Notes from What do Pictures Want?, W.J.T. Mitchell

What do Pictures Want?

The aim here is to look at varieties of animation or vitality that are attributed to images, the agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity, or other symptoms that make pictures into ‘vital signs’, by which I mean not merely signs for living things but signs as living things. If the question, what do pictures want? Makes any sense at all, it must be because we assume that pictures are something like life-forms, driven by desire and appetites.

What do pictures want? Why should such an apparently idle, frivolous, or nonsensical question command more than a moments notice? The shortest answer I can give can only be formulated as yet another question: why is it that people have such strange attitudes towards images, objects, and media? Why do they behave as if pictures were alive, as if works of art had minds of their own, as if images had the power to influence human beings, demanding things from us, persuading, seducing, and leading us astray? Even more puzzling, why is it that the very people who express these attitudes and engage in this behaviour will, when questioned, ensure us that they know very well that pictures are not alive, that works of art do not have minds of their own, and that images are really quite powerless to do anything without the cooperation of their beholders. How is it, in other words, that people are able to maintain a ‘double consciousness’ toward images, pictures, and representations in a variety of media, facilitating between magical beliefs and sceptical doubts, naïve animism and hard headed materialism, mystical and critical attitudes?

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The usual way of sorting out this kind of double consciousness is to attribute one side of it (generally the naïve, magical, superstitious side) to someone else, and to claim the hard-headed, critical, and sceptical position as ones own. There are many candidates for the ‘someone else’ who believes that images are alive and want things: primitives, children, the masses, the illiterate, the uncritical, the illogical, the ‘Other’. Anthropologists have traditionally attributed these beliefs to the ‘savage mind’, art historians to the non- Western or premodern mind, psychologists to the neurotic or infantine mind, sociologists to the popular mind. At the same time, every anthropologist and art historian who has made this attribution has hesitated over it. Claude Levi-Stauss makes it clear that the savage mind, whatever that is, has much to teach us about modern minds. And art historians such as David Freedberg and Hans Belting, who have pondered the magical character of images ‘before the era of art’ admit to some uncertainty about whether these naïve beliefs are alive and well in the modern society.

I believe that magical attitudes towards images are just as powerful in the modern world as they were in so-called ages of faith. I also believe that the ages of faith were a bit more sceptical than we give them credit for. My argument here is that the double consciousness about images is a deep and abiding feature to human responses to representation.

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Roland Barthes put the problem very well when he noted that ‘general opinion … has a vague conception of the image as an area of resistance to re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection’. When Barthes wrote this, he believed that semiotics, the ‘science of signs’ would conquer the images ‘resistance to meaning’ and demystify the ;mythical idea of life’ that makes representation seem a kind of resurrection. Later, when he reflected on the problem of photography, and was faced with a photograph of his own mother in a winter garden as the ‘centre’ of the worlds ‘Labyrinths of photographs’, he began to waver in his belief that critique could overcome the magic of the image: ‘when I confronted the Winter Garden Photograph I gave myself up to the image, to the image repertoire.’ The punctum, or wound, left by a photograph always trumps its stadium, the message or semiotic content that it discloses. A similar (and simpler) demonstration is offered by one of my art history colleagues: when students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.

The purpose of this book is to make the vague conception as clear as possible, to analyze the ways in which images seem to come alive and want things.

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We need to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive – but also dead; powerful  - but also weak; meaningful – but also meaningless.  To ask, what do pictures want? Is not just to attribute them life and power and desire, but also to raise the question of what it is they lack, what they do not possess, what cannot be attributed to them. To say, in other words, that pictures ‘want’ life or power does not necessarily imply that they have life or power, or even that they are capable of wishing for it. It may simply be an admission that they lack something of this sort, that it is missing or (as we say) ‘wanting’.

