v

WHAT DO PICTURES WANT? 29

IiI ious attitude toward images, one that if taken seriously would return us
Iti

prnctices that most modern, enlightened

1110

idolatry, and animism.' These are people regard with suspicion as primitive, psychtic, or ch ildis h in their traditional forms (the worship of practices like totemism, fetishism,

terial objects; the treating of inanimate objects like dolls as if they were tlive) and as pathological symptoms in their modern manifestations (feI shism either of commodities or of neurotic perversion).

2 What Do Pictures Want?

ictu ' P, res m recent literature about visual k een mterpref d h ' ,now what pictures mean and what the rve an r etorica], We want to signs and symbols, what sort of pow th y ~o: how they communicate as y and behavior, When the quest' fedr ,e , ave to effect human emotion th ron o eSlre ISrai d ' , e producers or consumers of i ,lse ,lt IS usually located in , Images, with th ' presslOn of the artist's d ' e pICture treated as an e esire or as a mech ' xthe beholder, In this chap ter I'd lik ' arusrn for e1iciting the desires of th ' l e to shift the 1 ' emselves, and ask what pict ' ocatlOn of desire to images ures want This ' mean an abandonment of i t " questlOn certainly does not h m erpretIve and h t 'al' ope, make the question ofpict '1 ' .r e one issues, but it will I I diff ona meanmg a d ' l erent, It will also help us gras th fu n power appear somewhat other disciplines that isso t' p e nd~mental shift in art history and d h' me lm es called VISU1 1 an w ICh I have associated with ' , a cu ture or visual studies , 11 a plctonal t 'b ' mte ectual culture, urn m oth popular and elite The dominant questions about

l'm also quite aware that the question may seem like a tasteless appropriation of an inquiry that is properly reserved for other people, particuIii rly those classes of people who have been the objects of discrimination, vi timized by prejudicial images- "profiled" in stereotype and caricature.
'I'hc question echoes the whole investigation

culture and art his tory have b

into the desire of the abject or

rlowncast Other, the minority or subaltern that has been so central to the
\I .velopment of modern studies in gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.' "What

do s the black man want?" is the question raised by Franz Fanon, risking
th reification of manhood and negritude in a single sentence.' "What do wornen want?" is the question Freud found himself unable to answer,"
Women and people of color have struggled to speak directly to these ques-

tions, to articulate accounts of their own desire. It is hard to imagine how

pi tures might do the same, or how any inquiry of this sort could be more ihan a kind of disingenuous or (at best) unconscious ventriloquism, as if I~d Bergen were to ask Charlie McCarthy, "What do puppets want?" 'ar

To sa~e time, I want to begin with the assu ' Suspendmg our disbeliefl'n th mptlOn that we are capable of e very prem ' f h ' tures want? I'm well aware that thi b' rses o t e questlOn, what do pic, , ISISa izarre pe h question. I m aware that it '1 "r aps even objectionable . mvo ves a sub f'" ' P rsomfication of inanimate obi 'h }.ec ~vlzmg of Images, a dubious jects, t at rt thrts with a re . ., , gresslVe, superchapter is a slightly modified a d d Want?" that appeared in In Vi:bl:o:au:~~~ versi~n of an essayentitled "What Do Pic(Sydney, Australia: Power Publications, l . odermsm a~d Maseulinity, ed. Terry Smith '''1' 's Really Want?'" O b 997). A shorterverslOn appeared "Wh . m eto er 77 (Summer ) as at Do Pieli rlunt, Homi Bhabha T I CI k A 1996 : 71-82. I would like to thank L I ' '. ar, nnette Mich I I . auren unc Anders Troelsen for their help in thi ki e son, ohn RICCO, Terry Smith, Joel Snyde' m mg about this knotty question. I,
J his lul'cS

ee chapter 7 of the present text for a detailed discussion of these concepts. . The transferability of minority and subaltern characteristics to images will of course II [I entral issue in what follows. One might begin with a reflection on Gayatri Spivak's 1,IIIIOllS question, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation oj Culture, 1'(1. ary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1988), 271-313. II 'r nn wer is no, an answerthat is echoed when images are treatedas (he silent or mute sign, II 'opable of speech, sound, and negation (in which case the answer to our question might Iw, pi wre want a voice, and a poetics of enunciation). The "mino rity" position ofthe im"tI is bcst scen in Gilles Deleuze's remarks on the way the poetic process introduces a "stutI -r" into language that "minorizes" it, producing "a language of images, resounding and col111'111 images," that "bore]s] holes' in language "by means of an ordinary silence, when the vIII' '$ $C III lO have died out." See Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. iinlth nnd Mi hncl A. reco (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997), 109, 159. l. P"lIn l'anon, Biack: kin, Whjte Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 8. IJ. l!rntNI Jon 'S rcports that Freud nce exclairned to Princess Marie Bonaparte, "Was will li I W~ h?" (Wh.lI does wQl110n wanti) cc Peter ay, The Freud Reader (New York:Norton, lIiHV), 1i711.
I.

WHAT

DO PICTURES

WANT?

\0

I M

tdll S

The literary treatment Nevertheless, I want to proceed as if . partly as a kind of thought . the question were worth aski I expenment si I 'n part y out of a conviction that this is a ' ~p y to see what happens, an we c~nnot help but ask, and that ther ~uestlOn we are already asking, th aged m this bythe precedents ofM e ore deserves analysis. I'm encour ern science of the social and th arx and F~eud, who both felt that a mod of fetishism and animi h e p~yc~ologlCal had to deal with th . thi s "m, t e subjectivit f b' e "SU mgs. Pictures are things that h b Y o o jects, the personhood o personhood and animation: they ::i:i:: marked ~ith all the stigmata O they speak to us, sometimes liter 11 o~h physical and virtual bodics: back at u, silently mo" a "gulf u~b~i~ometun" figuratively; o, they 100; just a surface but a facethat face s the be~:~:y lang~age.6 They present not treat the personified subj ectifi d . er. While Marx and Freud bot h subi .' e , animated obi . jectmg their respective fetishes t . ject with deep suspicion energy is spent in detailing the o iconoclastic critique, much of their d d' processes by whi h h . uce m human experience. And it's lC ~ e life of objects is procase at least, .t~ere is any real prospect o~'~;:~ .qu~stlOn whether, in Freud's g My o,:n po.sltlOn is that the subjectivized .m the n:alady of fetishism.' other IS an incurable symptom d h ' animated object in some form O" a .d ' an t at Mar dF ' s gUl ~s to the understanding of this s x an reud are better treated formation of it into less pathologiCalY;Pto~ and perhaps to som e transstuck with our magical prem d ' ~magmg forms. In short we ar . ' o ern attitud t ' pictures, and our task is not to ove . es oward objects, especially come them, to work through their svmpr t these attitudes but to understand p omatology.

