Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is (...) inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke’s Song of Success and Other Poems for Children. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader. (shrink)

The barest awareness of the ubiquity and influence of the media today provides proof enough that our fate is in the hands of the image. But when and how was this fate sealed? _Image, Icon, Economy_ considers this question and recounts an essential thread in the conceptualization of visual images within the Western tradition. This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life—the contemporary imaginary—can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and (...) ninth centuries. It was during this period that the church was compelled to produce an account of the theological status of the religious image that would nevertheless not be open to even the slightest suspicion of idolatry. The solution arrived at was the dual doctrine of the _image_, _invisible_ and the _icon_, _visible_, and thus perfectly fitted to be placed at the center of a pedagogical and political strategy serving the temporal power of the church. The foundations of this immense philosophical enterprise were laid in no less than the multifarious, interwoven strands of the divine _economy_, God's overall plan for the salvation of humanity. (shrink)

This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life--the contemporary imaginary--can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.

This review article of Frederik Stjernfelt’s Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism (2022) argues that Peirce’s theory of iconicity with its subdivision into the image-diagram-metaphor triad must not be reduced to diagrammatic iconicity. The foundation of the triadic subdivision of the icon is not in Peirce’s diagrammatic logic but in Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories. A focus is on misinterpretations of Peirce’s concept of thirdness in the firstness of the icon. The paper argues that not only metaphors, but also comparisons, analogies, analogic (...) arguments, and examples belong to the third class of icons. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relation between icon and depiction and their equally central role both in verbal and in nonverbal artistic texts. For this purpose, I will examine the contact points between Jakobson and Bakhtin’s theory of text. In particular, I will dwell on Jakobson’s “Quest for the essence of language” and on Bakhtin’s “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences.” Both Jakobson and Bakhtin build their idea of text on this dialogue between different (...) dimensions. According to Bakhtin dialogical logic is the specific logic of the text. Though indispensable in the initial phase of understanding, the first is reductive if it claims to exhaust the semantic import of the text. Both in Bakhtin and in Jakobson, this idea of text based upon a dialogue between different dimensions implies that sign expression cannot be exhausted in representation because there is something which exceeds representation. I will call this excedent element “depiction.” Depiction is what is at stake in the artistic text, what exceeds the symbolic level of representation. “Depiction” can be configured, both in verbal and non-verbal text, as an idea of iconicity which exceeds resemblance and immediate visibility. (shrink)

The Call for Papers invokes a history of thinking about images in terms of Western traditions, culminating in the ‘apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate’ Jacques Rancière describes in The future of the image. Not considered in this scenario are other ways of looking at, being moved by, thinking about, going with and feeling through images, which I will unfold in this paper. Starting with filmmaker Merata Mita from Aotearoa New Zealand, who contrasts living images of her ancestors in documentaries, (...) ‘very much alive’ to her, with outsiders’ selective collecting of those images ; linking with Natalie Robertson’s tracing of takiaho, by which descendants keep connections with their ancestors in film fragments alive; I will also remember Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben – the ‘survival’, ‘continuity’ and ‘metamorphosis’ of images and motifs, and finally engage Mitchell’s consideration of a road not taken by Rancière in contemplating The future of the image. The paper explores a range of experiences, actions, reflections and emotions bundled in the terms appropriation and iconicity: from engaged encounters to consumptive misuse in the first case, from fleeting celebrity fame to a particular form of material presence that contributes to identification and community building in the latter. By bringing Māori and Pacific ways of thinking together with minor European thought traditions the paper shows that images, as appearance into visibility and doability, can not only connect the imagination with reality. They can also open up new and old realms of possibilities through affective and effective iconicity. Whether or not this can happen depends on the prevailing kind of belonging. (shrink)

