parrhesia 26 · 2016 · 20-39
what is an image? form as
a category of meaning in
philosophical anthropology
alison ross
The category of the image is generally understood in terms that emphasise its
connection with visual perception.1 The emphasis is justiied in a certain sense,
which we have to set out in clear terms. And yet, even in those intellectual traditions that make this connection all important, it seems that the image cannot
be adequately deined as a perceptible visual form. Apart from other issues such
a deinition is not selective enough. James Elkins’ position that the idea of the
image in art history needs to be democratised gives a sense of the problem: if
anything susceptible to singular perception in virtue of its form may be treated
and studied as an image, the semantic coherence of the term and in particular its
distinction from ‘things in general’ risks being lost.2
Those accounts that deine the ‘image’ as a type of inner perception, or mental
idea, are also insuiciently selective about what counts as an image. But they are
troubling too for other reasons. The approach to the image as a type of mental
idea pegs the topic of the image to the technical problem of mental perception
and mental states, and over-emphasises the visual quality of the image. In some of
the literature this gives rise to what may be seen from outside as minor squabbles
over nomenclature: for instance, the ‘image’ gets tied to the seeming arbitrariness
entailed in individual perception and opposed to the external solidity associated
in the vocabulary of ordinary language philosophy with the ‘picture’. Although
there are facets of the image, notably its association with illusion, that perhaps
warrants the distinction between its ‘internal’ and ‘external’ existence, those debates focused on issues in mental perception and representation are not insightful about them.3 This is because such approaches are anchored to the problem of
distinguishing between true and false perception. The distinction, which is undeniably crucial in technical treatments of representation, is unimportant for the
deinition of the image. Indeed, in these technical deinitions of the image, just
as in the treatment of the image as the perception of organised form, the general
analytical utility of the term is undermined.
Work in the ield of art history, on account of its subject matter, does not concern itself with the issue of erroneous perception of form. However, diferent
problems for a robust deinition of the image are raised here. Some scholarship,
impressed by the impact of new technologies, takes an unnecessarily historically
restrictive approach. Eric Alliez, for instance, argues that the impact of photography was to place ‘the image in crisis’.4 However, if we consider the fact that even
in its various technological modes of existence and communication the image is
distinct from the physical media that transmits it, important consequences follow
for such technologically inlected treatments of the image. To abbreviate a point
that could be developed at more length: such treatments of the image deal not
with (the concept of) the image, but with various media of its communication.
Their historical sensitivities, I think, can obscure one of the crucial features of the
image—that is, the striking fact of its trans-historical and cross-cultural presence,
which makes the talk of the image as such being ‘in crisis’ somewhat odd. The
continuity of the link between human life and the various activities associated
with image production and reception outweighs the transformations wrought by
the technological innovations to the media that communicate images.
Other limitations are placed on the analytical reach of the concept of the image in
the scholarship that faithfully observes traditional ways of formulating the ontological components of the image. The ontological approach frames the image as
the ‘absent’, ‘invisible’ or ‘substantial’ term that is rendered ‘present’, ‘visible’ or
‘material’ in an icon. In Christology the image is located in the ternary structure
of the doctrine of incarnation. God is incarnated in the imago dei of the son who,
in turn, stands behind iconic representations. This onto-theological deinition of
the image as split between image and icon is adopted and revised, even in those
positions that are critical of the coherence of its dualist division between the
‘natural’ image and the ‘artiicial’ icon. For instance, Jean-Luc Nancy’s treatment
of the topic of the image is structured entirely by the role the image has in the
what is an image? · 21
dualist framework of the incarnation of God in the onto-theological conception
of Western metaphysics. He considers this tradition to be fundamental for the
contemporary ield of image production and reception. For Nancy, the credibility
of the notion that a substantial ‘idea’ stands behind the ‘icon’ as its intelligible
ground has been lost. In our modern, nihilist condition we are left with material
sites of presentation as the only basis for the expression and communication of
‘ideas’.5 His rehabilitation of the category of the image thus has in view a critical
assessment of the coherence of the dualism between ideas and materiality, which
he takes to be the all determining framework for considering images.
In ields of scholarship that do not take the ‘onto-theology’ of Western metaphysics to be all determinant, the way the image is framed also draws on organising
features of this dualist model of representation. Hans Belting’s ‘anthropology of
images’ refers, for example, to the ‘invisibility’ of the image to deine the capacity of images to withstand iconoclastic destruction. His conception of the image
relies on the thesis of derivation that belongs to the dualist model, although he
contends the relevant point of departure is not that of an invisible essence, but an
‘original’ and ‘immediate’ environment.6 Marie Jose-Mondzain treats the relations
between images and icons in the onto-theological conception as an ‘economy.’ 7
Like Belting, the emphasis in her account is on the ineradicable status of the image; even the iconoclasts, she points out, rely on images to regulate the relations
of people to the institutions of earthly power.8 The use of the dualist structure in
either of these cases may obviously be cited as a corrective to Alliez’s position,
which fuses the image to the site and media of its presentation.9
In this essay, I would like to step back from these theories of the image and
propose an alternative approach. The hypothesis I will venture here is that the
question ‘what is an image’ is entangled with another: that of the ‘signiicance’
or ‘meaning’ of the image. An image that exerts a hold and that lives beyond its
medium presupposes an agent who is engaged by it, i.e., who inds it meaningful
or signiicant. Further, I think it can be argued that the image engages its recipient
in a highly speciic way: it provides the meaning context for action. In this respect,
its deining quality is the ‘immediacy’ it possesses in its power of communication,
a quality that can be contrasted with the discursive categories of conceptual explanation or doctrine. To expound this position I will argue that the image is more
than a visual presentation; more precisely, I will show that what is distinctive
about the image is that it possesses a communicative force that is surplus to its
perceptible form.10 It is this force that diferentiates the image from other kinds
22 · alison ross
of perceptible form.
