know how and where it comes to be. A toothache is not determined by its location or by its extension, but by its intensity. Consequently, the question of art, too, is no longer presented by Bergson in an extensional manner, but in an intensive one: ‘the artist knows without the possibility of doubt that the picture of a master affords him more intense pleasure than the signboard of a shop’ (Bergson 2001 [1888]: 5). Atopia But if this is the case, then one would be hard pressed to say where the intensity is located in the painting. In his lectures on image consciousness, Edmund Husserl had already pointed to this problem: ‘If I look at the photograph, I can say: “The image appears” there, thirty centimeters in front of me at this definite position in space. But do I properly see the image object itself in that position?’ (Husserl 2005: 573) Or, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, the animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formations. Nor are they elsewhere . . . I would be hard-pressed to say where the picture is that I am gazing at. (Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1961]: 126) (Figure 6) Figure 6. Lascaux Cave, Unknown Artist, The Great Black Bull, Paint on Limestone, c. 15,000 BCE (Courtesy : Ministère français de la culture). Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 16 Emmanuel Alloa Drawing on Richard Wollheim and his notion of ‘seeing-in’, one could say that we see the prehistoric animal in the surface of the cave wall, despite the cracks and splits which make its reading difficult. But with MerleauPonty, we could also say that we see ‘according to the image’ (selon l’image) (Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1961]: 126). A kind of seeing thus which would not be despite, but rather with or along the lines of those cracks and crevices, a kind of ‘medial seeing’ (Alloa 2011b) which, through the materiality, sees beyond it. A kind of seeing where to see is to see more than what meets the eye. With respect to what there is, the image is always both lacking behind and excessive in its sensorial over-presence. The beholder would be hard pressed to locate it on the wall and to frame it. But it is exceeding topographic ascription in another sense too: if images are attributed an emotive power, that is to say that they are literally moving (e-motio) and capable of producing a response (Freedberg 1989), this might eventually be due to their ‘atopic’ character, as Plato’s Sophist would say: the efficacy of an image cannot be located in the traditional order of knowledge; its pathos appears to oppose itself to its mathos, its punctum to its studium. To consider, on the other hand, that in an image there is a pungent coherence that operates especially when it touches us in its punctum amounts to reconsidering the possibility of a pathei mathos, of a ‘knowledge through suffering’ prophesized by Aeschylus and Sophocles (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 178). From the indicative to the subjunctive ‘Phenomena’, according to Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, ‘are visions of the invisible (opsis tôn adêlon ta phainomena)’ (Anaxagoras: fragment B21a). The question here is obviously how the relationship between visible and invisible is conceived; if it is a matter of an analogical relationship, that is, of a simple correspondence, or of a heuristic relationship, that is, of the possibility of including the invisible in the visible. Ancient Greek medicine appropriated this phrase and made it a cornerstone of symptomatology. The art of reading a symptom (sêmêion) presupposes not only theoretical, but also practical, knowledge; an empeiria of he who is skilled as he possesses a certain expertise. This expertise derives from the autopsy, from having seen with one’s own eyes: an autopsy, as providing against chance, and against the singularity of that which is eventful (of the event). In fact, a diagnosis is rarely made from a distance or based on hearsay, because, due to its overdetermination, a symptom is intricate. Unlike a trace, which supposes that the body it was left by has departed, a symptom needs a body on whose surface it can appear. A symptomal body, then, is a body that is exposed and that can signal something else only by being exposed; like a sign, a symptom does not resemble what it is a symptomatic expression of, it exemplifies it.3 3 On the birth of semiotics out of Ancient medicine, and the importance of circumstantial embodied knowledge in reading symptoms, see (Alloa 2015). Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Iconic Turn 17 Exemplification We must be clear as to what we mean when we speak of ‘exemplification’. By reason of its singularity, the symptomal knot cannot be analysed as an exemplar of a general class; its sense cannot be deduced by any generic rule. It is not an example in the sense of a ‘sample’ or a ‘token’, but in the sense of something that stands out (exemplum comes from eximere, ‘to take out’). This is why symptomal knowledge is a constitutively precarious and uncertain knowledge, and its generalisation (in other words: its de-contextualization) remains problematic. If we wanted to avail ourselves of a category introduced by C.S. Peirce, we could say symptomal knowledge corresponds to ‘abduction’: the abduction is not a deduction (the derivation of a conclusion from a general principle) nor an induction (the inference of a general principle from empiric observation) but hypothesis inferred from a non-standard, surprising observation. As a matter of fact, Peirce even doubted that ‘inference’ was the right expression and suggested to talk of ‘conjecturing’ rather than of ‘inferring’ (CP 5.189), whereby gesturing back to the Ancient technique of art of conjectures (ars coniecturalis). Conjecture Symptomal knowledge can thus be understood as an art of conjecture; an art of conjecture with regard to phainomena. Unlike gods who, as