of pictures is, of course, quite unabashed

in its

\ 1,1 'bration of their uncanny personhood and vitality, perhaps because the I I .rary image does not have to be faced directly, but is distanced by the sec1\lldary mediation oflanguage. Magic portraits, masks, and mirrors, living and tradiIlllues, and haunted houses are everywhere in both modern

I l)I1alliterary narratives, and the aura of these imaginary images seeps into 8 I olh professional and popular attitudes toward real pictures. Art historiins may "know" that the pictures they study are only material objects that Ill\vebeen marked with colors and shapes, but they frequently talk and act
IN if pictures had feeling, will, consciousness, agency, and desire." Everyone I n ws that a photograph of their mothet is not alive, but they will still be
1

'Iuctant to deface or destroy it. No modern,

rational,

secular person

Ih inks that pictures are to be treated like persons, but we always seern to be willing to make exceptions for special cases And this attitude is not confined to valuable artworks or pictures that

hnve perso

l'"

significance. Every advertising executive knowe that sorne nal mages, to use the trade jargon, "have legs" -that is, they seem to have a sur-

I lmpaign,

ing cop.city to genecate new directions and ,u,p",ing twists in an ad as if they had an intelligence and purposiveness of theif own. When Moses demands that Aaron explain the making of the golden calf,

A, ron says that he merely threw the Israelites' gold jewelry into the fire "and this calf came out" (Exod. 32:23 (KJV1), as is ifwere a self-created auto-

;~:~.::~:;'W""' " is,~o"' pm::: ~:."::::o o,wha

"

. 5. In saying that pictures have some of gmg the question of what a p erson IS Whatev features of personhood ' of course, I am beg . the . l h

ch" question, ;, w d as well as represent them. This d' . . it possible for pictures to imo.r p~r-sonare(to "sound through") whi h iscussion might start from the origin ofth as icornc . figur~s and as megaphones in Greekroots the figu re o f t h e person in the masks usede ' IC tra ma fe ; denfve their characteristic features from im gedY'k~ersons and personalities, in short a 6 I rom persons. ures age-ma mg as much as pictures d'enve t hei ' . Cif . am quotmg here John Ber er's re ':hy Look at Animals," in About ;okin mark on the gaze of the ani mai in his elassie . II1Ismatter, see my "L 00 k.mg at Animals g(New York: Pantheon Book)S,1980 ,3 For mor O . essay, 1. Lo ki " .. F ,. mversrty of licago Press, 1994), 3 9-44 . o mg, m Picture Theory (Chicago' . U . n
2

willhave,;

8. Magical pictures and animated objects are an especially salient feature of the ninelt '11Ih-century European novel, appearing in the pages of Balzac, the Brontes, Edgar Allan Po " Henry James, and of course throughout the gothic novel. See Theodore Ziolkowski, DisI'" '/Ianted Images: ALiterary lconology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).It's liSi r the encounter with and destruction of traditional or premodern "fetishistic" societies pmduced a post_Enlightenl11ent resurgence of subjectivized objects in Victorian domestic p\1,es.The fuli docul11entation of the trope of the personified . and "living" work of art in

feti r. 7. reud s discussion of " ISh'isrn beg' ms b y notmg that the fe . h . . ;llI"lorysymptom d' lsrn' (I 27)' ,an that his patients rarely corne to h i111 '1 tis IS a notoriously sot! , 111 tandard Edition oj h . Wit 1 ornplaints about i ":,' don: Ilogorth PI' ss "l ,2J:15 -57.t e Complete PS)lrlllllfl~il'lll Work .r Ignll/lld . L I Ilsh "I ") ,OJ "'n'IIr/(l.ulI 2

W'SI 1'11 art-historical discourse would require a separate essay. Such an essay migh! begin wlIh o l ok at the status ofthe art object in the three canonical "fathers" ofart history, Vasari, ical Win klmann, and Hegel.lt would find, 1suspect, that, the progressive and teleolog narIIIIiv 's or westero art are not (as is so often suggested) focused primarily on the conquest of IpP '1\I'on ; \\lKIvisuol realism, as n the qu suon ofhow, in Vasari's terms, "liveliness" and "I\I\II)),\IIOII"(\I"IOb infu cdinIO\h'o\)j' I. Win k Imann's treatment ofartistic media as 11\'1 Il\lh -lr OWIIhislol"i ol LI 'v 'IOp"I '111,IIIHlhl d'$ ription ofthe Apollo Belvedere as an 'n\ n oh \'\ I II hllllll'tllvillt 11,,11\11111011111\1\ \11 ~P\'I \ 1101' nlO \1Py molio figure, a statue II \1111\ i III\\1 \11\\1\ 1 \ " Wllllld Iw II 1'1111 ,,11m \I II 1\1li lIII I Ily. II w\Illlt! \ \ 't'> 'I'R tr olm I1tof the 1\1 1 I 0111"\ I 11111111tI 11lIIf\ \11\\\111\III VI.! "\1111111'\ 11111\ \ \ Id III!' P dl\llll!'

I MA

es
WHAT DO PICTURES WANT?

33

u:aton.1OE~ident1ysome idols have legs too." The idea that images have a kI.nd,of social or psychol~gical power of their own is, in fact, the reigning cliche of conteu:porary visual culture. The c1aimthat we live in a society of spectac1e,~~r~elllance, and simulacra is not merely an insight of advanced cultural cnncism, a sports and advertising icon like Andre Agassi can say ~hat "image is .everything," and be understood as speaking not only about ~magesbut for images, as someone who was himself seen as "nothing but an Image." There is n~ difficulty, then, in demonstrating that the idea of the personhood of pictures (or, at minimum, their animism) is just as alive in the modern world as itwas in traditional societies. The difficulty is in knowing w~at ~o say next: How are traditional attitudes toward images-idolatry, fetishism, totemlsm-refunctioned in modern societies? Is our task as cultural critics to demystify these images, to smash the modern idols, to expose the fetishes that enslave people? Is it to discriminate between true and false, he~lthy and sick, pure and impure, good and evil images? Are images the terram on which political struggle should be waged, the site on which a new ethics is to be articulated? . There is a strong temptation to answer these questions with a resoundmg yes, an~.to t~ke the critique of visual culture as a straightforward strat~gy of political mte~ventio~. This sort of criticism proceeds by exposing Images as agents. of ldeol~glCal manipulation and actual human damage. At one extreme lS the clajm of legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon that ~ornography is not just a representation of violence toward and degradatl~n of women ~ut an act of violent degradation, and that pornographic plCtures-espeClally photographic and cinematic images-are themselves agents ~f violenc~.1.2 her.e.arealso the fami1iar and less controversial arguT ments m the political cntique of visual culture: that Hollywood cinema constructs women as objects of the "male gaze"; that the uillettered masse
10. Pier Bori notes that the "seIf-ereating" partofthe
rnto an,ldol