To make this case, I would like to deine the surplus quality or force of the image
in relation to two speciications: its artiiciality; and its power.11 These speciications show, I think, that and how the image is more than an object of visual
perception, but they also indicate that the ‘surplus’ characteristics of the image
address anthropological needs or desires and are in this regard very far from being
able to be, pace Alliez, put ‘in crisis’ as a result of changes to the technology of any
given media. The image is indispensable for human life because it allows human
beings to step outside their ordinary experience. More precisely, the image allows
the reworking of that experience for the purpose of framing it in a more or less
comprehensive system of meaning. In this regard, the meaning communicated
in an image provides support for ideas that would not otherwise have existential
resonance.
THE ARTIFICIALITY OF THE IMAGE
Characterization of the image as ‘artiicial’ follows from its status as a speciic
type of organised form. Form is to be distinguished from bare materiality as perceptible order. The distinction between form and materiality signals not that the
image is devoid of material features per se, but that, on account of its artiiciality, it is distinguishable from its immediate environment (and transferable to
contexts beyond it) by virtue of the fact that it is perceived to carry an intention, hence a meaning. This feature of the image is important since it helps to
explain how an image communicates more than its perceptible features. Further,
its formal character is the basis on which the image may exercise something analogous to conceptual force in both its organising relation to an environment and
its transferability between diferent contexts. The cruciix is a good example of
an image that has these aspects of ‘artiiciality’ and ‘transferability’.12 I will return
to this example. We can also mention Immanuel Kant’s idea of the ‘technic of
nature’, which views nature in the prism of its receptivity to human moral ends.
Nature is thus re-calibrated in some respects to the framework of intention and
thus meaning.13
First, to get at the nature of the ‘artiiciality’ of the image, it is helpful to contrast
briely the two major ways of approaching this topic in some works of philosophical anthropology. These may be roughly labelled the ‘speculative’ and ‘functional’
approaches to the image. The form of the image is fundamentally the index of the
what is an image? · 23
meaning ascribed to it, this is the conclusion that can be drawn from the functional approach to the image. We can appreciate the implications of this point by
considering the limitations of the speculative approach to the image.
Hans Jonas, who I take to represent the speculative approach, has argued that the
ability to create and comprehend images requires the capacity to distinguish form
from matter. In his view, this capacity signals at once the distinctive freedom of
human beings from other animals, and their propensity, given the basis of the image in the mere appearance of form, to error and illusion. The image requires both
a separation from the object (so that form is perceived independently of the presence of the thing) and a grasping of appearance as distinct from reality. The ‘generality’ of form is won by the independence of the image from the physical medium
of its carrier as well as from the object depicted. The image thus has the status
of an ‘intermediary, posed between two physical realities—image qua thing and
depicted thing.’ This ‘intermediary’, he writes, ‘is the eidos as such, which becomes
the real object we experience’.14 The question to ask of Jonas’ account is what can
be experienced in form? Jonas looks past this question in order to defend the
unique capacities of human beings that, according to him, the ‘intermediary’ status of the image indicates. The human being’s capacity for a free relation to their
environment pivots on their capacity to perceive and make form. He explores the
implications of this point through an analogy between the image and the word.
It is as ‘form’ that images ‘do in visible fashion what names do invisibly: [that
is, they] give things a new existence qua symbol.’15 This new existence is deined
partly by the generality of what is thereby perceived, and partly by the creativity it allows in relation to the environment. On both counts the production and
reception of images signals the distance from particular things that is necessary
for human cognition, imagination and speech. Jonas refers to the Genesis story of
Adam’s naming language and comments: the one who names takes ‘a step beyond
creation’.16 It is the generality of the name that ‘preserves the archetypical order
of Creation in the face of its manifold replications in individual cases. Thus, the
symbolic duplication of the world through names is at the same time an ordering
of it according to its generic prototypes. Every horse is the original horse, every
dog the original dog’.17 And he continues: ‘The generality of the name is the generality of the image. The prehistoric hunter did not draw this or that bison but
the bison—every possible bison was thereby evoked, anticipated, remembered.
Drawing an image of something is analogous to calling it by name, or rather is its
unabridged form, since it makes physically present that inner image of which the
phonetic sign is an abbreviation and whose generality alone makes it applicable to
24 · alison ross
the many individual specimens.’18
The comparison between name/or word and image is based in a number of factors: the origin of the line in graphic depiction, the shift from individual, interior
experience, such as Jonas’ ‘inner image’, to sharable experience in language and
the exterior, symbolic form of the image, etc. Both word and image involve the
idea, above all, that the shift from particular things or individual cases to representation is a move away from immediacy and that with such distance comes
freedom in respect to the environment, if not some degree of control over it.
