Chapter One for The New Lives of Images

One

THE IMAGE

The image is present to our gaze, certainly. But that presence, or visibility, relies on the medium in which the image appears, whether on a monitor or embodied in an old statue. In their own right, images testify to the absence of that which they make present. [. . .] In this lies the paradox of images—in the fact that they are or mean the presence of an absence—and this paradox is in part the result of our capacity to distinguish image and medium. [. . .] They need a presence as medium in order to symbolize the absence of what they represent.

—HANS BELTING, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body¹

[I]mages are not as limpid as concepts; they do not follow the mind’s activity with the same flexibility; they can only be governed indirectly; they maintain a certain opacity, like a foreign population in the midst of an orderly state. Displaying, to a degree, will, appetite and motion, images almost seem to be secondary organisms within the thinking being.

—GILBERT SIMONDON, Imagination and Invention²

Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force. And, to extract it, it subtracts or removes it from homogeneity, it distracts it from it, distinguishes it, detaches it and casts it forth. It throws it in front of us, and this throwing [jet], this projection, makes its mark, its very trait and its stigma: its tracing, its line, its style, its incision, its scar, its signature, all of this at once.

—JEAN-LUC NANCY, The Ground of the Image³

···Images surround us on all sides. They decorate the walls of our homes and are displayed on our clothes, our vehicles, and signs that mark our roadsides and fill our cities. We see them, admire them, puzzle over them, and glean information from them at every significant site of our everyday lives: our schools, gyms, doctor’s offices, stores and businesses, government facilities, churches and temples. We store them in our wallets, for occasional sharing with friends, and tattoo them in ink into the skin of our bodies. They fill books and magazines and radiate from (and move across) our smartphones, computer screens, and media devices. Some of these images we interact with daily, internalizing them so that they appear in our dreams, our reveries, and our imaginings, in our mind’s eyes and mind’s ears (and this book will define images to include not just the visual but the auditory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, interoceptive, and other kinds). Some of these images—for instance, of police violence directed at individuals like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, or of protester violence directed at symbols of the state, or of flags, religious prophets, or symbolically significant buildings being burned, desecrated, or attacked—become the fulcrums around which history turns.

This image richness of our world is the first of two facts that ought to frame any discussion of images today. Not only is our world full of images, but new ones are coming into being every day, with all of them disseminated along technical networks and hardware and software platforms—from YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to media outlets and databases of many kinds—which are evolving so rapidly that few of us can keep up.

The second fact is that images feature at the center of so many of the cultural, political, and religious conflicts found in the world today. Such conflicts—around the “truth” or “fakeness” of images, around how different groups of people (or deities) are depicted in them, how they react to them, and around their qualities, significance, and sacredness or profanity—can only be expected to intensify with every passing year, with every billion humans added (to a number that has surpassed eight billion as I write this), and with every degree of temperature rise forecasted by climate scientists. The role of images both in raising the climate of politics and in navigating the climate of Earth has become incontrovertible.

These two facts make the study of images an increasingly important part of understanding today’s world. This book proposes a broad and encompassing way of thinking about images. Its focus is not so much the images themselves as it is the relationship we humans have had, continue to have, and will likely have in the future with images—our images, other people’s images, and images whose authorship and provenance are uncertain. It presents, in its first half, a typology of six distinctive “regimes” by which those relationships are and have been organized. Understanding the differences between these regimes and something of their history will help us see how our own understanding of images is not the only one, nor necessarily the correct one; images might be made to work very differently than they do for us. It also helps us to get a better handle on the image-rich world of today, an image-world that surrounds us, immerses us, captivates us, and shapes our lives in ways we may barely understand.

In its second half, the book presents interpretations of several sets of images—“image formations” that arise within “image ecologies”—in light of the typology presented here. The first of these sets are images depicting the present as a time of crisis—a time called by some the Anthropocene, though the emphasis here is not so much on the triumph of humanity (the Anthropos) over the world as on the perils exhibited in that triumph. The second consists of works in our digital image-world that seemingly animate the world by depicting animals (of the nonhuman kind) interacting with each other and with humans in unexpected, sometimes transgressive, and instructive ways. The third concerns a set of strategies pursued by some artists and image-makers to access a “higher” (or “deeper”) world even in the midst of a tacit denial of the existence of any world beyond that of modern humanity. The chapters probe the tensions between different kinds of image relations: for instance, between the regime of the “expression-image,” for which images are valued as works of artistic expression; the regime of the “world-picture,” which values images as accurate duplicates of sensible reality; and the regime of the “ideal-image,” for which they are valued as windows into an otherwise inaccessible, transcendent world (one that reappears throughout modernity in the guise of “the sublime”). Each of these readings highlights ways in which different ways of relating to images combine with new technological capacities to create new potentials for working with images in the complicated image-world we inhabit.

The book, then, proposes something like a diagnostic toolkit for understanding the work that images do, and can do, for us today. Its goal is not to be thorough and comprehensive about any of the specific regimes it analyzes. That goes as well for the digital image-world, as I will call it—the thickly mediatized world in which images flow, connect, modulate, and otherwise shape the larger world of people, bodies, and “nature” in novel and barely mapped ways. The book does not aim to get into the weeds of debates and rival perspectives on today’s image-rich world. It aims instead to provide something like a global overview of things many of us may already intuit, and then to apply that overview to some interesting phenomena that populate both the boundaries between image regimes and the connections that relate humans to the more-than-human world today. The book will have done its work if its insights—its categories and classifications—are found to be helpful in interpreting the work that images do today, and if it sheds light on the relationship between an image-equipped humanity and the Earth within which that humanity makes its dwelling.

One typology of images, which restricts itself to the visual, includes the following categories: solid (or three-dimensional) images, pictorial images, arrested images, mirror images, projected camera images, photographic camera images, retinal images, optical after-images, memory images, and mental images.¹⁰ W. J. T. Mitchell in his straightforwardly titled essay “What Is an Image?” notes another typology: “We speak of pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas as images.” Images, he adds, can be graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal.¹¹ If we were to add to this the full array of nonvisual images—auditory (from recorded sounds to hallucinated voices), olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, and other kinds—we would have a tremendous array of data to work with.

Most work on images proposes some way of simplifying what it is that makes an image distinct from other things. In a synoptic overview of contemporary philosophical approaches to images, John Kulvicki succinctly defines images as “likenesses made to present things,” arguing that images are one of two main ways of presenting, or representing things, the other being verbal and/or textual.¹² The definition of the image I will follow in this book builds on this notion that the image presents things by referring to those things, at least in part, through likeness or resemblance. More precisely, I will define an image as a perceptible form that produces an effect in an observer in part through its resemblance to something else.

There is a lot to unpack in this definition, and this book will take some time in doing that. But as a first stab, this definition will be helpful for us in its emphasis on four things.

(1) An image is a form that is sensed or perceived. It need not be a visual form (as mentioned). And let us not trouble ourselves with whether an image must really be there in front of us or if it could also be in our minds, or somewhere in the relationship between the two. We still call “mental images” images, and they could not exist in our minds without being the sort of thing we could perceive with our senses; the two share that quality, but their relationship can be left aside for now.