are manipulated by the images of visual media and popular culture; that people of color are subject to graphic stereotyp es and racist visual discrimination; that art museums are a kind ofhybrid form of religious tempIe and bank in which c;pmmodity fetishes are dispIayed for rituals of public ven.ration that are designed to produce surplus aesthetic and economic value. I want to say that all these arguments have some truth to them (in fact, l've mad e many of them myself), but also that there is something radically unsatisfactory about them. Perhaps the most obvious problem is that the ritical exposure and demolition of the nefarious power of images is both asyand ineffectual. Pictures are a popular political antagonist because one an take a tough stand on them, and yet, at the end of the day, everything remains pretty much the same." Scopic regimes can be overturned repeatdly without any visible effect on either visual or political cultur~. I~ M~cKinnon's case, the brilliance, passion, and futility of this enterpnse lSquite vident. Are the energies of a progressive, humane politics that seeks social and economic justice really well spent on a campaign to stamp out pomography? Or is this at best a mere symptom of political frustra~ion, ~t worst.a r al diversion of progressive political energy into collaboration with dubi(lUS forms of political reaction? Or even better, is MacKinnon's treatment of images as if they had agency a kin d of testimony to the incorrigi~l~ charI ter of our tendency to personify and animate images? Could political fuIility lead us toward iconological insight? In any event, it may be time to rein in our notions of the political stakes i II a critique of visual culture, and to scale down the rhetoric of the "power () images."Images are certainly not powerless, but they may be a lot weaker Ihan we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of lh ir power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what p i tures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model ?f the dominant power to be opposed, to the model ofthe subaltern to be interro ated or (better ) to be invited to speak. If the power of images is like the
I . The most egregious example of this shadow politics is the industry of psychologieal

aeeount of the making of the cal f was a crucial ofthe Iewish people) by the chur into the li re as "turned h the gold thrown

exe~lpation as ifthe

of Aaron (and the eondemnation lire imitated [the people's] decision"

:3thers. :vraeanus

the Great, for instance, deseribes

holar s Press, 1990], 19).

II. I'

(n d, 'i11C

o/den CalfrAtlanto:
I"

II'Rllng d signed to show that video games are the eausal agent in youth violenee. Sup~orted lIy pol iti al inrerests that would prefer an ieonie, "cultural"
liiI' 11-t ual

'Ilon ph nom

wings. My colleague Wu Hung tells m' I" II /I non in hinese leg nds.

1111lillllI'N ol' III/ddho w

om-

/~' ~r.:' ,olh .rinc ~o Kinnon, FClI/h,/III/ (111/1111,/'/" ,/(1 1111I1" "/11', Ity I r ,~N, II H7), Np' '/olly pp. 17 7\ IIlId III I I

MA:

l hu v

lI'd

lJnlvl"

seapegoat to som~ attention to instrurnents of violence, namely guliS, enormous amounts of public money are p -1/1 nnnually to support "re earch" (sic) on the impaet ofvideo games. For more details see IIltp:/I ulturulpoli y.u hi ago. du/news_evcnts.html#conffor an account of"The Arts and Ililllllt,illll'
111

Puhli

I.if 200': 'Plnying by lhc Rul s: The 'n 'h 'Id

lit

ultural

Policy Challenges

of

V tlI'" (:IIIIH' ,'"

II ('Ol/C-,'

th . lJnlvl'l

Ily of' ,hl 'I' o

tobcr 26-27, 2001.

\ 34 IMAGES

WHAT DO PICTURES

WANT?

35

of force. Inso power of the weak, that may be wh their . . y to make up for their actual impot:nce wdeslre " .correspondingl strong:

~e stronger than they actually are in order te as. cntics may want pictures to III opposing, exposing, or praising th o glve ourselves a sense of power t The subaltern model of the oi l d' l e pictur em. the oth h d on ua la ectics of power and d . .' er an ,opens up the acF fi esire III our relatio .h anon re ects on negritude h d 'b' ns wit pictures. When th at lShurled in the immedi ' e f escn es rt a s a " corporeal malediction" . h' B h iacy o t e visual en co " ut t e construction of the racial and' unter, Look, a Negro.":" ercise of the picture as a tech . frdaclst stereotyp e is not a simple exd bl b' mque o ominatio It i h ou e ind that afflicts both th b' n. lS t e knotting of a l ex o f desi and hatred 15 Th e su ject and the obiJec t o f racism in a com. esire ul' . e oc ar viole f' P two, rending and rendering it Slo lt nce o racism splits its object in . mu aneously hy . ibl an o ject of, in Fanon's wo d "b .. perV1Sl e and invisible 16 .b r s, a omination" d" ' nation and adoration are precisely th t .n an adoration."" Abomiin the Bible: it is because the .d l' id erms m which idolatry is excoriated th . l o lS a ored that it b e iconophobe." The idol lik h must e abominated by h' d ' e t e black man . b h d s lppe ,reviled for being a n' ,1S ot espised and wors onentity, a slave and b d upernatural power. If idolat . h ,eare as an alien and k ry lS t e most d . b nown to visual culture, it is aremark bl ra.matlC orm of image power a y ambivalent and ambiguous kind
14. Fanon, "The Fact ofBlackness," in Black Ski . 15. For a subtle analysis of thi d bl b' Skin, Whlte Masks, 109 Stereot ype, D'" s ou e ind, see Horn' I Bh a bh a, " The Other Question: iscrimination and the D' (New Y, k R outledge, 1994), 66-84. iscourse of Coloniali ism,". m The Location of Culture . or: . 16. Ralph ElIison's elassie novel, The In .. IS beca~se the invisible man is hYPervisibleV:~~I~:an, renders this paradox most vividly: it 17. To us, the man who adores the N . ~n.ot~er sense) he is invisible. (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks , 8) . egro IS as sick as the man who abominates h'Im " 18. See, for instance, the descri tion . n ians, and Chemosh the abominatfon Of~ th~ Ido~ of Ash~oreth, "the abomination
t lon

