Image act

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The image act is a philosophical and image-scientific theory that tries to capture the action-inducing effects emanating from the designed world.

In the literal sense of the word, the theory of the pictorial act refers to the ancient rhetoric, which gave the “acting pictures” (imagines agentes) a visually effective option. From this formula, new terms were constantly derived, which emphasized the pseudo-lively agency of images. After 1945 the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre coined formulations with the phrase “l'image est acte” and the photo theorist Philippe Dubois with the catchphrase “acte iconique”, to which the art historian Horst Bredekamp ties in with his theory of the image act .

theory

The basic assumption of the theory is that there is more to the image than just an image. Accordingly, images cannot only be reduced to the perception processes in the viewer. Contrary to the prevailing view of reality and the use of images as internal representations, the theory emphasizes the autonomous appearance of the image. When the viewer and the image meet, the recipient not only receives his or her own subjective perception of the image, but is confronted with a counterpart who, in its distinct form, possesses and exercises autonomy.

As developed by David Freedberg in his fundamental study The Power of Images , all discussions of such an autonomy and power of the image are based on an expanded concept of the image. This refers not only to works of art and photography or even just framed paintings, but in the broadest sense to all material artifacts that show a minimum of human processing. Thus the entire designed environment belongs to the phenomenon of image act.

Image act and speech act

Bredenkamp has the concept Picture Act as an alternative to a native of the linguistics notion of speech act created. In this transference, the image is placed in the role of the speaker. In artistic practice, this status is shown in the form of speaking works on which inscriptions with self-statements are formulated. The well-known formula me fecit (“made me”), for example, on the frame of Jan van Eyck's man with the red turban names “JOH [ANN] ES DE EYCK ME FECIT A [N] NO MCCC 33 21 OCTOBRIS” (Jan Van Eyck made me in the year 1433 on October 21st) in this way "the double existence of the work as a created object and an autonomous subject."

Three forms of the pictorial act

In his attempt at a comprehensive definition of the pictorial act, Bredekamp distinguishes between three different forms. The schematic pictorial act describes pictorial practices that bring the picture to life by making use of the body schemes or by turning bodies into pictures themselves, as in the Tableaux Vivants.

The substitutive image act describes the interchangeability of image and body. This role of the image is shown in iconoclasm, when images are punished like living people, or when people are killed as a means of terror in order to turn them into images of destruction. Examples of this range from the Reformation iconoclasm and shame to the current terror tactics of the “ Islamic State ”, which annihilates people as living images and images as living enemies.

The intrinsic act of image names the effect that emanates from the specifics of the material and the designed forms. This opens up an ontological level of consideration which leads to the basic question of the extent to which an inherent potency of form must be presupposed on the level of materiality.

philosophy

Basic philosophical assumptions in the sense of the pictorial act can be found, for example, in Giambattista Vico , who understood the world of the mondo civile as an independently designed universe that humans can understand because they created it themselves. Vico understood image and language as twins of an active force. Thomas Hobbes linked the formation of communities to the power of images. Charles Sanders Peirce also saw visual appearances as autonomous, so that humans appear as participants and not as creators of a designed environment.

The philosophy of the pictorial act is, in the broadest sense, a variant of pragmatism and the philosophy of embodiment. While for these, as in enactivism , the body and the correspondence with aids are included in the question of consciousness, the pictorial act like James Gibson's Affordances does not only count on the extension of the mind, but on its determination by the "oncoming" figure. Eva Schürmann has given the principle of the pictorial act its own status in her philosophy of the practice of seeing. The concept of symbolic articulation includes the act of image in a redefinition of the concept of symbol that encompasses sound, gestures and the body as a whole.

Reception and criticism

In view of the growing importance of images due to the digitization of the world, the image act was praised as an attempt to strengthen their independent, non-representative significance. The philosopher Wolfram Hogrebe welcomed the act of painting as eye-opening for a “picture-blind natural and spiritual science”, since he made it clear that pictures “do not depict reality, but rather create it”.

