Culture, Theory and Critique

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Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw

Emmanuel Alloa
To cite this article: Emmanuel Alloa (2015): Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw,
Culture, Theory and Critique, DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2015.1068127
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1068127

Published online: 01 Sep 2015.

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Culture, Theory and Critique, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1068127

Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw

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Emmanuel Alloa
Abstract In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a pictorial or iconic
turn. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was
describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather
calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of
logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has
two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the pictorial/iconic
turn, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and
German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by
the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that image sciences are easy by advocating
for three turns of the screw to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the
indicative to the subjunctive.

The image, a new paradigm?

Within a decade, they had completely disappeared from the urban scape of
New York: I am referring to the characteristic yellow WALK/DONT
WALK traffic lights, familiar to anyone who has ever been exploring
New York by foot, but also beyond, given its bold presence in so many
movie pictures and TV series. Introduced in the 1950s, the sturdy boxes
were recognisable from afar, flashing their unambiguous message to the
metropolitan rambler. To walk or not to walk: the Manichean imperative left
little space for questioning and exerted a form of domineering coercion on
any pedestrians mind. Not on every pedestrians mind, however, as it eventually became clear. Among the crowds of global visitors to the city, many
who were unfamiliar with English were found to be unable to understand
the message, however unmistakeable it had first seemed to the locals mind.
In the late 1990s, the authorities decided upon a major shift, replacing the
old boxes with newly designed ones, where the text lines would be replaced by
pictographs. Starting in 1999 and over the next decade, all the old boxes were
slowly but firmly substituted by a new kind of traffic lights where the WALK
tag would be traded for a striding figure in profile, while the DONT WALK
tag would be turned into a hand turned palm-forward, reminiscent of a

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

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Emmanuel Alloa

policemans hand directing traffic. Today, it is said that in some remote parts of
Queens, a couple of relics of the old age are still to be found, but that otherwise,
the deep shift from text to pictographs, from language to image, is complete
(Figure 1).
The change in New Yorks traffic light policies was not necessary for one
to understand that deep modifications have lately been ongoing in societys
modes of communication. Many have claimed that we now live in a visual
age, in a time thoroughly designed and shaped by images. But as often
happens, the uncontested consensus hides a reality which is far less obvious
than it seems. W.J.T. Mitchell lucidly observed that today, images have a
status that oscillates strangely between that of a paradigm and that of an
anomaly (Mitchell 1994: 13). On the one hand, it would seem indisputable
that our lives are now determined by visuality and its screens to a degree
that was unimaginable until recently. On the other hand, contemporary thinking (philosophy, theory, critique) still seems to be imperfectly armed for confronting a reality that cannot be interpreted on the basis of a text or (to say
the least) understood as one of its extensions.
The voices of W.J.T. Mitchell in America and Gottfried Boehm in Europe
played a decisive role in revealing the difference between this phenomenon
and the methodologies available for describing it (see their correspondence
in Boehm and Mitchell 2009. The differences in their approaches have been
highlighted by Moxey 2008; Curtis 2010). Nevertheless, it is this very difference that makes the heuristic value of the so-called iconic turn (Boehm) or
pictorial turn (Mitchell) uncertain. When the Boehm and Mitchell coined
their respective formulas in slightly different and independent ways, it
remained unclear if this diagnosis referred to a change of society or if it
were a merely epistemological turn within the thinking process; in other
words, if this turn regarded the exponential increase in forms of visual communication that is, the emergence of new objects or a hermeneutic turn that
is, a change in the way of thinking and seeing. If in fact the iconic turn can be
exemplified in a technological change that produces an increase of visual

Figure 1. LED Pedestrian Traffic Lights, New York. Credit: E. Alloa.

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Iconic Turn

artefacts but does not modify the theory that describes them, the image can
have no other status than that of an anomaly; a sort of hybrid object, vitiated
by a constitutive hubris that impedes its particular placement within the consecrated forms of knowledge, halfway between an ontology of the object and a
semiotics of the sign. Yet, what are the conditions that need to be met it
would be tempting to ask Mitchell and Boehm in order to truly speak of a
paradigm shift? On what basis can we affirm that an image is not a supplementary object, but rather becomes a vector, a medium or a decisive operator for our contemporary practices and for our forms of knowledge?
The difference that has just been described does not appear to be specific
to the question of images, but rather is characteristic of any paradigm shift.
The so-called linguistic turn, whose name is now associated with Richard
Rorty and his edited volume (Rorty 1967), certainly doesnt refer to the emergence of new forms of language or a transformation within language, but
rather an unprecedented awareness of the fact that the linguistic dimension
is omnipresent at every level of social life and that we cannot seriously
think of a kind of social life deprived of any linguistic dimension. Yet epistemic
turns paradigm shifts, as Thomas S. Kuhn called them can have different
ranges: on a restricted scale, the epistemic turn concerns the emergence of a
new science or discipline, while on a broad scale, it refers to a change in viewpoint, where all objects observed by the sciences in the past are now considered from a new perspective. In this sense, the linguistic turn can be
considered from the point of view of a differentiation within disciplines
(and the emergence of linguistics as a new specific field of investigation)
while the anthropological turn, which took place about a century and a half
earlier brought about anthropology as a new discipline. Yet, it can also be
asserted that the true range of the anthropological turn is missed if reduced to
the emergence of a new discipline. This was Foucaults argument: the emergence of the human as a new episteme is not so much about the emergence
of a new object; human sciences are not sciences that have humans as their
object, but rather sciences that consider all other objects from an anthropological point of view, through the human vector so speak. In a similar fashion, the
linguistic turn reaches well beyond the simple inauguration of a new object of
study, whose specificity has not yet been perceived, but rather constitutes a
metatheory or a metaphilosophy (Rorty 1967: 1), as it compels us to reflect
on the medium of each reflection.
Today, we are faced with some urgent questions: Is it possible to think in a
non-anthropological manner (this is the question posed today by what is
known as speculative realism)? Is it possible to think on the basis of a
grammar different from that of propositional language? Is an image really
more than a simple object of some regional discipline? Can the image,
instead of being conceived as a reduplication of the world, be thought of as
an access to the world and as a medium of the world? Is there something like a
visual thinking or, more exactly, a thinking with and according to images?
Within the humanities, a growing number of voices tend to give a positive
answer to these questions. Admittedly, however, this overall sea-change has
not yet produced a general institutional consensus, with some minor exceptions. While in the US new curricula of visual culture studies are being
implemented, the German-speaking world has experimented with the