Alcmaeon of Croton affirmed, ‘have sure knowledge of invisible and mortal things, man in contrast is reduced to conjecture [tekmairesthai]’ (Alcmaeon of Croton, fragment B1). The ars coniecturalis invoked here is an art that is aware of its provisional nature and limitedness, an art that sees connections or makes them, an art that follows the nuances of the symptom and shapes constellations by grouping symptoms into syndromes, which – literally – are nothing but a ‘con-course’ (syn-dromas) of circumstances. This game gives rise to a new type of probatio, or the exploration of possible scenarios (Alloa 2013). Operating by images, then, amounts not only to establishing facts, but also to exploring potentialities, as this essay will try to elaborate upon a little further. Conjecture, however, requires a specific modality: it does not state its hypotheses in the indicative, but rather in a hypothetical tense, or, in the subjunctive. Allegorism and tautegorism: the image in the indicative The third shift that we might hope for in the debate on images would be a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. It should suffice, in this context, to chalk out a reflection which has been developed elsewhere (Alloa 2010): nevertheless, it would seem, the scope of the index at times lurks under the disguise of a sort of re-auratisation of the image-trace or of the image-fetish, as if – after decades of analytical semiotics – it aspired to return to a ‘real’ and immediate presence. It often happens that the current apology of ‘presence’ which can be observed in various domains (Gumbrecht 2003) results in the updating of theorems that had once thought to be definitely obsolete, such as that of the ‘natural trace’. Subsequent to Panofsky’s allegorism, it looks as if we were now faced with a new type of tautologism or, rather, tautegorism (allos agoreuein, ‘to say other things’; tautos agoreuein, ‘to say the same’). An 18 Emmanuel Alloa image is no longer a symbol of something seen through an ‘open window’, as Alberti would say, but rather it is a trace of the same thing: in an image – specifically a photographic image – an event is documented, just as it had been, before any interpretation (Figure 7). Allegorism Picture as ‘transparent window’ The picture opens to the meaning beyond Tautegorism Picture as opaque surface The picture is the meaning Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 The renewed interest in the theorems suggested by a post-semiotic Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, must be taken seriously, as well as the Figure 7. Adolphe Eugène Disdéri, Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, around 1852. Photograph. Courtesy: Leigh McKinnon. Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Iconic Turn 19 idea that the photographic image has as its object a ça a été, an ‘it was this way’: when looking at a photograph of Napoleon Bonaparte’s younger brother, Barthes states that he cannot help but think that in this moment he is looking at ‘eyes that looked at the Emperor’ (Barthes 1980: 3). The return of the category of referential indexicality to the debate – particularly with reference to Rosalind Krauss’ Notes on the Index (Krauss 1977) – is, in this respect, very telling. Without starting a complex discussion (Barthes, moreover, appears to aim not at an ontology of the photographic image, but at a phenomenology of the photographic experience, which is something very different), we cannot help but observe that in the debate, a strange return of the real has taken place. In the 1970s, Susan Sontag remarked that ‘A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened’ (Sontag 1977: 5). Today, the discussion has shifted from photography to other kinds of visual streams: the supposed transparency with regard to the registered event is not provided by a realistic appearance, but very often by its opposite. It is the low-grade video image, produced by amateur footage, that has gained the status of pictorial truth-telling; technological low-fi that claims high fidelity to the event. The images provided by CCTV cameras, generally equally lacking sharpness, are today at the centre of new information wars, trying to establish whether or not something has been the case. But why reduce a photograph to the indication of a given event in the past at all? Or more generally: why reduce any image (analogic or not) to be the index of a given fact? Why does a visual evidentia have to be narrowed to providing ‘evidence’? Whether one goes the realist way and takes the image to be the physical trace of something else which left its imprint in the matter or the conventionalist way and takes the image to be the sign of some meaning beyond, symbolic allegorism and realist tautegorism end up converging in the paradigm of indicativity: an image is justified by the fact that it points to something specific which makes up for its being unequivocal; it is the indication of a ‘this is how it is’. Subjunctive images The indicative, however, is certainly not the only modality of an image; it would appear that the subjunctive is one of its modalities as well: the image opens up a space of possibility between an ‘it was this way’ and an ‘it will never be this way’. This concerns obviously the domain of artistic images in general, and especially of those of modernity, where values like ambiguity, indeterminacy and openness have become of utmost importance. Dario Gamboni has suggested to place such images exploring the indeterminate and ambiguous forms of the visual in the modernist avant-gardes under the general title of potential images (Gamboni 2004). Both comparing and differentiating them from accidental as well as from hidden images, Gamboni defines potential images as ‘those established – in the realm of the virtual – by the artist, but dependent on the beholder for their realisation, and their property is to make the beholder aware – either painfully or enjoyably – of the active, subjective nature of seeing’ (Gamboni 2004: 17). In such a constitution of potential images, imagination thus plays a chief role, and Gamboni Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 20 Emmanuel Alloa exemplifies his notion by examples drawn from paintings of Turner, Redon, Ensor or Seurat. Yet, if the concept of subjunctive images has heuristic relevance, it will have to be larger than the field of not only artistic pictures, but also of images drawing mainly on subjective imagination. The fact that by looking at images, one does not necessarily look at what really happened – appearing in an image is a ‘possible’ appearance, tied to an event that does not necessarily have an actual correspondence – but has an either inward, oneiric (dream-like) or hallucinatory gaze would seem to bolster the idea that the domain of images is the domain of imagination. Such was Jean-Paul Sartre’s assumption, for instance, in his L’imaginaire. Yet the ability to operate by images does not amount to escaping reality, as Sartre believed in his theory of the imaginary, but rather to exploring modalities of reality other than those of factuality. (This is why it is not enough, as has been the case in recent discussions about the claim of the ‘transparent’ nature of photographic images to say that one should assume something like an ‘interaction’ of ‘actual and imagined seeing’ (Walton 2008: 127)). Just as the restriction to artistic images left out a large deal of visual artefacts that decisively determined (and continues to determine) social meaning, to talk about the ‘imaginary’ nature of images is still subordinating image operations too much to the authority of a subject and its psychological faculties. If we consider the extent to which virtual images today are decisive for visualising a house to build, preparing surgeons for an operation or pilots for a flight, the dimension of the image is certainly not reduced to a sort of escapist break from the world, as Sartre believes. Nor are images limited to possible anticipations of a reality that is to be realised, as if they foresaw what will be, as a sort of virtual pre-vision. Virtual images can equally refer to the past, for example when they allow for various virtual reconstructions of archaeological sites (virtual archaeology) which would not be possible in physical reconstructions. Rather than the so-called ‘virtual history’, which bases itself on counter-factual assumptions (how would things look like if X hadn’t happened . . .), such virtual archaeology is highly factual, and yet hypothetical, as unlike in physical reconstructions, where all but one hypothesis must be discarded, various possibilities can coexist that are not mutually exclusive. Beyond the non-exclusivity, to which Gamboni had already pointed when referring to the fundamental ambiguity and internal plurality of the images he analyses, there is another aspect: the virtuality of such images has to do with the fact that they cannot be exhausted by a single actualisation, but that every actualisation keeps further actualisations open. This is famously the case of ‘virtual autopsy’ (also known as virtopsy) in new forensics: rather than irreversibly cutting into a body, virtual autopsies are image-based procedures whereby through multi-sliced computerised tomography an non-invasive analysis is carried out which does not preclude the possibility of further, different autopsies. Which leads to a first hint about what subjunctive images could be about: rather than being in an indicative mode of actuality or to indicate some actual event (in the present or in the past), subjunctive images concern the possibility of not being subjected to the logic of actualisation. The connections such hypothetic Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Iconic Turn Figure 8. 21 Eugène Atget, Bitumiers (‘Asphalt Layers’), 1899 –1900. Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print. 17.5×21 cm. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. images form are not neutral, however, but have a cogency of their own (hence the sub-iunctio in the subjunctive). The domain of what might be is not opposed to the domain of what is, rather, it gestures at something whose existential status cannot (yet) be determined, because for instance it is still in the making. That is why rather than being in the indicative (in esse), images have to do with the time in the subjunctive (in fieri). This concerns not only electronic images, or so-called virtual reality, but images that are considered to be more realistic as well. Of the most documentary photographs of avant-garde pioneer, Eugène Atget, who registered with his photographic plate urban views of the Paris metropolis around 1900, André Breton beautifully said that upon them blows ‘the wind of possibility’ (le vent de l’éventuel) (Breton 1998 [1924]: 196). Paying attention to this ‘wind of possibility’ would give a new breath to the iconic turn, which otherwise cannot help but exhibit, at the moment in which it is proclaimed, its first hints of breathlessness (Figure 8). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. ORCID Emmanuel Alloa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1919-5074 22 Emmanuel Alloa Downloaded by [University of Basel] at 08:55 07 September 2015 Works Cited Agamben, G. 1975. ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’. In Potentialities. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press 1999, 89 –103. Alloa, E. 2010. ‘Changer de sens. Quelques effets du tournant iconique’. 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Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 563– 591. Emmanuel Alloa is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University St. Gallen and Senior Research Fellow at the NCCR iconic criticism (Basel). He has published a series of books dealing with issues of contemporary French philosophy, aesthetics and image theory.