Teorie della rappresentazione - III modulo

TEORIE DELLA RAPPRESENTAZIONE E DELL’IMMAGINE

Prof. Anna Caterina DALMASSO

A.A. 2019/2020

Unità C – The Life of Images Between Agency and Performativity

Lesson 1 Part I – What Images Do. “You Live and You Do Me Nothing”

The Unit C of the course will concentrate on idea that images are able to affect and event to transform

he beholder who observes them, triggering love, hate, desire or fear, and will focus in particular on the

notion of agency from a theoretical point of view. Since the end of the XIX century, and especially in the

last decades, it has become more and more common to refer to images as living beings. Sharing the same

theoretical effort contributions in different fields of image studies have affirmed the need to no longer

classify images as exclusively visual objects but to see them as living beings. But is the idea of life of

images just a metaphor, a manner of speaking, or really shall we attribute animation to inorganic objects

and even personhood to nonhuman entities? If we affirm that images are alive, one might wonder

whether this be considered a form of animistic belief. We will focus on these topics in order to unravel

these questions: what do images do and what do they do to us? How can we describe the specific agency

of images and is the very notion of agency adequate to describe the power of images? We will it put into

question an active role of images, especially with regard to contemporary image theories and we will try

to inscribe this approach as part of a broader trend in anthropology and human sciences in general that

can be traced back at least at the turn of the XX century. This tendency characterizes the work of art

historians, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers but also philosophers, neuroscientists and media

theorists, who sought to highline alternative ontological models and to overcome the dualism between

subject and object deeply rooted in our cultural tradition. But what brought turn of the century art

historians and more recently visual culture scholars and anthropologists to project ethnographic theories

of animistic practices on modern artwork and popular cultural pictures, by endowing inner images with

a semblance of liveness and animation? In different ways, scholars have so to highlight the capacity of

images to affect and to influence human reactions but also to stare back at half, and even to perform acts.

We will focus in particular on the notion of act, agency, interactivity, frequently used by theorists and scholars

to refer to the animation and the life of images or to the look images set on us and we will examine

whether images can be categorized as

actions and how.

We will start by going back to the very title

of this course: what images do to us. A

famous dictum by Aby Warburg says You

live and you do me nothing. This epigram was

used as a motto by Warburg on the first

page of his unpublished manuscript on

aesthetics originally titled Foundational

Fragments for Amnestic Psychology of Art and

1

written between 1888 and 1903. In this highly disparate collection of over 430 aphorisms, one of the

themes is the shifting relation between the experiencing subject and the object through the mediation of

the image. In Warburg’s statement, a human subject, specifically an art historian, addresses an object, and

more specifically an image, as if it were a living being. But, if the image is alive, why is it supposed to do

nothing? How much confidence can we be still up on this nothing? Is not the object status as a living

entity precisely what enables it to do something? Also, does not the very act of talking to an inert thing

empower at least with the agency of hearing? So, we may ask, to which entity refers this you in the

statement. Does the you refer to another subject or to an object? And, if it is an object, is it a physical

artifact or a two-dimensional image? Or, could it simply be anything that could eventually be perceived

as living, expressing a general perception of aliveness? In which sense the object lives? How can it be said

to be alive? Is it merely likely that is animated, but not actually living, endowed with a life of its own? In

fact, despite the apparently paratactive structure of the phrase you live and you do me nothing, the sentence

remains quite ambiguous, and this end in the middle, und in the original German text, could entirely

changed the meaning of the statement. Should this be interpreted as an opposite conjunction, as a

concessive or opposing conjunction, such as yet, but or even though?

In this case, we shall rephrase the English

translation of Warburg’s statement as

follows: you live and yet you do me nothing, you

live but you do me nothing, and so on. But,

once we accepted the liveliness of the

inorganic interlocutor of the art historian,

whatever meaning we decide to attribute

to this life, our attention now focus on the

second part of the phrase.

We are told that, even if the object appears

capable of doing things, it can essentially

do nothing, so, what would it be the object’s tentative action, the action that is denied to it here? The

very fact of the sentence, affirming this you, that is the image, cannot do anything to the speaker, seems

to suggest anything bad. This is at least the direction suggested by Warburg’s presupposition according

to Gombrich. In his translation, in fact, when the art historian evokes the passage in his volume devoted

to Warburg, he translates the passage you

live and you do me no harm or, we could say,

you live and do not harm me, which

presupposes that the only thing that an

object would do is to harm and not

something good.

The image is supposed to do something

negative and not just positive, but why

should we suppose images as threatening?