The article investigates the hypothesis that preaching implies more than merely verbalising, proclaiming and rhetoric reasoning. Preaching is fundamentally the art of poetic seeing; an aesthetic event on an ontic and spiritual level; that is, it provides vocabulary and images in order to help people to discover meaning in life (preaching as the art of foolishness). In this regard, preaching should provide God-images that open up the dimension of aesthetics and provide vistas of the ‘unseen’. The iconic dimension of preaching (...) is about symbols and metaphors that help people to ‘see’ in everyday life (a poetic gaze) the presence of God in such a way that tragic events, the awareness of death and the anguish about the fear for loss and rejection become events for signifying life and for healing (the quest for wholeness). It is argued that practical theology should be about a liturgy of life. In this regard, the ‘ugliness of God’ becomes an aesthetic category in a Christian spiritual approach to iconography. In order to do this a critical approach to praxis thinking should probe into the realm of paradigms, especially paradigms that describe the ‘power of God’. Due to the assumption that the depiction of God’s power was predominantly influenced by the Serapis, Zeus and Roman cult (Emperor mystique), a paradigm shift from omni-categories (pantokrator) to bowel categories (passio Dei) in the homiletic depiction of God is proposed. (shrink)

Why is the urge to lose the iconic image relevant to reformation and modernism? A question so central in a society built more than ever on visual media dependency. Is that relevant to sceptical questioning of the essence of reality, and if the image is a reflection of reality in the era of new technology of image creating and manipulating? As iconoclasts began deliberately destroying images at the alter as a sign of reformation, modern art was no longer bound by (...) truthful representations of iconic reality; from shift in colour as a medium to a scientific light reflection, to pushing colour boundaries in reality, to losing the object for the absolute representation of abstract and supermatist visual, to deliberate losing of intended visual representation to materials, then to the empty frame, and to the empty gallery … on goes the iconoclastic gesture of modern art. Followed by a transitional shift from iconic representation all the way to resonance in visual communications, exploring with the possibilities of different referential functions of signs, and thru to minimalism and replacing visual by verbal referential codes. This article studies actions and motives of deliberate loss of iconic image, examining the factors associated with the development and process, criss-crossing the boundaries of two image dependant yet very different domains; art and visual communication. (shrink)

Resumen En la década del noventa del último siglo apareció en Alemania el así denominado “giro icónico” (ikonische Wende). Keith Moxey (2009) interpretará este viraje como un nuevo paradigma que, harto del giro lingüístico y la tesis del acceso mediado a la realidad, propone a la imagen como una instancia de acceso inmediato al mundo, eliminando la distinción entre sujeto y objeto. Sin embargo, Boehm sostiene que el giro icónico debe entenderse a partir del giro de todos los giros, el (...) giro trascendental kantiano. La hipótesis que defenderé aquí es que el giro icónico debe entenderse como un pensamiento postkantiano. Abstract The 1990s saw the emergence in Germany of the so-called “iconic turn” (ikonische Wende). Keith Moxey (2009) interprets this turn as a new paradigm that, fed up with the linguistic turn and the thesis of mediated access to reality, proposes the image as an instance of immediate access to the world, eliminating the distinction between subject and object. However, Boehm argues that the iconic turn must be understood on the basis of the turn of all turns, the Kantian transcendental turn. The hypothesis I will defend here is that the iconic turn is to be understood as a post-Kantian thought. (shrink)

According to one important proposal, the difference between perception and cognition consists in the representational formats used in the two systems (Carey, 2009; Burge, 2010; Block, 2014). In particular, it is claimed that perceptual representations are iconic, or image-like, while cognitive representations are discursive, or language-like. Taking object perception as a test case, this paper argues on empirical grounds that it requires discursive label-like representations. These representations segment the perceptual field, continuously pick out objects despite changes in their features, and (...) abstractly represent high-level features, none of which appears possible for purely iconic representations. (shrink)

'Photo-credit: David Hume': a dialogue showing how application of Hume's three vivacity principles of resemblance, contiguity and causation--even his illustrations of them--not only immediately clarify the main sources of interest in photography, but locate photography in the broad and fascinating history of various functions that images serve us, thereby dispelling ongoing mystification about it. (In the dialogue, Veronica represents our contiguity and causal interests, Miranda [named for a Japanese camera company] our depictive ('resemblance') interests, while Clara serves as philosophical moderator.).

