What are we to make of this contest between the interests of verbal and pictorial representation? I propose that we historicize it, and treat it, not as a matter for peaceful settlement under the terms of some all-embracing theory of signs, but as a struggle that carries the fundamental contradictions of our culture into the heart of theoretical discourse itself.

W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology

W. J. T. Mitchell's 1986 book Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology stands as a plateau from which we can survey the troubled past of image theory and from which we hope to launch our own targeted probes. Mitchell persists in the long tradition of opposing images to words, but in the important passage with which we begin, he declares himself prepared to abandon the analysis of essential differences between these forms of knowledge and communication in favor of a history of their competition in Western society. We will follow him. For even when they involve canonized intellectuals, the disputes this anthology chronicles and occasionally stages appear more cultural than purely philosophical. Although philosophical reflection is now regarded as thoroughly historical, a particular kind of discourse occurring in a time and at a place, only fifteen years ago a book bearing this title would likely have concerned itself more directly with "essential" aesthetic issues. In the meantime philosophers like Richard Rorty have made such speculation appear clumsy, even naive.

We join Mitchell and an increasing number of newly historicized theorists who have retreated from forthright philosophical engagement, having realized that our language, like that of Plato and later thinkers who dared to address the power of images, surely rigs the contest to its own advantage. Western intellectuals, from the Greeks to Gotthold Lessing to Nelson Goodman, have ever granted the uncanny attraction of images, but only to demote their claims to special or even equal treatment. While entranced by them, Plato still wanted to banish images, and Lessing thought painting suitable only to the lower functions of art, essentially to description as opposed to analysis and drama. In our day, Goodman brashly deflates images to the point where they seem to comprise a conventional notation that makes them ordinary and without privileged access to the world or to our minds? Curiously, his coolly philosophical suspicions stand in league with the more passionate diatribes of Marxists and feminists, who have to be counted among the chief iconoclasts of our era.

Evidently most philosophical positions are devoted to the "logos" embedded in the very term "icon-ology." They disdain or beware the religious function that "icons" have so often served. Yet do they not thereby beg the question of the im age's status, by forcing it to submit to their "logic" and by repudiating at the outset the lure of its difference and of its body? How can the language of philosophy fairly adjudicate a dispute that involves precisely the scope of language and of philosophy? The Western tradition—consolidated and culminating in Hegel—maintains a tender but often patronizing affection for images as part of the prehistory of philosophy. Images seem to embody thought sensuously, immediately, and engagingly, but in a childish and uncritical manner. Philosophy, Hegel taught, replaced images as Western culture gradually matured. By virtue of its historically countenanced mission, then, philosophy, at least its main traditions, proudly kneels to no law or power higher than the rules of thought and language. Religion, on the other hand, might be said to begin on its knees, groping toward a power it aims to locate, to corral, and perhaps to begin to comprehend. The image after all is thought to traffic in religious power.

Historicism, like hermeneutics, was born of this dispute between faith and suspicion, defining itself as a particularly forgiving descriptive human science. To speak about images as a historian or anthropologist means to surrender essential claims made by images or by language and to chronicle instead the shifting contours of the debate between them. Whatever quasi-magical properties images may harbor would tend to resist the philosophical project of understanding their meaning. Just as anthropology and history hope to give religion its due, while keeping track of the way other discourses in culture accommodate or repudiate religion in return, so in this volume we aim to evoke the power and scope of the image in the secular age of modernism, while watching it be hemmed in, disciplined, or romanced by discourse, our own discourse included.

In this project our essays stand in constant dialogue with Walter Benjamin, who, more intricately and earlier than other thinkers, strove to relate a new image culture (for which cinema appears to be the privileged apparatus) to a modernity that involves new forms of subjectivity and social organization. In the discussions we had while preparing these essays we let Benjamin's ambivalence about cinema—even the contradictory character of his chief essay on this art—encourage us to examine multiple aspects of the complex he addressed. And in projecting his speculations toward the image culture of our own times, we found the following categories highly convenient:

1. The image and ontology

After photography, philosophers have had to reckon with the automatic production of likeness, with unintended and accidental images and with unanticipated inclusions within images. In his first major essay, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," André Bazin suggests that photographs might be treated "like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins" significantly affect our relation to them. As things in nature, the photographic arts are perhaps not arts at all, but proleptic sensorial assists. And our use of them, as well as our attitude toward them, cannot compare with that which earlier eras accorded the painted and drawn images they lived with. At a nearer temporal extreme, today's and most certainly tomorrow's digitally produced simulations for computer and video screen claim no earthly or vegetal origins and pose new questions that, before being sociological and aesthetic, are fundamentally ontological.