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introduction of a new science of images, the Bildwissenschaft (see for instance

Sachs-Hombach 2005). While in the American context, it is the notion of visual
culture which has been heavily contested for its various implications,
especially the abolition of the difference between art and visuality (see
the famous October Visual Culture Questionnaire (1996); see also Elkins
et al. 2015). In the German context, it is not so much the levelling of artistic
and non-artistic images which has raised objections, but the institutionalisation of the new discipline.
The first response that comes to mind is that such a discipline has of
course already been created, and even more than once. In the twentieth
century, the founding of a science of images an iconology is associated
with the name Erwin Panofsky (Bredekamp 2003). Yet, one needed to wait till
1967 (a preface to the French edition of Iconography and Iconology) for Panofsky
to acknowledge openly that his iconology project was indebted to what Aby
Warburg once called Ikonologie although, as Giorgio Agamben recalled,
Warburg never gave a definitive name to his science (Agamben 1975) but
also to the entire seventeenth-century tradition of the Iconologia (Panofsky
1967: 34). To study the sciences of images is not a whimsical idea of the twentieth century: already in Cesare Ripas Iconologia from 1603 (Ripa 1603), there is
an attempt to single out the elements of painting in order to make them readable; that is to say, to make all that persuades through the eye comparable
with that which persuades through words, as it is exemplified by the allegory
of beauty and its clouded face (Figure 2).

The science of images is easy . . .

It is significant that the majority of iconological encyclopaedias of the seventeenth century aim to isolate figures that are able to have the same definiteness
of letters or words, immutable elements that can circulate and be rearranged
into new pictorial syntagms. The image is subordinated to the text in all
respects and cannot be thought independently of it. In Ripas Iconologia, the
icons do not have a logic of their own; they are to follow the model of the
text: they are supposed to be as literal as possible.
In the twentieth century, Erwin Panofsky stands for the attempt to reinitiate the iconological project on new grounds, freed from its literalist bias.
The first move consists in simply turning the iconology of his predecessors
into iconography, hence making the term iconology available for a semantic
redefinition. The iconological level will both name the third and highest level of
Panofskys analysis that of meaning and the project as such. His attempt of
freeing the image from the literalist bias and demonstrating that it is worthy of
the logos too will ultimately end in cementing the literalist bias even more
firmly, as we shall see subsequently. But in the meantime, one should not
forget that Panofskys first, anti-textual move was seen by his contemporaries
as a direct attack on philology and its supposed prerogatives. When in his
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, originally released in 1948, he
writes that only literature possesses an autonomous structure (eine autonome
Struktur) and that only literature is the bearer of ideas (Trager von Gedanken),
the great philologist Ernst Robert Curtius appears to be directly addressing
Panofsky and Warburg (paradoxically, he dedicates the book to the latter).

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Iconic Turn

Figure 2.

Cesare Ripa, Allegory of Beauty in I Descrittione Dellimagini Universali cavate dallAntichita` et da altri
luoghi, Rome: L. Facij, 1603, no. 15.

The author goes on to say that to read Pindaric poems can be a hassle, but to
observe the frieze of the Parthenon is not; a book is a text we must understand it, otherwise we fail; there is nothing enigmatic about images (nichts
Unverstandliches). Curtius concludes: knowing pictures is easy compared
with knowing books (Curtius 1973: 15).
The programmatic version of Iconography and Iconology, published by
Panofsky (after a preliminary draft in German from 1939) in the year 1955