Crucially, this control has a temporal dimension insofar as it includes the memory
of past as well as the anticipation of new situations. The analogous structure of
word and form points to the artiicial nature of the image, in the sense that the
presence of intention is discernible in it. Nonetheless, the approach does not set
a high enough bar for organised form to qualify for the status of an image. This
is because in its structuring comparison with the word, all that is required for an
organised form to be an image and to order an environment is the classiicatory
feature of the (general) type. But this feature is synonymous with form itself,
or rather it is implied by the distinction between form and materiality. Missing
from Jonas’ conception of the artiiciality of form is an account of the source of
the communicative power of the image. This topic cannot be adequately treated
through his position that the generality of the image makes it the visual counterpart to the word. After all, the image does not just allow freedom in relation to the
environment; it produces a world, whose transmission of ‘meaning’ is direct and
immediate, and not necessarily reliant on visual perception. In this respect, a full
deinition of the image calls into question the terms of Jonas’ comparison, since it
allows, what many would consider to be the uncontroversial point, that an image
can be expressed in words.
In functional approaches the question of the efectiveness of the image comes to
the fore. With this focus many of the habitual ways of looking at the image in the
speculative tradition are discarded.
According to the functional perspective the species engages its environment
through the image or form in general, in the modes of both compensation and
basic operability. Viewed this way, the image is part of the repertoire that helps to
manage the peculiar ‘instinct deiciency’ of the species in its dealings with the environment. Aesthetic activities are not expressive or creative outlets that testify
to the nebulous idea of human ‘freedom’ but foundational aspects of the species’
what is an image? · 25
techniques of survival. Furthermore, an image is less a derivative depiction in
form of a part of some pre-existing substantive ‘reality’ (Jonas’ image qua ‘thing’)
than it is a means of orientation that provides an alternative framework for dealing with reality. As such, an image is always an orientation toward the ‘whole’
environment, even if, or precisely because it treats the complexity of this environment, whatever it is, in highly selective ways.
Hans Blumenberg has argued that the basic function of the image is that of managing the speciic needs of an instinct-deicient creature who inhabits a hostile
environment. He links the phylogenetic scope of the claim of human ‘instinct
deiciency’ to certain inescapable ontogenetic existential settings, most notably
anxiety. It is the ‘situational leap’ that occurs in human evolution that is the core
of Blumenberg’s account.19 In his parsing of the leap to the bipedal posture Blumenberg notes that whether it was induced ‘by an enforced or accidental change
in [its] environment’, there was a signiicant ‘sensory advantage’ in assuming this
posture. Whatever the cause of the leap, ‘that creature had left the protection of a
more hidden form of life, and an adapted one, in order to expose itself to the risks
of the widened horizon of its perception, which were also those of its perceivability’. This leap ‘made the unoccupied distant horizon into the ongoing expectation of hitherto unknown things’. The creature’s eforts to adapt to this situation
grapple with the need to overcome ‘the loss of the old state of concealment in the
primeval forest’. On the one hand, having left ‘[t]he shrinking rain forest … for the
open savannah’, the species inds and perfects a new type of ‘hidden’ environment
when it settles ‘in caves’. The bipedal creature thus meets ‘new requirements for
performance in obtaining food outside [its] living places’ and it pursues the ‘old
advantage of undisturbed reproduction and rearing of the next generation, with
its prolonged need for learning, [but it does so] now in the protection of housing
[i.e., the cave] that was easy to close of from the outside’. He concludes that an
existence deined by the activities of ‘hunting and [rearing]’ was the outcome of
‘the overcoming of the loss of the old state of concealment in the primeval forest’.
Blumenberg calls the ‘totality’ of the factors that go with this situational leap, ‘the
absolutism of reality’. And he argues that the leap itself ‘is inconceivable without
super-accomplishment in consequence of a sudden lack of adaptation.’20
For my purposes what is signiicant is that the character of such super-accomplishment is to ind artiicial adaptation where natural adaptation is lacking. In
this respect, the distance attained through form is double edged and it has decisive existential consequences. For instance, there is ‘the capacity for foresight’,
26 · alison ross
the way of anticipating ‘what has not yet taken place’ and the ‘preparation for
what is absent, beyond the horizon.’ The operability the image gives to the deicient creature is to the fore here. It makes the environment familiar. Speciically,
the image deines the environment as hospitable for action. Before the horizon is
given shape in the substitutive form of an image, there is raw ‘anxiety’: the state
of ‘pure…indeinite anticipation’.21 In anxiety, consciousness is in an alert state of
intentionality, but it has no object. The efect is a levelling and intensiication of
the feeling of threat: ‘the whole horizon becomes equivalent as the totality of the
directions from which “it can come at one.”’ The reality/openness of the horizon
cannot be processed and alternatives need to be found. This leads to panic or
paralysis; and it is the symbolic substitution of the entirety of the horizon, that
is, the efective deployment of the image, that is its remedy. ‘Freud described the
complete helplessness of the ego in the face of overwhelming danger as the core
of the traumatic situation’.22 For Blumenberg, the species’ emergence from the
protective cover of the primeval forest into the open savannah is directly parallel to the Freudian conception of the traumatic situation. The account of the
leap is thus the relevant frame for considering how an individual manages the
‘absolutism of reality’. More than this, it can be used to specify the artiiciality of
the image as a basic strategy for dealing with this absolutism in and beyond the
anthropogenetic (also anthropotechnic) model used in Blumenberg’s conception.
