Images and their relatives : Introduction (draft) (Paul Dumouchel)

 

I am interested by what may be described as the semantic cloud surrounding the concept of images. What I mean by a semantic cloud may be illustrated with the help of a kanji – the ideograms of Chinese origin which the Japanese use to write their language. Because of the structure of Japanese language kanjis are not usually alone but associated with phonetic signs – hiragana syllabary – they form different words and in these words the kanji – the Chinese ideogram – constitutes or indicates the root meaning of the words in which it enters. Take for example the following kanji “shita”*                     which means below, as in “you will find it below the table”. That kanji enters into the following words, among others: below, down, please, to hang (a painting), to be under guidance, to give, to be unskilful, to surrender, to be discharged, to get down the train, to give an order, to make a judgement, to be inferior, to fall back, to receive, urine, diarrhea, the lower part of a river, to be downwind, subordinate, and subcontractor. We can stop here.

 

All these words are in some way related to the fact of being lower in space and to the idea of inferiority (physical or political) and of what has less value. A kanji like shita can be understood as being as the center of a semantic cloud, a set of words which are semantically related. The relation between these terms is not etymological. It is not one of historical descent, but one of meaning, or rather meanings, because there are many different meaning relations between the various terms in the writing of which the kanji “shita” enters. These relations are fuzzy and manyfold. They are not clear like deduction, neither are they linear like descent, nor is it a set of arbitrary associations. That is why I call this a semantic cloud, a cloud of meanings whose contour is not very clear and well defined, but whose center is the fact of being below and the idea of inferiority.   

 

Another aspect of this example which I think is important is that it involves two very different components. First to be below or under in physical space, which is not an idea, but a fact. It is something or an event in the world that you observe or perceive. “The garbage bin is underneath the sink.” Second, inferiority in various relations, which is not a material thing that is directly physically observable but something that has to do with thought and meaning. This semantic cloud associates two very different elements, a state of affairs in the world and an idea or concept, that of being inferior which extends to the domain of value.

 

In languages which are written phonetically we cannot recognize semantic clouds as easily, simply by looking for the root kanji. A semantic cloud is a cluster of concepts or ideas that are related together through their meaning and I think that we can recognize a semantic cloud when we find a group of ideas that are related in such a way that we tend to explain any member of that group in relation to other members. That I believe is the case of images, ideas, representation, copy, reproduction, imitation, simulation, icons, mirror or mirroring, figuring, mimesis, and model are related in this way and they form a semantic cloud. It is, for example, hard to explain what is representation without taking about images, ideas, copies or reproduction and vice versa it is hard to explain what is an idea without using referring to a copies, representations or images. My claim is that it is image that sits at the center of this semantic cloud, image is in this case the equivalent of the root kanji. All these ideas have a visual dimension or connotation which is more than suggested by the importance of the resemblance between two objects or behavior. A resemblance that is visual and can be perceived that offers itself as a criteria or the means of recognizing[1] that we are dealing with a copy, an imitation, mirror image, etc.

 

Of course, very early on in the Western philosophical tradition attempts will be made to sunder the relationship between visual and non-visual representation, between images and ideas – the word “eikon” in ancient Greek was originally used for both. However, the temptation of understanding representation as essentially visual will never disappear and will repeatedly become dominant for a while. In fact, whenever we try to explain the ideas of representation, of model, of copy or reproduction a visual metaphor is never far away. Or better, it seems that many these terms have both a visual and a non-visual interpretation. This is evident in such terms as model, representation, simulation, reproduction, figuring and mimesis.

 

These different notions – images, imitation or simulation – are also closely related to the phenomena of dreams, to imagination and to visions – understood in this last case not as a form of perception but as a revelation or visitation from another world. Simulation, reproduction, imitation, copies and images are also sometime related to what is false and to deceit, but they are also associated to the opposite, to truth and to what reveals the world as it is. In fact, the debate concerning whether images, ideas, representation, models and imitation reveals or deceive is never completely separated from the question of whether we should understand these ideas visually or not.

 

Finally images are central to how we understand or represent thinking and knowing. This is the case since Plato’s theory of ideas (eikon) – the Greek word for images – to the central role and importance of representations in todays cognitive science. In consequence, our inability to escape this semantic cloud when trying to explain one or another of its concepts, our failure to explain them in relation to something that is completely different is somewhat troubling, as if we reaching here some kind of limit.

