Response to W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory

In the materials we have covered thus far, it seems that "The Pictorial Turn" section of Mitchell's work may be one of the most commonly cited. So, it seems fair to start here (and because this is the first section after the intro.)

Mitchell says that "what is specific to our moment is exactly this paradox" that we encounter within the pictorial turn. He says that "it seems overwhelmingly obvious" that something has changed... here I hear an echo of Debord (who Mitchell cites 2 pages earlier) and yet, on the other hand, "the fear of the image" (15) is nothing new.

He goes on to say that the pictorial turn "is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation ... it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic resdiscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality" (16).

He says that the pictorial turn "is the realization that spectatorship ... may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading ... and that visual experience might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality" (16).

Here, I would add, as I believe Mitchell goes on in various places in the text to suggest. That is problem is not only as deep but also as old a problem as various forms of reading.

So, in that sense, the answers we may give in response to Baudrillard or Debord might be similar to how we approach Plato's consideration of the function of the image. This seems connected to what Mitchell goes on to say in "Beyond Comparison" (before another one of his phrases that we've seen quoted elsewhere this semester, "all media are mixed media" (95)) -- that "[t]he best preventitive to comparitive methods is an insistence on literalness and materiality" (90).

Later in "The Pictorial Turn," Mitchell says, "There is an ancient tradition, of course, which argues that language is the essential human attribute: "man" is the "speaking animal." the image is the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the "dumb" animal, the child, the woman, the masses" (24). This seems connected to what Mictchell goes on to describe in "Narrative, Memory, and Slavery" as "the blankness prior to the formation of memory" (188).

In the ancient theory (Aristotelian?) that Mitchell references, images would precede language, as we have traditionally understood it. Yet, it seems that before memory there is blankness. Could we then go on to say that blankness would be replaced by pictorial memories, which are then complicated and changed into narrative once the speaking subject is constituted? Or, it seems that from another point of view, and what Mitchell may also seem to suggest in his discussion of Morrison's Beloved, there is always the chance that we will fall, through images, back into a sort of blankness. Is it possible that this blankness is more of a sensorial overload, the presenting itself of presence in such a way that after we have acquired language, can be nearly blinding?

From a different perspective, if man is the animal whose nature is necessarily one of forgetfullness, then what is the monstrous quality of remembering? Is it one of images or words or is it something about the relationship between the two?