An instinct deicient creature compensates for the ‘absolutism of reality’ through
activities of ‘artiicial’ substitution. The broader implications of this point are
worth considering. The ‘environment’ in question may include any number of
variants that address the features of an unmanageable horizon by substituting for
it a new one. Here we might include religious practices that treat human mortality
through the perspective of the afterlife; or speculative, philosophical theses that
in their attempts to push for global explanations rely on constructions that are
more than what philosophical argumentation alone can accomplish. Each of these
practices involves images that are substitutive formations of a ‘whole’. To have a
world is always the result of an ‘art’, or an artiicial substitution for ‘reality’ [i.e., a
raw, unprocessed, complex environment].23 What is important is that the awareness of the unpredictable horizon also requires a creature able to anticipate it.
The mode of anticipation in an image of a totalised or deinitive situation is artiicial in respect to the open horizon. It has to be. And from this perspective,
the thesis of the artiiciality of the image seems to invite scepticism about how a
meaningful experience of the world is cobbled together: that is to say, it invites
scepticism about the pivotal role artiicial techniques of adaptation have in dif-
what is an image? · 27
ferent practices of belief, including intellectual ones. The image is efective as a
tool of orientation because it provides an agent with a deinite situation. In this
sense it is a medium of commitment for this [artiicial/totalised] situation. The
image provides not a speciic outlet for derivative depictions of lost features of
the immediate environment [Belting], or a luxurious mode of expression of human freedom prone to error as much as invention [Jonas]. It provides a tool of
mediation to manage the absolutism of reality; and the key here is that the factor
of mediation, whatever the ‘reality’ it manages, has existential functions. The ‘reality’ the image manages is the nebulous ‘threat’ that comes from the horizon, and
its structure is also one of the orientation needed to anticipate the possibilities
that come from the horizon. In all of these respects, the image may be deined as
perceptible meaning that orientates action. The image provides [artiicial] security of purpose; this is what it substitutes for the anxiety instilling raw awareness
of an open horizon. What is crucial is that this function of orientation operates
through a substitution that engages its recipient.
THE POWER OF THE IMAGE
The engaging status of an artiicial form is the basis of the power of the image; it
is what distinguishes an image from mere organised form and secures for it a life
beyond particular media.24 Once again, I will refer to Blumenberg to help set out
this second characteristic of the image. In Blumenberg’s topography of ‘hunting’
(outside) and ‘rearing’ (inside), the interior space of the cave allows for the assertion of the absolutism of the ‘wish’ embodied in the image in opposition to the
absolutism of the ‘reality’ outside the cave.
The closed space of the cave reinforces the magical features of the image; it binds
the image to the structure of the wish: ‘the closed space allows what the open
space prohibits: the power of the wish, of magic, of illusion, and the preparation
of efects by thought’.25 The powers that lourish in the protected space of the
cave cover over the artiiciality of the image; they assert its ‘reality’ against the
absolute ‘reality’ of the open space that would otherwise dissipate its force. The
power of the image in Blumenberg’s genetic conception may be rephrased to give
it more general applicability. Indeed the speciic account of the origins of the
image in the bipedal ‘situational leap’ may be replaced with a general opposition
between a ‘reality principle’, or open horizon, and the rebuttal or counter it faces
in and through the image. In particular, this more general perspective can help
to identify the disposition that the ‘recipient’ of an image maintains to efect the
28 · alison ross
power of the image outside of the space of its genesis. It also lets us consider different contexts in which this work on the image occurs.
The artiiciality of the image counters raw reality: it is an efective embodiment
of meaning able to stem the dispersion of events. Its power lies in its deining
what is pertinent in a given situation and this also means that it consigns some
factors to irrelevance. In its function of selection, the image must be understood
as a procedure, which gathers further meanings in addition to those at stake in its
original deployment. In this respect, the space of its origins does not conine the
power it thereby wins. The point can be elucidated through comparison with rulefollowing behaviour. The transferability of a rule is a crucial part of its successful
functioning as a rule—it is in these conditions that a ‘precisely determined result’
may be produced that is not conined to ‘the time and place of the procedure’.26
Similarly, the powers of the image, such as its capacity to provide a survey of an
unarticulated ield of data, and its qualities, including its magical aura, are transferable across contexts. Thus whatever the original motivation for the painting of
the images in the cave, whatever importance they had for the irst painter, they
are a ‘procedure’ that can be applied in a secondary confrontation to the world:
‘In the hunting magic of his cave pictures the hunter reaches, from his housing,
out and across to the world’.27 (Or, as Walter Benjamin puts it: ‘in his pictures the
hunter remembers the feel of the blow he used to kill the beast’, i.e., the hunter
preserves the moment and makes it available for further use.)28 The status of the
image as a ‘procedure’ with secondary functions is akin to the conceptuality of the
word in that both are transferable across contexts and their meaning functions
adapt to new contexts.