This paper explores conflations of martyrdom, spectatorship, and image theory in Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601). It argues that Caravaggio employs an “iconic” visual formula as a response to the pressures of a post-Tridentine poetics. Through these strategies, an iconography of immediacy and presence is paired with a sacrificial subject-matter. This merging united witness and visual experience in the shape of the sacred image. Martyrdom, as both a historical and representational phenomenon of early modern sociality and culture, invoked the (...) act of spectatorship. In connecting the Crucifixion of St. Peter with the cultural and aesthetic paradigms of post-Tridentine Italy, the article argues that Caravaggio’s image re-imagines the codes of iconic repre­sentation. While not a novel academic context for Caravaggio scholarship, I will read this image less as the expression of stylistic tensions in the Roman artworld than as the result of overlapping frameworks—martyrdom, Petrine iconography, and a Counter-Reformation aesthetic. Reenergized as part of the visual rhetoric of Tridentine politics, the icon reflected a new propensity for paleochristian cultural revival. Discussing both the contextual pressures of this new aesthetic regime as well as intertwining it with the increasing presence of Catholic image treatises, the article suggests an “iconic” space for reading Caravaggio’s Crucifixion. This “iconic” framework is built into the charged discourse surrounding the image itself. (shrink)

It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures (...) its ability to do the explanatory work, which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the notion of an ‘Analogue Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision's iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border. (shrink)

Mathematical images occur in lectures, books, notes and posters, and on the internet. We extend Kennedy's proposal for classifying these images. In doing so we distinguish three uses of images in mathematics: iconic images; incidental images; and integral images. An iconic image is one that so captures the essence of a concept or proof that it serves for a community of mathematicians as a motto or a meme for an area or a result. A system such as Euclid's can combine (...) such apprehensions with other forms of logical inference and an image that is built into a system of exposition is called an integral image. An incidental image is an image used by a mathematician to reason with a particular concept. In addition to this thematic characterization, we also explore one concept, infinity, in some depth by comparing representations of the infinite by mathematicians and artists. (shrink)

This special issue examines how the comic and the icon prefigure forms of legality that are different to modern law. There is a primal seeing of law unmediated by reading, writing or possibly thinking. This introduction identifies the primacy of the eye, the emergence of visual jurisprudence and the transformations of law as a paper-based material practice to a digitally enabled activity.

For a sign to be a sign it must bond an object, a signifier, and the idea to which it gives rise. The paper focuses on the iconicity of silence as a hypoiconic signifier, exploring the semiotics of silence in light of the notions and studies of iconicity. Fascinating parallelisms hold between iconicity and silence. These raise many challenges to the study of each separately, let alone dealing with them jointly. Some icons and some silences are qualities (...) in the real world, others are semiotic forms standing for or denoting objects. Simple, intuitive qualities of iconicity and of silence are naturally grasped and shared from antiquity to the present by cultures and peoples. The paper employs Peirce’s initial basic trichotomy of iconic classes as well as his later hierarchies for studying the iconic stance of silence as a hypoiconic signifier. Analyzing and illustrating the possible complexities between forms, contents, their relations and their interpretations, group hypoiconic silences into silence as an image, silence as a diagram, and silence as a metaphor. (shrink)

Short‐term memory in vision is typically thought to divide into at least two memory stores: a short, fragile, high‐capacity store known as iconic memory, and a longer, durable, capacity‐limited store known as visual working memory (VWM). This paper argues that iconic memory stores icons, i.e., image‐like perceptual representations. The iconicity of iconic memory has significant consequences for understanding consciousness, nonconceptual content, and the perception–cognition border. Steven Gross and Jonathan Flombaum have recently challenged the division between iconic memory and VWM (...) by arguing against the idea of capacity limits in favor of a flexible resource‐based model of short‐term memory. I argue that, while VWM capacity is probably governed by flexible resources rather than a sharp limit, the two memory stores should still be distinguished by their representational formats. Iconic memory stores icons, while VWM stores discursive (i.e., language‐like) representations. I conclude by arguing that this format‐based distinction between memory stores entails that prominent views about consciousness and the perception–cognition border will likely have to be revised. (shrink)

