THE CIRCULATION OF IMAGES

What shall we call an “image”? Is it that from which knowledge proceeds or that which anticipates knowledge? Is image something only able to be recognised as object of thinking or it shows per se, in its polysemy and equivocal constitution, a deep, still unexplored generative form of thinking? From the point of view of the understanding of the digital age, where we entered in, to a strong consideration of the new frontiers of science, knowledge, and philosophy and from here up to societal and cultural dimensions, the thinking of the image still remain an enigma. Since the ancient world, the philosophical antiquity from Plato to Aristotle has left this question as a legacy. This question has continued to pursue the history of thought: Islamic World and Christianity, Middle and Modern Age. It can be found massively in contemporary philosophy, culture studies, history of art and ideas. The aim of the international conference is, perhaps for the first time, to study and to explore in a genuine interdisciplinary approach the multiversal horizon of human imagery and, in particular its constructive, generative capacity of building a world-meaning. The international conference is organised on the behalf of the IEA of the University Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) in collaboration with the LESA, Laboratoire d’Études en Sciences des Arts (EA 3274) and the Research Group on the Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Image and Imaginary: Fausto Fraisopi, Professor at Freiburg University and Senior Research Fellow at IMéRA, Agnès Callu, Research HDR at the CNRS (LAP - Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS/CNRS, UMR 8177), Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Research Director at the CéSor (Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux EHESS) and Alexander Schnell, Professor for Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Director of the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology.

“The goal was to separate image from sound”, was the response from Swiss-French film artist Jean-Luc Godard to a question from a journalist who was interviewing him at a press conference set up on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival for his current film Le Livre d’image (The Image Book, 2018). The working title ‘Image et Parole’ (Image and Word), which was retained as the subtitle, already hints at the fact that the connection of image and language, which is accepted as a matter of course and which characterises the audiovisual medium of film, is here no longer assumed unconditionally. In the process, Godard returns to considerations he formulated as far back as 50 years ago. The year 1968 marks a crucial line of demarcation in the film artist’s work, one that can particularly be detected in the films La Chinoise (1967) and Le gai savoir (1969). Nietzschean nihilism, from which the latter borrowed its title, serves as a starting point for critical reflexion. Television would henceforth be chosen as a medium of this process. In this context, the episode Photo et Cie, which Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville created specifically for television as one part of their video series Six fois deux (1976), is particularly remarkable. My presentation will focus on these various historical points, from where it will shed new light on the relationship between images and language.

Today's idea of the so-called fin-de-siècle is still somewhat inexact and incomplete. This lack of precision originates from a deeply rooted methodological approach which consists of considering the respective developments of literature, art, and science in isolation, without paying attention to any interference or reciprocal contamination. This defective method also affects the overlaps and contacts between high culture and popular culture. Despite the progress made over recent years, there are few researchers who approach their objective with a real awareness of the complexity of a time period which saw the appearance of mass culture in the current sense and an unprecedented boom in scientific and technological development. 1 To this end, the example of the great German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his studies on Paris during the 19th century-collected in the essays on the great French poet Charles Baudelaire and especially in the monumental and unfinished work The Arcades Project-is, without doubt, a model to follow. Taking the path suggested by Benjamin, this article sets out a revision of the novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892) by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach, considered one of the major exponents of the fin-de-siècle decadence, which goes beyond the usual approach of a symbolist reading, by paying special attention to the frictions between literature and technology on one hand, and between literature and popular entertainment on the other.

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SEMIOTICS, 2001

A book review essay explicating Alain Robbe-Grillet, SNAPSHOTS [1962]. Uses Ernst Cassirer's symbolic forms for explication.

Oxford University Press, 2019

We live in an age of the mobile image. The world today is absolutely saturated with images of all kinds circulating around the world at an incredible rate. The movement of the image has never been more extraordinary than it is today. This recent kinetic revolution of the image has enormous consequences not only for the way we think about contemporary art and aesthetics but also for art history as well. Responding to this historical moment, Theory of the Image offers a fresh new theory and history of art from the perspective of this epoch-defining mobility. The image has been understood in many ways, but it is rarely understood to be fundamentally in motion. The original and materialist approach is what defines Theory of the Image and what allows it to offer the first kinetic history of the Western art tradition. In this book, Thomas Nail further develops his larger philosophy of movement into a comprehensive "kinesthetic" of the moving image from prehistory to the present. The book concludes with a vivid analysis of the contemporary digital image and its hybridity, ultimately outlining new territory for research and exploration across aesthetics, art history, cultural theory, and media studies.

This anthology examines the workings of historical imagery in fourteen essays, offering fresh perspectives from leading researchers on a central question for contemporary art history. Drawing on the results of an international conference held in Vienna in 2018, the authors approach images from the premodern period in terms of their fabrication, deployment, and reception. The focus lies on wide-ranging media— architecture, sculpture, painting, metalwork, stained glass—in similarly wide-ranging contexts: from monumental installations in the most public zones of urban churches to exquisite devotional objects and illuminated books reserved for more exclusive settings. This spectrum reflects the broad interests of the conference’s dedicatee, Michael Viktor Schwarz, whose introductory interview lays out the parameters of the subject.