It would be disingenuous, however, to deny that the question of what pictures want has overtones of animism, vitalism, and anthropomorphism, and that it leads us to consider cases in which images are treated as if they were living things. The concept of image-as-organism is, of course, ‘only’ a metaphor, an analogy that must have some limits. The living image is, in my view, both a verbal and a visual trope, a figure of speech, of vision, of graphic design, and of thought. It is, in other words, a a secondary, reflexive image of images, or what I have called a ‘meta picture’. The relevant questions, then, are what are the limits of this analogy? Where does it take us? What motivates its appearances? What do we mean by ‘life’ in the first place? Why does the link between images and living things seem so inevitable and necessary, at the same time that it almost invariably arouses a kind of disbelief: ‘Do you really believe that images want things?’ my answer is no, I don’t believe it. But we cannot ignore that human beings insist on talking and behaving as if they did believe it, and that is what I mean by the ‘double consciousness’ surrounding images.

….Images are like living organisms; living organisms are best described as things that have desires (for example, appetites, needs, demands, drives); therefore, the question of what pictures want is inevitable.

If the living image has always been the subject of a double consciousness, of simultaneous belief and disavowal, what conditions are making the disavowal more difficult to remain today? Why, in other words, do various forms of ‘iconoclash’ – the war of images – seem so conspicuously a part of the pictorial turn of our time?

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The potency of these images (Twin Towers under attack, and ‘Dolly’ the cloned sheep) doesn’t reside merely in their presentness or topical currency but in their status as enigmas or omens, harbingers of uncertain futures. They also exemplify the sensuous spectrum of image anxiety in out time, ranging from the overwhelmingly traumatic spectacle of mass destruction on the one hand to the subtle creepiness of the cloned sheep, which, as visual image, is quite unremarkable, but as idea is a figure of considerable dread.

The clone signifies the potential for the creation of new images in our time – new images that fulfil the ancient dream of creating a ‘living image’, a replica or copy that is not merely a mechanical duplicate but an organic, biologically viable simulacrum of a living organism. The clone represents the disavowal of living images impossible by turning the concept of animated icon on its head. Now we see that it is not merely a case of some images that seem to come alive, but that living things themselves were always already images in one form or another.

The image of the World Trade Centre, by contrast, signifies the potential for the destruction of images in our time, a new and more virulent form of iconoclasm. The towers themselves were already recognised as icons of globalisation and advanced capitalism, and that is why they were the target of attack by those who regarded them as symbols of decadence and evil.

Both Dolly and the World Trade Centre are living images or animated icons. Dolly was literally a living organism that was also the exact genetic duplicate of its parent. The ‘Twin Towers’ were (as their ‘twin’ designation indicates) already anthropomorphised, perhaps even clone like. And they were almost certainly alive in the sense that historian Neil Harris has explored in his book Building Lives.

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Why did a sheep become the icon of cloning and biotechnology? Other animals had been more or less successfully cloned before Dolly, and yet none of them achieved the global publicity achieved by this particular creature. The answer may lie partly in the preexisting symbolic connotations of the sheep is a figure of pastoral care, harmlessness, innocence, sacrifice, and (more ominously) of masses led by authoritarian elites – sheep to the slaughter. The creation of an image can be just as deep an abomination as its destruction…The second commandment, prohibiting the making of graven images, is not just a ban on idolatry, but a ban on the making of images of any kind, and it may well be based on the belief that images will inevitably take on “a life of their own” no matter how innocent the purposes of their creators.

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The ancient superstitions about images  - that they take on “lives of their own”, that they make people do irrational things, that they are potentially destructive forces that seduce and lead us astray-are not quantitatively less powerful in our time, though they are surely different in a qualitative sense. They have taken on radically new forms in the context of new scientific and technical possibilities, new social formations, and new religious movements, but their deep structure remains the same.  That structure is not some psychological phobia about images, nor is it reducible to straightforward religious doctrines, laws, and prohibitions that a people might follow and violate. It is, rather, a social structure grounded in the experience of otherness and especially in the collective representation of others as idolaters.

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The clone shows us why the lives of images are so complex, and why the question, what do pictures want?, will never be settled with some unequivocal answer. The clone is what Walter Benjamin called a “dialectical image”, capturing the historical process at a standstill. It goes before us as a figure of our future, threatens to come after us as an image of what could replace us, and takes us back to the question of our own origins as creatures made “in the image” of an invisible, inscrutable creative force.