This article looks into the history of the church and its dealings with iconoclastic controversy of the 8th century. The research singles out various concepts in discussion of the most prominent apologetic to the iconoclastic movement and theologian of icon veneration – Saint John of Damascus. Looking through the theological discourses of Saint John of Damascus the article detects the early church teaching about icons and their veneration in the liturgical tradition of the early Christianity. The relevance of such a (...) research is such that it addresses modern iconoclastic concepts and misunderstandings of the tradition of icon veneration from the scholarly and theological, as well as from the historical perspectives. (shrink)

Brand image constitutes one of the most salient, over-defined, heavily explored and multifariously operationalized conceptual constructs in marketing theory and practice. In this Chapter, definitions of brand image that have been offered by marketing scholars will be critically addressed in the context of a culturally oriented discussion, informed by the semiotic notion of iconicity. This cultural bend, in conjunction with the concept’s semiotic contextualization, are expected both to dispel terminological confusions in the either inter-changeable or fuzzily differentiated employment of (...) such terms as brand image, symbol, icon, as well as to address the function of brand image at a deeper level than a mere construct to be operationalized in quantitative studies of purchase drivers. This shift in focus is coupled with a critical turn from the cogito-centric view of the consuming subject through the cognitivist lens of the AI metaphor as decision-making centre at the origin of largely conscious meaning-making, in favor of a psychoanalytically informed approach that considers figurativity as an essential process whereby brand image is formed. In these terms, brand image will be intimately linked to brand images as figurative multimodal expressive units and rhetorical tropes, as figurative syntax, that are responsible for shaping an idiolectal brand language, as well as to distinctive levels of iconicity as textual condition of possibility of a brand language. In order to understand the role of iconicity as fundamental condition of brand textuality, rather than just a procedure for spawning brand images, the discussion is contextualized in a wider framework involving the culturally situated source of brand images, how they become correlated with brand image concepts and how correlations between brand images and brand image result in brand knowledge structures (Keller 1998). This opening up of the discussion on iconicity is enacted against the background of what I call the Brand Imaginarium which involves: (i) a critical engagement with the dominant cognitivist perspective in branding research that prioritizes individual memory in brand knowledge formation, through a cultural branding lens that involves two additional types of memory, viz. communicative and cultural (ii) a critical engagement with the cognitivist perspective on brand knowledge formation that prioritizes conscious processing of stimuli (as ‘brute facts’, rather than as already semiotized expressive units) in a cognitive mechanism from which the faculty of imagination has been expelled, by restoring the importance of imagination in brand knowledge formation, and, concomitantly, by showing that the highly figurative language of brands may not be researched thoroughly unless imagination is posited anew as processing correlate (iii) the adoption of an expansionist approach to the role of the imaginary in brand knowledge formation, from cognitive (or psychic) faculty, to a more sociologically inclined process of inter-subjective mirroring, and concomitantly as imaginary social significations (Castoriades 1985) that are shared by culturally conditioned and habituated subjects that engage in meaningful cultural practices, rather than individual processing monads. (shrink)

Modern microscopes create a capacity to see and act at the scale where unassisted human senses are powerless. Images of nanoscale phenomena represent a world that effectively intervenes in human life while remaining distant and ineffable. This combination of an unbridgeable distance between man and technology with a real power of the latter over the human condition is characteristic, not only of nanotechnology, but also of the theology of sacred icons that mediate in the knowledge of divine reality. We draw (...) an anthropological analogy between nanotechnological images and sacred icons, and we employ it to analyze the functioning of such images in society. The questions that we study include: a) the art of mediation in representing the ineffable and its necessity; b) the effects provoked by such images; c) primitive comprehension of nanoscale images. This work has repercussions for a wide variety of disciplinary accounts and practices, from the anthropologist and the philosopher to the laboratory scientist, the art critic, and the engineer who conceives and designs nanoscale instruments. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titles: Introduction Senders and Receivers Content States of the Mind and Brain.