Why do we find an image shocking? Here an answer is gradually elaborated around the concept of montage – a montage of different views and places, of different figures and times. An increasing distrust with regard to images portraying evil, the birth of the pornographic sensibility, the emergence of anti-establishment graffiti, the destruction of images by the authorities that commissioned them and the skilful construction of the unimaginable are so many events that illuminate our changing relationship to images in the Western world. Images and the idea of transgression jointly form a history that the authors place in perspective with the present time. By so doing, they proceed to decipher our belief in the power of images.

L’atelier Clark-INHA est organisé conjointement par le Clark Art Institute (David Breslin, qui a remplacé Aruna D’Souza) et l’INHA (Philippe Sénéchal). Le premier atelier « Iconology Today » et le deuxième « What is connoisseurship ? » se sont tenus à Williamstown, Massachusetts, en 2007 et 2008 ; le troisième, intitulé « Description » et le quatrième, « Regarder l’art contemporain avec des yeux entraînés sur le passé » ont eu lieu à la Fondation Hartung Bergman, à Antibes, en 2009 et 2011. Le cinquième séminaire s’est déroulé également à la Fondation Hartung Bergman, du lundi 15 à vendredi 19 juillet 2013. Les chercheurs invité par le Clark étaient : Darby English, le nouveau Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program au Clark Art Institute ; Michael Ann Holly, Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program au Clark Art Institute ; David Joselit, professeur à CUNY University ; Keith Moxey, Barbara Novak, Professor and Chair of Art History au Barnard College, New York ; Michael S. Roth, Président de la Wesleyan University ; et Mariët Westermann, Vice-Présidente de la Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Les chercheurs invité par l’INHA étaient : Pierre Leguillon, artiste ; Philippe-Alain Michaud, conservateur responsable des collections cinématographiques du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris ; Philippe Sénéchal et Riccardo Venturi, pensionnaire à l’INHA. François Hers, le directeur de la Fondation Hartung Bergman, et Xavier Douroux, codirecteur du Consortium et fondateur des Presses du réel, ont également participé au séminaire. Les chercheurs invités par le Clark et l’INHA – un groupe dont les spécialités couvraient l’étendue de l’histoire de l’art – se sont réunis durant quatre jours de discussion et de débats, travaillant ensemble sur un même corpus hétérogène de textes, images ou vidéos, explorant des points épineux mais essentiels concernant des choix d’écriture de l’histoire de l’art, dans le but de parvenir à certaines conclusions individuelles ou collectives. Le corpus de textes discutés comprenait des extraits de : Giorgio Agamben sur le dispositif ; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun et Thomas Keenan sur le passage du multimédia aux nouveaux média ; Alexander R. Galloway sur le rôle de l’interface ; Oliver Grau sur la relation entre histoire de l’art et media studies ; David Joselit sur les enjeux de l’art contemporain ; Friedrich Kittler sur l’archéologie des médias ; Alan Liu sur les digital humanities ; Lev Manovich sur les nouveaux média ; W.J.T. Mitchell et Mark B.N. Hansen sur le médium dans sa relation avec la mémoire ; et D.N. Rodowick sur les cinema studies. Cet atelier a permis à des chercheurs européens et nord-américains de travailler ensemble sur le thème « When Images Meet New Media / Quand les images rencontrent les nouveaux médias », ou sur la manière dont l’histoire de l’art et les pratiques artistiques sont influencées, mises en œuvre et modifiées par les nouveaux médias. Alors que les travaux de ses dernières années se sont concentrés sur les transformations des sciences sociales à l’ère numérique, ces rencontres ont envisagé ces questions au-delà d’un usage strictement utilitaire des nouveaux médias. À partir de ce constat et de l’argument de Frederick Kittler selon lequel l’innovation technologique modifie de façon décisive la subjectivité humaine, ces dialogues ont situé les nouveaux médias comme des dispositifs favorisant la réflexion philosophique sur la discipline de l’histoire de l’art, les notions d’objectivité et les théories de la perception. Les discussions ont abordé des questions comme : le déterminisme technologique, l’optimisme technologique, la trace à l’époque numérique, la question de l’inscription, de la matérialité, de l’enchantement, de la mémoire, du corps, de l’écran, du futur des médias anciens et du « futur du passé ». Si la perception est entendue comme le va-et-vient qui nous permet de considérer de manière plus critique la nature des interactions entre sujet et objet, et si les nouveaux médias constituent de nouvelles formes d’objectivation du monde, comment, dans cette perspective, les images nous situent-elles ? Pourquoi sommes-nous fascinés par l’apparente originalité des manières dont les nouveaux médias nous permettent de comprendre notre situation ? Remplacent-ils ou s’ajoutent-ils aux ressources déjà existantes ?