Theory & Event

We live in a visualised world, a world in which we are bombarded everyday and everywhere with images that appear transglobal, capable of crossing geographic and racial divides, or as one famous advertisement implied, of uniting, hand in virtual hand, people of different age, sex and ethnicity (p. 1).

Such is the immediate rationale for Julia Thomas’ anthology Reading Images, a book which attempts to bring together some of the most significant essays on the theorisation of the image. Certainly I don’t dispute the need for an anthology of this kind. Consideration of the image, what and how it signifies, its veracity and what we invest in it has been around since Plato, but the last half of the twentieth century — undoubtedly stimulated by the proliferation of the image in the mass media that Thomas alludes to above — witnessed an unprecedented intensification of such inquiry, constituting in the process a common object for debate among film and media theorists, philosophers, art historians and psychoanalysts. The theory of the image forms the basis for a number of courses at art schools and universities and there is no text that I know of that attempts to draw together (or for that matter to schematise) the philosophical, aesthetic and critical contributions to its investigation. To date, one can find theorisations of the image specific to each of the disciplines of film studies, media studies and art history, but this collection actually presents essays dealing with a range of different visual media. This volume should facilitate further debate on the image because of the way it combines essays that attempt to theorise different aspects of visuality.

Reading Images is one of four books published by Palgrave in the Readers in Cultural Criticism Series. Most of the essays chosen for the book and Thomas’s introduction to them are firmly entrenched in the terms of reference set out by the General Editor of the series, Catherine Belsey. In her preface to the collection, Belsey situates the book in the context of those cultural studies debates which are the legacy of the sixties theoretical writings by Roland Barthes on myth, Louis Althusser on the culture of capitalism and Jacques Lacan on psychoanalysis. (Essays by the first and the third of these writers are included in this volume.) This theoretical terrain is to some extent retraversed by Thomas in her own introduction, although she, not surprisingly, makes her coverage of it more specific to the image, visuality, and spectatorship. Thomas makes no bones about the fact that for her the image must be understood in the context of 1970s cultural theory and the tenets of Althusserian ideology, Lacanian subjectivity and gender distinctions, all of which she takes as givens. The main points of her introduction (and thus the frame of reference she presents for her book) concern the politics of visuality and its relation to women and gender, the co-implication of the image and truth and the image and ideology, and the relationships between vision and power, seers and seen, visuality and language.

The collection contains a number of essays which are today considered classics and the largest contingent of writers represented are from the Continent: “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” from Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan; “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” by Walter Benjamin; “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and “Las Meninas” from The Order of Things by Michel Foucault; “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography” by Roland Barthes; “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality” by Jean Baudrillard; and “Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini” by Julia Kristeva. The manner in which these essays are presented in the book is to some extent misleading. Some, for instance, were not written as individual pieces but as chapters of longer book-length studies. The chapter by Barthes in this volume is in fact a collection of disconnected excerpts from Camera Lucida, while Lacan’s...