The Orthodox icon is often claimed as unique among images. Yet many proponents of this view, such as Leonid Ouspensky and Pavel Florensky, defend this singularity through a polemic against Western realism using a logic that culminates in a polemic against the world of experience. In this paper, I will use phenomenology to dismantle these two false dualities, against realist images and real experience, by uncovering the deeper concerns that motivate them. First, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of painting to (...) collapse the dichotomy of carnal and spiritual images. Then, I use Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenality of Revelation to reframe the dichotomy of worldly and spiritual experience. This broadened understanding of experience will serve as a starting point to refine our understanding of what is claimed by the icon, both in its function as an image and in the world it opens for those who approach it on its own terms. (shrink)

Why is beauty consoling? Ancient and Medieval Western philosophy was primarily concerned with beauty in relation to truth and goodness. The theistic religions assume a link between beauty, goodness and truth, all of which are viewed as Divine attributes. This is one reason for the iconoclasm that all three Abrahamic religions share to a greater or lesser degree. Yet, creative fictions of great artistic beauty aspire to a certain truthfulness. A work of the imagination may deepen or purify our emotions (...) such that we gain a clearer understanding of reality. Beauty is consoling because it resolves the contradictions of experience; art can be a conduit to a supreme transcendent unity. The Iconic Imagination is both a reflection on the redemptive potential of art, and an investigation of the traditions of occidental Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam in their confrontations with the particular power of art to represent the transcendent. Throughout, Hedley argues that the malaise of much contemporary reflection upon beauty is a consequence of the marginalisation of beauty's religious dimension. (shrink)

The article explores cross-modal iconic relations in nine diverse Western-music songs ranging from 1600 to 2015, all of them thematizing dysphoric weeping. Initial input comes from five recurrent features observed in ancient Greek texts associated with performative events, including the prominence of sound, interjections and strong self-referentiality, repetitions and refrains, the motif of endlessness, and tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids. The analysis adopts Peirce’s conceptual distinction between image, diagram, and metaphor iconicity, although the continuum (...) reading proposed by several scholars is ultimately favored. The sample turns out to offer plenty of evidence of iconic relations. Interjections, falsetto, verbal repetitions, musical repetitions, musical rendering of sighs and endlessness, ostinato patterns, downward notes, and water images (rain and rivers), all of this is shown to substantiate cross-modal iconicity encompassing weeping, lyrics, music (including musical notation), and images, in different combinations. Quantitative investigations confirming/disconfirming and adding iconicity patterns, and comparative analyses linking Western and non-Western lament traditions constitute desiderata for future work. (shrink)

RESUMEN Según Furio Jesi y Giorgio Agamben, la máquina antropológica es un dispositivo histórico que produce imágenes del hombre. En este artículo nos proponemos retomar esta categoría y mostrar que existen dos grandes modelos de máquina según la naturaleza de la imagen generada: la máquina teológica-bíblica, que funciona hasta el siglo XIX y que produce al hombre como ícono; la máquina ateológica, posterior a la muerte de Dios, que produce al hombre como fantasma. ABSTRACT According to Furio Jesi and Giorgio (...) Agamben, the anthropological machine is a historical dispositive that produces images of man. This paper aims at returning to this category and demonstrating that two models of the machine can be found depending on the nature of the image produced: the theological-biblical machine that operates until 19th century and that produces man as icon, and the a-theological machine, after disappearance of God, that produces man as phantasm. (shrink)