as visuality and visual culture are infected by a kind of far "guilt by association" with idolatry and the evil eye of racism. it is no wonder that intellectual historian Martin Jay can think S)f the "eye" itself as something that is1repeatedly "cast down' (or plucked out) in Western culture, and vision as something that has been repeatedly subjected to "denigration:'19 lf pictures are persons, then, they are colored or marked persens, and the scandal of the purely white or purely black canvas, the blank, unmarked surface, presents quite a different face. As for the gender of pictures, it's elear that the "default" position of images is feminine, "constructing spectatorship;' in art historian Norman Bryson's words, "around an opposition between woman as image and man 20 as the bearer of the look" -not images oj women, but images as women. The question ofwhat pictures want, then. is inseparable from the question of what women want. Long before Freud, Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" staged a narrative around the question, "What is it that women most desire?" This question is posed to a knight who has been found guilty of raping a lady of the court, and who is given a one-year reprieve on his death sentence to go in quest ofthe right answer. Ifhe returns with the wrong answer, the death sentence will be carried out. The knight hears many wrong answers from the women he interviews-money, reputation, love. b eaut y, fine elothes, lust abed, many admirers. The right answer turns out to be , maistrye, a complex middle-English term that equivocates between "mastery" by right or consent, and the power that goes with superior strength or cunning.21 The official moral of Chaucer's tale is that consensual, freely given master y is best, but Chaucer's narrator, the cynical and worldly Wife of Bath, knows that women want (that is, lack) power, and they will take whatever kind they can get. What is the moral for pictures? lf one could interview all the pictures one encounters in a year, what answers would they give? Surely, many of the pictures would give Chaucer's "wrong" answers: that is, pictures would want to be worth a lot of money; they would want to be admired and praised as .
19. See Martin [ay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration ofVision in Twentieth Century French

1~10~ltes" (2 Kings 23: 3KJV]), and Isaiah [ h' ~Ilcom the abomination ofthe Arnhall I fali down before a bl oc k off woodi" s a make the . .. . I . . Th r . residue of it an abo mina, senonary lays out the doubtful etymolo . "A' . e on me edition of the Oxford English cxplnined as ab homine, and explained as~:~a bf~mmable, regularly spelt abhominable, and t lo" of the animate image with b . Y om man, l ~ . , . easts IS I suspect . inhuman, b ClSt Iy.''' 'I'he n ssociais also a term regularly applied :0 "unc '~, crucia eatur ofpllllll'hd t/,'/llr\" AIIOIndnzburgol1lheidolasa" . lean ortaboo unlniul !llllllllhl S ' , I'. ', monstrous" Image prese t' ,111 111 \'\' .lI do (l1l1)111' humnn and nnim n I features in Tdols r' II I I n 1118 '1 hl. "1111111 II' "I 11111111111 VIII.,1. nul It~ I{' .cptlon," in ,'0/'14 r . I aru 1.11'III' I. t II11 II 11111111111111 III I '., "S'8 it: /"! i \ I II,~ .11/1/ "kir III II (1.1I IdolI: Plllllt/oll PI' 'o' ') 1,\.1/ / Iltl 1/1111111 liiI/ii III 1111'/111/1 1111 "s, 1\ 1)" I (I II, I
,",n 110"

::'1~~~ ii

of Sido-

Tlrollght (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press. 1993) :2.0. Norman Bryson, introduction to Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman nryson, Michael Ann Holly, on l Keith Moxey (Hanover, NH: University Press ofNew Englund. 1191\.),xxv. Th lossi dis lIssion f the gendering of image and gaze remains, of 'OIIl'S', \,1111'(\ lIlv .y's "VI~III,l PII-I' lIII' liII l NOl'l'olive inema;' Scree,116, no. 3 (1975): 6-18. M I, My lllllllk to) ,y ,,\ 1111'11 \1111 hll II li 'Ip wlth lh hOLI rinn notion of maistrye.

36 IMAGES
WHAT DO PICTURES WANT?

37

beautifuI; they would want to be adored b would want a kind of t Y many Iovers. But above all they . mas ery over the b h Id . Michael Fried summarizes paintin 's" . e o .er. Art hisronan and critic these terms: "a painting h d fi g pnmordlaI convention" in precisely . " a rst to attract the b h Id and fina11ytoenthrall the beh Id h . e o er, then to arrest . o er,t atlsapainf h d b . nng him to a halt in front of itself and hold . mg a t~ call to someone, unable to move "22 The . " hirn there as if spel1bound and . pamtmgs desire in h t' the beholder, to transiix or pa al h 'b s ort, IS to change p1aceswith . r yze t e eholder t . h' an Image for the gaze of the pictur . h .' urrung Im or her into effect." This effect is perhaps th le m w at mlght be called "the Medusa e c earest demo t . power of pictures and of women : d l ns ranon we have that the n IS mo e ed on h a model of both pictures and worn h . on.eanot er, and that this is trated.> The power they t. ~n t at IS ab)ect, mutilated, and caswan IS mamfested a l k We could no doubt elaborat th l' k s ac .not as possession. e e m age betw . and negritude much more fuH t ki een plCtures, femininity, y, a mg into account th '. su baltem status of images . t f o er vanatlOns on the . . III errns o other d l f tity, culturaI Iocation and even "d ~o e s o gender, sexuaI idenspeCleslentIty ( c . h desires ofpictures ' wer t e d I d suppose, tor mstance, that . e mo e e on the d' f' WIttgenstein mean in h' fi esires o ammaIs? What does . IS requent reference t . . sophlcal metaphors as "q' o certalll pervaslve philoueer plCtures"?) 24 B I to the model of Chaucer's qu t d '. ut want to tum now simply es an see what h 'f tures about their desires instead ofI ki appens I we question pic. 00 ng at them I or lllstruments of p ower. as veh'lCes of meaning I begin with a picture that wears its heart on it Sam" recruiting poster for the U S A d' s sIeeve,the famous "UncIe FIagg during World War I (fi ). Th~m.y es~gnedby James Montgomery . IS IS an Image wh d d esires seern absolutely cI g.t;7. ose emands if not " " ear, ocused on a determinate b' . you, that is, the young men of eli ibl c . . o ject: rt wants gr e age ror mlhtary service.25 The im22. Michael Fried, Absorption '980),92. a d Th

mediate aim of the picture appears to be a version of the Medusa effect: that

. . eatrzcalzty (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press,

1;01154

r h" ' ary . IS, owever ' ernphan ica IIy not "perverse" (w /'der. . r IC , even as It IS"strange" (seltsam) " ~rr). ce LudwigWitl'genstein Phi/ I' I or remarkable" (merkwllr_ l(lI'd: BusilBlo kw II, (953), 79-~0, 83~::. uca Jnvestigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombc ( x
tli
I ./' /) I nt ut IC /