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Emmanuel Alloa

(Panofsky 1955), can be interpreted as an attempt to confer dignity to the new

science of images, by demonstrating that images are by no means conspicuous
or obvious, but rather they conceal infinite textual references just like a book.
And yet, it is Panofskys very effort to ennoble the iconic as this essay
attempts to argue in the following pages which will ultimately give rise to
a renewed subordination of the iconic to the discursive. For Panofsky, the
image is always an allegory, in a broad or, better yet, etymological sense: the
image never has an intrinsic sense, but rather it expresses something different
from itself, and in this sense it is allegorical, from the Greek allagoreuein, literally, to speak of something else.
At the expense of a long tradition that from Panofsky can be traced back to
Renaissance treatises whose objective was to make images speak (take, for
example, Gabriele Paleotti and his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images
from 1582), and which define iconology as the study of its discourse, and of
the silent prose of pictures granted that the classic formula of ut pictura
poesis can be reinterpreted within this context the current iconic turn
seems not so much to seek a rehabilitation of the discursivity of the image,
but rather to point out its figural power. When reading the French translation
of Panofsky, it would appear that Michel Foucault had been tempted to limit
the field of discourse and its analysis (with which, it goes without saying, Foucault was already associated): in his review of Panofskys writings published
by Bernard Teysse`dre and of the translation of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, he in fact affirms: Discourse and figure have
their specific ways of being (Foucault 1994 [1967]: 622). Or, stated in different
terms: answering the question of if an image constitutes an anomaly or a paradigm involves understanding if the image is a different modality of discourse or a
modality different from discourse. The latter is a modality which, when taken
seriously, could give rise to unprecedented perspectives on meaning and its
operations. If, as Rorty saw it, the linguistic turn is measured also by the
fact that the very way of thinking has changed, then we are left wondering
what would happen to thinking at the very moment it stops denying its
indebtedness to images. As Paul Valery had already rightly noted: Philosophers have a great taste for images: there is no trade that requires more of
them, although philosophers often hide them under dull-gray words
(Valery 1983: 58).
Different scenarios can be outlined:
(1) The iconic turn as archaeology: If we follow Nietzsche in considering that
many concepts are metaphors whose origin we have simply forgotten,
the iconic turn can be understood as an archaeology of those images still
operative in the most abstract concepts; an archaeology of the figural
dimension of thinking. Hans Blumenbergs vast project of a metaphorology can be seen as such an archaeological endeavour, that is to read the
philosophical tradition as a tradition not only of logical concepts, but
also a tradition of metaphors. Some of these metaphors, says Blumenberg,
have an absolute status, not so much in the sense that they are fundamental or anthropologically eternal, but only that they prove resistant to terminological claims and cannot be dissolved into conceptuality (Blumenberg
2010 [1960]: 5). This does not mean, however, that these metaphorical

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Iconic Turn

images cannot be replaced by others or corrected by a more precise one: this

is why metaphors have a history, and that writing a metaphorology is an
archaeological undertaking. What Blumenberg has started for philosophy
and what is now being taken up by others, who investigate the rhetoricity
and metaphoricity of the philosophical tradition (Konersmann 2011), is
currently also taking place in other fields which are supposedly mainly
non-visual, such as law or economics, but also in history, political theory,
or science studies, proving the extent to which knowledge is indebted to
images (to name but a few: respectively Jones and Galison 1998; Mirowski
1994; Burke 2001; Stolleis 2009; Brandt 2013; Breidbach 2013).
(2) The iconic turn as poetics: to see by means of images. In addition to psychologists who, like Rudolf Arnheim (2004), have taken an interest in visual
thinking, there are also many artists who have explored the possibility of
thinking by way of figures, a poetics of images. In this sense, MerleauPonty was able to justly speak of painting as a figured philosophy
(Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1961]: 129). In the field of cinematographic
expression, it was Sergei Eisenstein who, together with psychologist Lev
Vygotsky, explored the possibilities of non-discursive thinking. This
non-discursive, sensorial based thinking he called sensual thinking,
and which functions by way of images (Eisenstein 1966 [1942]). In yet
another area, Sigmund Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams can be similarly
understood as an attempt to clarify the logic of dream images which,
characterised by the principle of condensation and translation, creates
forms that cannot be traced back to verbal logic. The question of form is,
therefore, not limited to a poetic or aesthetic problem, but rather it
brings into play the possibility of morphological and metamorph(olog)ical
knowledge.
(3) The iconic turn as episteme. According to the Platonic opposition, scientific
knowledge (episteme) differs from opinion (doxa). But the difference
becomes less clear when examining the semantics tied to this science
which, as a kind of contemplation aimed at identifying the form or eidos
of things, is never able to entirely detach itself from the visual field, but
rather is brought to the level of the minds eye, or the Cartesian oculus
animae. While with Husserl and in the framework of what he called
eidetic phenomenology, the eidos was refastened to the dimension of
the doxa, from which it had been isolated, the eidetic becomes stuck
within the trap of identifying knowledge. Within the iconic turn, a
renewed interest in the morphe, the appearance of form, morphology and
its metamorphoses, seems to extend the question of the eidos beyond a
merely formal recognition of patterns or types (see Pinotti 2001; Vercellone
2006).
According to the German art historian Max Imdahl, whose founding work in
the field of image theory has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, images
do not only require a recognizing gaze (wiederkennendes Sehen), which is
capable of reading the visual alphabet and its rhetorical figures; oftentimes,
images force us to see in a different way, to see the way in which we see
(this is what Imdahl calls seeing gaze, sehendes Sehen) and, consequently, to
generate a new kind of cognizing gaze (erkennendes Sehen) (Imdahl 1980: 88,

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99). In this sense, it has been suggested that the iconic turn redefines the very
meaning of the word episteme. Or to rephrase this in yet a different way,
drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotards compelling formula which seems to summarise this shift towards an episteme of the non-identical: Learning how to see
is unlearning how to recognize (Lyotard 2011 [1971]: 151).
For Gottfried Boehm, we might only speak of an iconic episteme, provided
that we revisit one of the oldest foundations of European science, which
involves attributing meaning and truth only to that which can be expressed
in the form of propositional phrases; and we can speak of a paradigm of
images only when we stop relating schemes of iconic sense to already preestablished forms in verbal language and other systems of signs and
symbols (Boehm 2007: 7879). This is why the simple statement of intent
most likely pronounced under the influence of the technological transition
towards an increasingly visual culture to dedicate oneself to the image is certainly not sufficient, and the classic Panofsky model continues to prove its
tight limitations.
About ten years ago, James Elkins introduced a catalogue of Ten Ways to
Make Visual Studies More Difficult (Elkins 2003). In the wake of Elkins, this essay
would also like to suggest albeit much more modestly certain potential
shifts within the field of iconology as it has been established in order to
apply this injunction of Lyotards, and to make the study of images less recognizable and obvious. Thus, three shifts, turns or tropisms: the iconological
turn to symptomatology, the turn from the extensive to the intensive and
the turn from the indicative to the subjunctive.