Nonetheless if we follow Blumenberg’s lead and consider the image in functional
terms, the analogy between word and image that is so central in the literature on
the topic seems inadequate. In one direction the analogy breaks down because
words also function as images; they communicate feelings and organise a context
for action. In the other direction, however, this analogy becomes especially problematic when we consider the distinctive power of the image, which contrasts
markedly with the operations of the word in its conceptual functions.
The image invokes, whereas the word evokes. A word points its recipient to a concept that is not related to the phonetic structure or material form of the sign. The
word evokes because it refers to a concept entirely dissimilar to the sign that represents it. In contrast, the image has the power to draw its percipient in; its power
what is an image? · 29
to engage is the meaning it embodies. There is thus a diferent mode of representing in the sign and in the image. And there is also a diferent order of representation in each. If the relation of the word to what it evokes is in some ways arbitrary,
the image, in contrast, ‘is’ in abbreviated form the idea it invokes. The key diference between word and image is that the image does not provide, as the sign does,
conceptual order to the world - it provides instead a fundamental experience of
meaning that cannot be gainsaid and that may indeed be used to generate and
justify conceptual order.29 In some substantial way the image embodies what it
refers to. At the same time, what is distinctive about the image is that its power of
invocation exceeds its physical medium, or component elements, but that it does
so by making present in some way the meaning it bears. For this reason, the image
itself is liable to become sacred. And it is the meaning it embodies for its recipient
that underpins that possibility.
The contrast that opposes the initial context from which the image derives its
power to the ‘reality principle’ that would dissipate that power is replicated in
other frameworks too. We can cite the conception of aesthetic space in Kant’s
aesthetic theory, which requires a suspension of pragmatic and cognitive perspectives to confer expressive power on diverse categories of form, including tools
from lost civilizations, the play of light in a ire and the encounter with singular
instances of natural beauty, like the surprise encounter with the lower in nature.30 The expressive power of such forms is a feature of the suspension of instrumental attitudes in the aesthetic attitude. Similarly, religious rites require a
suspension of ordinary experience in order to mark out the heightened signiicance that is due to ritual forms.31 In each of these cases the image provides the
practical deinition and orientation towards a world where none ‘really’ exists,
whether that of the afterlife in religious ritual, or the moral view of the world in
Kant. (Leroi-Gourhan re-phrases the same point when he characterises human
symbolic activity as the activity that allows its recipients to step outside ordinary
experience).32 The image gives these artiicial ideas a foothold or a niche that they
don’t otherwise have. Finally, we might also mention the distinctive processes
identiied in psychoanalysis as modes of obsessive and phobic attention to particular objects. In each of these cases a secluded space protects and secures for
particular forms their distinctive power of signiication. The psychoanalytic conception is important because it locates the role of psychic labor in establishing
and maintaining the signiication of form and thus extending the ‘magical’ power
of its operation beyond the conines of its original installation.33 Equally, in the
cases of Kantian aesthetics and the maintenance of world order in religious rites,
30 · alison ross
the power of the image also depends on its capacity to engage its recipient. The
way an image engages its recipient is the basis of the life any image might acquire
beyond its origins.
In prayer the god presents itself to the faithful somehow. Similarly, if the image
invokes, in some way its formal elements, however paltry, such as the cruciix
worn on a necklace, embody a narrative, a constellation of ideas that engages
its recipient. Put in other words: the image presents in abbreviated and transportable form the meaning of the phenomenon that it invokes. For example, the
image of the cross does not narrowly refer to Jesus on the cross, but it presents
a whole conceptual horizon or narrative, a rich constellation of concepts or notions. Moreover, what is important is that the igure of the cross itself acquires the
power of what it represents, namely the credibility of the idea that the sacriice
of the Son of God to save humanity occurred. The deicit in the representational
properties of the image is, as Plato complained, repaid in full in the power the image nonetheless has to invoke the experience of its ‘object’.
I have argued here against the view that the contemporary ubiquity of the image
must mean the erosion of its (conceptual) coherence and hence its potential as
an analytic category. Against this widespread view, which tends to conlate the
category of the ‘image’ with technological media, I have outlined the idea that an
image is a sensuous experience of meaning that organises a world and inclines its
recipient to particular paths of action.
I have also argued against those speculative positions from philosophical anthropology that conlate the category of form with that of the image. Sensible forms
and the sense these have for the perceiver are constitutive of perception; they are
aspects of the structure of perception. But the meaning embodied in the image
is the ‘something more’ that makes the sensible form the prompt of a deinite
way of existing and acting meaningfully. This signiicance is not strictly speaking
the property of perceptible form, rather it is contributed by its dynamic relation
with the recipient of the image. As such, the capacity to convey meaning does
not belong to the perceptible form per se. This means that among the locations
of the image we must count sites such as memory, dreams and imagination. Indeed, as Hans Belting has argued, one should expect to ind the image especially
in these locations, since they are (presumably) places of meaning, that is, nothing
but emotionally charged and selected representations.34
what is an image? · 31
An image that works for and on its recipient is artiicial in the sense that it conveys a meaning, speciically, the (presumed) intention of making one live and act
in a certain way, hence its ‘power’. The image is transferrable to contexts other
than its original one and can take on additional layers of meaning. Human instinct
deiciency may be the basis of culturally inherited meaning practices and their
tools, such as the image. This is at least how the matter has been presented in
the German tradition of philosophical anthropology. What is important is that
whether it is a painting in a cave, a cross that is worn around someone’s neck or
a vivid scenario in a treatise, the image is a tool for the expression and communication of meaning. In the way it engages its recipients, the image is an artiicial
horizon that sets a context for human life and action.