. ee Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male H . (Fali 1983): 27-54 and my d' '. f ystena under Political Pressure," Representn_ , rscussion o Medusa in P" . 24 Queer in Wittgenstein's vocabul . h lcture Theory, 171-77.

s, it "hails" the viewer verbally and tries to transfix him with the directness uf its gaze and (its most wonderful pietorial feature) foreshortened pointIngfinger that single out the viewer, accusing, designating, and commandInghim. But the desire to transfix is onIy a transitary and momentary goal. 'I 'he longer range motive is to move and mobilize the beholder, to send him on to the "nearest recruiting station" and ultimately overseas to fight and possibly die for his country. SAfar, however, this is only a reading of what might be called the overt signs of positive desire. The gesture of the pointing ar beckoning hand is a ommon feature of the modern recruiting poster (fig. 8). To go any further I han this, we need to ask what the picture wants in terms oflack. Here the ontrast of the U.S.with the German recruiting poster is cIarifying. The latter is an image in which a young soldier hails his brothers, calis them to the brotherhood of honorable death in battIe. In contrast, Uncle Sam, as his name indicates, has a more tenuous, indirect relation to the potential reruit. He is an older man who lacks the youthful vigor for combat, and perhaps even more important, lacks the direct blood connection that a figure f the fatherland would evoke. He asks young men to go fight and die in a war in which neither he nor his sons will participate. There are no "sons" f UncIe Sam, only "real live nephews," as George M. Cohan put it; UncIe am himself is sterile, a kind of abstract, pasteboard figure who has no body, no blood, but who impersonates the nation and Ca11S other men's for sons to donate their bodies and their blood. It's only appropriate that he is a pietorial descendant ofBritish caricatures of"Yankee Doodle," a figure of ridicule that adorned the pages of Punch throughout the nineteenth cenlury. His ultimate ancestor is a real person, "Uncle Sam" Wilson, a supplier ofbeef to the U.S.Army during the War of 1812. One can imagine a scene in which the original prototype for Unde Sam is addressing not a group of young men but a herd of cattle about to be slaughtered. Small wonder that this image was so readily appropriated for parodie inversion in the figure of
val that demand hollows out within itself ... it is ... what is evoked by any demand beyond rhc n ci articulated in it" (Lee, Jacques Lacan [Amherst: University ofMassachusetts Press, 1991]' 8). ee also Slavoj Zizek, Leoking Awry ( ambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 134. The v rb "to wnnt" an, f COlJr$', Sil 'Sl finy of Ihs meanings (desire, demand, need), dej) 'J1dilll on rhe ontcxt. 7.it k /tlili polnl\'d illll lon1\' that it would be perverse to read Uncle SI' 111'1"1WIlI1I you" 1111 d "sll" yOlI" /111111'1 II 1111 "I 1111'" rxprc'ssion of d rnand or need. NoneIii 1" I w II 111(111)(' 'III 11I1itI/W 1'1'/Vc,., III P 11111('11 evhl

b ut "ganz natu
'
l

~, I 11111 invnkll1
JlIlllllhnll

SOli/'

I~ 1 ncnruan diSlinction 't' 1)/'()vH 'S" II '1,1' I I "d ' , " III 8 oSS' ,'.',

h "' II

betw
I

"

Sil 1511111 li h w

een d SII'V, (i(oll1f1nd,and I .

IN

II

'('(I

1111111 Il'd In Ih '/1111" II'

III IMA(

ns
WHAT DO PICTURES WANT?

39

(fi Y, 9),

arna" urging the young rnen of A

' menca to go to war against Ira

ne of racial masquerade

it promises. It is as if this masquerade

finally re-

So what does this picture want' A fi 11 ' the political unconscious ofa t: hU a,nalysls,would take us deep int na ion t at IS nom 11' , embodied abstraction an E l' h ma y lmagmed as a dis , ' n 19 tenment polity fI d ciples and not blood relatio h' d o aws an not rnen, prin old white rnen send you ns IpS, adn actua11y embodied as a place wher ng rnen an women of 11 (i proportionately high nurnb f 1 d araces mc1uding a dis this real and imagined nati er1o kC~ore people) to fight their wars, What ion ac s is mear b d' db it sends to obtain thern is a h 11 o ies an lood-and what o Owman ameats l' artist. The contemp orary mod 1 fi h' upp ier, or perhaps just an e or t e UncIe Sam t ' was James Montgomery Plagg h' li U pos er, as rt turns out, rmsetr, ncIe Sam' th lf the patriotic American artist ' t' 1d IS us a se -portrait of , m na iona rag rep d 'h' , hons of identical prints the s t f fi ili ' ro ucmg imself m mil , or o ert rty that ' 'l bl ' to artists The "d' b d' IS avai a e to Images and , ,. isern o imenr" ofhis mass- r d d' , by ItS concrete embodiment and 1 ' ~ o uce Image IScountered , ocatlOn as plcture26 ' l' mg stations (and the bod' fI' m re ation to recruitGiven thi b k ies o rea recruits) a11over the nation IS ac ground, you might think it ' any power or effectiveness at a11as "a wo~der that this poster had . a recrUltmg devic d' d ' be very difficult to know anyth] b h e, an m eed, it would mg a out t e real p f h ' one can describe however ' 't ,ower o t e Image, What , , IS l s constructlOn of d " , tasies of power and impote p h ' esire m relanon to fannce, er aps the Imag' b 1 bloodless sterility as well as 't '" e s su t e candor about its , l S ongms m comme d' bine to make it seem so ap' rce an cancature comSometimes the exp ,proPfnate a symbol of the United States, ression o a want signifi 1 k h to command or make dema d 'h es ac rat er than the power n s, as m t e Warner Bro ' of entertainer Al Jolsen fo 't' s, promotlOnal poster r l s movrs The Jazz Sin (fi ) gestures connote beseechin a dl' ger g, 10 , whose hand "M" g n p eading, decIarations of 1 fi amrny and an audience that is to be moved ove or a cruiting office What thi 't to the theater, not to the re, ISpIC ure wants, as distinct Er h' figure asks for, is a stable relati b om w at ItS depicted ron etween figure d marcating body Erom space ki fi l ' an ground, a way of de, s m rom c othmg th ' Erom its interior And thi h ' ' e extenor of the body , IS ISw at it carmot h f, h . and body image are dissolved 't h ave, or t e stigmata of ra C m o a s uttle of hifti bl spaces that "tlicker" before us lik h' ,s l mg ack-and-whit e t e cmematIC medium itself and th
26, The distinction