How to make the science of images more difficult

From iconology to symptomatology
Pre-texts for meaning
Erwin Panofsky pioneering achievement was the elaboration of a method to
describe images independently of their artistic value. This method, as it is
known, received the name iconological method and has proven to have
launched an historical-artistic study of typologies of images that had not
been appreciably considered up until that point, such as non-Western
images, mass images and images in motion. In fact, Panofsky not only dedicated one (semi-humoristic) article to the Rolls-Royce radiator (Panofsky
1963), he also wrote an essay on cinema (Panofsky 1985 [1934/36]). Karl Mannheim, on the other hand, applied the iconological method in the sociological
field, and the analysis of the cinematographic image developed by Roland
Barthes, arranged on three levels, undoubtedly presents noteworthy similarities to the Panofskian model. But the attempt to demonstrate the stratification and, therefore, the depth of the image, which allowed for its
epistemological ennoblement before those who, like Curtius, had already disqualified it, compels even Panofsky to hypothecate the iconological investigation from the start: only and exclusively profound images will be
acceptable, that is, images that refer (like books) to some meaning that precedes them and which they do nothing but depict. According to a method
that has already been tested for other classic works, this involves finding the
texts (if not the text) that allow for the reconstitution of the meaning of a work.

Iconic Turn

Durers engraving from 1499, known as The Justice, which depicts a male
figure with an illuminated face, appears to be a radically new iconographic
invention, which distances itself from the classical representations of justice
disguised as a blindfolded female subject (Figure 3).

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According to Panofskys famous analysis however, Durers engraving is

not an inventio per imaginem, as one might think. Rather, the engraving constitutes the faithful pictorial transposition of a text written a century and a half
prior, the literary source Panofsky returns to, that is, the Repertorium morale
by Petrus Berchorius, which establishes an equivalence between Christ and
the sun (Sol Iustitiae). Durer knew this text Panofsky concludes as it had
been printed by his godfather Koberger in 1489 (Panofsky 1970 [1921]: 277).

Figure 3.

Albrecht Durer, Sol Iustitiae, 1499. Copper engraving, 105 76 mm. Quoted after: Adam Bartsch, Le
peintre graveur, Vienna : J.C. Degen, vol. VII, 1808, p. 93, n8 79.

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Emmanuel Alloa

Among the many that could be mentioned here, this simple case proves how
in Panofskys iconology, the image is not considered as such for its chromatic
or formal characteristics, for instance, as it was in the Viennese school of Alois
Riegl or Konrad Fiedler but rather for its referential structure. Panofsky
demonstrates that even a Rolls-Royces radiator refers to classic art (to Palladian architecture, to be more precise). And in 1966, when he sees the feature
film Lannee dernie`re a` Marienbad, he is not interested in the radical invention
of the form of temporal sequences that French filmmaker Alain Resnais introduces, but tries to trace back the avant-gardist screenplay written by RobbeGrillet to an elegiac poem by Goethe (Heckscher 1995 [1969]: 18687). As
Panofsky eloquently puts it, the meaning of the image is a documentary
meaning [Dokumentsinn] (Panofsky 2012 [1932]: 478). The image is documentary insofar as it is the result of a document which allows the image to become
intelligible: through the pre-text of the image, the image becomes readable for
the viewer.

Readability
Max Imdahl was among those who emphasised the intrinsic limitations of the
iconological method: For Panofsky, the image be it artistic or not is
nothing but the injunction of a seeing of recognition, which identifies
objects (Imdahl 1980: 89). Panofsky himself seems to have been conscious of
his problematic textualism. In pre-modern painting, a female figure offering
a peach is to be identified as the incarnation of Veritas. Yet, when dealing with
Auguste Renoirs Peaches, a still life, Panofsky says that we cannot hunt for a

Figure 4.

Auguste Renoir, Peaches, 1881 1882. Oil on canvas, 38 cm 47 cm (15 in 19 in.). Paris,
Musee de lOrangerie.