(2) An image produces an effect. By this I mean that it is active—it is an image by virtue of its imaging, and not simply in its being there to be perceived if a perceiver happens to come along. Our working rule will be this: if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then it does not make a sound. This is not because sound waves are not produced by it (they are), but because there is no organism nearby to turn those sound waves into perceived sounds. That’s a highly unlikely scenario (as with many thought exercises), but the point is that the image is what it does. The image, as defined here, will not be the sound waves themselves which may or may not be turned into a “sound.” It will be the sound as it is perceived, which is always already meaningful, or feelingful, or meaning-and feeling-inducing and-provoking. This will be the pragmatic and processual part of our definition; more on that momentarily.

(3) The effect it produces is in or on an observer, and it is in relationship to a “something else” that is not directly present to the observer. This means that the image is not equivalent to the effect it has on an observer, nor is it equivalent to the something else that the image points to, reminds one of, or otherwise refers to for that observer. The image understood completely—which we can more technically call the “image relation” or “image event”—is inclusive of these two relationships. The image, in other words, includes three elements: there is the image itself, the perceivable form; there is the thing it refers to, which is its object or referent; and there is the effect that it has, an effect which could be a meaning, a feeling, or something of both. The second of these—the thing being referred to by an image—is not directly present but is made present by the image. It is presented, represented, indicated, or otherwise brought to presence in and through the image. We could depict this relationship as a triangle, one that shows a movement, a shift, or a connection made between the something that is there (the image) and the something that is not there (the referent), and another one from those two to the someone for whom the two are brought together in the effect—the meaning, the feeling, the significance—they produce. Without the image, the referent and the effect are unrelated; the image is their mediator.

To speak of the “effect” that an image produces is not meant to suggest a causal arrow moving from the image (or the referent via the image) to its recipient, as if the recipient were passive. It is better to think of the effect as something produced in and through the entire relation. The “imaging event” encompasses all three points of the triangle: the image itself, its referent, and its registration, or its bearing, in a beholder. The image could have arisen as a result of a triggering event in the world outside the observer (which would make this more of a perceptual image), or it could have arisen purely as a result of the neurophysical activity of the observer (which would make this more of a mental event, such as one based in the memory of a perceptual encounter). But its arising is triadic, with the “image itself” mediating between its referent and the meaning it bears for the observer. (By “the observer” I simply mean the bearer of the image and the recipient of its effect.)

FIGURE 1.1. The image relation/event.

Moreover, the correspondences between the referent and the registered image, and between the referent and the meaning or effect, are never complete. There is always a shift, a movement, or a slippage that leaves behind an elusive remainder that cannot be contained, encompassed, or even measured in the imaging event. The point is that a presence is established. As Hans Belting puts it in An Anthropology of Images (cited in the opening quote to this chapter), the “paradox of images” is “that they are or mean the presence of an absence.”¹³ An image combines this presence (of an absence) with meaning: it produces meaning (which may also be feeling), and in this lies its eventness, but it does this through its presence, without which it could not function. It makes something (else) present through its own presence. The “something else” is made present through the image, but its (presumed) existence elsewhere or elsewhen is part of the relationship. (Because it is not directly present except by implication, I place the word “referent” in square brackets above.) The image is therefore the real and active mediator of a relationship.

(4) Finally, and crucially, the relationship between the image and what it refers to is at least in part a relationship of resemblance or likeness. The image in some sense looks like, sounds like, feels like, tastes like, or otherwise resembles its referent in its form, outline, structure, or other perceivable qualities. The relationship between them need not be entirely and fully that of resemblance—indeed it may not always be clear what makes it a resemblance or how much of a resemblance is needed to qualify as a resemblance—but it is this “being like” that makes something an image as opposed to, say, a word, a clue, or another kind of sign. (More on signs in a moment.) An image, in this sense, always has a secondarity to it; it is always a reminder, even as it adds to or builds on whatever it may be reminding of. It is always an echo of something, a repetition, even as it opens onto difference, transformation, or novelty. (More on repetition and difference in a moment.)

A simple example of an image is that of a human face, such as the one pictured in figure 1.2. When you look at this face, you are aware that it looks like the face of a real person, but also that it is not that face. If it were, that face would be attached to a body and a consciousness that would see you. It would not be a square surrounded by white space on a leaf of paper (if you are holding a book in your hands) or on the screen version of a page. Assuming you do not actually believe that the eyes on this face see you the same way that you see them, this qualifies as a sign whose meaning depends on its resemblance to something that is not present. Whether in fact there is a person whose face this represents—a person whose facial profile was captured by camera at some previous point in time—or if it is a composite image created by artificial intelligence from myriad data it has processed, we are not sure. But while that may complexify its meaning, it does not prevent it from meaning what it does: the image of a face of someone who may have existed in reality. More specifically, that someone seems to be young, a boy, and vaguely “Asian” in appearance. That person may stand beside you as you gaze at their image, or they may not exist at all. The image is not them, but it brings their absence into presence for you at this moment that you gaze at it. Its imaging is an occurrence here and now, for you, even as it connects you to a there and a then, when the picture may have been taken of a person who may have gazed into a camera, or, alternatively, to a more ambiguous act of image-creation by human-prompted AI. It is a sign that signifies in large part through resemblance to something that exists, in some sense, elsewhere and elsewhen.

FIGURE 1.2. Image of a human face.

My reference to signs brings us to the most important theoretical source informing this inquiry. This is the work of American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”). Peirce founded the field now called semiotics, or the study of signs, which is devoted to how things come to mean anything. Unlike the other major strand of semiotics, founded on the work of French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Peirce was not only interested in the meanings themselves. He was also centrally concerned with the process by which meaning occurs for anything or anyone, and therefore in how meaning itself is even possible. Signs, for Peirce, are the basic units of meaning. Their signness lies in their signification, or their production of meaning; it is their action as such that is their essence. And signs are the basis of all life, and indeed of all things.

Peirce conceived of three basic kinds of signs.¹⁴ First, there are those that take their meaning from the resemblance or likeness between the sign or “sign-vehicle,” the thing that carries meaning, and its referent. They look, sound, smell, taste, or feel like the thing that they refer to. These he called icons. Second, there are those that take their meaning from the directly physical, causal, or “existential” connection between the sign and its referent—in the way that a weathervane indicates the direction of the wind, or that smoke on the horizon indicates a likely fire somewhere below. These he called indexes or indices. And finally there are those that take their meaning from convention, rule, or habit, which he called symbols. These mean what they mean because they are part of a larger system of meanings, one whose basic rules must be learned before the individual meanings can be understood or used. Words are generally this third kind of sign. And while these three forms of signification are not always, nor even usually, easily separable, the difference is significant for reasons that should become clear soon. The image, as I use the word, is that for which the primary basis of meaning, its center of gravity so to speak, is the first of these (the iconic) rather than the second (indexical) or third (symbolic).¹⁵

Unlike images, language works mostly through the symbolic or conventional register. Words mean things only because they are part of vast, interconnected networks of other words, meanings, and operational rules, which in their combination we call languages. The exceptions are mainly onomatopoeic words that sound like what they mean (which are therefore iconic) and deictic words that take their meaning entirely from their contexts (which are therefore indexical). For humans, linguistic communication is especially important; we rely on words, texts, and stories to a degree that is unmatched among creatures we know. Understanding these requires understanding the logic of language, which means the interrelation of words and concepts within systems that both connect and differentiate concepts with and from each other. Understanding words requires understanding the language they are part of.