 

Clearly related, but, I think, members of a different semantic clouds are the ideas of sign, symbol, writing, calculating, and again but this time differently the notions of metaphors and of figures of style. These, I believe, do not belong to the same cluster of ideas as images and representation. Though as we will see later on they may be considered as descending from it. The main difference between the two types of objects (images and their relatives on the one hand, signs, symbols and numbers on the other) concerns the role of rules of composition between them. What I mean is that though art historians for examples will explain to us the rule of composition of various painting, there are no rules of composition between paintings while words and numbers derive their force essentially through syntax and rules.

 

Something similar, I think, applies to models and simulations. There is a grammar that applies within a model or simulation but not easily between different one. A model or simulation, like an image is an independent object or reality. Each one forms a whole and individual, while signs and numbers function in community. In that sense, the ideograms of non-phonetically written languages which represent one complete idea would in a sense be in between an image and a sign.

 

So I am interested in the group, cloud or cluster of notions and objects mentioned above, let us call it: images. One observation and a multiple hypothesis guide my interest and inquiry. The observation first: Images, ideas, copy, reproduction, representation, imitation, simulation, icons, mirroring, dreams, mimesis and models all participate in two different paradigms.[2] The first paradigm is identity. That is a copy, an image, a representation, a simulation, an icon or imitation should as much as possible be “like” or truthful to that of which it is a copy, an image, a representation, simulation, imitation of. Perfection in imitation appears as the goal to be aimed at. And images understood in relation to this paradigm are related to truth which is itself conceived as a perfect representation or adequate image of reality, of what is. This paradigm leads to the following paradox. Perfection in imitation or resemblance, as well as complete truth, abolishes the idea of imitation or resemblance. What we are dealing with when perfect reproduction is achieved is not an image anymore, not a copy, nor representation, but another one of the same, a second hat, house or person, not an image but reality. A copy that is a perfect imitation is not a copy anymore but one more individual, another token of the same class, or the same individual the thing itself that was for a moment confused with its image. – the example of bronze sculptures.

 

Magritte’s famous painting  « Ceci est une pipe » trades on this particular ambiguity, which introduces us to the second paradigm.

 

The second paradigm is that of difference. An image, idea, model, representation or simulation is always different from what it is an image, idea, model, representation or simulation of. The two cannot be identical. The image is a different object and reality than what it is an image of, which in art theory is often called its prototype, and this difference is not viewed as an imperfection, as in the first paradigm, but as precisely what makes an image and image. What makes a painting a good painting or a sculpture a good sculpture is the artist’s success in making “the same”, in reproducing or copying the paradigm but in a completely different material.

 

In this case, it is the difference, between the image and what it is an image of, that is precisely what is important, useful, and fruitful. Here the ontological horizon of representation is not for the copy to disappear in the original, or for reality to supersede the function of image. What is fundamental is the appearance of reality and the appearance (or emergence) of a new type of objects: images, representations, models, simulations, that represent the world as it is, so to speak, but that are not what they represent, that are different. These are objects that did not exist before, objects that are made on purpose to represent (they are not natural objects) and that, unlike different tokens of the same class and unlike the prototype of the image, belong to an entirely different type of realities.

 

In the case of the first paradigm, imitation is thought ideally or in its most perfect form to lead to the collapse of the difference between the imitator and the imitated, and the image’s failure to do that is viewed as a mistake or failure or at least as an imperfection. – There are Chinese legends of painted birds that take flight. The greatest artist is one who reproduces reality so well that the animals and plants that he paints become alive. According to the second paradigm, the image, imitation, simulation or model asserts the difference that separates its from the original and builds on it. What gives modelling and in many case drawing its advantage is that it is different from its prototype, though it needs in some sense to be “like it”. What makes a mime all dressed in white a great mime is that we can recognize different characters through his mimics.

 

The tension and hesitation between these two paradigms of images is present throughout the whole semantic cloud and throughout the history of art. Images, representations, simulations, imitations, and dreams are evaluated, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, depending on whether they are more “like” or more “different” from what they represent, whether they are real or appearances. At times similarity is praised and valued at other times, it is difference that is prized and pursued. This hesitation between the value of identity or difference is related to how we understand truth.

           

The hypothesis is more difficult to present. At this point it is constituted of a set of (at least) three different hypotheses which it may be later possible to unite into one only, but for now I do not know how to do that.

