What W.J.T. Mitchell wants.

WHAT DO PICTURES WANT?: THE LIVES AND LOVES OF IMAGES

BY W.J.T. MITCHELL

CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2005

408 PP./$35.00 (HB)

The very title of W.J.T. Mitchell's latest book, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, announces a polemic that puts the reader on the defensive before a single page has been turned. Mitchell's title leaves the reader wondering how to respond without seeming to agree tacitly with the premise implied in the titular question, in this case, that pictures have the capacity to "want" anything in the first place. Of course, Mitchell, a leading thinker and public intellectual on all cultures visual, addresses this hesitation in a number of ways throughout the book. His most immediately persuasive detour around this stumbling block is a reading of the word "want" as "lack"; in other words, Mitchell suggests that one may interpret his title as asking, what do pictures lack?--a question that does not imply that pictures are desiring objects, a question that no media intellectual who has read Karl Marx or Jacques Lacan would have trouble pondering. At other times, Mitchell claims that his title describes only a metaphoric relation between pictures and people; in asserting that "images are like living organisms" (11, emphasis added), Mitchell is free to make keen insights about the striking similarities in contemporary culture between cyborgs and humans, smart bombs and suicide bombers, unreal media events and catastrophes of mass death.

But as the subtitle of his book clearly implies, Mitchell also wants to know what pictures desire from their beholders, a question that will give most readers pause. Repeatedly, and with great rhetorical effect, Mitchell's tactical response is to acknowledge this hesitancy and address it directly. He informs the reader that he is "well aware that some critics will regard the mere entertainment of this question as a regressive, even reactionary move" (7). He even appears to agree with his imagined critics when he describes the "incorrigible tendency to lapse into vitalistic and animistic ways of speaking when we talk about images" (2). At the same time, Mitchell is not afraid of contradicting himself; he is also capable of making the bold, somewhat New Age statements that he wants "to let [pictures] speak for themselves" (6) and to help pictures explain the claims that they are making on their beholders. With Mitchell's blessing, the structure of disavowal at the heart of the fetish--"I know, but all the same I believe"--runs throughout the book. Mitchell also realizes that the title of his book "seems to be just the sort of question that an idolater would ask, one which leads the process of interpretation toward a kind of secular divination" (25).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Nevertheless, it is not the idol or the fetish but the totem that emerges as the hero of Mitchell's picaresque tale of the lives and loves of the image. Unlike the sublime, shiny idol or the erotic, furry fetish, the totem is a mundane but symbolic object that bears the chips and marks of its making. While the fetish is a private, sexualized object waiting to be defiled, and the idol is a public object that demands sacrifice and worship, the totem is a level-headed, dispassionate image that resembles your friend or brother, a member of the tribe to which you belong. Neither descendant from the heavens nor hidden between the sheets, the totem seems best able to represent the rapprochement between nature and culture, the spiritual and the material. According to Mitchell, the totem stands for the lost community, not the lost body part or the lost father, and it promises equality, participation, and intimacy.

In this description, it becomes clear that the totem is not only the model of the proper picture, but also a prescription for the proper image-beholder relationship. Mitchell's elaboration of the totem makes the reader realize that the question the book most clearly answers is, what does Mitchell want from pictures?, or more precisely, what does he want us to want from pictures? The immediate answers to these questions are that he wants pictures to be totem-like, and that he wants us to value most highly the totem-like image. While Mitchell does not describe the political counterparts to his tripartite categories of the image, we can surmise that the idol embodies the authoritarian desire to knock down the citizen's private walls and overtake him completely, and the fetish represents the liberal love of privacy and the wish, above all, to be left alone. Meanwhile, the totem, as Mitchell describes it, seems to represent most closely the ethos of social democracy that champions equal participation in all aspects of the determination of public society.

But while Mitchell forcefully asserts the superior moral and political value of the totem, the reader cannot help but think at times that he secretly, perhaps unconsciously, prefers both the idol and the fetish. This secret predilection would explain Mitchell's fascination with images of sublime, idol-like dinosaurs and the fetishized, cloned sheep Dolly. It would also explain why Mitchell has trouble claiming the totem status of Antony Gormley's monolith statues, and why he reveals in a throwaway footnote that he prefers the idolatrous concerts of the self-contained Bob Dylan over the communal concerts of the totemistic Bruce Spring-steen. Mitchell's ambivalence toward the social symbolism of the totem comes across most clearly in his own fundamentally asocial, individualistic approach to art criticism. He often fails to provide a social context to the pictures he considers, or to his own acts of interpretation of films, art installations, museum exhibits, and photographs. The social institutions of art, culture, and politics in which images appear and gain meanings of desire and empathy are often left unconsidered. Too frequently, Mitchell's analysis boils down to his standing in front of the work of art, telling you how he sees it--a method that yields a lot of wonderful observations about the structure and style of the image, but little about its social, political, or historical meanings. When he tries to head off this criticism by claiming that he is not interested in the meanings of images, that he wants to "shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire" (33), he ignores the fact that power and desire are intimately related, and that his most interesting and perceptive analyses interpret the meanings of images--from Dolly to Uncle Sam to the World Trade Center--and the meanings of desire itself.

Moreover, a thicker description of the social context in which specific pictures are produced, distributed, exhibited, and received would have prevented Mitchell from making overly general claims about the image, such as the claim that the image is like the politically oppressed "other," a subaltern subject that has not been allowed to speak. The problem with this comparison is that not all images are political "others" in any meaningful sense of the term. There are some images that embody and mediate hegemonic power because of who made these images, what messages they convey, as well as when, where, and how they are circulated in society; for the same reasons, other images represent less dominant ideas and political discourses. At a few different points throughout the book, African Americans seem to be equated with racist stereotypes and women with sexist imagery; these equations disregard the obvious fact that African Americans and women do not typically feel that their desires are being represented by their mass-mediated images. Mitchell needs to make more distinctions between kinds of images based on institutional divisions--distinctions that would pull him away from the image and out into the world of image circulation.

Such distinctions would help to clarify why some of the images that he analyzes, such as images produced by Spike Lee and Barbara Kruger, want different things from their spectators than those typically found in Hollywood film or commercial advertising. When Mitchell claims that "a scopic regime can be overturned repeatedly without any visible effect on either visual or political culture" (33), the reader wants to know what overturned scopic regimes he is talking about. Last time I checked, the male gaze of Hollywood film was alive and well and still the biggest kid on the cinematic block, although alternatives are more and more available because of the institutional efforts of filmmaker collectives, film festivals, and microcinemas. Also crucial to the attempts to provide alternative scopic paradigms are the efforts of feminist film critics who, contrary to the impression created by Mitchell's narrative, never had a mission to ban Hollywood film parallel to Catherine MacKinnon's anti-pornography crusade.

Although Mitchell overreaches in some of his general claims about the lives and loves of the image, the book displays great analytical energy, playfulness, and insight into the many varied answers that he offers to his own central question: images want to be kissed and touched and heard; they want to trade places with the beholder; they want everything and nothing. When Mitchell argues that critics should put the image first, he is attempting to open up the field of visual inquiry and avoid any orthodoxy of method, whether psychoanalytic or materialist, that would consider the image as mere symptom or ideological manifestation, an object of iconoclastic destruction or idolatrous esteem. The strength of What Do Pictures Want? is that it is less a manifesto on the rules and systems of analysis than a call to expand the field with "new questions of process, affect, and the spectator position" (49), a thought experiment on the vitality of images, and their ability to create in the present new forms and representations of the deep past and near future, from digitized dinosaurs to cloned sheep.

ANNA SIOMOPOULOS is assistant professor of English and Cinema Studies at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.