A predictable objection to my whole article here is that it attributes a power to images that is simply alien to the attitudes of modern people. Modern technologies, far from liberating us from the mystery surrounding our own artificial creations, have produced a new world order of “factishes”, new synthesis of the order of scientific, technical factuality on the one hand and of fetishism, totemism, and idolatry, on the other. Computers, as we know, are nothing but calculating machines. They are also (as we know equally well) mysterious new organisms, maddeningly complex life-forms that come complete with parasites, viruses, and a social network of their own. New media have made communication more transparent, immediate, and rational than ever before, at the same time they have enmeshed us in labyrinths, of new images, objects, tribal identities, and ritual practices. Marshal McLuhan understood this irony very clearly when he pointed out that “by continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.

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So we must ask the question, what do pictures want? And stay for the answers, even though the question seems impossible to begin with. We might even have to entertain what I would call “critical idolatry” or “secular divination” as an antidote to that reflexive critical iconoclasm that governs intellectual discourse today. Critical Idolatry involves an approach to images that does not dream of destroying them, and that recognises every act of disfiguration or defacement as itself an act of creative destruction for which we must take responsibility. It would take as its inspiration the opening pages of Nietzsche’s Twilight of Idols, in which Nietzsche recommends “sounding out” the odls with the hammer, or “tuning fork” of critical language. The idols that Nietzsche wants to strike are, as he says, “eternal”, which I take to mean indestructible. The proper strategy then, is not to attempt to destroy them, an iconoclasm that is doomed to failure, but to play upon them as if they were musical instruments. The power of idols over the human mind resides in their silence, their spectacular impassiveness, their dumb insistence on repeating the same message, and their capacity for absorbing human desire and violence and projecting it back to us as a demand for human sacrifice. It also resides in their obdurate indestructibility, which only builds strength from the sense of futility that accompanies the vain attempt to destroy them.  “Sounding” the idols, by contrast, is a way of playing upon them. It does not dream of breaking the idol but of breaking its silence, making it speak and resonate, and transforming its hollowness into an echo chamber for human thought.

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To save time, I want to begin with the assumption that we are capable of suspending our disbelief in the very premise of the question, what do pictures want? I’m well aware that this is a bizarre, perhaps even objectionable, question. I’m aware that it involves subjectivizing images, a dubious personification of inanimate objects; that it flirts with a regressive, superstitious attitude toward images, one that if taken seriously would return us to practices like totemism, fetishism, and idolatry, and animism. These are practices that most modern, enlightened people regard with suspicion as primitive, psychotic, or childish in their traditional forms ( the worship of material objects; the treating of inanimate objects like dolls as if they were alive) and as pathological symptoms in their modern manifestations (fetishism either as commodities or of neurotic perversion).

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P. 29

Nevertheless, I want to proceed as if the question were worth asking, partly as a kind of thought experiment, simply to see what happens, and partly out of a conviction that this is a question we are already asking, that we cannot help but ask, and that therefore deserves analysis. I’m encouraged in this by the precedents Marx and Freud, who both felt that modern science of the social and the psychological had to deal with the issue of fetishism and animism, the subjectivity of objects, the personhood of things. Pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigmata of personhood and animation: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally , sometimes figuratively ; or they look back at us silently across a “gulf unbridged by language”. They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder.

My own position is that the subjectivized, animated object in some form or other is an incurable symptom, and that Marx and Freud are better treated as guides to the understanding of this symptom and perhaps to some transformation of it into less pathological, damaging forms. In short, we are stuck with our magical, pre-modern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology.

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P.30

Magic portraits, masks and mirrors, living statues, and haunted houses are everywhere in modern and traditional literary narratives, and the aura of these imaginary images seeps into both professional and popular attitudes toward real pictures. Art historians may “know” that the pictures they study are only material objects that are marked with colours and shapes, but they frequently talk and act as if the pictures had feeling, will, consciousness, agency, and desire. Everyone knows that a photograph of their mother is not alive, but they will still be reluctant to deface or destroy it. No modern, rational, secular person thinks that pictures are to be treated like persons, but we always seem to be willing to make exceptions for special cases .