 

1 The first hypothesis is that the differences between the two paradigms are in some way related to the difference between imitation and mimesis, both of them considered as actions rather than as the result of action. In other words how is the action of imitating different from being mimetic. There are many differences between mimesis and imitation, but two in particular are worth noticing in this context. One is that imitation essentially is a dyadic relation while mimesis is a triadic relation and this is also the case of images which fundamentally are triadic relations. Images are triadic in two senses. First the images establishes a relation with its viewer and with its content. So that there are three things involved here: the image of the tree, the tree and the person looking at the image. Second, an image is made by someone and looked at by someone else, or maybe by the same person at a different time. There are three poles involved, the person who makes the image, the object (or prototype) of which the image is the image, and the person who looks at the image. Images are made for others or for a later incarnation of myself, an other in that sense. The image also has a purpose, which is to be seen.

 

Note, because that will become important later on, that this triadic relation does not exist in the case of what we call mental images or representations. My mental images or representations are for me, they are not for someone else, and they are not made on purpose by anyone. They arise spontaneously and from ancient Greek philosophy to today, they are conceived as establishing a dyadic relation between the agent who has the image and the world.

 

When I see an image of a tree or of a pipe, I can look at a tree or a pipe and compare the prototype with the image. This is something that I cannot do in the case of mental images or representations. In the case of a mental image because when I look at the tree the mental image is not there and vice versa when I inspect my mental image of a tree, I cannot observe the tree. In the case of mental representation the difficulty is really the same though it present itself differently. Given that my mental representations are assumed to be the way I know or relate to the world, it is impossible for me to interact with a tree otherwise than through my mental representation of a tree, in consequence my relation to the world is condemned to remain dyadic. Both the relation between the representations and the world and between me and my representation is dyadic are dyadic and unlike what is the case of an image there is no way for the relation to ever become triadic.

 

However, if both mimesis and images are triadic relation, mimesis, as we will see later on, is continuous and dynamic, while images are static and discrete. Even though films, dreams and video games may seem to escape these limitations they in fact do not. The reason why such moving images fail to become dynamic the mimesis is because images are always framed. They have a frame, box, or magic circle that imprisons them and out of which they cannot escape. That is to say, like ritual actions, images give themselves as separated from normal life. Images are objects, but they are a very specific type of objects. And perhaps that in a sense, the goal and purpose of images is precisely to arrest and stop the flow of life.

 

Note that if this explanation is correct it suggest that to be dynamic you need to be continuous. Models, like ABM models, where time is discrete suggests the same.

 

Hypothesis 1): the fact that images are triadic relations indicates that they are more related to mimesis than to imitation. (I will have to explain in a clearer way what this means or entails and this will be the topic of the second conference.)

 

2 The second, closely related, hypothesis is that difference between the image or the copy, and the prototype is grounded in the material dimension of the image or copy. This corresponds to a certain point to what the art historian Hans Belting* calls the medium.[3] An image is always realized in a medium of some sort, paint on a canvas, stone, or flashes of light and colour on a digital screen. And one of the defining characteristics of an image is that its matter, its medium, is different from the matter of the prototype. If it were the same we would fall into the earlier mentioned paradox where it would not be an image, but another example of the same.

 

We sometimes say of a child that he or she is the prefect image of his father or her of her mother, but that is a figure of speech, a child is not an image. It is important that the copy, image or representation, should exist as an object that is different from and exists independently of both what is copied and of the image maker.

 

This point suggests an interesting objection. If it is true that a copy in order to be an image must be made of a different matter than what it is a copy of, doesn’t it follow that mechanically reproduced images are not images? In fact no. The answer to this apparent paradox is that mechanically reproduced copies of an image which are made of the same matter as the original image are not images of what they are a copy of. That is to say, a print that is made from a previous print, copied from it in such a way that it is a print of the similar kind as the original is an image, but it is not an image of the first print. It is an image of whatever the first print is an image of.

 

The requirement that images be material and of a material that is different from the material that constitutes the prototype implies that mental images or dreams only really become images when they are related to something that is different from both the dreamer and the dream itself. To put is otherwise, the fact that we are dealing with an image or representation rather than with another token of the same is equivalent to saying that the representation exists as a concrete particular and as an object of a different type from both the object of which it is a copy and the copier. This a sense repeats what was said in describing the imaging relation as triadic rather than simply dyadic.