God revealed to man during the history of his salvation in two ways: through word and through image. In other words, the divine message was addressed to the hearing and seeing of man. In the second case, revelation was achieved in a complete form. Man was part of a theophanic act, he was enveloped by the divine light and with the help of his spiritual eyes he was able to see, as much as it was permitted, God who is light. (...) This light was not completely strange to man, even though he could not see it with his physical eyes. The uncreated light that God made even from the first day of creation did not disappear when the great light were put in the sky. It had the purpose to arrange creation and to be the environment within which man could meet God and talk to Him face to face. Even though the fall took man out of sight, God established that from time to time this bright environment should be revealed to man in order to call him back to the life within light. These presentations of the Lord in the light of His glory continued after His incarnation. The mystical experiences of the Fathers of the Church constitute a testimony to this respect. But seeing this divine light is not reserved exclusively to the mystics, but may be experienced, partly, by the faithful nowadays. The present study endeavours to provide contemporary man with the necessary premises to experience the sight of the deifying light by means of religious imagery. Whether we have in view icons painted on wood or walls or stained glass imagery, they all contain, hidden within, the kind of light which, once experienced, illuminates man and fills him with light. (shrink)

Images can be studied in many ways--as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images are often something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independent of human will. Images come alive--they move us to action, calm us, reveal the power of the (...) divine, change the world around us. In these instances, we need an alternative model for exploring what is at work, one that recognizes the presence of images as objects that act on us. Building on his previous innovative work in visual and religious studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the human mind can be enchanted by images in Images at Work. In carefully crafted arguments, Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned and recognized by human beings for their capacity to engage us. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment, as described, is not a violation of cosmic order, but a very natural way that the mind animates the world around it. His groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humans create culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These various agents--human and non-human, material, geographic, and spiritual--become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to images and to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work in visual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to secular icons like Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have a power of us in ways we can't always describe"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

While it has become commonplace to use the term “icon” in philosophy of religion, it is an “icon” modeled after the resources of language. We find this for example in the recent Blackfriars article by Adam Glover, which despite its intention to treat the icon as an image, reduces it once again to a general form of reference which immediately feeds back into the linguistic. But might the icon have resources unique to its character as an image that can help (...) us understand what is meant by the paradoxical task of making visible the invisible God? This article takes up this task in conversation with the work of Jean-Luc Marion. (shrink)

Some twenty years after the term <I>iconic turn has been coined, and with a deluge of digital images, videos and animations surrounding, indeed invading, the learning environment, it appears that educational science, and the everyday practice of education, still very much labour under the impact of the past dominance of alphabetic literacy. But while educators clearly need to retain a measure of conservatism, maintain an acute sense for the logic of the written text and preserve the ability to handle extended (...) hardcopy documents, they have to rise to the task, also, of exploiting the potentials of online networked communication, the constant presence of images, both static and moving, and the continuous interplay of words and images. (shrink)

Images, or icons, have been made the subject of a ‘turn’. But no new epoch under its sign is looming. The image is just one medium among others. The best we can do is to face what it may and what it may not achieve. Its main competitor is the word – though there is a field of transition between both. Words and numbers surpass the image when one needs to refer to something that cannot be seen – this holds (...) for ‘radioactivity’ just as much as for ‘responsibility’. To unambiguously show a categorial relation like causality or a logical feature like negation in an image borders on the impossible. (The aspiration to symbolize or manifest the invisible, though, has long inspired artistic images.) Pictures are accessible to the illiterate; while a language must be learned, an image seems to admit everyone. Yet that is in part an illusion. Obviously, it is not enough to see an image. To understand it, however, often a number of things must have been learnt in the first place, too. (shrink)

The essay proposes a notion of “icon” understood, according to the paradigm born of the Second Council of Nicaea, as a visible image of the invisible qua invisible. In this light, the distinctive feature of the icon-image is its ability to manifest the paradoxical identity-difference relationship that links visible and invisible, and, consequently, representable and unrepresentable, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time. By offering itself as the privileged place for the presentation of an absence and of a “withdrawal”, the icon (...) is distinguished in the first place by its apophatic and kenotic character. In this sense, the salient trait of the icon is its constitutive disquiet: it is founded on the “relational economy” of the image, which implies the need of an incessant articulation of the relation between visible and invisible. We can thus see in the icon the paradigm itself of “great art”: indeed, like the icon, great art is always primarily characterised by its disquiet, that is its ability to make transcendence appear in immanence, the Other of the visible appear in the visible. (shrink)