Aren’t images such essentially harmless? 2 How should we interpret this statement then,

could the subject’s denial be a form of exorcism

against all the things that objects can do against

the harm that they are capable of inflicting? And,

at the same time, would not this reputation

ultimately provoke a response by that

interlocutor, who is condemned to say or do

nothing? Maybe it is because, in order to

acknowledge that objects have life, they have to

knock us on the head and anesthetize us. In fact,

response to the vivification of objects is a

phobic response, a fearful reaction, caused by the objects intruding into the territory of the living, that

we are commonly used to refer only exclusively to animals and organic beings. So, the very idea of the

animation is associated with the type of menacing behavior on the part of the objects, the harm they do.

Such a dynamics is at the basis of the principle of animism described by Edward Taylor’s anthropological

study Primitive Culture (1871). Explaining that, if the animistic’s attitude perceives souls everywhere in

rivers, stones, trees, weapons and so forth, and if such entities are treated as living, intelligent beings, talk

to, propitiation, punished, this is due to the harm they do, which is reciprocated by ambivalent

performance by the afflicted subject. A principle which is at the basis of ritual and apotropaic beliefs.

On this topic, one of the most influential sources for Warburg was the work of animal psychologist Tito

Vignoli, especially his Myth and Science (1880). Following Vignoli, Warburg considers that in real life

animals and humans perceive everything that looks alive or merely moving as hostile potentially harmful.

But is this also the case of art? At least in the Western tradition, art allows us to have representations of

life in motion, that, as such, are not threatening. The subject is pacified by encountering living things

that, as they are depicted, are essentially harmless. An object represented in images loses the power to

affect its observer. It cannot affect them as it would do in a real encounter.

In the Western tradition, distancing can

even be considered as a condition of

possibility for the aesthetic experience.

This conception is at the basis of Kant’s

call for disinterestedness in the

appreciation of beauty and can even be in

traced back to Lucretius metaphor of the

shipwreck with spectator, at the beginning of

book two of his De Rerum Natura,

describing an observer who, looking at the shipwreck from afar, is pacified by encountering a living view

that is essentially harmless:

‹‹Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s

great tribulation; not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free

of them yourself is pleasant.›› 3 So, it is taking on this tradition that Warburg

adds in a note underneath his motto here lies the

idea of distancing. In fact, in Western art, the

animistic power that image is an artifact have

tribal cultures is obstructed, sublimated or

exorcized.

The image, that in itself is devoid of life, seems

to be alive. In so doing it gives visual form to

the threat and allows the viewer to conquer the

image instead of being threated by them.

Instead of being confronted with real life, the subject can rejoice in the liveliness of animated images. For

Warburg, the image offers precisely an intermediate realm that, by absorbing, inflecting or nullifying all

previous agencies, can mediate our communication with both subjects and objects. Warburg’s dictum is

a defensive response against the animistic properties of the object, the properties that we would tend to

attribute to inanimate things. Thus, Warburg’s sentence you live and you do me nothing has to be interpreted

also as a reassuring assertion that seeks to pacify the terror that would come from the animation of the

in animate. But is it true that images do nothing, that they do nothing to us, that they cannot harm us or

affect us, as long as despite their liveliness inanimation they remain inanimate beings. And, if so, in which

ways images may act on humans?

Lesson 1 Part II – What Images Do. Do Images Really Do Nothing? Are we really sure that, as according to

Warburg’s dictum, images do nothing? If

they do nothing, why do we feel the need

to destroy them or to protect them? Why

do we care so much for some of them? Is

this because of what they represent,

because of the living reality they evoke, or

because of their intrinsic features? The

amounts of money and energy nations and

states disbursed annually to the artworld

can be seen in the museums they erect and

supported within their borders, the

exhibits of their national treasures they send around the world. The tourists are productions they advertise

and the artists they glorify as they own. This suggests that some images at least occupy a central place in

the domestic and international politics of nations and states. In the entire history of human civilization,

images have often been attacked. In fact, aiming at an image we also try to reach its creator, or those who

worship it or simply care about it. This is why images have had and have today such a crucial role in

cultural conflicts throughout the world. The history of art and the history of images has known the rise

and the decline of the great iconoclastic movements. From the time of the Old Testament, rulers and

public have attempt do away with images and have assaulted specific paintings and sculptures. Everyone

can easily produce an example of an attacked image, everyone knows of at least one historical period in

4

which iconoclasm was legitimized. Either for political or theological reasons, people have smashed

images, or they have destroyed artworks which have roused their shame. In all of these cases, even if we

argue that it is because the image is a symbol of something else, we must assume that it is the image,

whether to agree to or lesser degree, that arouses the iconoclast to their gestures. Nevertheless, as Bruno

Latour has pointed out, we cannot line a distinction between iconoclasm, when there is a clear intent for

destruction or the demise of an image, and cases where their apparent destruction produces a more critical

gesture, in front of which there is an uncertainty about what is committed when an image from science,

religion or art is being smashed. This is what he calls Iconaclash.