 

This autonomy and reality of the image disappears when the imitation does not give rise to an object that is different from both the imitator and the imitated. This, as noted before, is the case with mental images, which is another way of saying that mental representations are private, rather than public. To the opposite, images because they are material objects that are distinct from both the imitator and the imitated are public. They are there to be seen by anyone who cares to look, not hidden inside the agent’s head.  

 

Hypothesis 2): Images are material objects. They are concrete particular. This may seem evident but it is often overlooked. Here I want to insist on the difference between images as such and other type of (pseudo)visual representation.

 

3 The third, again closely related, hypothesis concerns current cognitive science which views representations as central to knowledge and cognition. Cognitive science postulates that all cognitive systems have (or contain) internal representations that allow them to be cognitive systems. My suspicion is that when cognitive science is understood in this way, it naïvely views internal “representations” as if they were images. That is to say, as if they were material objects that are distinct from both what they represent and from the representer. Mainstream cognitive science tends to endow internal representations with the characteristics of images, and to understands cognition as if it were represented somewhat in the same way as external representations, in the way images relate to the objects in the world. As copies or doubles of the world, but copies that have no substance.

 

Hypothesis (2) implies that such a view of internal representation and knowledge is incorrect, mental representations are not images. My claim then is that representations are only images to the extent that they are material objects of a different type than the object they represent and of the representer. Purely ideal, mathematical or digital representations as such are not images either because they are not objects or the right type of objects. In consequence, they tend to collapse into identity, as is implicit in the claim that all is data. The representation is the world says that claim. There is, I want to argue, a certain inescapable concreteness to the relation of representation, in the sense that a representation is something different from that of which it is a representation and different from the representer.

 

Hypothesis 3): only images are true representation because a representation is a material object that is different from both the representer and the represented

 

This third hypothesis, if it is true, suggest the following claim: that while representations in terms of images play a fundamental role in human cognition and knowledge, but this role, the central place of images and representation in human knowledge is not found in the way most cognitive systems work, not even the way large parts of human cognitive abilities function. Images have shaped our cognitive system in a way we do not find in other cognitive systems.

 

The usual claim would be that it is because humans have a different, more evolved or developed cognitive system that they make image, the claim I want to defend is the converse. It is because humans make images that they have a more evolved or developed cognitive system. When I say “make images”, “make” should be understood in a very wide sense, perhaps it would be best to say, it is because humans trade in images that they have a more developed cognitive system.

 

We live in a world that is full of images, that contains so many images that we fail to notice it. But we do not fail to notice the images.

 

Underlying this claim is, among others, the following observation. Humans are the only animals who make images, and images – beginning with cave drawings and handprints – have been with us since the beginning of modern humans. However, all animals, all cognitive systems are deemed to rest on representations, including artificial ones. This raises the question: why don’t they make images, or to put it otherwise, why do we make images and what does that have to do with our particular cognitive abilities? What is the point or advantage of these external representations?

 

That is, how do representations that are a different physical object from that of which they are representations and yet in some way similar to them affect our knowledge of the world? Internal representations, to the extent that they may be considered as material objects, are fleeting distributed processes not concrete particular as images are and they are not objects for the agent who has these representations. They are not for him or her who has these representation objects, that person does not experiences them as mental images of the world but as the world.  When you see a tree what you experience is a tree, not a mental image of a tree which the neurologist or philosopher say is what you really are in contact with. And when the neurologist views them as objects, i.e. patterns of neural activity, he or she does not experience them as images. If the central hypothesis of present cognitive science is correct, if all cognition rests on “mental representation”, why were we not satisfied with them? What do painting, drawing, carving add to or reveal about our cognitive abilities? How did images transform us as cognitive systems?

 

I do not know the answer to these questions but I think they are worth asking. All three hypotheses are still vague and need to be developed. In many ways this course is the opportunity of doing that. However, at this point all of this is rather abstract, abstruse philosophy and cognitive science. How can I transform this into a palatable course for students who are not philosophers or cognitive scientists – which in many ways is a good thing, because students of philosophy and cognitive sciences tend to already be “deformed” by the dominant paradigms in these disciplines, which in spite of what is often claimed tend to fuse together images and mental images. Their main way of rejecting this accusation is by saying that representation should not be understood as if it were visual representation. That however is a very old issue and centuries of philosophy have not succeeded in coming out clear about it. The point I want to insist on is not the visual or non visual representation, but its material dimension.