In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a (...) crucial resource for critical reflection. Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life. (shrink)

Marie-José Mondzain, philosophe, est directrice de recherche au CNRS. Elle a publié des livres sur l’image, entre autres, Image, icône, économie (Seuil, 1996), L’image peut-elle tuer? (Bayard, 2002), Le Commerce des regards (Seuil, 2003) ; des livres sur la peinture : Van Gogh ou la Peinture comme tauromachie (Éd. de l’Épure, 1996), Henri Cueco, vol. 2 (Cercle d’Art, 1997), L’Arche et l’Arc-en-ciel, Michel-Ange – la voûte de la chapelle Sixtine (Le Passage, 2006). Sa réflexion sur l’image l’a conduite à collaborer (...) avec des gens de théâtre et de cinéma, et à participer à des ouvrages collectifs : L’Assemblée théâtrale, 1 (Éd. de l’Amandier, 2002) et 2 ( La Représentation, Éd. de l’Amandier, 2004), Voir ensemble. Autour de Jean-Toussaint Desanti (Gallimard, 2003, coll. « Réfléchir le cinéma »), Le Cinéma et la Shoah. Un art à l’épreuve de la tragédie du xx e siècle (sous la dir. de J.-M. Frodon, Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007). Elle vient de publier Homo spectator (Bayard, 2007). (shrink)

In this article, the post-war institutional interpretation of Jacob A. Riis' photographs is measured against their nineteenth-century capacity for mass media communication. The conventions that today determine the proper meaning and origin of these celebrated photos first emerged with an exhibition held in 1947. The ensuing, and dominant, mode of interpretation is shown here to be fundamentally at odds with the conditions for image use in early mass media communication. This article examines the clash and argues for an alternative mode (...) of interpretation that is capable of accounting for the distinct production of iconic meaning afforded by the media that Riis employed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IconsEwa HarabaszArtistEwa Harabasz was born in Czestochowa, Poland. She currently lives and paints in New York City, where she is represented by The Luxe Gallery. Her paintings have been recently featured in several solo shows in Poland, most recently at Galeria BWA in Bielsko Biala, Le Guern in Warsaw, Galeria Miejska Arsenal in Poznan, and Galeria Wozownia in Torun. Her work was also featured in a solo exhibition at (...) the Luxe Gallery in New York. Her paintings have been included in a number of group shows including “Poza” at Real Art Ways in Hartford (see the catalog, “Poza: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art”). Ewa Harabasz's new work will be presented in 2008 as part of the group show “Identity and Otherness in the Face of Anxiety” at the Socio-Political Contemporary Art Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.Harabasz has worked in church and religious art conservation in Italy and Poland, and grew up in Czestochowa, the seat of a Polish national religious shrine—a Byzantine icon called “Black Madonna.” She has been a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University since 2005.StatementThe images painted by Ewa Harabasz present themselves as ambiguous “icons”: it is unclear whether they refer to media representations of present-day war and destruction or to religious or spiritual iconography. Harabasz appropriates mass media images from the wars in Bosnia and Iraq, the Beslan tragedy, and London underground transportation terrorism by using photographic transfer methods combined with painting on wood in the style of inspirational religious art. Harabasz insists that the spectacle inherent in her images is a critical reflection on how the destruction and horror of human suffering in war and terrorism is often glamorized and dramatized, and turned into present-day pseudo-icons by the mass media to be consumed by the public as a “redeeming” experience. Writer Dora Apel cautions viewers to reflect “that these works are less analogous to the Byzantine icons of Harabasz's native Poland than the International Gothic paintings of the late Middle Ages, which demanded of religious art that it correlate with people's everyday experience. Paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries employed an extensive use of gold to create a sumptuous surface but combined it with a radical naturalism. The images ultimately pictured the workings of secular power, combined with religious figures. This came about at a time when religion focused increasingly on human and humane concerns. Similarly Harabasz uses a spiritual lens to focus on worldly experience, achieving, for modern sensibilities, the same elegance, coloristic splendor, narrative detail, and lyricism as those earlier medieval works.”Harabasz says that despite her obvious references to the Madonna images and other religious iconography, she wishes these images to be viewed as “false icons.” While saints and martyrs are immortalized via religious art, the survivors and victims whom media notoriously immortalize had no choice in their suffering. [End Page 81] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 82] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 83] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 84] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 85] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 86] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 87] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 88] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 89]Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