2. The image and psychology

In fact Bazin's celebrated essay about ontology begins with this speculative clause: "If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis. . . ." Writing in the shadow of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 1937 L'Imaginaire he extensively annotated, Bazin recognized more than Sartre himself did the detours of illusion and belief in the smooth corridors of the technologically produced image. Sartre's remarkable phenomenology of levels of consciousness would have been unthinkable without the intervening phenomenon of an image that was at the same time an object. Since Sartre, every considered meditation on the haunting nature of photographs-up to and including Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida—turns on the quivering psychological status of photographs and the even more consternating status of moving pictures. The modern era may be bracketed by the birth and death of this specific psychological structure of belief before photography images were deciphered as products of human artistry. After cinema, in the digitalized videosphere we have entered, images are taken as autoreflexive, spun out by computer algorithms. Cinema and photography dominated an era between these extremes, an era during which the physical world was recruited to participate in its own deciphering.

3. The image and aesthetics

Lessing's Laocoön marks the plateau of image aesthetics at the end of the classical period. Photography and motion pictures initiate new criteria, if not for beauty in visual representation, then at least for appropriateness. These criteria incorporate the temporality and authenticity of subject matter, on the one hand, and, on the other, they involve such psychological notions as hypnosis and distraction in spectatorship. Where Lessing presumed that pictorial arts were doomed to haunt the spatial dimension, motion pictures require a poetics that is at once spatial and temporal, narrative and pictorial. Where his classicism promoted purity of forms, modernism thrives on mixed forms (motion pictures for one, but also photomontage and cubist poetry, to take examples found within this volume).

4. The image and semiotics

Our century has seen iconography superseded by semiotics; Erwin Panofsky has given way to Roland Barthes. The former relies on erudition, glossing paintings and other visual representations that are distant from us in time and culture. Panofsky tried to be a medium through which, for instance, today's spectators could adopt the Middle Age or early Renaissance world view when approaching, say, a painting by Dürer. Barthes, on the other hand, has been partly responsible for promulgating semiotics, a discipline and a technique by which to read what is terribly close and familiar: advertisements, fashion, food, photography. Technology has flooded us with representations such that we need to develop reflexes of reading in order to cope with a superabundance of signification. Semiotics might be thought of as a critical strategy responding directly to the technology of image production in the modern age. But photographs, because they are in part auto-generated, present enormous problems for those who would control the reading of them. Everything in a photo is potentially significant, even and especially that which has escaped the control of the photographer pointing the camera. Here the indexical function of the photo comes to the fore, outweighing its iconic function. The photographic plate is etched with experience, like the unconscious; and like the unconscious, it invites a symptomatic reading of the images that escape from it to reach the surface. As was the case with psychoanalysis, the structural study of latent meaning had eventually to give way to strategies of reading that are stimulated by excessive signification—in other words, poststructural reading strategies.

5. The image and poststructuralism

Machines of the visible produce images today that no longer respond fully to decipherment or hermeneutics. In the case of standard television, such images are drawn from our own reservoir and return to us in an effortless circuit and in an utterly obvious manner. More "difficult" images today, many produced by what used to stand as an artistic community, seem unconcerned with us, seem to arise within an inhuman world of technology that scarcely cares for us as it passes us on its way to other machines. If reading images seems superfluous or inadequate, either because the source to which reading returns us is uninspired (ourselves) or inhuman, what should we do with what we see in culture? Gilles Deleuze has provided the most extended response in his L'Image Mouvement and L'Image-Temps. These books treat cinema as a thinking machine, spinning off options that in the first half of the century imitated human thought and in the second half began to generate new thinking possibilities altogether. Deleuze does not read images; he sees with images, using them as a source for what can yet be thought, not as a record of what has already been thought. Deleuze heads a phalanx of thinkers (Paul Virilio is another") for whom the machinery of image production in our century should not be curved into the warm space of humanism but should spur the production of inhuman thought, expanding the human while it expands the thinkable. Deleuze and Virilio invest images—technologically produced ones especially—with a power that other philosophers (Nelson Goodman or, from a different school altogether, Jacques Derrida) would drain from them. The posthuman source of this power might be thought by some to replace for us the transhuman religious source that images hold in other cultures or held in other eras. Just look at Francis Bacon's Crucifixion triptychs, illustrated in a later chapter of this volume, a particularly apt icon of our era that Deleuze has paid homage to.