 

 

8 courses or conferences

 

1 Introduction

            This is what we have just done, my goal here was to present the general problematic of images, describe what I see as some of their fundamental characteristics, and indicates how they relate to some other concepts especially those of representation and mental image. The 7 talks that follow can be considered as independent from each other, and there will be some overlap and repetition. However, they are nonetheless related and there is a certain progression between them. In other words, you do not have to follow them all, but I will, because the different talks are not unrelated and they will respond to each other.

 

 

2 Mimesis and imitation*

            Here I will present some fundamental aspects of René Girard mimetic theory. First I will give an overview of the theory insisting on some consequences of this way of looking at the world, among other thing the importance if gives to violence, that are consequential for the way I want to analyse images. In particular, I will stress the difference between imitation and mimesis. At this point I will not talk so much about images but about what I think underlies the ability to make images.

 

3 The power of images*

            First, I will review and expand on some of things I said about images in the first meeting. After I will analyse to example that illustrate the power of images. Humans respond to images in very forceful ways. The two examples of the power or images, I will present illustrate two different relations between images and violence. First, how we do violence with images: revenge porn and second, how we do violence to images: iconoclasm

 

4 Robots and images*

            Most social robots are made in our image Sometimes extremely so, for example robots like Gemenoid or Sophia that are doubles of real person in the first case. Sometimes, they only vaguely resemble us, but for various robots we will look at most social robots have a humanoid shape and aim to imitate various aspects of human behaviour. Are such robots images? The answer, I will suggest has something to do with the notion of presence which is fundamental in both robotics and the analysis of images.

           

5 Icons, Index and Symbols*

            The American philosopher Charles Sandor Peirce distinguishes between three different types of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. Icons are images, but symbols are not. It is not entirely clear where indexes stand in relation to images. The anthropologist Alfred Gell proposes an anthropology of theory of art that analyses all works of arts as indexes. Most of the art works he has in mind is not representative and I will argue that indexes are the paradigm of non-representative images.

 

6 Copies and Models: Reproduction and originals*

            Here we will turn in part towards biology where copying and reproduction play such an important role, but also to the idea of modelization in science. In biology one of the main issue is the fidelity of the copying process, its exactness and conversely copying mistake. And the result of this copying process is not an image but another one of the same, another protein, another cell, another complex organism. Evolutionary biology, or rather evolution can be seen as a series of copying mistake. – distinguish between biological reproduction and industrial reproduction.

In science modelizing is guided by a completely different set of criteria. A model by definition disregards many important aspects of whatever it aims at modelling. The gain in knowledge a model can provide is closely related to the fact that the model is an imperfect representation. (To take an excessively evident example, we modelize thermos-nuclear reactions because such models are not thermos-nuclear reactions.) The importance of the difference between the model and what it is a model of remains true even in the sciences of artificial that use the synthetic method: learning by doing

           

7 Ideas, images, representations and intentional objects*

            It is probably no accident that in so many languages to see also means to understand and, in English at least, to understand is also said “to figure”. In fact, the Greek word eidos from which is derived our word “idea” also means form, figure and image. So, I wish to enquire into the relationship between vision and understanding, between seeing and grasping (another, but different, interesting image!), between figure and figuring. I also wish to address the relationship between images, which are concrete particulars, and abstract concept, classes. Representation is a central concept in cognitive sciences that is inseparable from the idea of an intentional object, which is more or less viewed as a mental image which the subject uses to act in the world. According to this point of view, we do not interact with the world but with a mental image of the world. An image however, is not an intentional object, but an object in the world that represents by being both like and different from the object it represents. Images, I will argue are the model of intentional objects. It is images that provided us with that idea.

 

8. Do we live in a simulation?*

            There is a suggestion that has been advanced by some philosophers, but also by others, i.e. Elon Musk, or the film Matrix that we live in a simulation. This idea has a long and sophisticated ancestry in philosophy which I will review rapidly. I will argue that this hypothesis is inseparable from reducing representation to a dyadic relation and confusing representations with images.

           

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[1] Note that “seeing” and “recognizing” are also more or less interchangeable so that explaining one by the other again is to some extent explaining the same by the same!

[2][2] The opposition between these two paradigms constitutes the beginning thesis of Quatremère de Quincy Essai sur la nature, les buts et les moyens de l’imitation dans les beaux-arts, 1823.

[3] H. Belting, Anthropologie des images, Paris : Gallimard, 2008.