Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

“The book as a whole, then, is about pictures, understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements.” (p. xiii) The world, at least according to Heidegger, has become a picture. In the contemporary world dominated by representations, pictures are “ways of worldmaking, not just world mirroring.” (xv) “A picture, then, is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, bot concrete and abstract, bot a specific individual ting and a symbolic form that embraces a totality.” (xvii)

So, Mitchell discusses pictures as “vital,” as possessing “the agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity, or other symptoms.” (6) And it is humans that make pictures vital and drive them “by desires and appetites.” (6) Therefore, his analysis is anthropological in the sense that it doesn’t move beyond pictures into those presumable forces that drive them.

Here’s a good point: Mitchell explains why he discusses images through the concept of desire: “The question of desire is ideally suited for this inquiry... To ask, what do pictures want? Is not just to attribute to 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’ lie or power does not necessarily imply that they have life or power, or even that they are capable of wishing for it.” (p. 10)

“What do the images want rom us? Where are they leading us? What is it that they lack, that they are inviting us to fill in? What desires have we projected onto them, and what form do those desires take as they are projected back at us, making demands upon us, seducing us to feel and act in specific ways?” (p. 25)  As Mitchell argues, perhaps, images are “weaker” than they seem, “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.” (p. 33) His answer is that “above all they [pictures] would want a kind of mastery over the beholder... The paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyze the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture... The power they want is manifested as lack, not as possession.” (p. 36)

Mitchell differentiates between two types of desire: “we might contrast these two pictures of desire (psychological and ontological, or Freudian-Lacanian and Blakean-Deleuzian) as based respectively on lack and plenitude, in the longing for an object and the possession that surpasses any object. Desire as longing produces fantasies, evanescent specular images that continually tease and elude the beholder; desire as possession produces (or is produced by) Deleuzian “assemblages.” (p. 66)

“Images both "express" desires that we already have, and teach us how to desire in the first place.” (p. 68) “The picture wants to hold, to arrest, to mummify an image in silence and slow time.” (p. 72) – on the difference between an image and a picture: “the picture as a concretely embodied object or assemblage and the image as a disembodied motif, a phantom that circulates from one picture to another and across media.” (ibid)

An idea of scopic drive – from Lacan – as imagery forcing people to do something. (p. 80) “Their [pictures’] main function is to awaken desire; to create, not gratify thirst; to provoke a sense of lack and craving by giving us the apparent presence of something and taking it away in the same gesture.” (p. 80)

“Images are active players in the game of establishing and changing values. They are capable of introducing new values into the world and thus of threatening old ones. For better and for worse, human beings establish their collective, historical identity by creating around them a second nature composed of images which do not merely reflect the values consciously intended by their makers, but radiate new forms of value formed in the collective, political unconscious of their beholders.” (105)

In the second part of his book, Mitchell explores his thesis that “images are embodies in material objects, in things...” (p. 108)  Desire is related to the sought object: “the sought object, the desired object, the sublime or beautiful object, the valued object, the aesthetic object, the produced, consumed, or exchanged object, the given or taken object, the symbolic object, the feared or hated object, the good or bad object, the lost or vanishing object.” (p. 116)

Discusses iconoclasm as an important symptom in understanding cultures and societies, for by rejecting images people reveal and negotiate certain structures of meanings, otherwise hidden from observation (p. 126ff). “When images offend us, we still take revenge by offending them in turn.” (128) In chapter 6, Mitchell discusses in detail “offending images” (swastika, images perceived as anti-religious, etc.). Raises an interesting issue that a fear of imitation is reflected (and reinforce) through the biblical story of the human creation – what could be implications for the soviet story? An example of Offi’s Madonna as an image and a picture which are not perceived as “just” an image and a picture.

Bill Brown, Things

Bill Brown (ed.): Things

Brown in his contribution refers to four interesting points:

(a)    (new scholarship should address the question of) how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects (p. 7). He later refers to Benjamin to argue that “subjects may constitute objects, but within Benjamin’s materialism things have already installed themselves in the human psyche.” (11) – refers to “Dream Kitsch” and “Several Points on Folk Art.”