Iconic Turn 11

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text to disclose the allegorical meaning of the fruit (Panofsky 2012 [1932]: 468)
(Figure 4).
Once more, the meaning of an image transcends the image: even a work
that belongs to the type of the still life without meaning [Typus des bedeutungsfreien Stillebens], Panofsky presumes, must have a meaning it may be
a symptom of the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion (Panofsky 1939: 7). Renoirs peach, then, is the
expression of a certain world-view at a certain historical-cultural moment,
observable in various impressionist paintings. The German medievalist Otto
Pacht, who was among the very first critics of Panofsky, claimed that the
entire project of iconology is permeated by a hidden symbolism (Pacht
1956: 278). It is paradoxical, observes Pacht,
that in an era in which psychology has permitted the scientific study
of the realm of the unconscious and of the preconscious, we can insist
on reducing the most masterful pictorial creations to mere visual
shells of philosophemes, ideograms or symbolizations of rational
meanings. (Pacht 1987 [1977], 374)

Policies of meaning
The most systematic critique of iconology however has been put forward by
French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, who sees in
Panofskys Neoplatonism not only an attempt to exorcise the uncontrollable
energies of the image, but also a reluctance to accept the fact highlighted
by Warburg that iconological analysis should favour a methodological
amplification [methodische Grenzerweitung] of disciplinary borders, that is not
frightened by the policing stance [grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit] (Warburg
1999 [1912]: 5641) of the palisades that continue to separate various forms of
knowledge. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, we must rethink the
value of one of Panofskys definitions of iconology: that of a history of cultural
symptoms [Geschichte kultureller Symptome] (Panofsky 1939: 18).
If little attention has been paid to this symptomatology, it is most likely
due to the fact that Panofsky is quick to add cultural symptoms, or symbols
in general [Symptome, oder allgemein Symbole] (Panofsky 1939: 18), immediately relating the study of images to Cassirers symbolic forms. Nevertheless,
if the science of images can have a sense today, perhaps it would be worthwhile to rethink the value of the term symptom, by disassociating it from a
philosophy of symbolic forms and bringing it back to its original context,
which is that of clinical records.
From the extensive to the intensive
Overdetermination
According to Sigmund Freud, a symptom is characterised by its constitutive
berbestimmtheit), i.e. the fact that as a such, the
overdetermination (U
1

On the same topic, see also Didi-Huberman 2002; 2005 [1990], ch. 3.

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Emmanuel Alloa

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symptom is not a direct expression of a cause, but is rather determined by

numerous causes at once and can therefore not be traced back to a single
one. In its overdetermined, saturated condition, it makes the very possibility
of causal determination shaky. The memory-images or dream-images Freud
treats as symptoms are not simply traces that relate to a real event that precedes them; it is the very idea of linearity and causality that is once again
called into question by symptomatology: if anything, the connection
between the symptom and the cause resembles a pronged line or more precisely a branched system of twisted and interlaced lines.
It has nodal points at which two or more threads meet and from there
on proceeds as one; and as a rule several threads which run independently or which are connected at various points by side-paths,
debouch into the nucleus. To put this in different words, it is remarkable how often a symptom is determined in several ways, is overdetermined [uberbestimmt]. (Freud 1895: 290)
A symptom, therefore, is not a point, but a crossroads, an entanglement, a condensation, permeated by powers that are sometimes even opposite one
another.
If this is true and if an image is always already an entwinement rather
than a casual trace, then it is no longer possible to follow a single thread
and, accordingly, apply the evidential paradigm, theorized by Carlo Ginzburg (which, for that matter, does not hide its criminological inspiration)
(Ginzburg 1979). Freuds symptomatology can by no means be reduced to
Morellis historical-artistic method, which seeks to identify the author of a
work or the actual cause of a symptom, because a symptom already constitutes a re-articulation against the backdrop of numerous factors. Within a
symptom, literally, things that are heterogeneous among themselves
happen together or co-incide (syn-ptoma). This is why a symptom cannot
be related to a superior order, but rather is fundamentally singular and
remains tied to the event.

Symptom
In this sense, symptomatology is distinguished from a classificatory nosology,
such as the one introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by
scientists such as Boissier Sauvages de Lacroix and his Synopsis of Methodical
Nosology (1763) or Thomas Sydenham, who suggested that all diseases could
be classified the same way as botanists classify plants. Following Carl Linnaeus, the principle is that of an exhaustive classification of all there is, according to the principle of binary opposition (dihairesis), which leaves nothing out.
To know means to know the causes, and to reconstruct the unidirectional chain
of derivation. To Boissier Sauvages or Sydenham, just as to Linnaeus, the task
was to elaborate a comprehensive synopsis which would embrace the entire
field of their objects and which would be organised around the principles of
identity, contradiction and of the excluded middle (either A or not-A,
tertium non datur). The Synopsis of Medical Nosology aimed at establishing the
entire arborescence between causes and diseases, making the symptom the

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effect of an unambiguously identifiable cause (Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix

1763).
A straight line runs between these taxonomical nosologies and current
psychiatric manuals, such as the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association 2013) the principle being
the positioning within an arborescence of possible epidemics, as the Isagoge
of Porphyry and his followers, who had tried to represent graphically (arbor
porphyriana) the ontology of derivation generally associated with Aristotle
(Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Arbor porphyriana. From Boethius, Commentary on Porphyrys Isagoge, III.3, in Opera varia. Pars
I. Venice: Forlivio 1497.

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Degree, not pedigree

As we have attempted to illustrate elsewhere (Alloa 2011a), the iconic turn
cannot consist of the restoration of the ancient ontological question of the
Greek ti esti, or what it is, by applying it to the image-object: iconicity is
not a specific difference that delimits a class of entities or signs. Iconicity
couldnt possibly be a specific difference, for a simple reason: it is not an extensive dimension, but an intensive one. It is impossible to delimit the field of
images because, according to the circumstances, it may be necessary to consider that not only paintings, photographs or frescoes, but also diagrams,
reflections, metaphors, hallucinations, monochromes, films, installations and
sculptures are images. Incidentally, this is the reason for which Umberto
Ecos proposal to consider iconicity as a subcategory of the sign is problematic,
since, according to Eco, a sign is everything which can be used for the purpose
of lying: seeing as though the reflection in a mirror will never show anything
other than what is in front of it, the reflected image cannot lie and, therefore, is
not a sign (and, consequently, if it is not a sign, it cannot be iconic) (Eco 1984). It
is urgent to expel these remains of Porphyrianism from the contemporary
debate on the image: iconicity is not to be reduced to a semiotic subcategory
and degree is not a matter of pedigree.

