Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology by Mitchell W. J. T

Author:Mitchell, W. J. T.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

Resemblance

Difference

Poetry

Prose

Images

Words

Primitive

Modern

Obscure Images

Clear Images

What this table reveals, I suggest, is a curious reversal in the placement of the word-image distinction growing out of the initial ambivalence about the cognitive reliability of imagery: the realm of prose and discursive values turns out to be aligned with clear, distinct ideas or mental pictures, and the realm of poetry and fancy that proliferates these images seems to cancel itself out by producing images that cannot be seen.8

This reversal of roles is far from explicit in Locke’s writing, but it becomes quite unmistakable in the writing of a theorist such as Edmund Burke who wants to reassert the boundaries between texts and images, and who wants to defy the prevailing Lockean notion of mental images/ideas as the referents of words. Burke introduces his Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful by echoing Locke’s distinctions between wit and judgment:

The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect matter. . . . Hence it is, that men are much more naturally inclined to belief than to incredulity. And it is upon this principle that the most ignorant and barbarous nations have frequently excelled in similitudes, comparisons, metaphors, and allegories, who have been weak in distinguishing and sorting their ideas. And it is for a reason of this kind that Homer and the oriental writers, though very fond of similitudes, and though they often strike out such as are truly admirable, they seldom take care to have them exact; that is, they are taken with the general resemblance, they paint it strongly, and they take no notice of the difference which may be found between the things compared.9

The oriental, pictorial way of writing lacks, as Locke argued, focus and distinctness: it paints “strongly” but not “exactly.” By the end of his Enquiry, however, Burke will have carried Locke’s argument well beyond this point: the tendency of language to arouse obscure, confused images, or no images at all, will begin to seem normative. Obscurity and other antipictorial features will (at times) become the characteristics of language in general, not just of the poetic or primitive. “Words,” Burke will say (still following Locke), produce “three effects . . . in the mind of the hearer. The first is, the sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the thing signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing” (Enquiry, 166). But it will turn out that for Burke the pictorial effect is marginal, dispensable. Only “simple abstracts” such as “blue, green, hot, cold, and the like” are “capable of affecting all three of the purposes of words” (Enquiry, 166–67).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.