But the iconic and the indexical are also present in the ways we communicate and make sense of the world. The iconic even weaves its way into language, so that the most powerful uses of language are those that include clear and resonant images: metaphors that suggest likeness between things we know are different, for instance, between body parts and social or political units (head of state, head of the family, body politic, underbelly, having a leg to stand on, hitting below the belt), between social classes and spatial or temporal categories (higher authorities, upper and lower classes, vanguard, and retrograde), or between mental states and sensory phenomena (darkness and enlightenment). These are more complex forms of signs, which will not be the focus of this book, but they help to demonstrate how images are indeed everywhere.

As sensorially perceptible forms, images include formal qualities that are capable of being maintained across contexts. This makes images sharable between people and contexts, which in turn connects them to networks of meaning, use, production, and interpretation. This is true even while their uses remain negotiable, contestable, and unique to any specific image-event. There is a necessary ambiguity in my description here: I say that an image is sharable, but I have also just claimed that the image is an image only in its imaging—which means that the image I perceive today cannot be the same as the image you or I will perceive tomorrow, no matter if it is the same photo shared on a different computer, or the same road sign, poster, billboard, or cell phone ringtone. There is something shared, and there is something different—just as there is something the image resembles (which makes of it an image) and there is some way in which the resemblance is never complete. The image differs even as it repeats.

My choice of words here is partly informed by the title of Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition, in which Deleuze argues that “difference” is not secondary to “identity” or sameness—there are not things that maintain their identities and, only secondarily, things that happen to make those identities change. Rather, for Deleuze, difference is more like the primary fact of the universe: there is something at all only because there is differentiation.¹⁶ Change, transformation, and movement are at the core of all things. The image, in this sense, differs in at least two primary ways: it differs from the thing that it refers to, which makes of it an image; and it differs in that its particular instantiation as an image-event is always different from any other. These two differences, or deferrals—between the image and its referent, and between the image and its effect—are the two “movements,” “shifts,” or “spans” that make of it a sign. And the likeness that is carried across these “spans,” which is always a repetition with a difference, is what makes of it the kind of sign that we are calling an image.

An image, then, is something that means, or that makes meaning, that carries a “force” (to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s evocative language, cited in the epigraph to this chapter), by reference to something else—an elsewhere, an elsewhen, or both. Imaging is a making of meaning through reference, which means through connection. It is the kind of connection that, when multiplied and cross-referenced, weaves worlds. Imagination, then, is the bearing (and ongoing production) of the images that constitute worlds for living in. Meaning is not solely made through images; it can also be made through direct reference—by the kind of sign called an index (as when a clap of thunder means, or indicates, an electrical storm)—and through the complex and more arbitrary system of meanings shaped by language. But images are inherent to the making of meaningful worlds, for humans and for other image-bearing creatures.

This definition of an image is somewhat idiosyncratic. Like other everyday words—mind, nature, thought, self, spirit, world, and so on—“image” is used in a multitude of ways, and my use of the word will hardly be able to avoid all the connotations suggested by other uses. For that matter, it is not necessarily a word that travels well across cultural contexts. In German, for instance, there are no separate words for “image” and for “picture”; both are translated as Bild. Given the German language’s proximity to English, one can see how complicated this might get. For all its messiness, I am hoping that my definition will provide us an adequate place to start.

My short answer to this question is: the repetition goes all the way back, and so does the creativity. This may not literally mean “back to the Big Bang” or to the original creative act that begat the universe. But if it did, I would add “but that was also a creative repetition of what preceded it”—a previous big bang, or whatever else we might imagine, wherein the constraints on our ability to imagine become evident. The point is that both repetition and creativity are built into the understanding of the sort of thing that we, and the universe, are.

In another sense, we might say that the original image was the first echo, or the first image seen in a mirror, such as a pool of still water. Before there was water, there was a substance that allowed for something to be echoed back. Imaging begins with echoability. Once something—the first form, a visage of some sort, or a sound (such as the sound of “the Big Bang,” and without a substance for it to resonate within, there could have been no bang)—is capable of being echoed, and once there is someone or something capable of perceiving that echo, there is imaging.¹⁷ Imaging therefore begins as “thirdness,” which is a word that plays a key role for Peirce, who distinguishes between “firstness,” or a thing in and of itself without reference to anything else; “secondness,” or a direct and causal relation between two things; and “thirdness,” or the mediation or generalization of a direct relation. Imaging is in this sense the first form of thirdness: the perception of a relationship between a thing and its repetition, its echo. Imagination, in turn, builds upon imaging; it is ongoing thirdness made or built from this most basic form of thirdness.

Lest it sound as if I am speaking mythologically, this is the point at which I should articulate the ontological core of my argument. The definition I am proposing of the image and of imagination draws in part on the work of image theorists whose names will be referenced in the footnotes throughout this book, but it also emerges from my previous work on images, and on moving images in particular.¹⁸ In that work, I developed a process-relational (or process-semiotic) conception of images drawn from the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, the processual semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and a range of other thinkers loosely allied around the following three understandings:

1) Reality is most fruitfully understood as consisting not of objects or substances, but of events, occasions of experience, acts of existence, or becomings.

2) Within these events, subjectivity and objectivity, or the mental and the material, in some sense co-arise; they do this as “a response to what it given.” The response is possible because of a creative openness inherent to things; “what is given” is there because of the conditions shaped by what came before. The response, in turn, determines the next set of conditions for the next set of responses; and so on down the ever-branching stream. Determination and openness (to some degree, even if infinitesimal) are conjoined in every event that makes up the universe.

3) These events act and build on each other dynamically and systemically, historically and ecologically, to create the complex worlds in which we live.¹⁹

If we take something like “relational process” to be central to all life (if not all things), with “process” considered something like the act of processing—the act of “taking up” things perceived and consequently “bringing forth” further things—then it is fair to say that the world is both consumed and produced through the acts of its constituent agents.²⁰ Whitehead coined the word “prehension” for precisely this kind of “taking up,” that is, for taking account of and responding to things given in experience. Prehension, for Whitehead, is analytically distinguishable into a “subjective pole,” a component involving the arising, formation, or consolidation of a subjective perception, a becoming-subject; an “objective pole,” or the becoming-object of those elements, factors, or perceived things that served in this way for the becoming-subject; and a specific way in which the two are actively and creatively constituted, which is the form taken by the prehension.²¹

Peirce spoke of the same kind of act or event as “semeiotic” and emphasized its triadic character, wherein something (the “representamen” or “sign-itself”) is taken as standing for something else (the “object”) for a third (the “interpretant”).²² As an example, hearing a phrase of birdsong could evoke a certain set of meanings in the mind of a bird, a predatory animal, or a human who hears it. Analogously, the phrase “I hear a bird” can evoke a certain type of auditory and/or visual image for a human listener. Both of these is the production of a sign (or several), even if the latter involves language and the former does not. Signs, for Peirce, exist in their production: if no one hears a tree fall, then it has not made a sound—which means that the air wave contractions resulting from the fall have not been interpreted acoustically by an organism capable of hearing them because no such organism is in its proximity.

For Peirce and the semioticists who followed in his wake—including the entire fields of biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics, phytosemiotics, and others—life itself occurs and unfolds through distinctly semiotic acts.²³ A process-semiotic approach understands the world, or at least the living world, to consist of events of semiosis, which are events of relational process, events of mediation resulting in novelty. Such semiosis is not at all restricted to human beings—far from it, in fact—but humans draw upon a complicated array of meaning-making forms, including the iconic (which are based on resemblance between objects and their referents), the indexical (based on causal relationship between objects and their referents), and the symbolic (based on habit or convention), and understanding our world today requires grasping this full complexity of semiotic modalities.