(b)   Thingness of things discloses the othering of people (p. 12) – referring to Bruno Latour, who also “forcefully and repeatedly insisted that ‘things do not exist without being full of people’ and that considering humans necessarily involves the consideration of things. The subject/object dialectic itself (with which he simply has no truck) has obscured patterns of circulation, transference, translation, and displacement.” (p.12) “Latour has argued that modernity artificially made an ontological distinction between inanimate objects and human subjects, whereas in fact the world is full of ‘quasi-object’ and ‘quasi-subject’, terms he borrows from Michel Serres.” (p. 12) – refers to two works by Latour: “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. Graves-Brown (London, 2000) and We Have Never Been Modern.

(c)    Refers to Simmel: “Simmel’s earlier account of the gap between the ‘culture of thigns’ and modernity’s human subject” and “his insistence that the subject’s desire, and not productive labor, is the source of an object’s value” (p. 13) – refers to Simmel, “The Future of Our Culture” in Simmel on Culture (London, 1997). Also mentions that Lukacs, Bloch, Benjamin and Krakauer complicated Simmel’s analysis.

(d)   “Inanimate objects organize the temporality of the animate world.” (15) – refers to W. J. T. Mitchell’s contribution in this volume who explored how the discovery of a new kind of object in the 18^th century, the fossil, enablied romanticism to recognize and to refigure its relation to the mortal limits of the natural world.

W. J. T. Mitchell in “Romanticism and the Life of Things” explores how material things changed human perception of history. Refers to Foucault’s The Order of Things which explored “the historicity of things.”

Georg Simmel, A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value

Georg Simmel, “A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 5 (Mar., 1900), pp. 577-603

p. 577: “The practically effective value is conferred upon the object, not merely by its own desirability, but by the desirability of another object... Not merely the relationship to the receptive subjects characterizes this value, but also the fact that it arrives at this relationship only at the price of a sacrifice.”

p. 578: “Desire and the feeling of the agent stand, to be sure, as the motor energy behind all this, but from this in and of itself this value form could not proceed. It rather comes only from the reciprocal counterbalancing of the objects.” – that is, for Simmel objects acquire value, first, because they are desired and, second, because they exist in ‘assemblages’.

Simmel actually speaks of ‘assemblages’ – in his theory, the exchange value appears only as part of a complex system in which people and things are intrinsically interrelated. (581-583) While he gives certain precedence to people’s desires (speaking of enjoyment and sacrifice as the two driving forces of any economy), exchange value, the basis of economy, does not appear without an object. There is economy even in the cases when “primitive economic people” are not involved in the trade among each other: “the party with whom he contracts is not a sec- ond sentient being, but the natural order and regularity of things, which no more satisfy our desires without a sacrifice on our part than would another person.” (582)

p. 588: “The economic form of the value stands between two boundaries: on the one hand, the desire for the object, which attaches itself to the anticipated feeling of satisfaction from its possession and enjoyment; on the other hand, to this enjoyment itself, which, exactly considered, is not an economic act.”

p. 589: Argues that desire becomes an important economic (and arguably cultural) phenomenon only because satisfaction of desire cannot be immediate and should undergo struggle and diminution. – curiously, this is why Soviet people remember so well everything they had to buy.

p. 590: “Kant once summarized his Theory of Knowledge in the proposition: "The conditions of experience are at the same time the conditions of the objects of experience." By this he meant that the process which we call experience and the conceptions which constitute its contents or objects are subject to the selfsame laws of the reason. The objects can come into our experience, that is, be experienced by us, because they are conceptions in us; and the same energy which makes and defines the experience has also manifested itself in the structure of the objects.”

p. 593: why it is important that things are engaged in economic systems/networks: “The mere desire for an object does not lead to this valuation, since it finds in itself alone no measure. Only the comparison of desires, that is, the exchangeability of their objects, fixes each of the same as a value defined in accordance with its scale, that is, an economic value.”

The fact that any particular object is desired is the driving force of its economic value, but the desire and economic value do not engage into a direct cause-and-effect relationship: there is a whole chain of intermediaries (the system of economy) between them (p. 594): “It is always the relation of the desires to each other, realized in exchange, which makes their objects economic values.” (599)

Simmel ends by discussing the role of scarcity in the establishment of value – might be very relevant for the role of commodities in late Soviet history. Things are so valuable because they are so scarce. Since they are scarce, their values increases – and the Soviet Union becomes a very materialistic (but not in the Marxist meaning of this term) society.