.Iuced to a fixation on the orifices and organs of the body as zones of indis(lnction, eyes, mouth, and hands fetishized as illuminated gateways beIween the invisiole and visible man, inner whiteness and outer blackness.
"I am black but O my soul is white,' says William Blake; but the windows

of the soul are triply inscribed as ocular, oral, and tactile in this image-an
uvitation to see, feel, and speak beyond the veil of racial difference, What

Ihe picture awakens our desire to see, as Jacques Lacan might put it, is exI tly what it carmot show, This impotence power it has." is what gives it whatever specific

Sometimes the disappearance of the object of visual desire in a picture Is a direct trace of the activity of generations of viewers, as in the Byzantine miniatur from the eleventh cen tury (fig, n). The figure ofChrist, like that

of UncIe Sam and Al Iolson, directly addresses the viewer, here with the v .rses from Psalm 77: "Give heed, O my people to my law; inclineyour ear
lo the words of my mouth," What is cIear from the physical evidence of the picture, however, is that ears have not been incIined to the words of the 111 uth so much as mouths have been pressed to the lips of the image, wearing awy its face to near oblivion, These are viewers who have folIowed the

idvice of Iohn of Damascus "to embrace [images] with the eyes, the lips, th heart.?" Like UncIe Sam, this icon is an image that wants the beholder's
I ody and blood and spirit; unlike UncIe Sam, it gives away its own body in in a kin d of pietorial reenactment of the eucharistic sacri.The defacement of the image is not a desecration but a sign of devoIi 11, a recirculation of the painted body in the body of the beholder,
(I

I h encounter,

ully associated with "vulgar" mo des of imaging-commercial

These sorts of direct expressions of pietorial desire are, of course, generadvertising Ind political ar religious propaganda, The picture as subaltern makes an ipp al ar issues a demand whose precise effectand power emerges in an incompounded of signs of positive desire and traces la kor impotence. Butwhat ofthe "work of art" proper, the aesthetic obI that

I .rsu bjective encounter

l)

j'
()

)11

is imply supposed to "be" in its autonomous beauty or sublimity? answ I' i pl' vided by Michael Fried, who argues that the emergence
rn art is precisely to be understood
rh i dinl

l110d

in terms of the negation

of racial stereotypes

ar
and

.,. POI 11\01" Oli

li s of blackface, and the animatlon

will be discussed

between the disembod' d . furrher in chapter 4. re ,lmmaterial

IIII(

11111'\' ,NI'I'

IH,,')\ ir 14,
12, no. 2 ,11111111111('1'111 \11 1011,

imag

:llId 111, on rete pi LlIJ"

J.t!, H('(, 'tO"('I'! H, N -lson, "Th I IS oursc oCI ()11$, 'l'h '11 nnd Now," Artflis/ory
(/11111 11111'1): 1.11

1111/1/ /11111 ~ MOIIIHIIi1kry FIGURE

Uncle Osama. Image provided courtesy of TomPaine.com, a project of the nonprofit Florence Fund.

ilIIlIll,

n 1-

urn, World War!.

NEAREST
FIGURE

RECRUITING

STATION

8
FIGURE 10

German recruiting poster, ca.

1915-16.

Warner Eros. poster of Al [olson for

Courtesyof Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

The Jazz Singer.

I'

I ~lfd II

F/GURE

11

Byzantine icon: Christ. IlIuminated manuscript, Psalter and New Testament (D,O, MS 3), fol. 39r. Byzantine Collection, Dumbarton Washington, De. Oaks,

renunciation of direct signs of desire. The process of pietorial seduction h admires is successful precisely in proportion to its indirectness, its seemin indifference to the beholder, its antitheatrical "absorption" in its own internal drama. The very special sort of pictures that enthrall him get what they want by seeming not to want anything, by pretending that they havc everything they need. Fried's discussions of Iean -Baptiste-Simon Chardi n's Soap Bubbles and Thodore Gericaults Raft oj the Medusa (figs. 12, 13) might be taken as exemplary here, and help us to see that it is not merely o question of what the figures in the pictures appear to want, the legible sign of desire that they convey. This desire may be enraptured and contemplative, as it is in Soap Bubbles, where the shimmering and trembling gl b that absorbs the figure becomes "a natural correlative for r hardin'sl own engrossment in the act of painting and a proleptic mir1'O,'il1l\ oC whnt h' trusted would be the absorption ofthe beholder b fol'(' tlu'llI\ lwi! work,"
,"G

. a Bubbles, ca. 1733.The Metropolitan Museum of Chardm, Sa h t Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, I'I W ntwonh Fund, 1949 (49.24). Photograp cour esy A , M ' d Louvre u,W J3 Theodore Gericault, Raftofthe Medusa, 1819 usee u NY , 1'" . M e Nationaux I Art Resource, . P~ris. I hotOBraph Runton des us
U n fi J2 Jcan-Baptiste-Slmeon

WHAT

DO PICTURES

WANT?

