Iconology

W. J. T. Mitchell is not so much out at providing a new definition of the image, does not prevent him either from having a rather precise idea of what may be called an image: ‘I have tried not to rule out any widely used sense of the term’ (p. 3). He gives an overview of all the ‘language games’ that can be played with the word ‘image’: there are ‘graphic (pictures, statues, designs), optical (lenses, projections), perceptual (sense data, “species”, appearances), mental images (dreams, memories, ideas, fantasmata), and verbal images (metaphors, descriptions) ‘(1986, 10).

Images must be understood as a kind of language’. ‘Images are now regarded as the sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparency, concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification’ (1986,8).