images and their agency

Paradoxes of Conflicts, 2016

Considering Jaspers' studies on the paradoxical nature of conflicts, I reflect on the capacity of communicative forms to provide an objective representation. In particular, my attention is devoted to the predicative intentionality of images (PII), namely the set of modalities by which an image represents. The level of accuracy of images is relevant also for a specific meaning of the ethics of communication, regarding the truthfulness of what is represented in a photograph. After an historical reconstruction of the several ways in which representation has been themed, I consider as a case study some pictures of allegedly hysterical patients, taken from the archive of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. My thesis is that, for an adequate analysis of images, a pragmatic interpretation is necessary, able to integrate the hermeneutical approach.

My heart since childhood has been brought up in the veneration of images, and a harmful fear has entered me which I would gladly rid myself of, and cannot … If I had not heard the spirit of God crying out against the idols, and not read his word, I would have thought thus: "I do not love images," "I do not fear images." But now I know how I stand in this matter in relation to God and the images, and how firmly and deeply images are seated in my heart. This paper is part of an ongoing recurrent interest I have with the phenomenon of presence and the ascription of agency to images and visual representations. Writing in the early Reformation, Andreas Karlstadt's admissions present a powerful instance of the pull of the idol, the representation endowed with agency and hence an object of worship. However, I am not going to offer a straightforward historical account of idolatry and iconoclasm in the Reformation. Rather, I wish to consider the methodological implications of the various attempts to provide an explanatory framework for this. I shall be ranging over a wider variety of materials and ideas, but I wish to start with the work of Hans Belting, who has constructed one of the most ambitious recent attempts to theorise the meaning of the image in a way that goes beyond the simple opposition of idol / artwork. In his book Bildanthropologie ('Anthropology of the Image'), with the subtitle Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft ('Essays towards a Science of the Image') Belting attempted to formulate a universal, trans--cultural, theory of the image. 1 It covered a large number of 1 Hans Belting, Bildanthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft ('Anthropology of the Image. Essays on a Science of the Image') (Munich, 2001). Delivered at: The Secret Lives of Artworks. University of Leiden, 25 June 2010.

Images, Imagini, Images. Journal of Visual and Cultural Studies ISSN 2247-7950, 2015

As the editor of (and one of the contributors to) the first two volumes of the Penser l'image series published by Les Presses du réel in their " Perceptions " collection, Emmanuel Alloa manages to assemble an unprecedented theoretical kaleidoscope, having in its invisible center a protean and fluid conception of the image. The metaphor is not too far-reached, if one sees the two anthologies-distanced only in time, not so much in substance-as " optical " devices serving to an imaginative examination (skopeō) of the beauty (kalos) of images (eidos). 'What do we think about when we think about images?' seems to be the key question that confines within the covers of the series a wide range of contemporary insights into an inexhaustible paradox: it becomes increasingly obvious that the proliferation of images grows in reverse proportion with our ability to provide a stable definition for it.

What shall we call an “image”? Is it that from which knowledge proceeds or that which anticipates knowledge? Is image something only able to be recognised as object of thinking or it shows per se, in its polysemy and equivocal constitution, a deep, still unexplored generative form of thinking? From the point of view of the understanding of the digital age, where we entered in, to a strong consideration of the new frontiers of science, knowledge, and philosophy and from here up to societal and cultural dimensions, the thinking of the image still remain an enigma. Since the ancient world, the philosophical antiquity from Plato to Aristotle has left this question as a legacy. This question has continued to pursue the history of thought: Islamic World and Christianity, Middle and Modern Age. It can be found massively in contemporary philosophy, culture studies, history of art and ideas. The aim of the international conference is, perhaps for the first time, to study and to explore in a genuine interdisciplinary approach the multiversal horizon of human imagery and, in particular its constructive, generative capacity of building a world-meaning. The international conference is organised on the behalf of the IEA of the University Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) in collaboration with the LESA, Laboratoire d’Études en Sciences des Arts (EA 3274) and the Research Group on the Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Image and Imaginary: Fausto Fraisopi, Professor at Freiburg University and Senior Research Fellow at IMéRA, Agnès Callu, Research HDR at the CNRS (LAP - Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS/CNRS, UMR 8177), Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Research Director at the CéSor (Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux EHESS) and Alexander Schnell, Professor for Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Director of the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology.