45

II

I ~I

(1\'

), II may be violent, as in Raft oj the Medusa, where the "strivings of the raft" are not simply to be understood in relation to its internal omposition and the sign ofthe rescue ship on the horizon, "but also bythe need to escape our gaze, to put an end to being beheld by us, to be rescued
n
'11 11the

from the ineluctable their sufferings.'?"

fact of a presence that threatens to theatricalize

even

The end point of this sort of pietorial desire is, I think, the purism of modernist abstraction, whose negation of the beholder's presence is articulated in theorist Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy, and displayed in its final reduction in the white paintings of the early Robert Rauschenberg, whose surfa ces the artist regarded as "hypersensitive membranes ... registering the slightest phenomenon on their blanched white
11\

skins.?" Abstract paintings are pictures that want not to be pictures, pictures that want to be liberated from image-making. But the desire not to show desire is, as Lacan reminds us, still a form of desire. The whole antitheatrical tradition reminds one again of the default feminization of the picture, which is treated as something that must awaken desire in the beholder while not disclosing any signs of desire ar even awareness that it is being beheld, as if the beholder were a voyeur at a keyhole. Barbara Kruger's photo collage "Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face" (fig. 14) speaks rather directly to this purist or puritanical account of picto rial desire. The IIIarbIe face in the picture, like the absorbed face of Chardin's boy with a bubble, is shown in profile, oblivious to the gaze of the spectator or the harsh beam oflight that rakes its features from above. The inwardness of the figure, its blank eyes and stony absence of expression, make it seem beyond desire, in that state of pure serenity we associate with classical beauty. But the verballabels glued onto the picture send an absolutely contrary message: "your gaz e hits the side of my face." If we read these words as spoken by the statue, the whole lo ok of the face suddenly changes, as if it were a living person who had just been turned to stone, and the spectator were in the Medusa position, casting her violent, baleful gaze up on the picture. But the placement and segmentation of the inscription

FIGURE

14

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face), 1981.Zindman/Fremont photography, Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, New York,

ift

aur and my) make the word seem

29. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 51, 154. 30. Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Caroline [ones, "Finishing S h( ol: John age and the Abstract Expressionist Ego," Critical InquirYl9, no. 4 (Sunuuer lilii l), (\'17,'I'hc n cgativc relationofabstractiontoWorringer'sconceptofel11pOl'hyl e 1'1111111111111111111 hupter II 11 ofthe present text. The trope ofthe painrcd surfu ~ (I~ II 1\ II '\ I II I 111\ I1I11'd 1\ rhe 1 ternperature-sensitive paintingsofB din ol'llsl!tIl'KI'" Mil l, \ lilii III li 111,111 '/1'111i1/1i1 and need-a ta Iii respons frorn lit' h 'hold\'I' IOItIIVI 1III I 1"11)1 I II, I

(l~Otto t:e~:i~~:~:b:~e ~~~::~:st:: ~emselves to the surface ofth~PhO~' a terna Th d "belong" alternately to the statue, the photograp , an tograph. e wor s . d tin is so conspicuously foreto the artist, whose labor. of cuttmg an pas d this as a straightforward d W for mstance, want to rea grounde. e may, lit' cs of the gaze, a female fi.gure complaining message ab?ut the gende; ~(~oIo~ism:' But the statue's gender is quite indeabout the violence of ma e d A d if the words belong to the photolerminate; it could be a Ga~y~e e' n ender are we to attribute to them? h raph or the whole composItlOn: w at g tible messages about its desire (it This picture sends at least three mcobmpa I, 't' 's indifferent to being seen). . 't d sn't want to e seen, I I , wants to be seen, I oesn i v . ibilit for the silent, stillImage. impossi ~ f kind /\b ve all , it wants to be heard-an fK er's Image comes rom a Lik the Al [olson poster, the ~ower o rug leaves the viewer in a sort of of ni k ring of alternate readings. one ~hat,cc . the beholder is ,' [ the face ofJ<ru) .r's abject/mdlUerent Image, . Iy~\ , n pnra d nd hailed as a hl looldtlll" us an expose voyeur a HimullO\1 Oli 'Iy au , 'Al) 150n'5 dir tly hailing imI ," S 1\"th\(11 ,1\ lonl,,'sl, M 'tIlI. \ W l(iH y, I I Hl I 'IH'S n ul'n\i 1 "Iion of th '1 'I"kl '11\11111'" \ \\11 I I "" P \fIl' plllll 1 , '

WHAT

DO PICTURES

WANT?

47

46 IMAGES

\ any picture, and this chapter is nothing more than a suggestion to try it desire of the silent, still image for voice an ' erally fulfilled by the technical h ' ~ monon-c-a demand quite So what do pictures want?c ~ra~~nstlcs of the cinematic image, drawn from this hasty survey?' e ere any general conclusions

lit

uut for yourself. What pictures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea

to b

nf visuality adequate to their ontology. Contemporarydiscussions

I ulture

ofvisual

My first thought is that, despite m o ' from questions of mea' d Y penmg gestu re of moving awa , mng an power to the ouesti , tmually circled back to th d question of desire, I have eon ' e proce ures of se 't' h r etonc. The question of h t ' rmo ICS, errneneutics, an h ' w a pictures want c t' l d t e mterpretation of signs AlI ' ,er ain y oes not eliminat , it accomplishes ' b l ' h target of interpretation l' h ' ISa su t e dislocation of th , ' a s Ig t modification in th ' pictures (and perhaps signs) th l e pictur we have o ' , emse ves." Th k ' , islocation are (1) assent to the c ' , e e,Ysto this modification/ d mated" beings, quasi-agents m konstJtutJve fiction of pictures as "ani, oc persons' and ( ) h tures not as sovereign subj e t d' " 2 t e construal of pi c s or isernbodied " b w ose bodies are marked with th ' spmts ut as subaltern s "h e stigmata of diff . oth as go-betweens" a d ' erence, and who function b , , n scapegoats m the s 'l fi Id ity, It s crucialto this strategie shift th ocia e ofhuman visualture with the desires of the t' I hat we not confuse the desire of the pic. ar ist, t e beholde picture, What pictures want is t th r, or even the figures in the , . no e same as the h rucate or the effect theyprod .' , message t ey commu, uce; it s not even the h want. Like people pictures m k same as w atthey saythey ' ay not now what th . e ped to recollect it through d' l . ey want; they have to be h lI co . . a la ogue with others. . uld have made this mquiry harder b l ' (pictures that want not b' ) y ookmg at abstract paintings e pictures or at gen h personhood emerges only as a "fil' " res suc as landscape where with the face as the primordi l b~gree, to use Lacan's expression." I begin . la o ject and surface f' , tooed vlsage to painted faces B t h . o mimesis, from the tat. u t e question of desire may be addressed
b 31. Ioel Snyder suggests that thi15 Shift o f a tten tion i d ' l 'b b etween rhetorie (the study of com " 15 esen a le by Aristotle's distinetion I ' mumcation of m' d g ana YSlsofthepropertiesofamadethin t ' ,eanm an effeets) and poeties (the eerned with a "made thing" or imitationg(t:eat~d as if it had a soul), Thus, the Poetics is eontragedy," a eoneeit that is further ness" of poetie creations ej b :ge y), an~ the plot is declared to be "the soul of insists on the "organie wholeand treats :h~::ted w~en A:lstotle