When is an image?
In his theory of the imaginary, Jean-Paul Sartre suggests that this ontology of
extension be substituted by another concept: that of family (Sartre 2010
[1940]2). There is a family relationship among images, but whether or not
the third cousin can still consider himself a member of that family depends
on the circumstances. Following this suggestion, we might affirm that iconicity is a matter of degree, not of essence, and that the question of degree is
not a matter of belonging, but rather of intensity. Furthermore, in the shift
from extensive to intensive, we might be inspired by the move made by
Nelson Goodman with respect to the question of aesthetics. To the traditional
question, what is art?, the American philosopher substituted the question,
when is art? rather than giving a substantial definition of art, Goodman
suggests a circumstantial approach, i.e. to take the presence of certain conditions as a hint that we are very likely to be in the presence of an artwork
(Goodman 1988 [1977]). These conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient,
they should rather be thought of as symptoms of the aesthetic, says
Goodman.
These symptoms provide no definition, much less a full-blooded
description or a celebration. Presence or absence of one or more of
them does not qualify or disqualify anything as aesthetic . . . Symptoms, after all, are but clues; the patient may have the symptoms
without the disease, or the disease without the symptoms.
(Goodman 1988 [1977], 68)
2

An interesting comparison could be made between the Sartrean notion of the

family of images and Wittgensteins concept of family resemblance.

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15

In a similar manner, when faced with the pervasive return of that which Paolo
Fabbri once called ontalgia, i.e. the nostalgia for returning to an identical
ontical core of things, it may prove useful to substitute the question, what is
an image? with a more incidental question, such as when is an image? (and, on
a second level, with a question like when does an image become an artistic image?).
This obviously implies considering an image not only as a vehicle of ideal or
semantic content, but also as a matrix of feelings. As Bergson points out, in order
to understand what a certain pain is, it takes little to know how and where it
comes to be. A toothache is not determined by its location or by its extension,
but by its intensity. Consequently, the question of art, too, is no longer presented
by Bergson in an extensional manner, but in an intensive one: the artist knows
without the possibility of doubt that the picture of a master affords him more
intense pleasure than the signboard of a shop (Bergson 2001 [1888]: 5).

Atopia
But if this is the case, then one would be hard pressed to say where the intensity
is located in the painting. In his lectures on image consciousness, Edmund
Husserl had already pointed to this problem: If I look at the photograph, I
can say: The image appears there, thirty centimeters in front of me at this
definite position in space. But do I properly see the image object itself in
that position? (Husserl 2005: 573) Or, in Merleau-Pontys words,
the animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same
way as the fissures and limestone formations. Nor are they elsewhere
. . . I would be hard-pressed to say where the picture is that I am
gazing at. (Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1961]: 126) (Figure 6)

Figure 6. Lascaux Cave, Unknown Artist, The Great Black Bull, Paint on Limestone, c. 15,000 BCE (Courtesy :
Ministe`re francais de la culture).

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Emmanuel Alloa

Drawing on Richard Wollheim and his notion of seeing-in, one could say
that we see the prehistoric animal in the surface of the cave wall, despite
the cracks and splits which make its reading difficult. But with MerleauPonty, we could also say that we see according to the image (selon limage)
(Merleau-Ponty 1993 [1961]: 126). A kind of seeing thus which would not
be despite, but rather with or along the lines of those cracks and crevices, a
kind of medial seeing (Alloa 2011b) which, through the materiality, sees
beyond it. A kind of seeing where to see is to see more than what meets
the eye.
With respect to what there is, the image is always both lacking behind and
excessive in its sensorial over-presence. The beholder would be hard pressed
to locate it on the wall and to frame it. But it is exceeding topographic ascription in another sense too: if images are attributed an emotive power, that is to
say that they are literally moving (e-motio) and capable of producing a
response (Freedberg 1989), this might eventually be due to their atopic character, as Platos Sophist would say: the efficacy of an image cannot be located in
the traditional order of knowledge; its pathos appears to oppose itself to its
mathos, its punctum to its studium. To consider, on the other hand, that in an
image there is a pungent coherence that operates especially when it touches
us in its punctum amounts to reconsidering the possibility of a pathei mathos,
of a knowledge through suffering prophesized by Aeschylus and Sophocles
(Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 178).