If images are a form of signification, and if signification is always active and relational, always an act rather than a thing, then the world, or at least a meaningfully lived world, consists at least in part of acts of imaging. How we image the world, and how we take up and transform those images in our acts of imaging, is both how we add to the world and how we constitute ourselves in the process. Imaging, by this definition, represents a form of accessing, or, in Whitehead’s terms, prehending. As Whitehead once put it, “mind is inside its images, not its images inside the mind.”²⁴ The image is the form or vehicle facilitating an act of accessing; because it mediates, the role of the image is active.²⁵ The capacity to form images—not from scratch, but from the world—and to then inhabit those images, is a precondition for any knowledge of the world.²⁶

Defining the imagination in this way, as a capacity or faculty that is a precondition for any knowledge of the world, brings my theory close to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who presented imagination more or less like this in his 1787 Critique of Pure Reason.²⁷ And indeed, Kant’s notion of the imagination as both reproductive and productive, and as a synthetic activity encompassing both the sensible (that which is known through the senses) and the intelligible or conceptual, is central to how I am using this word. But what is a “faculty,” and who possesses it? A process-semiotic account of imagination does not dwell on establishing preconditions, capacities, or limitations to what a human (or nonhuman) might be able to do with images or the imagination. It focuses on the activity of imaging—of creating, inhabiting, and transforming images—and on the relations they enable with the world itself. For that reason, I do not much dwell on the philosophy of imagination in this book; there are other places to look for that.²⁸ I dwell instead on the relations we make with our images and how that shapes the capacity for imagination. I take “imagination” to be a kind of cumulative stand-in for the activity of imaging, which is the activity of making the world through the creation of meaning by resemblance.

Images, I will insist, are not merely visual. They are perceptual, which means that they are based in the possibility of perception. As such, they could be auditory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, gustatory, or of another sensorial mode or combination of perceptual modes that a given organism might have access to. Imaging serves as medium of our experience of the world, a world that, in psychologist James Hillman’s words, affords “imagistic intelligibility.”²⁹ The images are, in this sense, not in our heads nor in the world (out there); they are in between. They are the between, and they (along with other kinds of signification) are the constituents of the world(s) we live. We take up images selectively, allowing them to take and carry us, to hold and possess us, or to otherwise facilitate our movement in and through the world as we make sense of that world for ourselves and for others.³⁰

Let me introduce a more precise vocabulary for analyzing sensory experience. We live in a world whose changing forms and processes come to us through sensory perception. Going back at least to Aristotle, the senses have traditionally been enumerated as five: visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smelling), gustatory (tasting), and tactile (touching). But this conception is consistent neither across western scientific domains nor cross-culturally. Sometimes the list is extended to the proprioceptive (body awareness) and the vestibular or equilibrioceptive (movement and balance); less frequently it includes the interoceptive (senses related to internal organs, which enable perception of heart rate, hunger, chemicals in the bloodstream, spinal and cranial nerves, nervous “butterflies,” and the like). Other senses have been proposed, including the vomeronasal, which perceives pheromones separately from the nasal, and specific senses to distinguish pain, temperature, pressure, and other features of experience. Folk taxonomies frequently refer to more mysterious forms of perception, such as intuition, a sixth sense, or x-ray vision, alongside more (apparently) metaphorical usages such as sense of humor, sense of duty, sense of rhythm, and so on.³¹ Once we begin to include non-western discourses about sensory experience, things get even murkier, as some cultures do not distinguish at all between physical senses and affects, feelings, or emotions.³² Expanding to other species makes things even more challenging: there is the echolocation of bats, the ultraviolet vision and infrared perception of many species, an electric sense in fish, and magnetic field sensitivity in many species.

All of that said, speaking of five senses is understandable insofar as these relate directly to a recognizable organ of perception—eyes (sight), ears (hearing), nose (smell), tongue (taste), and skin (touch)—while the others do not. But delineating precise locations for each of these (retina, cochlea, taste buds, and so on) becomes challenging: where, for instance, are the skin receptors, and which ones count? I propose that we begin instead with an understanding of some broad generalities of sensory perception. Each of the five “traditional” senses has the capacity to sense a more general perceptual “field” and, in contrast, a more specific and delineated array of perceptual “objects.” We can speak of a visual field and of visual objects; a sonic or auditory field and of auditory objects; an olfactory field and of olfactory objects; a tactile field and tactile objects; and, at least hypothetically, a gustatory field and gustatory objects. Insofar as specific objects take on specific meanings, they become signs: this is where we get visual images, auditory images, olfactory images, tactile images, and gustatory images. The imagined smell of roses is an olfactory image (icon) of roses; the imagined taste of lemon is a gustatory image of lemon; and so on. In the same sense, we could speak of visual or auditory indexes and symbols: the sensation of being tickled by one’s lover, for instance, is an index of her touch, though it may also be a symbol of her love. The stars on the U.S. flag, on the other hand, take their meaning neither from any resemblance (iconic) to particular stars in the sky nor from the activity of those stars (indexical), but only from the symbolic understanding that they represent states that collectively made the United States of America.

A fully fledged analysis of all the senses, even one that restricted itself to the traditional five, would take us too far afield for the purposes of this book. Instead, I will delve more deeply here into the world of sound, or what François Bonnet in his wonderful meditation on The Order of Sounds calls the “regime of audibility.”³³ The sonic, audiovisual, and poetic-literary will return in later parts of this book, but the assumption throughout will be the definition of the image provided in the previous pages.

Bonnet’s The Order of Sounds begins with the image of a seashell which, when we hold an ear to it, resounds with the sound of the sea. Applying a Peircian analysis to this, we can ask: is this a trace of the actual sea we hear (an index), our own memory of the sea (an icon), or a convention understood from hearing and reading about seashells taken to “contain” the “sound of the sea” (a symbol)? When the sound of a bullroarer is taken to be the voice of a god or a lake-monster, or when church bells are taken to signify the arrival of sacred or divine time, is that sound iconic because it is like the object, indexical because it is of the object, or symbolic because it is taken as such within the system of cultural meanings in which that is possible? Would a Kaspar Hauser, a feral child who had never previously experienced church bells, know anything of their intent or significance? When the sound of a thunderbird or of sirens is heard, is this a matter of pure and direct hearing (indexicality), of resemblance (iconicity), or of interpretation (symbolicity)?

Any interpretive framework that renders such sounds meaningful—that takes the bullroarer to be the correct god and not another one, or the sound of thunder to be a thunderbird rather than a raven or the meaningless discharge of electricity—eludes full arbitrarity, to one extent or another. That is, to the degree that the thunderbird in fact sounds like thunder, or that ambulance sirens sound oceanic, powerful, alluring, and “sirenic”—their perception transcends the merely arbitrary, conventional, and symbolic (in Peirce’s sense). Whatever else we may say about these signs, they are not entirely arbitrary; at some point in their evolution (so to speak) they either resembled a source (iconically) or issued directly from it (indexically), and their meanings continue to harbor at least a trace of those significances. So the question here may ultimately be a matter of distinguishing the iconic from the indexical.