often seem distracted by a rhetoric of innovation and modernizailon. They want to update art history by playing catch-up with the text-

h ased disciplines and with the study of film and mass culture. They want to
-rase the distinctions between high and low culture and transform "the history of art into the history ofimages:' Theywant to "break" with art hisiory's supposed reliance on naive notions of"resemblance ar mimesis;' the uperstitio "naturai attitudes" toward pictures that seem sa difficult to us lamp out." They appeal to "semiotic" or "discursive" models of images ies that will reveal them as projections of ideology, technolog of dominali n to be resisted by clear-sighted lhe contrary,

critique-" It's not so much that this idea of visual culture is wrong or fruitless. On

it has produced a remarkable transformation in the sleepy nfmes of academic art history. But is that all we want? Or (rnore to the \ int) is that all that pictures want? The most far-reaching shift signaled by the search for an adequate concept of visual culture is its emphasis on the s cial field of the visual, the everyday processes oflooking at others and bej ng looked at. This complex field of visual reciprocity is not merely a byI r duct of social reality but actively constitutive of it. Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the "sign;' or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with lan'uage, not to be rurned into language. They want neither to be leveled into (\ "history of images" nor elevated into a "history of art," but to be seen 35 as mplex individuals occupying multiple subject positians and identities.

Iion

of the gaze as a "filigree" in landscape appears in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental 'ol1cepts o! Psychoana1ysis (New York: Norton, 1978), 101, On the urges of abstract painting, chapter 11of the present text, 33- ee Michael Taussig's critique "mcre" of commonplace assumptions about "naive mimesis"

~
liS

pying Ol' realistic representation

in Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge,

loguing naturai kinds, The question c u y o PO~tlC forms as if he were a biologist cataf ki , lor us now, obviously. i I I o ma mg, imitating, and organie' , ,15 W lat inpp '1l~ 10 I h .sc c ncepts , ism m an era of cyb I~ I neenng, For further thoughts on this u ' orgs, MI '1(' rl I I', nlld IW" li engi32, For a discussion of the ' ,q estion, see chapt r I IwllllY, animarion/personif ,I /I Lnnds np '; lsra I, Palc tine and th A ' 1 I n: Oli () IllId I'IJII lidIII, 1'" IIly "I hlly W ' ' ' c . 1111'1 on Wllth "I I ,),1, Mitcli '11, nd d, ( hi OU()' 'I I III , II ,11I,1",/" ,"/d "11\111'" d
, ,,' nlVl'l'~ Iyoll

"\I ),44-45, SUl11l11arizinghere the basic claims rnade by Bryson, Holly, and Moxey in their 4, I arn .~\I\()rilll imr

du ti n

10 Vislu,[

li/wre,

For furthel' diseussion

of the emergent

field of vi-

LI ,I '11\\111", S hOI l l' I b low, I ,i\ nol h 'I' woy l() plIllhll w()\lld

/) III NlIy II nt pi iures

do not want to be redueed to the l. but they might be open

\,'l\lI

\1111

Iy

11'11I1\11, 1",\\"1

\,

II \ 1''/ 1\ 1\ 111\ II" Y :lll'l,~inn subj

""11111'1'

III

I 'III

11111111' 110 ,

48 IMAGES

They want a hermeneutic that would return to the opening gesture of art historian Erwin Panofsky's iconology, before Panofsky elaborates his method ofinterpretation and compares the initial encounter with a picture to a meeting with "an acquaintance" who "greets me on the street by re moving his hat.":" What pictures want, then, is not to be interpreted, decoded, worshipped, smashed, exposed, or demystified by their beholders, or to enthrall their beholders. They may not even want to be granted subjectivity or personhood by well-meaning commentators who think that humanness is the greatest compliment they could pay to pictures. The desires of pictures may be inhuman or nonhuman, better modeled by figures of animals, machines, or cyborgs, or by even more basie images-what Erasmus Darwin called "the loves of plants." What pictures want in the last instance, then, is simply to be asked what they want, with the understanding that the answer may well be, nothing at all.

minate, rather than an O ready-made template four levels of iconolozir ..i:O...L..-I"'I] model that knows before:: or social cause), by hal . the encounter with a' street." The point, hov of art as the master ten:: to make the relauonali The: idea is to make vi',:::::~ analysis of pictures to tion the spectator pos,~.,....'7" "us" or from "them" 0:- i: demand/desire/need =--~ question: what does of erasure? 1ts blind r
I

Coda: Frequently Asked Questions

The following questions have been raised by a number of respondents to this chapter. I'm especially grateful to Charles Harrison, Lauren Berlant, Teresa de Lauretis, Terry Smith, Mary Kelly,Eric Santner, Arnold Davidson, Marina Grzinic, Geoffrey Harpham, Evonne Levy,Francoise Meltzer, and Ioel Snyder for their generous interventions.
1.

37. In Panofsky, "leon picture

ology: Panofsky, Althusser. -from a model of r ment, and (what rnight be Althusser's concept of the ga2e as

notion of in"""'~""--,"'-;.""

also James Elkins's intp~~--==--- 38. I'm thinking here ::....... "the communication

I find that when I try to apply the question, what do pictures want? to

off
-==-t

specific works oj art and images, I don't know where to start. How does one proceed to ask, much less answer, this question? No method is being offered

sity Press, 1993). See <fu'-a=;s%:I:!dffl art works as an allegoryi"IK-'~-

here. This might be thought of more as an invitation to a conversational opening or an improvisation in which the outcome is somewhat indeterto the "poetics of enunciation" that Julia Kristeva so cogently transferred on the centrality from literature University to

tober82 (Fali 1997): 1439, This might be seen zs sight that our language ~:...~ __ ,1iI picture," i.e. "we address a

oflntention

[New Hav mobile

C:
a;lC _

the visual arts in her elassie text, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia 1980). See especially "The Ethics of Linguistics," "Giotto's Ioy," on the mechanisms City, NY: Doubleday, Ideology: Panofsky, 36. Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography Althusser, of jouissance in the Assisi frescoes. and Iconology," discussion

Press,

an alarmingly

of poetry and poetics, and

alive" (10), My suggestiru: picture not just as an obi verbal/conceptual play ar tially) as a subject witb engage the picture's life now, but what did (and

in Meaning in the Visua/ Arts (Garden of this point, see my "Iconology epilogue to Reframing and

1955), 26. For further

~'
2.5

and the Scene of Recognition,"

the

=-

Renaissance: Visua/ Cu/ture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 292-300.

just what did the pictur -