From the indicative to the subjunctive

Phenomena, according to Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, are visions of the
invisible (opsis ton adelon ta phainomena) (Anaxagoras: fragment B21a). The
question here is obviously how the relationship between visible and invisible
is conceived; if it is a matter of an analogical relationship, that is, of a simple
correspondence, or of a heuristic relationship, that is, of the possibility of
including the invisible in the visible. Ancient Greek medicine appropriated
this phrase and made it a cornerstone of symptomatology. The art of
reading a symptom (semeion) presupposes not only theoretical, but also practical, knowledge; an empeiria of he who is skilled as he possesses a certain
expertise. This expertise derives from the autopsy, from having seen with
ones own eyes: an autopsy, as providing against chance, and against the singularity of that which is eventful (of the event). In fact, a diagnosis is rarely made
from a distance or based on hearsay, because, due to its overdetermination, a
symptom is intricate. Unlike a trace, which supposes that the body it was left
by has departed, a symptom needs a body on whose surface it can appear. A
symptomal body, then, is a body that is exposed and that can signal something
else only by being exposed; like a sign, a symptom does not resemble what it is a
symptomatic expression of, it exemplifies it.3
3

On the birth of semiotics out of Ancient medicine, and the importance of circumstantial embodied knowledge in reading symptoms, see (Alloa 2015).

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Exemplication
We must be clear as to what we mean when we speak of exemplification. By
reason of its singularity, the symptomal knot cannot be analysed as an exemplar of a general class; its sense cannot be deduced by any generic rule. It is not
an example in the sense of a sample or a token, but in the sense of something
that stands out (exemplum comes from eximere, to take out). This is why symptomal knowledge is a constitutively precarious and uncertain knowledge, and
its generalisation (in other words: its de-contextualization) remains problematic. If we wanted to avail ourselves of a category introduced by C.S.
Peirce, we could say symptomal knowledge corresponds to abduction: the
abduction is not a deduction (the derivation of a conclusion from a general
principle) nor an induction (the inference of a general principle from
empiric observation) but hypothesis inferred from a non-standard, surprising
observation. As a matter of fact, Peirce even doubted that inference was the
right expression and suggested to talk of conjecturing rather than of inferring (CP 5.189), whereby gesturing back to the Ancient technique of art of conjectures (ars coniecturalis).
Conjecture
Symptomal knowledge can thus be understood as an art of conjecture; an art of
conjecture with regard to phainomena. Unlike gods who, as Alcmaeon of
Croton affirmed, have sure knowledge of invisible and mortal things, man
in contrast is reduced to conjecture [tekmairesthai] (Alcmaeon of Croton, fragment B1). The ars coniecturalis invoked here is an art that is aware of its provisional nature and limitedness, an art that sees connections or makes them, an
art that follows the nuances of the symptom and shapes constellations by
grouping symptoms into syndromes, which literally are nothing but a
con-course (syn-dromas) of circumstances. This game gives rise to a new
type of probatio, or the exploration of possible scenarios (Alloa 2013). Operating by images, then, amounts not only to establishing facts, but also to exploring potentialities, as this essay will try to elaborate upon a little further.
Conjecture, however, requires a specific modality: it does not state its hypotheses in the indicative, but rather in a hypothetical tense, or, in the subjunctive.
Allegorism and tautegorism: the image in the indicative
The third shift that we might hope for in the debate on images would be a shift
from the indicative to the subjunctive. It should suffice, in this context, to chalk
out a reflection which has been developed elsewhere (Alloa 2010): nevertheless, it would seem, the scope of the index at times lurks under the disguise
of a sort of re-auratisation of the image-trace or of the image-fetish, as if
after decades of analytical semiotics it aspired to return to a real and
immediate presence. It often happens that the current apology of presence
which can be observed in various domains (Gumbrecht 2003) results in the
updating of theorems that had once thought to be definitely obsolete, such
as that of the natural trace. Subsequent to Panofskys allegorism, it looks as
if we were now faced with a new type of tautologism or, rather, tautegorism
(allos agoreuein, to say other things; tautos agoreuein, to say the same). An

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Emmanuel Alloa

image is no longer a symbol of something seen through an open window, as

Alberti would say, but rather it is a trace of the same thing: in an image
specifically a photographic image an event is documented, just as it had
been, before any interpretation (Figure 7).
Allegorism
Picture as transparent window
The picture opens to the meaning beyond

Tautegorism
Picture as opaque surface
The picture is the meaning

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The renewed interest in the theorems suggested by a post-semiotic

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, must be taken seriously, as well as the

Figure 7.

Adolphe Euge`ne Disderi, Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, around
1852. Photograph. Courtesy: Leigh McKinnon.

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idea that the photographic image has as its object a ca a ete, an it was this way:
when looking at a photograph of Napoleon Bonapartes younger brother,
Barthes states that he cannot help but think that in this moment he is
looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor (Barthes 1980: 3).
The return of the category of referential indexicality to the debate particularly with reference to Rosalind Krauss Notes on the Index (Krauss 1977)
is, in this respect, very telling. Without starting a complex discussion
(Barthes, moreover, appears to aim not at an ontology of the photographic
image, but at a phenomenology of the photographic experience, which is something very different), we cannot help but observe that in the debate, a strange
return of the real has taken place.
In the 1970s, Susan Sontag remarked that A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened (Sontag 1977: 5). Today, the discussion has shifted from photography to other kinds of visual streams: the
supposed transparency with regard to the registered event is not provided
by a realistic appearance, but very often by its opposite. It is the low-grade
video image, produced by amateur footage, that has gained the status of pictorial truth-telling; technological low-fi that claims high fidelity to the event.
The images provided by CCTV cameras, generally equally lacking sharpness,
are today at the centre of new information wars, trying to establish whether or
not something has been the case.
But why reduce a photograph to the indication of a given event in the past
at all? Or more generally: why reduce any image (analogic or not) to be the
index of a given fact? Why does a visual evidentia have to be narrowed to providing evidence? Whether one goes the realist way and takes the image to be
the physical trace of something else which left its imprint in the matter or the
conventionalist way and takes the image to be the sign of some meaning
beyond, symbolic allegorism and realist tautegorism end up converging in
the paradigm of indicativity: an image is justified by the fact that it points to
something specific which makes up for its being unequivocal; it is the indication
of a this is how it is.