Monash University
32 · alison ross
NOTES
1. This paper forms part of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship Project, ‘Living with Complexity’, which is a study of the way diferent forms
of aesthetic experience are put to use in managing complex environments. I would
like to acknowledge the support of the ARC in funding this research. Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the ASCP conference, held at the University
of NSW in December 2015; the Monash-New School Aesthetics Workshop, held
in New York in May 2016; and the Image-Imagination-Myth Workshop held at Tel
Aviv University in November 2016. I would like to thank the audiences at those
events for their helpful comments and criticisms and Simon Lumsden, Eli Friedlander and Ilit Ferber for hosting these talks. The AFTAM Grant Scheme funded
the Image-Imagination-Myth workshop. Paul Redding, Knox Peden, Jean-Philippe
Deranty and Amir Ahmadi provided detailed responses to some of the ideas aired
in this article. I am grateful to each of them and the anonymous reviewers at Parrhesia for the points they raised. The shortcomings here are mine alone.
2. James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001),
see the Preface and 10. The position that focuses on organized form speciically
aims to undo the pertinence of the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ for deining the ield of images. Elkins opens his book with the following statement:
‘Most images are not art’, 3. Although the de-restriction of images from the ield of
art is necessary, the ubiquity of the image that results is unhelpful. Another type
of restriction of the ield needs to be found.
3. Much is made in commentary on this position that the German ‘bild’ means
both ‘image’ and ‘picture’, but even if such commentary endorses the association
of the image with a subjective impression rather than the objective presence of
a picture or looks for a type of combination between them, it sanctions the idea
that we are dealing with degrees of perceivable form. The ‘image’/ ‘picture’ distinction is often made in ordinary language philosophy, but it has also been used
in studies of the disciplinary and institutional functions of the vocabulary of images. See W.T.J. Mitchell, ‘What is an Image?’, New Literary History, Vol.15, No. 3,
Spring, 1984, 503-537, especially 507-512. A set of terms that does not presuppose
that mental representations and perception are ‘visual’ would go against the assumption in Hume and others that percepts and mental images are diferences in
degree not kind. According to Thomas, cognitive science deines mental imagery
as an unspeciied form of representation and hence avoids the controversy as to
whether ‘the relevant representations are, in any interesting sense, picture-like.’
See Nigel J.T. Thomas, ‘Mental Imagery’, Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclo-
what is an image? · 33
pedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/(Accessed 4
August, 2016).
4. Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, ‘Défaire l’image’ Multitudes, 2007/1, No.28.
www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2007-1-page189.htm (Accessed, November 1,
2015). It would be unfair to characterise Alliez’s position on the image solely as a
response to technological innovations. He and Bonne describe their position as
an ‘archaeology’ in Foucault’s sense. Hence the way that the form-image becomes
marked as a problem certainly responds to the omnipresence of images after the
advent of photography. However, Alliez’s focus is on how the form-image and the
form-aesthetic is ‘unmade’ in modern art through his selection of the twin polarities of Matisse and Duchamp. Amongst the relevant aspects of Matisse’s practice
for this project are his disregard for categories of igurative or non-igurative form
and what Alliez refers to in his Deleuzian terminology as the ‘machinic’ status of
color.
5. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1994) and The Ground of the Image, trans. Jef Fort (New York,
NY: Fordham University Press, 2005). See my discussion of the intricacies of
Nancy’s position on the image, Alison Ross ‘Image-Politics: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Ontological Rehabilitation of the Image’, Nancy and the Political, Ed. Sanja Dejanovic
(Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 139-163.
6. He writes “images make a physical… absence visible by transforming it into iconic presence.” The way he articulates this position draws speciically on the role of
funereal images in standing in for the “missing body of the dead.” These images
need an artiicial body to take the “vacant place of the deceased”. This artiicial
body is “the medium (and not just ‘material’)” body. Images in general, Belting
argues, require “embodiment in order to acquire visibility.” The body of the image
is not the image, and the medium of images can include the dreams and memories
of the human body. Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 3, his emphases. Belting’s
use of the “body” in some of his formulations can seem imprecise in its inclusion
of dreams and memory, which is supported by his insistence that mental phenomena belong to the body. The position conveniently skirts the literature that attempts to specify the relation of the two and asserts instead that images “colonize
our bodies (our brains)”, 10. The use of the language of colonization in this elision
is not incidental: “... even if it seems that we are in charge of generating them, it is
in fact the images that are in control”, 10.
7. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, Trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005). The general perspective of her study relates to the status of what
34 · alison ross
she terms “the visible world”, “the one that is given to us to see.” Is this world,
she asks, one of “liberty or enslavement?” (Mondzain, 3). She takes the dualism of
the image used strategically in the Byzantine iconoclast controversy of the eighth
and ninth centuries to underwrite the ield of images per se, and especially the
contemporary stakes of our relation to images in which both a participatory relation to meaning and the imposition of the authority of images are possibilities. A strategically formulated conceptual position is thus given trans-historical
signiicance and enduring continuity for practices involving images: “In order to
be able to envisage a world radically founded on visibility, and starting from the
conviction that whatever constitutes its essence and meaning is itself invisible, it
proved essential to establish a system of thought that set the visible and invisible
in relation to each other. This relation was based on the distinction between the
image and the icon. The image is invisible, the icon is visible. The economy was
the concept of their living linkage. The image is a mystery. The icon is an enigma.