The image act theory was criticized for the fact that the autonomy of the images, thought of as pseudo-liveliness, would be associated with a thing-magical thinking and the danger of animism and a mystical twist. With reference to this criticism, WJ Mitchell pointed out that it represented a denial of the everyday human experience with images. This should be reflected on and possibly also criticized, but should not be ignored. The controversial discussion of the image act in different subjects was the subject of a symposium at the ZiF in Bielefeld in April 2018.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rhetorica ad Herrennium (ed. U. Übers .: Theodor Nüßlein), Dusseldorf and Zurich in 1994, III / 37, p 176/177 and Quintilian [M. Fabius Quintilianus], Institutio oratoria X. Textbook of Oratory 10th Book (Translator: Franz Loretto), Stuttgart 1974, XI, 2, 22, pp. 594/595.
  2. ↑ Jörg Jochen Berns, Aching Pictures. On the design and mnemonic quality of monstrous constructs in antiquity and early modern times in: Roland Borgards (ed.), Pain and memory, Munich 2005, pp. 25-55.
  3. ^ Henri Lefebvre, Lefebvre, Henri, Critique de la vie quotidienne, II, Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidienneté, Paris 1961, p. 290.
  4. ^ Philippe Dubois, L'Acte Photographique et autres Essais, Paris 1990, p. 13.
  5. ↑ Horst Bredekamp, ​​Theory of the Image Act. Frankfurt Adorno Lectures 2007, Suhrkamp Verlag: Berlin 2010. A new version was published as ders., Der Bildakt. Frankfurt Adorno Lectures 2007, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach: Berlin 2015.
  6. ↑ Horst Bredekamp: The picture act. Frankfurt Adorno Lectures 2007, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach: Berlin 2015 p. 63.
  7. ↑ Horst Bredekamp: The picture act. Frankfurt Adorno Lectures 2007, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach: Berlin 2015 p. 111 ff.
  8. ↑ Horst Bredekamp: The example of Palmyra. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne 2016.
  9. ↑ Hear hair - know structures - act spaces. Reports from the interdisciplinary laboratory image knowledge design. Annual conference, November 15, 2014, at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Ed .: Horst Bredekamp and Wolfgang Schäffner), Bielefeld 2015.
  10. ↑ Jürgen Trabant, Nacquero esse gemelle. About the twin birth of image and language. In: Ulrike Feist and Markus Rath (eds.): Et in imagine ego. Facets of act of image and embodiment. Berlin: Akademie Verlag: 77–92. ( http://juergen-trabant.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Trabant-2012j-Nacquero.pdf )
  11. ↑ Thomas Hobbes, Vom Körper (Ed. And Translator: Max Frischisen-Köhler), Hamburg 1967 [1915], p. 15. Cf. Horst Bredekamp, ​​Thomas Hobbes. Visual strategies. Leviathan : archetype of the modern state. Work illustrations and portraits, Berlin 1999, p. 71f.
  12. ↑ John Michael Krois, John Michael Krois, A fact and ten theses on Peirce's pictures in: The pictorial thinking: Charles S. Peirce (Ed .: Franz Engel, Moritz Queisner, Tullio Viola), Berlin 2012, pp. 53–64 , here: p. 63f.
  13. ↑ Jörg Fingerhut, Embodiment Philosophy, in: 23 Manifeste, Marion Lauschke, Pablo Schneider (ed.), De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
  14. ↑ Approaching Thinking. Understanding between form and sensation (Ed .: Franz Engel and Sabine Marienberg), Berlin 2015.
  15. ↑ Eva Schürmann, Imagine and Represent. Scenes from a media anthropological theory of mind, Wilhelm Fink 2018.
  16. ^ Symbolic Articulation. Image, Word, and Body Between Action and Schema, Sabine Marienberg ed., Image Word Action vol. 4. De Gruyter Berlin / Boston 2017.
  17. ↑ Jennifer Bleek, review of: Theory of the image act: About the right to life of the image, in: SEHEPUNKTE, Issue 11 (2011), No. 4. Retrieved May 18, 2018.
  18. ↑ Wolfram Hogrebe: Echo of ignorance, afterword. Akademieverlag Berlin, 2006, p. 368.
  19. ↑ Kia Vahland: We look back. In a radical, groundbreaking study, Horst Bredekamp explains the life of pictures, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 292, literature, Friday, December 17, 2010, p. 14.
  20. ↑ Hanno Rauterberg, Exploring the Power of Images, in: Die Zeit, No. 50, December 9, 2010, p. 53.
  21. ↑ Helmut Mayer, Horst Bredekamp hurries through history on the trail of our receptivity to images: From the cave venus to the screen in the fighter jet, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22, Neue Sachbücher, Thursday, January 27, 2011, p. 34.
  22. ^ WJ Mitchell, What do pictures want ?: The Lifes and Loves of Images, Chicago University Press 2005.
  23. ↑ Johannes Grave and Karlheinz Lüdeking, Horst Bredekamp's theory of the image act, in: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ZIF/AG/2018/04-05-L%C3%BCdeking.html