Subjunctive images
The indicative, however, is certainly not the only modality of an image; it
would appear that the subjunctive is one of its modalities as well: the image
opens up a space of possibility between an it was this way and an it will
never be this way. This concerns obviously the domain of artistic images in
general, and especially of those of modernity, where values like ambiguity,
indeterminacy and openness have become of utmost importance. Dario
Gamboni has suggested to place such images exploring the indeterminate
and ambiguous forms of the visual in the modernist avant-gardes under the
general title of potential images (Gamboni 2004). Both comparing and differentiating them from accidental as well as from hidden images, Gamboni defines
potential images as those established in the realm of the virtual by the
artist, but dependent on the beholder for their realisation, and their property
is to make the beholder aware either painfully or enjoyably of the active,
subjective nature of seeing (Gamboni 2004: 17). In such a constitution of
potential images, imagination thus plays a chief role, and Gamboni

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Emmanuel Alloa

exemplifies his notion by examples drawn from paintings of Turner, Redon,

Ensor or Seurat.
Yet, if the concept of subjunctive images has heuristic relevance, it will have
to be larger than the field of not only artistic pictures, but also of images
drawing mainly on subjective imagination. The fact that by looking at
images, one does not necessarily look at what really happened appearing
in an image is a possible appearance, tied to an event that does not necessarily have an actual correspondence but has an either inward, oneiric
(dream-like) or hallucinatory gaze would seem to bolster the idea that the
domain of images is the domain of imagination. Such was Jean-Paul Sartres
assumption, for instance, in his Limaginaire. Yet the ability to operate by
images does not amount to escaping reality, as Sartre believed in his theory
of the imaginary, but rather to exploring modalities of reality other than
those of factuality. (This is why it is not enough, as has been the case in
recent discussions about the claim of the transparent nature of photographic
images to say that one should assume something like an interaction of actual
and imagined seeing (Walton 2008: 127)). Just as the restriction to artistic
images left out a large deal of visual artefacts that decisively determined
(and continues to determine) social meaning, to talk about the imaginary
nature of images is still subordinating image operations too much to the authority of a subject and its psychological faculties.
If we consider the extent to which virtual images today are decisive for
visualising a house to build, preparing surgeons for an operation or pilots
for a flight, the dimension of the image is certainly not reduced to a sort of
escapist break from the world, as Sartre believes. Nor are images limited to
possible anticipations of a reality that is to be realised, as if they foresaw
what will be, as a sort of virtual pre-vision. Virtual images can equally refer
to the past, for example when they allow for various virtual reconstructions
of archaeological sites (virtual archaeology) which would not be possible in
physical reconstructions. Rather than the so-called virtual history, which
bases itself on counter-factual assumptions (how would things look like if X
hadnt happened . . .), such virtual archaeology is highly factual, and yet
hypothetical, as unlike in physical reconstructions, where all but one hypothesis must be discarded, various possibilities can coexist that are not mutually
exclusive.
Beyond the non-exclusivity, to which Gamboni had already pointed when
referring to the fundamental ambiguity and internal plurality of the images he
analyses, there is another aspect: the virtuality of such images has to do with
the fact that they cannot be exhausted by a single actualisation, but that every
actualisation keeps further actualisations open. This is famously the case of
virtual autopsy (also known as virtopsy) in new forensics: rather than irreversibly cutting into a body, virtual autopsies are image-based procedures
whereby through multi-sliced computerised tomography an non-invasive
analysis is carried out which does not preclude the possibility of further, different autopsies.
Which leads to a first hint about what subjunctive images could be about:
rather than being in an indicative mode of actuality or to indicate some actual
event (in the present or in the past), subjunctive images concern the possibility
of not being subjected to the logic of actualisation. The connections such hypothetic

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Iconic Turn

Figure 8.

21

Euge`ne Atget, Bitumiers (Asphalt Layers), 1899 1900. Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print.
17.521 cm. Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale de France.

images form are not neutral, however, but have a cogency of their own (hence
the sub-iunctio in the subjunctive). The domain of what might be is not opposed
to the domain of what is, rather, it gestures at something whose existential
status cannot (yet) be determined, because for instance it is still in the
making. That is why rather than being in the indicative (in esse), images
have to do with the time in the subjunctive (in fieri).
This concerns not only electronic images, or so-called virtual reality, but
images that are considered to be more realistic as well. Of the most documentary photographs of avant-garde pioneer, Euge`ne Atget, who registered with
his photographic plate urban views of the Paris metropolis around 1900,
Andre Breton beautifully said that upon them blows the wind of possibility
(le vent de leventuel) (Breton 1998 [1924]: 196). Paying attention to this wind of
possibility would give a new breath to the iconic turn, which otherwise cannot
help but exhibit, at the moment in which it is proclaimed, its first hints of
breathlessness (Figure 8).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Emmanuel Alloa

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1919-5074

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Emmanuel Alloa

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Emmanuel Alloa is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University St. Gallen and Senior Research
Fellow at the NCCR iconic criticism (Basel). He has published a series of
books dealing with issues of contemporary French philosophy, aesthetics
and image theory.