The economy was the concept of their relation and their intimacy. The image is
eternal similitude, the icon is temporal resemblance. The economy was the theory
of the transiguration of history” (Mondzain, 3). Some of the themes Mondzain
treats are also prominent in Jean-Luc Nancy’s attempts to rehabilitate the image
from the metaphysical dualism under which its materiality is seen as diferent in
kind from the invisible idea that is ‘behind’ and ‘grounds’ it in some way. And like
Hans Belting’s account of the image, Mondzain’s account of the ‘natural image’
emphasizes that to see an image is to see things, speciically the natural meaning
of the image, in their absence. Mondzain, 3; on Nancy and Belting, see respectively
Notes 5 and 6.
8. Like Nancy, there is a tendency in Mondzain’s work to over-systematise the results of her case study of the image. In fact, the terms of her treatment are limited
to quite speciic contexts. I will argue here for a functional idea of the image that
identiies the common application of the term across diferent contexts: including, religious, aesthetic, intellectual and political. Further, one of the tenets of my
position will be that the adaptive practices involved in the image render what is
strange familiar and thereby increase the pragmatic hold humans exert within an
environment. This is the function of the meaning an image is presumed to carry.
Mondzain thinks, in contrast, that the participatory meaning practices involved
in the image encourage hospitality to foreign others. This position seems overly
speculative.
In Mondzain’s account, the central concept in considering the image is
‘economy’, speciically the economy of its relation with the icon. There is a “resistance to philosophical consideration of the concept of the economy”, she argues.
what is an image? · 35
She thinks this resistance is the result of ‘an unconscious refusal of modern subjects to recognize the common foundations of our thinking about the image and
the institutions that govern us in an ecclesiastic manner’ (4). And: “each great
convulsion of religious and political thought’ raises the question of the legitimacy
of the image” (5). On her view, this question is managed by the distinction between the natural, invisible image and the artiicial, visible icon. In her study of
Nikephoros’ defence of the icon in the Byzantine iconoclast controversy, she argues that the distinction is a strategic one which guards the use of images from
the charge of idolatry and serves the temporal power of the church. Economy
is the concept that allows the mastery of images, since it allows the speed with
which an image operates and its emotional efectiveness to be used for ‘profane
objectives’, without incurring the charge of idolatry, 6. What precisely does the
image embody? Like Belting and Nancy, she contends that the invisible meaning
of the image is not exhausted in any visible form. The ‘artiiciality’ of the icon
refers speciically to its ontological deiciency, but it recruits this deiciency for
pragmatic purposes. The formulation of the economy of relations between image
and icon preserved the religious image from the charge of idolatry. Simultaneously, this conceptual move opens the ield of images up to participatory meaning
practices. I think such practices do not depend on conceptual moves; although
they may indeed be rendered legible or conceptually precise through them.
9. As Hans Belting points out in relation to Alliez, Anthropology of Images, 25-6.
10. Form may be distinguished as either perception of the environment in ways
distinct from the perception of matter, or as the modelling and making of form as
ways of organising the environment, as in the naming use of language or in image
production. The form carries such force in so far as the meaning it communicates
organises a view of the whole. My thesis is that something more than perceptible
form is traicked through the image. Hence it is ‘artiiciality’ rather than ‘illusion’ that is the important category in assessing what images are and what they
do. The artiiciality of the image is the way that vital meaning is invoked and processed as an organising frame for action. Artiiciality refers to the status of form
as the product of an intention and to its organising status vis-à-vis the otherwise
unprocessed, raw, or ‘real’ environment. For a systems theoretical discussion of
how meaning has this organising function in a ‘raw’ environment see Niklas Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990),
especially, 6-27. This use of artiiciality must be distinguished from the dualist approach to the image which allocates artiicial representation to the icon and natural presentation to the image on ontological grounds. See Notes 7 and 8 above.
11. Walter Benjamin objects to the auratic power of the image, which he thinks
36 · alison ross
involves ‘the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (Walter
Benjamin, ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Third
Version’, Selected Writings, Volume IV, 1938-1940, Ed. Michael Jennings (Boston,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2003) 251-284, 255. The experience of
the captivating efects of the image sets of a cycle of self-absorbed relection
in modern aesthetic experience. The authority of the image is intensiied in the
private, self-involving reverie an image stimulates in its ‘spectator’. This can be
contrasted with the iconoclasm that tries to destroy the power of the image as
well as with the magical and religious practices of ritual, which are collective, and
that aim to enhance this power. Finally, Benjamin sees in the existential hold of
the image a crucial resource of conversion to revolutionary positions. These different positions on the image are hard to reconcile without due reference to his
organising historical distinction between modern and pre-modern forms of experience. They are occasionally assigned diferent evaluative signiications across
the diferent periods and contexts of his writing. Nonetheless, in each case the
references to the image endorse the thesis that efective images are those that
possess the existential power of immediate meaning for their recipients. See my
discussion of the complexities involved in Benjamin’s thinking of the image in Alison Ross, Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Image (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015).