So, if images did nothing, if they were powerless, why should they be such a big deal? And, in which ways

images may act upon humans? Certainly, whether positive or negative, they provoke a reaction. We can

also observe that, very often, those reactions are subject to repression, because they appear too

embarrassing, too rude or too uncultured, so that they could be understood as being primitive, either

because they entail a potential danger of images or because these reactions make us vulnerable and

exposed. For example, if we go to a picture gallery and

are in front of a nude painting, such as Titian’s

Venus of Urbino, we would probably tend to

appreciate and comment the forms, the

colours, handling and composition of the

painting. As David Freedberg suggested, even

though the sensuality of the picture can hardly

be denied, any possible response that has to do

with sexuality, with the love of looking and

with the projection of desire will be discarded

by an average museum visitor. But, however

much we intellectualize our response, there still remains a basic level of reaction that cuts across historical,

social and other contextual boundaries. This is the thesis developed by Freedberg in his book The Power

of Images. Of course, no one would claim that the modern beholder’s response is likely to be the same or

as strong as that of the XVI century viewer. The response of contemporary spectators is dulled, as a

result of familiarity both with Titian’s work and with erotic and pornographic images, especially since the

invention of technical reproduction. Modern beholders may no longer find the Venus of Urbino especially

rousing, not only because they have seen so many reproductions of it and many others like it, but because

sexual imagery can now go so much farther. Still, even now, with a picture like this we must repress a

great deal to avoid admitting to a certain scopophilia and sexual desire. It is not extravagantly hypothetical

to imagine how much more direct an appeal such a picture must have made to the sexual responses of

some XVI century beholders. In fact, since we have been schooled in a particular form of static criticism,

in front of a nude we suppress acknowledgement of the basic elements of cognition and appetite or admit

them only with difficulty. We refuse, or refuse to admit, those elements of response that may be more

openly evinced by people who are less schooled. But images drive may also arouse a totally different kind

of response: they can leave us cold, but they can also move us to tears.

5 In his book Pictures and Tears, the art

historian James Elkins tells the story of

paintings that have made people cry. For

example, Ernest Hemingway was reduced to

tears in the midst of a drinking bout, when a

painting by James Thurber caught his eyes.

Crying in front of a painting means crying at

nothing but colours. So, according to David

Freedberg, the power of images, their action,

can be measured, first of all, as far as they

have the power to elicit a reaction, to provoke a response in the observer, as far as they have an impact

and, literally, as much as metaphorically, move us. In different cultures, images are hold as able to

affect the viewer, or to have the power to act at

a distance on the human beings. In exotic as

much as in familiar cultural contexts, images can

consulate and even cure, or pardon sins. We

attribute to them religious, apotropaic or magic

power. This is true for ancient as much as for

contemporary visual culture. From the magic

powers that in different cultures are attributed

to voodoo dolls or the Renaissance belief that a

picture of a fair and naked person in the

bedroom will somehow improve the offspring

of those who will conceive in its presence, up to

modern examples, such as the horror movie The

Ring, in which a journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape, which seems to cause the death of

anyone one week to the day after they watched. These examples may sound superstitious, but some of

such behaviors toward the images are so rooted in our society and culture that we don’t even put them

into question. We do not find weird at all that someone kisses a sacred icon or a photograph of their dear

ones. But if for a moment we do not take for granted our social conventions and cultural beliefs, why

kiss an image at all? Looking at images, people are stimulated and moved by a sphere which inherently

consists of a bidimensional reality. 6 Despite we are simply staring at colours on a

flat surface, images make us believe in the

existence of what they depict. Looking at a

picture, we do not see spots of colour or paint

touches, but we do recognize things,

landscapes and subjects. How can some mere

paint touches on a flat surface affect us that

much? What power images have upon us? As

regards to moral sphere, pictures are believed

to have undefined function or, conversely,

they may have the power to deceive us.

For instance, in the XV century it was common

the belief that the exemplary beauty and

actions of what was represented on images

would somehow help assure similar qualities in

the young beholders, but in the same cultural

context images were also hold as potentially

dangerous. For example, to possess a picture

of someone may raise the will to possess the

person represented, with a shift from the

depicted body to the real, living body. As far as

they show or vehiculate negative paradigm, or

as they draw the beholder attention away from reality, images can raise worries and have the potential to

affect the viewers and especially the youngest viewers, with long term behavioral consequences.

Nowadays, for advertising and their clients, images are powerful tools, capable of persuading you to buy

something, go somewhere and be someone. To parents and educators, it is not a question whether images

do things, that is assumed. The question is whether the deeds of images are good or bad, harmful or not.

What of images of violence and pornography and the time-consuming relationship children dev