As the pagan classical world was subsumed into Christianity sexually hyperactive gods and goddesses transmuted into saints, their former statues that glorified the perfection of their bodies smashed into pieces and reimagined as austere two-dimensional icons to be worshipped by the new faithful. That dualistic and polemic narrative, where the soul’s purpose was to annihilate the body, survives today in the distinction between software and hardware, algorithms and robots, the former as the “ghosts” that animate the empty vessels, the “machines”. (...) But how does this narrative impact our cultural and social fantasies in the twenty-first century as we accelerate toward coexisting, uniting, or merging with intelligent artifacts? How does “humanness” blur when it is claimed by no-biological human-like entities too, or when humans augment their perception, consciousness and physical power through genetic engineering, drugs, or software and mechanical prostheses? Suppose we are destined to remake ourselves in the image of our ancient gods. Will it be through the embodiment of technologies in the physical reality, or through the complete disembodiment of our minds inside virtual worlds? (shrink)

St. Maximus the Confessor claims that the logos of created beings represents their essence as an icon. This claim gives us the opportunity to understand the term essence as an dynamic reality and not as a static given. Essence is not something that the being is, but what it is supposed to be. The idea of icon is herein present as ultimately ontological. The icon is no mirror of reality, but rather its eschatological realization. That which will be uncovers the (...) truth of the being. This way, St. Maxius has founded a dynamic ontology, which is a fundamental step away from the Hellenic heritage. The equalization of the essence of beings and icon is only possible in an Eucharistic view of the world, wherein the Eucharist represents in an iconic way the presence of the eschatological truth in history. (shrink)

In this paper, we try to shed light on the ontological puzzle pertaining to models and to contribute to a better understanding of what models are. Our suggestion is that models should be regarded as a specific kind of signs according to the sign theory put forward by Charles S. Peirce, and, more precisely, as icons, i.e. as signs which are characterized by a similarity relation between sign (model) and object (original). We argue for this (1) by analyzing from a (...) semiotic point of view the representational relation which is characteristic of models. We then corroborate our hypothesis (2) by discussing the conceptual differences between icons, i.e. models, and indexical and symbolic signs and (3) by putting forward a general classification of all icons into three functional subclasses (images, diagrams, and metaphors). Subsequently, we (4) integratively refine our results by resorting to two influential and, as can be shown, complementary philosophy of science approaches to models. This yields the following result: models are determined by a semiotic structure in which a subject intentionally uses an object, i.e. the model, as a sign for another object, i.e. the original, in the context of a chosen theory or language in order to attain a specific end by instituting a representational relation in which the syntactic structure of the model, i.e. its attributes and relations, represents by way of a mapping the properties of the original, which hence are regarded as similar in a relevant manner. (shrink)

Working in collaboration with others, Agostino Veneziano produced three remarkable prints representing nude women seated or standing beside spectacular allantica vases and set before ruinous landscapes. This article investigates the authorship and origin of these unusual images. It suggests that the vases are presented as a metaphor for female beauty, and relates the visual rhetoric of these three prints to the writings of contemporary writers, including Agnolo Firenzuola, who described the beauty of women in relation to the elegant proportions of (...) such vases. (shrink)