The technological reproduction of prerecorded sounds is literally iconic—they sound like the originals. But is it so only when the hearer knows it is a recording and not the real thing? When the musical tritone, or augmented fourth interval, is taken to be the sound of the devil (as it may have been in certain medieval European contexts), or the tonal drone of the Indian raga (or the meditative Aum) is taken to be the foundational ground of the cosmos, is its performance iconic (yes, indeed!) or indexical (yes, but for whom)? Is the repeatedly insistent tritone at the center of proto-heavy metal band Black Sabbath’s eponymous song “Black Sabbath” the mark of the devil (an index), or is it merely a likeness of that mark (an icon)? It is also of course a winking nod to the tradition that, for whatever reason, took that interval to be the devil’s, which means that it is therefore also a symbol. But in each of these cases one could argue that it is in the blurring of the icon and the index that we come to participate in the world: that the world comes to be a place in which sounds—and images, smells, and tastes—can be reproduced because they point back to an original, and in which the tension between the originality and the reproduction becomes a lively and negotiable space for determining what is what.

What this implies for our definition of the image, as a sign incorporating likeness or resemblance, is that the degree of likeness to an original is a variable that may remain to some extent unresolvable. There may, in other words, be regimes within which an image is taken to be not an image but the original, the thing itself (Black Sabbath’s tritone is the devil); and in this case our calling it an image becomes an etic, or outsider’s, strategy of interpretation that differs from the emic (insider’s) reality it is interpreting. This is an ontological risk we should be prepared to account for as we move forward. In key respects, it will remain at the heart of our understanding of images and imagining, because it in fact prefigures one of the image regimes to be examined in the following chapter, that of the “animate-image.”

To the extent that we recognize the Black Sabbath song as music, however, we are recognizing it as participating in a language akin not only to other arts but also to language itself, and consisting of iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms in varying degrees. If music, as Whiteheadian philosopher Suzanne Langer called it, is an “occurrent” art of “virtual time” determined “by the movement of audible forms,”³⁴ some of those forms will be recognized in their relationship with each other—as elements of a symbolic language that is a language like language itself, whose elements refer to their relationships with each other (the note G sounds different in the context of a C major scale than that of an E minor scale). Others will be recognized for their resemblance to extra-musical things: to upward or downward movement, quickening pulses, birdsong, flowing water, steam trains, crashing metal, and devils. With aural images, no matter how connotatively symbolic they get (opera, hip-hop, and black metal all connote quite different sensibilities and cultures), they remain always already iconic in reference to what they sound like, and indexical in reference to their methods of production (the plucking of strings, the banging of metal, the fluttering of vocal chords).

As with music, so with dance, theatre, poetry, and other forms of creative expression: each generates meaning through culturally, and sometimes subculturally, specific systems of difference which, like much of language, seem arbitrary; but also through its simulation of things known from non-artistic contexts—say, those of politics, sexuality, bodily experience, nature, and so on. Teasing these apart is analytically feasible only up to a point. Even with visuality, this “always already ambiguity” can never be entirely eliminated. When I look outside my window and see a view of a lake and of mountains I know to actually be there, they are, for me, the things themselves: the mountains, the lake (in this case it is the Adirondacks on the opposite side of Lake Champlain, which I can see from the window of my Vermont home; for you of course mentioning these may conjure images from physical memory, or from photographs, travel brochures, or tourist geographies). I also recognize the lake as a lake because it shares in the character of lakeness—it is in this sense iconic of something I know to transcend this particular lake. But still I know that it is there to be touched and waded in if I were to walk down toward it. And yet, a moment’s thought will remind me that what I see is an image reconstructed by my brain from electromagnetic waves perceived by my optical receptors. The relationship here is indexical and somewhat complicated, based in evolutionary strategies underpinning the sensory apparatus by which I receive and interpret my world, with that interpretation always being somewhat predetermined through a set of algorithms that my nervous system (and yours) have found to be functional for our type of human living.³⁵ I see the lake as “blue” because of a shared understanding that that is what it is, and even if its color is closer to those I would in other circumstances call “green” or “gray,” I will still see it as blue as a matter of neuro-culturally determined habit.

My habits in this sense may not be as arbitrary as those making up language, but language is itself never quite arbitrary either, as its development is thoroughly historical and thereby causal: today’s languages are the results of historical networks of indexical determination that have resulted in what today may be both commonsensical and seemingly arbitrary. The word “lake” bears no resemblance to the appearance, sound, or smell of any actual lake; in its synchronic context, it appears perfectly arbitrary. But considered diachronically, its arbitrariness could be thoroughly deconstructed through a systematic and historical reconstruction of the evolution of the English language, of its predecessors (Old English, Old French, Latin, and so on), and of the speakers who enunciated it along the way.

The point here is that the very distinction between icon, index, and symbol breaks down when submitted to sufficient scrutiny. This breaking down—the elusiveness of reality in the face of our attempts to parse it—is something we will also see when we begin to distinguish different types of image regimes. Reality is a flux that submits to generalization only at the cost of its own messy detail. The best we can say is that, in an ultimate sense, the world is what Buddhists describe in their concept of Pratītyasamutpāda: it is a systemic network of dependently arisen phenomena, with each phenomenon being determined by multiple causes without which it could not be what it is. In this sense, a “fully Buddhist” analysis—which happens to be congruent with a “fully scientific” analysis—would take causality to be fundamental to the world’s functioning, which suggests that it is the index, the sign of causality, that most accurately presents that world to us. But causalities will always remain somewhat elusive to living beings, who are reliant on noting resemblances and, in the human case at least, on denotative systems of meaning (such as language), for interpreting the world. In a dynamic world, it is actually imperative to learn to read signs quickly: to note resemblances and to act on expectations derived from prior experience. This is how cognition works, according to neurocognitive scientists, for whom experience is a construction derived from the interaction of sensory input with a complex architecture of responses and expectations built from previous experience.³⁶ Iconic, and thus imagistic, thinking is therefore central to everything we humans do; and there is little reason to believe that this is not the case for every other life form as well.

My attempt in this book to distinguish the icon—the likeness and resemblance incorporated into a sign—from the index and the symbol is therefore an exercise of abstraction by which I am choosing to inflect my interpretation of things. In this sense the entire interpretive edifice of this book, with its focus on images as at least partly iconic, is an active, and ultimately contestable, choice: it is a way of participating in the world and never only a way of observing that world. Its goal is to see what this form of interpretive participation may bring—what its emphasis on knowing by resemblance adds to our understanding of the world. That is the journey on which I invite you to follow me. And all of that suggests that images are always already ensconced within networks or ecologies of relations.

In the years since Sontag’s intervention, scholars of cultural and visual studies, film and media studies, science and technology studies, art history, and related areas have grappled with the proliferation of images and image media, as well as with the question of how this proliferation is connected to longer-term trends in technology, economy, ecology, and society.³⁸ Scholars of religion have attempted to understand the role of images, visuality, and sensory cultures in the spread, transformation, and maintenance of religious ideas and practices.³⁹ Scholars of media have developed novel approaches to understand the mediation of images, texts, and practices not only by human-made systems for recording, storing, transmitting, and processing information, but also by “natural” forms of mediation, and some have developed provocative ecological models for media and culture more broadly.⁴⁰ Finally, scholarship associated with the so-called ontological turn has made it impossible to ignore that previously taken-for-granted assumptions about reality, including the reality of images and of the things they refer to, may not be universal nor even widely shared by many societies today and in the past that do not fall into the category of “modern.”⁴¹ Their views are in some ways met by the views of those approaching these questions from very different directions: namely, from those of Indigenous, traditional, and non-western worlds. All these trends are relevant to the proposals that follow.