 What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P31

Evidently some idols have legs too. The idea that images have a kind of social or psychological power of their own is, in fact, the reigning cliché of contemporary visual culture.

There is no difficulty, then, in demonstrating that the idea of the personhood of pictures (or, at minimum, their animism) is just as alive in the modern world as it was in traditional societies.

….the critical exposure and demolition of the nefarious power of images is both easy and ineffectual.

Images are certainly not powerless, but they remain a lot weaker than we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak.

 What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 33

We as critics want pictures to be stronger than they actually are in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them.

What is the moral for pictures? If one could interview all the pictures one encounters in a year, what answers would they give?

Art historian and critic Michael Fried summarizes painting’s “primordial convention” in these terms: “a painting…had first to attract the beholder, that is a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself and hold him there as if spell bound and unable to move”. The paintings desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture in what might be called “the Medusa effect”.

  What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P35 – 36

Sometimes the disappearance of the object of visual desire in a picture is a direct trace of the activity of generations of viewers, as in the Byzantine miniature from the eleventh century. The figure of Christ directly addresses the viewer, here with the verses from Psalm 77:”Give heed , O my people to my law; incline your ear to the words of my mouth”. What is clear from the physical evidence of the picture, however, is that ears have not been inclined to the words of the mouth so much as mouths have been pressed to the lips of the image, wearing away its face to near oblivion. These are viewers who followed the advice of John of Damascus “to embrace [images] with the eyes, the lips, the heart”. This is an image that wants the beholders body and blood and spirit; it gives away its own body in the encounter, in a kind of pictorial reenactment of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The defacement of the image is not a desecration but a sign of devotion, a recirculation of the painted body in the body of the beholder.

 What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 39

These sorts of direct expressions of pictorial desire are, of course, generally associated with “vulgar” modes of imaging – commercial advertising and political or religious propaganda. The picture as subaltern makes an appeal or issues a demand whose precise effect and power emerges in an intersubjective encounter compounded of signs of positive desire and traces of lack or impotence. But what or the “work of art” proper, the aesthetic object that is simply supposed to “be” in its autonomous beauty or sublimity? One answer is provided by Michael Fried, who argues that the emergence of modern art is precisely to be understood in terms of the negation or renunciation of direct signs of desire. This process of pictorial seduction he admires is successful precisely in proportion to its indirectness, its seeming indifference to the beholder, its antitheatrical “absorption” in its own internal drama. The very special sort of pictures that enthrall him get what they want by seeming not to want anything, by pretending they have everything they need. Fried’s discussion of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardan’s Soap Bubbles might be taken as exemplary here, and help us see that it is not merely a question of what the figures in the pictures appear to want, the legible signs of desire that they convey. This desire may be enraptured and contemplative, as it is in Soap Bubbles, where the shimmering and trembling globe that absorbs the figure becomes “a natural correlative for [Chardin’s] own engrossment in the act of painting and a proleptic mirroring of what he trusted would be the absorption of the beholder before the finished work.”   

 What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 42

Abstract paintings are pictures that want not to be pictures, pictures that want to be liberated from image-making. But the desire not to show desire is, as Lacan reminds us, still a form of desire.

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 44

The question of what pictures want certainly does not illuminate the interpretation of signs. All it accomplishes is a subtle dislocation of the target of interpretation, a slight modification in the picture we have of pictures (and perhaps signs) themselves. The keys to this modification / dislocation are (1) assent to the constitutive fiction of pictures as “animated” beings, quasi-agents, mock persons; and (2) the construal of pictures not as sovereign subjects or disembodied spirits but as subalterns whose bodies are marked with the stigmata of difference, and who function both as “go-betweens” and scapegoats in the social field of human visuality. It’s crucial to this strategic shift that we not confuse the desire of the picture with the desire of the artist, the beholder, or even the figures in the picture. What pictures want is not the same as the message they communicate or the effect they produce; it’s not even the same as what they want. Like people, pictures may not know what they want; they have to be helped to recollect it through a dialogue with others.