6. The image and the politics of representation

The image has often been. taken to be an energy source, even an explosive, that is censored or requisitioned by those in power. Before technology brought on a proliferation of pictures, authorities often commissioned, and more often governed, the display of images. Today images seem impossible to police, in democratic societies at any rate. And yet debates over violence, particularly violence against women, often turn on the questionable freedom to expose what are considered particularly dangerous pictures. A less direct but more pervasive debate concerns the racial, gender, and class politics at play not just in the use of representations but in the very structure and conditions of image production and reception. Such aspects of our image culture as the empowered versus unauthorized gaze, exhibitionism versus voyeurism, framing versus exclusion, deeply affect social behavior beyond the protected border of representations.

Of course, "the politics of representation" is precisely what "the image in dispute" must be about. And the cultural evolution from classical to modern conceptions of the image (as well as from modern to postmodern ones) identifies our point of departure, though not necessarily our terminus. Struck by Benjamin and largely adopting his (decisively nonevolutionary) problematic, we determined to keep in play the ontological, psychological, aesthetic, semiotic, and political aspects of a complex whose center continues to shift. We trust that as we delve into the recent past, probing for that elusive center, we are at the same time sketching the concerns and something of the character of the next century.

***

From the outset this volume was designed to benefit from a productive ratio of the planned and the unexpected. All its contributors participated in the 1992 Obermann Faculty Research Seminar, "The Image in Dispute: Visual Cultures in Modernity," held at the University of Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. I sought a range of topics and of expertise diverse enough to open up multiple aspects of the image and multiple disciplinary approaches to its study. Multiple, I insist, but limited. Aside from the opening essay in which John Peters took upon himself the task of placing Walter Benjamin's unsettled view of the image in quite a large intellectual context, you won't find direct discussion of classical aesthetic or moral issues, for modernism (and the technology that is its hallmark) altered the terms of these debates. Less still will you find here consideration of electronic imaging or much about the "videosphere" that has come to take the place of the "modernity" we focus on. Our goal was to highlight a series of textual, imagistic, and social phenomena that developed alongside modern technologies of representation, promoting new roles for the arts and perhaps new sorts of subjects, image consumers. We are the heirs of modernism, some of us spoiled by its largesse, some rebellious against its dubious ethics, others addicted to its obsessions, and all of us schooled in its skills. Whatever the next century brings—in terms of new alignments, new ethics, new requirements, and new possibilities—will be brought in response to the culture we are at pains to understand in these pages.

Although Jacques Aumont was finally unable to be present to discuss his chapter, the essay translated here and his books on the image were indispensable in orienting our weeks of discussion. James Lastra and Timothy Corrigan participated in individual sessions while the rest of the contributors met regularly to discuss first the general topics dear to Walter Benjamin and second our own specific theses.

In the months following the seminar, our essays were reformulated in response to the experience and debates of the summer. The attentive reader should be able to monitor an actual development of ideas that open onto one another, open into the project of this volume, and, most important, open onto the future where the terms of image and discourse will undoubtedly become ever more consternating, enticing, and consequential under the pressures of technological dependence and change.

I am anxious to acknowledge the graceful and resourceful assistance of Sally Shafto in getting this volume ready for publication. And I speak for all who participated in the project in warmly thanking Jay Semel, director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and his legendary assistant, Lorna Olson. Jay not only approved the project and gave it space and money; he helped define it and select its participants. Then he followed what he had put in motion with a benevolence that is the virtue of those who understand ideas and love to play with them. His pride joins mine in recognizing this project as deriving from the University of Iowa's tradition of wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice. With this in mind, let me point to three edifying models who, in my years here, did most to foster this tradition in me as in so many others and who, therefore, are the first addressees of this book: Angelo Bertocci, Sam Becker, and Esco Obermann. May they fully enjoy it.