2020

This article addresses the power of images in three periods of 20th century history. The use of images, particularly of photography, during these periods became omnipresent, although there are many other examples of the power of images over the relevance of words: the sight of Phryne’s partially naked body, for instance, had a big impact in her trial in the 4th century. Two of the examples presented in this paper (Nazism and Stalinism) used images as an instrument of power. They aimed to present simultaneously a sense of heroism and of “normalization” in radical contrast to the brutality that left a decisive mark in history as one of the most tragic dark moments of the 20th century. On the other hand, under Stalin, photos and images were manipulated: erasing people in photos can be understood as a macabre allegory of their annihilation in real life. The efficacy in the re-construction of reality through the manipulation of photos seems to result from an illusional omnipotence, as if...

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2010

2021

Social Epistemology, 2019

The article takes Cornelius Castoriadis' concept of the 'political imaginary' as an invitation to reflect on the role of pictures in politics and in facilitating alternative policies. For this purpose, pictures are not understood as merely rhetorical or propagandistic representations of political statements, which are actually to be thought of independently of the particular picture. Instead, by means of their specific pictorial qualities, pictures also influence the ways politics are negotiated or pursued and, moreover, they can stimulate alternative forms of political thinking. In order to argue for this understanding of the politics of pictures, the article proceeds in three steps: a brief review of the research on political iconography is followed by thoughts on Jacques Rancière and his concept of the 'distribution of the sensible'. On this basis, an understanding of pictorial politics is finally sketched that asks for genuinely political potentials that are directly linked to the specific qualities of the image: its duality, its vagueness, and its temporality. The Political Imaginary and the Status of Pictures The discipline of art history seems not to be particularly well equipped to think about the political imaginary. When art historians come across this concept it is difficult for them to do justice to the notion in its full scope of meaning. Instead, theyand I am one of them-can't help but have in mind materially bound pictures that can be experienced by the senses and that have always accompanied political communication and actions. By doing so, art history tends to focus on the representational and symbolic functions that pictures can have in political communication. However, the notion of the political imaginary, as Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) conceived it, is of much more general and fundamental relevance. Castoriadis went far beyond the symbolic as well as linguistic and pictorial representations, introducing the imaginary as a fundamental concept that allows us to understand why sociality and society are possible at all. As this imaginary proves to be an unavoidable precondition of society, and at the same time, is conceived of as radically historical and mutable, it becomes necessary to conceptualize the imaginary in a dynamic way, and not merely analogous to the persistent, static representations of written language or pictorially materialized images. Therefore, it is not the single specific symbol or the individual, historically contingent representation, which makes both the (temporary) stability of society and social change comprehensible, but the unrelenting processes and practices of generating, transforming, suspending and dissolving symbols and concepts. These practices and processes are not based on stable structures or static reference systems, but on an indefinite, fluid 'mass' of potential references and meanings for which Castoriadis has coined the metaphorical notion of 'magma'. The 'magma' precedes representation and discourse like an 'unmarked space'. 1 Consequently, Castoriadis' concept of the imaginary is not confined to what he calls the 'actual imaginary', that is, the concretized imaginary which has emerged in a particular society at a given time. Instead, his notion also includes the vague 'radical imaginary' that may be comprehended as the 'elementary and irreducible capacity of evoking images' (Castoriadis 1987, 127). This understanding of the 'radical imaginary' implies that images and pictures, though by no means the paradigm of the imaginary, still play a more than marginal role in the processes and practices of the imaginary. As far as I can see, Castoriadis himself has not systematically thought about the relationship between the imaginary and images or pictures in the sense of materialized pictorial artefacts that address the sense of sight (Caumières 2014; Pechriggl 2011, 98). In view of the importance Castoriadis attaches to the fluidity of the still unformed 'magma', pictures may at first appear as solidified sediments, lacking precisely the dynamics that characterize the radical imaginary. At best, they would then be of interest as a quiet echo of the creativity and productivity of the imaginary, which only becomes available and tangible in these sediments. But pictures have nevertheless to be considered as part of the 'actual imaginary', because they contribute considerably to new imaginations and symbols, ideas and phantasms that shape society. In material pictures images are manifested and they, in turn, inspire new imaginings. Therefore, they cannot be ignored when we try to understand the 'political imaginary.'

The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice

This chapter explores the relationships between Buddhist devotees and figurative images, particularly regarding images of Shakyamuni, which Buddhists conceive as enlivened beings possessed with agency. Building on recent studies of miraculous images and consecration practices, this chapter describes some of the ways in which devotees venerate images, the agency attributed to images, and the methods by which images are invested with their powers. Finally, the history of image veneration and enlivenment is addressed; the author asks whether these practices can be considered core features of Buddhism from its earliest days, or if they were later additions to the spectrum of reverent activities.