 What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P46

The complex field of visual reciprocity is not merely a byproduct of social reality but actively constitutive of it. Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the “sign”, or to discourse.

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 47

….the tableau of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas invokes the fiction of being surprised by the spectator, as if “caught in the act”. The picture invites us to participate in this game and to find ourselves not just literally in the mirror on the back wall but in the recognizing gazes of the figures – the infant, her maids, even the artist himself. This, at any rate, looks like the explicit demand of the picture, what it claims to need as a minimum for grasping its magic. But of course the “brute facts” are quite the opposite, and are signaled explicitly by a brute – the nearest figure in the picture, the sleepy, oblivious dog in the foreground. The picture only pretends to welcome us, the mirror does not really reflect us or its first beholders, the king and queen of Spain, but rather (as Joel Snyder has shown) reflects the hidden image on the canvas that Valezquez is working on. All these feints and deceptions remind us of the most literal facts about the picture: that the figures do not really “look” back at us; they only appear to do so. One might want to say, of course, that this is just a primordial convention of pictures as such, their innate doubleness and duplicity, looking back at us with eyes that cannot see. Las Meninas however, stages this convention in an enhanced, extreme form, positing its tableau vivant for sovereign beholders whose authority is subtly is called into question even as it is complimented. This is a picture that wants nothing from us while pretending to be totally orientated toward us.

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 50

…the best definition of a living thing is a straightforward dialectical statement: a living thing is something that can die.

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P52

I think painting dies. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. I think a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterwards its called the history of art. Men are mortal, pictures too.
Dialogues with Duchamp P.67

The question remains, however: how do pictures resemble life-forms? Are they born? Can they Die? Can they be killed? Some of [Helena] Curtis’s criteria don’t fit pictures in any obvious way and require modification. “Growth and development” might characterize the process by which an image is realized in a concrete picture or work of art, but once completed, the work is normally homeostatic (unless we think its aging and reception history constitutes a kind of “development” like that of a life-form; remember that Walter Benjamin thought that history that history and tradition were exactly what coffered “aura” – literally, “breath” – on the work of art). A similar point might be made about the taking of energy form the environment, unless we think of the mental energy required of the beholder as coming from the environment and returning transformed in the act of reception. The response to stimuli is realized literally in certain “interactive” artworks, figuratively in more traditional works. As for “reproducing themselves”, what else is implied when the proliferation of images is discussed in biological figures as a kind of epidemic, implied in the title of theorist Slavoj Zizek’s The Plague of Fantasies? How do fantasies come to be like infectious disease, an out-of-control virus or bacteria? Dismissing these as “merely figurative” forms of life or animation begs the question that is at issue: the life of images, pictures, and figures, including, obviously, their figurative life. The uncontrolabilty and conceit of the living image is itself an example of the problem: why does this metaphor seem to have a life of its own? Why is it so routine that we call it a “dead” metaphor. Implying that it was once alive and might come alive again?

The praise of the “lifelike” image is, of course, as old as image-making, and the liveliness of an image may be quite independent of its accuracy as a representation. The uncanny ability of pictures faces to “look back” in the technique of omnivoyance to seem to follow us with their eyes is well established.

Why is the moving image invariably characterized with vitalist metaphors such as “animation” and “live action”? Why is not enough to say that these images move, that actions are depicted? Familiarity blinds us to the strange life of these figures; it makes them dead metaphors at the same time it asserts their vitality.

 What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 53

For that is what totems, fetishes, and idols are: special things. They can range, therefore, from what we might call rather ordinary, secular and modern “special things” like commodities, souvenirs, family photos, and collections, to sacred, magical, uncanny things, symbolic things, associated with ritual and narrative, prophecies and divinations. These objects are also “special” in the sense that they are “specieslike”, comprising families of image and ritual practices(everything from nobility and circulation to unique habits and higly charges practices like human sacrifice, mutilation and festival) – what theorist Arjun Appadrai calls a “social life of things” – and they are often specular or spectacular – that is, associated with image-making, ornamentation, painting and sculpture.

What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P193