12. See Niklaus Largier, ‘The Poetics of the Image in Late Medieval Mysticism’,
Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, Ed.s, Image and Incarnation: The Early
Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015) 173187. Largier shows how in Meister Eckhardt and his student Henry Soso, the fact
of the incarnation is treated as an overcoming of the representational function of
images. This is because the incarnation is a divinisation which frees ‘man’ from
images. In Soso’s case, however, incarnation does not entail iconoclasm, but a
path that goes ‘through images’ to get beyond them, 177. The ‘path’ is a perpetual
negotiation with images. For Soso, the image of the naked man on the cross is of
speciic signiicance. This image arranges something like the degree zero of experience. On the one hand, it installs ‘the challenge and desire to be one with that
igure’ ‘where all perception is nothing else than being touched and being shaped
by the image that emerges from the abyss of all emergence’, 187. But, on the other
hand, such a state of a ‘bare, meaningless, naked and tactile’ igure in which we
exist in a ‘sheer state of receptivity’ can ‘never be reached’ in this life. Accordingly, Soso outlines a condition of constant movement between the dependence
of humans ‘on a visual poetics that produces the allegory, the rhetorical efects of
sensation and afect’, which will in Largier’s words: ‘turn time and again into the
bare igure that [we]… ultimately cannot grasp conceptually but only reiterate in
what is an image? · 37
the encounter with the image. This movement back and forth is, if we want to say
so, the birth of aesthetic experience’, 187.
13. Kant argues that ‘not so much as a blade of grass’ can be understood on the
basis of mechanical principles alone (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Trans.
Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987) §78, 296). The teleological
principle, i.e., the idea of purpose in form, is required for the understanding of
order in nature. Similarly, in his treatment of aesthetic judgment Kant entertains
the assumption that the ‘contingent’ accord between the subject’s feeling of pleasure and nature’s ‘organised forms’ shows the receptivity of nature to ‘man’s moral vocation’ and allows us to posit a ‘technic of nature’ (Kant, Critique of Judgment,
‘First Introduction’, 421) in which nature may be supposed to have an interest in
this vocation. In aesthetic judgment the postulation of such a technic organises
nature’s forms for meaning-efects in that it makes them compatible with intention (Kant, Critique of Judgment, §42, 165-7).
14. Hans Jonas, ‘Tool, Image, and Grave: On What is Beyond the Animal in Man’,
Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996) 75-86, 80. Jonas’ attempt to deine the speciicity
of human beings may be compared with Frans de Waal’s view that moral sentiments, such as equality, may be shared with other primates, but moral debates
are, for instance, ‘uniquely human’: ‘There is little evidence that other animals
judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly afect themselves. …This
is what sets human morality apart: a move toward universal standards combined
with an elaborate system of justiication, monitoring, and punishment.’ Like Jonas, de Waal argues that it is the reasoning process of speculative generality that
is distinctly human. Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2013) 18.
15. Jonas, ‘Tool, Image, and Grave’, 82.
16. Jonas, ‘Tool, Image, and Grave’, 82.
17. Jonas, ‘Tool, Image, and Grave’, 82-3.
18. Jonas, ‘Tool, Image, and Grave’, 82.
19. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 4.
20. All citations in this paragraph are from Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 4. The
original uses “mothering”, which I have replaced with “rearing”.
21. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 4.
22. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 4 - 5.
23. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 7.
24. Cf. Belting, Anthropology of Images. Belting shows that images survive between
generations because one of their ‘media’ is the human body and brain, which sus-
38 · alison ross
tains the image in memory and dreams. See especially, chapter 2, pages 44-51.
25. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 8.
26. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 8.
27. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 8.
28. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Knowledge that the First Material on which the Mimetic Faculty Tested Itself’, Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, Howard Eiland
and Michael Jennings, Ed.s (Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2002) 253.
29. We may refer here to work that tries to clarify how an image of an intellectual
endeavour performs justiicatory work for that endeavour. Similarly, attention to
the ways that the use of a speciic image may help to endorse a thesis that otherwise might not seem remotely credible shows in what senses the image provides
an ordering and artiicial orientation for experience of the world. Each of these
points is given focused treatment from an institutional perspective in Michèle Le
Doeuf’s, The Philosophical Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1989). See in particular the ‘Preface: The Shameful Face of Philosophy’, 1-21, and
the chapter ‘Long Hair, Short Ideas’, 100-129.
30. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, for the reverie occasioned by relecting on
lames in a ireplace (‘General Comment on the First Division’ 95) and for the tulip and the ‘stone utensils’ from ancient civilizations (‘Explication of the Beautiful
Inferred from the Third Moment’, 84, n.60).
31. See Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘The Bare Facts of Ritual,’ Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 53–66.
32. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993)
294.
33. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year Old Boy’ (Little Hans),
Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 10, Ed., James Strachey
(London, UK: Vintage, 2001).
34. Hans Belting’s approach emphasises in this way the relation between beholder
and ‘image’, An Anthropology of Images, 27-32, 39-40. See also Note 23.
what is an image? · 39
Alison Ross