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.