“Ecologies” can loosely be taken to mean the networks of consumption, production, and circulation that organize and embed the relations between organisms and other entities. To reduce our reliance on the metaphorics of capitalist production, these can also be described as networks of relational interdependence, by which organisms “take up” and “bring forth” their worlds, alongside the circulatory networks enabling these processes through which circulates agency, or the power to do.⁴² In his recent work on the ecology of images, David Morgan proposes:

The ecology of an image consists of those artifacts and forces with which it comes into connection—viewers, certainly, and image makers, but also the availability and chemistry of pigments, the trees, lumber industry, and market that provide the panels on which images are made. The panels are shaped by weather and worms that besiege wooden supports or stretcher bars over time; the sunlight that fades pigments; the fashion of framing and displaying images; the commerce of taste; the long, dense histories of genre, theme, and subject matter; style, paint medium, and technique; and the cascade of images from which pictures emerge and into which they vanish in endless acts of homage, comparison, emulation, and rivalry. This assemblage of human and nonhuman actors is the matrix for understanding any given image. [. . .] Images are instruments or technologies that connect bodies to places and to one another, productively integrating humans into their physical and social ecologies.⁴³

Drawing on the triadic “ecologies” of Gregory Bateson, Félix Guattari, and C. S. Peirce, I have elsewhere distinguished between three forms or registers of ecology.⁴⁴ In the scientific sense of the term, ecology consists of the study of the relationships between organisms and objects studied scientifically, which means as they are seen, measured, and analyzed. This includes the pigments, trees, lumber industries, panels, and so on mentioned by Morgan, and it spans the entire production-consumption cycle, from the extraction of resources to their deposition as waste. I call this material ecology in that it focuses on matter, the substance of things seen from their “outside.”

The study of relationships between the experienced “interiorities” of things—the subjective “you” and “I” who experience things, and all the other entities that do so in one way or another—can in turn be called social or political ecology in that its focus is intersubjectivity, or the ascription of agency to oneself and to others and the relations that arise from that ascription. I see you seeing me, hearing me, making sense of me; you see me making sense of you; we respond to each other in ways that may be inflected by “the commerce of taste,” the “histories of genre, theme, and subject matter,” and so on (as suggested by Morgan), but with an eye toward acknowledging each other’s agency. How we carve up that acknowledgment of agency—who or what is included in it, who has a “voice” or a “seat at the table,” and what expectations and obligations those relations carry—makes up the sociopolitics of the given situation.

Finally, the study of relationships between the perceptual or prehensive dynamics that constitute things—the ways in which the “taking up” and the “bringing forth” of our experience are effected, the chiasmic intertwinement (as Maurice Merleau-Ponty referred to it)⁴⁵ of bodily, sensorial, perceptual, and medial entanglements—these are identifiable as a third kind of ecology, which I call perceptual or medial ecology.⁴⁶ If perception is taken as a matter of material substances, including sensory organs and their extensions or modifications, mediating what is seen, heard, felt, and understood, then it is a matter of mediation. I therefore use the terms “perceptual” and “medial” interchangeably, in part to underline the point that perception is mediation and that media, including the novel kinds found in our world today, are forms of and for perception. It is here, in the perceptual entanglement, that the parsing of the social and the material—of what will count as subject and what as object—takes place. The latter two are effects, so to speak, of the first; they constitute the two ends of a kind of oscillatory continuum along which the social and the material get negotiated.

These three ecologies are a way to indicate the variegated nature of the relations that make up the world. Some of them can be studied scientifically (as would a natural scientist). Others require methods that are hermeneutic, or interpretive, and require talking about things and reflecting on them philosophically. The claim that underlies my triadic parsing of this territory is that neither a materialist nor an idealist or interpretive description of the world ultimately suffices; mind and matter, objectivity and subjectivity, are intertwined in ways that must be understood dynamically, and the process by which they emerge, moment to moment, is central to that dynamism. That is where the act of accessing the world figures in; and central to that act (and to all such acts) are the images and signs that support and shape that access. It is important to reiterate that these three sets of ecologies are not separate: neither the social nor the material can exist without the subject-object forming activity of prehension, and in a certain sense only the latter is “ultimately real.” Recognizing these as three analytical categories or registers, however, is helpful insofar as these are attended to for the experiential realities they signify.

If images are the perceivable forms that mediate our relationship with ourselves and with others (including nonhuman others), then there have certainly been a variety of ways in which that mediation has occurred and a variety of beliefs about the nature of that mediation and of the reality that is being mediated. In the remainder of this book, I propose and develop a typology of image-relations, or what I call image regimes. These are not types of images per se; rather, they are types of relations that humans have had with their images, relations that have established themselves through particular traditions of thinking about images, reality, and humanity. The distinctions between these regimes are schematic and heuristic. They are intended not as exclusionary categories nor as chronologically developed modes (though at least a few of them depend on specific historical developments that are important to understand); and they are certainly not an exhaustive list. Rather, they are meant to provide a loosely phenomenological typology of tendencies or orientations, some or all of which might be found in any particular image practice.

To be coherent, a typology of “image relations” or “image regimes” should be based on clear principles. A typology could, for instance, be grounded in diachronic, historical, or developmental criteria, which could involve asking: how have people’s relations to images evolved over time, and what factors have conditioned the most obvious shifts between one orientation and the next? Or it could be grounded in structural or ideal-typical principles, which would ask: how does a particular kind of image-relation conceive of the world and humans’ place in it? Is there some key variable (or two or three) along which such conceptions can be distinguished, such that we could map out a set of possible image types? Does one image regime, for instance, rely on a conception of reality as a unified field in which humans act in ways similar to other entities, and another on a conception of the human world as being fundamentally different from another world—whether it be the “natural” world, accessible to scientists, or the “supernatural” world accessible to religion? Does an image regime situate humans midway between the animals (and plants and rocks) and the gods? And whatever the imagined structure it relies on, does it perceive agency as moving in one direction only (from the gods, or from natural laws, to the human realm) or in both or all directions at once? Asking such a question will elicit a range of possible answers, and mapping out the full range along a limited set of axes would result in a possible typology.

These kinds of distinctions play a role in the typology I will present, but my goal is not to offer a comprehensive account of responses people have had to images.⁴⁷ Nor is it to shed light on historical developments framing the human relationship with images, or on cross-cultural differences in those relations. Each of these will figure somewhere or other: there will be some relationship between historical and technological developments with at least a few of the six image regimes to be presented here. As a taxonomy, however, the foundation for what I offer will be fluid and pragmatic. It is an attempt to distinguish six of the most prominent forms of image-relations based on a mix of rules applied promiscuously in order to help us navigate the world of images today. Even the very task of mapping them out could be taken as privileging a particular image regime—one that considers the mapping of such relationships fundamental. This is in itself an exercise of power. The question of the cross-cultural validity of these categories will thus remain unclear. I present these six regimes as a starting point for comparative and empirical elaboration, but do not attempt to defend them in the face of the wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence that could be brought to bear on them. Furthermore, these categories are in no way intended as mutually exclusive. The actual use of images partakes of whatever regime is at hand. Ultimately, it is not the regime that matters, but the image: in any particular instance, it is the specific image that counts. The regimes remain abstractions that are useful to think with.

