Thinking the Image From the Inside of the Picture

Abstract

When I read the exchange of letters between Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T.Mitchell published by Hans Belting in 2007, I was Struck by the many points of contact and even agreement between two positions that started from two totally different positions.1 In our program of interdisciplinary master studies now called "Aisthesis" (art history, archaeology, philosophy, and literary studies, coordinated among universities, museums, and research institutes in Augsburg, Eichstätt, Munich, and Regensburg), we have made students aware of the discrepancies between two traditions of thinking that were behind the "iconic" and the "pictorial" turn declared in 1994. Boehm insisted on the difference between what appears in an image and what we see, unmediated, through images; he labeled this the "iconic difference." In 1994, you could still imagine remains of old aesthetics in Boehms texts: one of the arguments was that there is coherence in images, whether they are beautiful or ugly, boring, interesting, or scandalous. This coherence might be what remains of Kants "purposefulness" {Zweckmäßig keit) of the beautiful image. However, more recently, Boehm has emphasized the idea of deixis, linking it to whatever one can do, or wants to do, in producing and using an image or by showing something in or through an image.2 In Mitchell, instead, images tend to be what one does with them-and what they do to those who see them. They are placed in practice and ideology; they tend to reflect what they are, and how they make us see the world through them. The gap they build between fiction and reality, or the links they forge between those two terms, are reflected in themselves.