engleski

Introduction to “W.J.T. Mitchell's Image Theory”

The first aim of this book is to show that the “problems with visual studies” are exactly what Mitchell considers its principal accomplishments: the creation of turbulences on the borders of various established disciplines and its efforts to address the issue of their purported self-sufficiency. The second aim is to show that image science cannot base itself on a set of premises, no matter how reliable or trustworthy, in the expectation that it will remain intact over the course of time. It is not that Mitchell’s various interventions in the humanities and social sciences ever implied shortcomings in semiotics, psychoanalytical theory or gender studies per se, or that when these disciplines were applied to different objects he ever found them unworthy of enquiry ; it is just that Mitchell never believed any of them could stringently define what images are, what they do, let alone “what they want”. The third aim of the book is, therefore, to show how such a precarious discipline – as visual studies may probably be called – is in fact the least ideologically biased way that we have today to engage with images and with their multifaceted incarnations.

W.J.T. Mitchell, critical iconology, pictures, visual studies, image science,

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