I would even go so far as to say that not only is the idea of an image regime an abstraction from a much more complex reality; so is the very category of “image” itself. To understand how images work, it is important to understand something of what they may be in aggregate, and something of how they interact within systems, networks, and regimes that themselves are changeable and negotiable. But ultimately it is the image in its specificity that matters. An image of Jesus is not an image of Krishna. For devotees of one or the other, it is not the image that matters—it is the being it embodies: the Messiah, Lord Krishna, Quan Yin, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Yemayá, Elvis, Beyoncé, Lionel Messi, Batman. The believer’s ontology is defined by the other, the deity, the force in whose gravitational field we orbit. By the same token, a screensaver image of the rock face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park is not equivalent to a screensaver image of one’s child, grandchild, lover, or cat. An image of a sports car in a magazine advertisement is not the image of that car being driven out of the driveway by one’s wealthy neighbor (or the sound that it makes as the neighbor revs its engine conspicuously). Each of these is a different image, different in its contexts and its meanings. And contrary to what Marshall McLuhan famously quipped, the medium in which an image is presented is not its message, though it may alter, condition, and contain that message. The thing itself will always still count for more than the system of interpretation being applied to it, whether consciously or unconsciously; and that thing itself will always be more than something that we might generically describe as an image. It is in this sense that an image has an “opacity,” if not a “will, appetite, and motion,” as Gilbert Simondon describes it, an irreducibility that makes it distinctively its own (this is something we will examine especially in chapter 4).

All that said, it is useful to consider how images function in these multiple ways, and how their functioning in a new and increasingly dominant regime—that of the digital image-world—may be describable as an ontology that includes and subsumes all of the others to varying degrees. Shedding light on the novelty of the regime of the digital image-world is the prime objective of this book. But that regime cannot be understood without understanding some of its main predecessors, because those continue to work in and through the novel and reshaped terrain of images, image-events, and imagescapes within which we find ourselves. The new lives of images are therefore always a recapitulation of their old lives, but today they are also much more than those.

Notes

1. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton University Press, 2011), 6.

2. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention, trans. Joe Hughes and Christophe Wall-Romana (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 9.

3. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (Fordham University Press, 2005), 4, emphasis in original.

4. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Cornell University Press, 2001); James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge University Press, 1998); James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Cornell University Press, 1999); Roy F. Fox, Images in Language, Media, and Mind (National Council of Teachers of English, 1994); James J. Gibson, “The Ecological Approach to the Visual Perception of Pictures,” Leonardo 11 (1978): 227–35; Carolyn Bailey Gill, ed., Time and the Image (Manchester University Press, 2000); Ernst Hans Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 1960); E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Phaidon Press, 1982); Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image, and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate (MIT Press, 1996); John V. Kulvicki, Images (Routledge, 2014); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Harper & Row, 1939/1972); Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013); Sunil Manghani, ed., Images: Critical and Primary Sources, 4 vols. (Bloomsbury, 2013); Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, eds., Images: A Reader (Sage, 2006); Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Harvard University Press, 2006); Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley, Image and Imagination: A Global Prehistory of Figurative Representation (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2007); Patricia Spyer and Mary Margaret Steedly, eds., Images That Move (School for Advanced Research Press, 2013); Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

5. Jonathan Crary, On Vision and Modernity: Techniques of the Observer in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, 1990); Elkins, The Domain of Images; James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Sceptical Introduction (Routledge, 2003); James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What Is an Image? (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Dia Art Foundation, 1988); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1993); Jacques Rancière, “Do Pictures Really Want to Live,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 50.2 (2009): 123–32.

6. Richard M. Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (University of Chicago Press, 1967); Richard M. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1981).

7. Gottfried Boehm, Was its ein Bild? (Brill, 1994); Gottfried Boehm and W.J.T. Mitchell, “Pictorial Versus Iconic Turn,” Culture, Theory and Critique 50 (2009): 103–21; Neal Curtis, ed. The Pictorial Turn (Routledge, 2010); W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1987); W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (University of Chicago Press, 1994); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

8. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (Sage, 1999); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge, 2009).

9. The idea of “iconoclashes” comes from a 2002 exhibition of that title, held at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, and followed by the mammoth anthology Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (MIT Press, 2002), which charts out so much of the current terrain of conflicts over images and their meanings. See also Liza Bakewell, “Image Acts,” American Anthropologist 100.1 (1998): 22–32; James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (Routledge, 2001); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (University of Chicago Press, 1989); Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019) (Duke University Press, 2001); Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013); David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (University of California Press, 1998); David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (Oxford University Press, 2018); Sthaneshwar Timalsina, Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach (Routledge, 2015).

10. James J. Gibson, “Foreword: A Prefatory Essay on the Perception of Surfaces Versus the Perception of Marking on a Surface,” in Margaret A. Hagen, ed., Varieties of Realism: Geometries of Representational Art, xi–xviii;(Cambridge University Press, 1980), xv–xvii.

11. W.J.T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?” New Literary History 15.3 (1984): 503–37; 504, 505.

12. Kulvicki, Images, 3.

13. Belting, An Anthropology of Images, 6.

14. E.g., C. S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893), ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Indiana University Press, 1992); C. S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913), ed. Peirce Edition Project (Indiana University Press, 1998).

15. In his later writings, Peirce used the word “image” to describe one type of iconic sign, in contradistinction to two others, which he called “diagrams” and “metaphors.” While other interpretations have been made, I find Farias and Queiroz’s clarification of this terminology particularly useful. They define these three forms of “iconic signs,” or “hypoicons,” as “instantiated icons, participating in sign relations, due mainly to some kind of likeness they share with their existing objects.” In this “instantiation” and “participation in sign relations,” these “iconic signs” more or less fit my definition of the image. They argue that this makes them “iconic sinsigns,” in Peircian parlance, which is one of three general types of icons (and a small subset of the 66 types of signs Peirce identified in his later writings). Farias and Queiroz clarify the difference between the three types by defining images as “instantiated icons of immediate, apparent, or superficial qualities,” diagrams as “hypoicons whose similarity with their objects is mostly based on shared structural or relational qualities,” and metaphors as “instantiated icons of habits, conventions, or laws.” They note that the three constitute a hierarchy of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, which means that the latter two categories incorporate the first in one way or another. My use of the term “image” could be applied to all three, but is particularly aimed at the first. It is, in any case, roughly equivalent to the Peircian term “iconic sign.” See Priscila Farias and João Queiroz, “Images, Diagrams, and Metaphors: Hypo-icons in the Context of Peirce’s Sixty-Six Fold Classification of Signs,” Semiotica 162 (2006), 287–307; 294.

16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (Continuum International, 1968/1994). What Deleuze accomplishes ontologically Jacques Derrida accomplishes epistemologically: namely, that difference, or différance in Derrida’s rendition—the slippage in meaning by which words and signs can never fully summon forth anything without appeal to additional words and signs, from which they differ and to which their meanings must be “deferred”—is part and parcel of the possibility of meaning. This is true for Peirce’s semiotics as well. All are processual philosophies that attempt to account for the dynamism and active interdependence of the world of our experience, a dynamic interdependence that Buddhists (as I argued in Shadowing the Anthropocene) named Pratītya-samutpāda, the conditioned arising of all things.

17. The argument has also been made that imaging begins with animal forms of camouflage, that is, with the creation and display of “forms that refer to something else.” See Caroline van Eck, “Camouflage, Zoomorphism, and the Origins of Image-Making,” in Images, Thought, and the Making of Social Worlds, ed. David Wengrow, 99–114 (Freiburger Studien zur Archäologie & Visuellen Kultur 3, Propylaeum, 2022), 93. As this form of image-making arguably involves an intention to deceive, I would call it more “advanced” than the echo.

18. Adrian Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013); Adrian Ivakhiv, Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum, 2018).

19. I define the “process-relational” tradition of thought in an appendix to Shadowing the Anthropocene (Punctum, 2018). Whitehead is often considered the quintessential process philosopher, with the term “process-relational” commonly used to describe his metaphysics; e.g., C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (Templeton Press, 2008). Peirce is generally recognized as a process philosopher by those who write about that tradition; see, e.g., Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1996); Carl Hausman, “Charles Peirce’s Evolutionary Realism as a Process Philosophy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 38.1/2 (2002): 13–27. Besides Peirce and Whitehead, representatives of this tradition who have most influenced my thinking include Henri Bergson, William James, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly, Brian Massumi, Isabelle Stengers, and Michel Weber. I should note that an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript expressed skepticism that process philosophy could adequately “articulat[e] ontology with history.” But if process philosophy is taken to include the work of such scholars as Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi, Connolly, Manuel De Landa, and John Protevi, then its ability to do justice to ontology, history, and politics is complex and insightful; see, e.g., Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books, 1997); John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

20. Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment (AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Tim Ingold, “Culture and the Perception of the Environment,” in E. Croll and D. Parkin, eds., Bush Base: Forest Farm. Culture, Environment and Development (Routledge, 1992).

21. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (The Free Press, 1933/1967); Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (The Free Press, 1933/1978). Whitehead termed the “end” of the process of prehension “concrescence.” For our purposes, the distinction between prehension and concrescence is not an important one to parse. I’ll simply refer to “prehension” for the entire process.

22. See note 14 above; and C. S. Peirce, “The Principles of Phenomenology: The Categories in Detail,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1, ed. by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 148–80 (Harvard University Press, 1931–58).

23. Claus Emmeche and Kalevi Kull, eds., Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life Is the Action of Signs (Imperial College Press, 2011); Donald Favareau, ed., Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary (Springer, 2010); Jesper Hoffmeyer, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, trans. B. Haveland (Indiana University Press, 1996); Thomas A. Sebeok, Global Semiotics (Indiana University Press, 2001).

24. Quoted by W. E. Hocking (from a recollected conversation) in “Whitehead on Mind and Nature,” in P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (Tudor Publication, 1951), 385.

25. This idea of images as the access points between agents finds a rough parallel in object-oriented philosophy (see Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything [Routledge, 2018]; Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality [Open Humanities Press, 2013]), which distinguishes between “real” objects (which are, effectively, agents) and “sensual” objects (which are what I call images). On the differences between object-oriented and process-relational ontologies, see Adrian Ivakhiv, “Beatnik Brothers? Between Graham Harman and the Deleuzo-Whiteheadian Axis,” Parrhesia 19 (2014): 65–78; Adrian Ivakhiv, Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum, 2018), 151ff.

26. Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics, and the Evolution of Culture (Laurence & Wishart, 2006).

27. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998). And see Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Kant’s Power of Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Samantha Matherne, “Kant’s Theory of the Imagination,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind, 55–68 (Routledge, 2016).

28. The imagination has long been the subject of philosophy, and a different book—not this one with its focus on images and image regimes, but one specifically devoted to the philosophy of imagination—would dedicate whole chapters to Kant, Schelling, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and more recent interpreters such as Castoriadis and Casey. In the preface (see note 6), I mentioned a few of the books that detail some of this history, by Eva Brann, J. M. Cocking, Richard Kearney, and others. For another overview, see Kind, Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination.

29. James Hillman, “Back to Beyond: On Cosmology,” in Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, ed. D. R. Griffin, 213–32 (Northwestern University Press, 1989).

30. Rather late in the process of writing this book, I came across the work of Thomas Nail, which shares a strongly process-oriented sensibility with mine. Nail’s Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019) approaches images, including the “history of images,” in ways that run parallel to mine in this book. But the core of our respective ontologies is subtly yet significantly different. His foundational concept is motion, or kinesis, of which both matter and images are expressions; mine is becoming, which is the conjoined process of subjectivation and objectivation. I find motion at once too abstract (like force, energy, activity, etc.) and too insufficient a concept, as it begs the question “what is it that is in motion?” The more important question for me is “motion to what end?” Becoming is motivated motion, motion (or action) in response to relational prompts and in pursuit of satisfactions triggered by those prompts. As a result, subjects become, and objects are taken into the becoming of subjects. At the core of everything, for me, is not motion in itself but motion in response. This is more closely affiliated with the idea of “desiring-production” that underpins the historico-materialist analyses of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s collaborative volumes, which Nail and I share among our inspirational starting points. There is more to be said in comparing our projects, especially on the typology of images, but I leave that aside for a future effort.

31. See David Howes, Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023); Fiona Macpherson, “Taxonomising the Senses,” Philosophical Studies 153.1 (2011): 123–42; Fiona Macpherson, The Senses: Classical and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2011); Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Random House, 2022).

32. Jack Goody, “The Anthropology of the Senses and Sensations,” La ricerca folklorica 45 (2002): 17–28.

33. Francois Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago (Urbanomic, 2016). On musical and auditory images, see also Robert J. Zatorre and Andrea R. Halpern, “Mental Concerts: Musical Imagery and Auditory Cortex,” Neuron 47.1 (2005): 9–12.

34. Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 121, 125.

35. One of the currently most influential neurological explanations of perception takes our moment-to-moment experience of the world to be constructed through a complex predictive process based on previous experience. See Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

36. See Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, mentioned above, which I reviewed in “Emotional Practices, Part 1: Affective Neuroscience” and “Emotional Practices, Part 2: Affective Construction, the Triune Self, and the Art of Joyful Deliberation,” Immanence, August 16 and August 25, 2020, https://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2020/08/16/emotional-practices-part-1-aff… and https://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2020/08/25/emotional-practices-part-2-aff….

37. Susan Sontag, “The Image-World,” in On Photography (Penguin, 1978), 180.

38. E.g., Oliver Grau with Thomas Veigl, Imagery in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2011); Manghani et al., Images: A Reader; Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?; Latour and Weibel, Iconoclash.

39. Belting, Likeness and Presence; Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton University Press, 1997); Graham Howes, The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (I. B. Tauris, 2007); Albert C. Moore, Iconography of Religions: An Introduction (Fortress, 1977); Morgan, Visual Piety; David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (University of California Press, 2005); Nico Tassi, “‘Dancing the Image’: Materiality and Spirituality in Andean Religious Images,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2012): 285–310.

40. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton (Athlone, 2000); Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009); Adrian Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013); Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020); Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as Vital Process (MIT Press, 2014); Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice; David Morgan, “The Ecology of Images: Seeing and the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 5 (2014): 83–105; John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (Verso, 1994).

41. Jessica Smartt Gullion, Diffractive Ethnography: Social Sciences and the Ontological Turn (Routledge, 2018); Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. C. Porter (Harvard University Press, 2013).

42. On ecological metaphors see Ivakhiv, “Three Ecologies: Ecomediality as Ontology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, ed. A. Lopez et al. (Routledge, 2023); Erich Hörl, ed. General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); C. M. Raymond et al., “Ecosystem Services and Beyond: Using Multiple Metaphors to Understand Human-Environment Relations,” BioScience 63.7 (2013): 536–46.

43. David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (Oxford University Press, 2018), 51.

44. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image, 33–42.

45. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1968).

46. I develop this tri-ecological view of media more fully in Ivakhiv, “Three Ecologies: Ecomediality as Ontology” (also see note 42).

47. For that, I would recommend starting with David Freedberg’s The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (University of Chicago Press, 1989).