W.J.T. Mitchell - "What Is An Image?"

Mitchell discusses a 'relationship of subversion' (43), where he suggests that pictorial and linguistic signs are ultimately each underlying the other. He notes Wittgenstein's efforts to 'expel' this subversive image from language. I tried to figure out whether he was meaning early or later Wittgenstein (or both?). Not directly related to this, I read Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics (1929) a little later, and have since been thinking about it in relation to this part of the Mitchell reading. I haven't really worked out a brilliant connection between Mitchell's linguistic/pictorial and Wittgenstein's ethics/aesthetics, though it seems like something, maybe; and Lecture on Ethics also discusses the problems Wittgenstein saw in the way language was being used.

Here Wittgenstein discusses the shared language between ethics and aesthetics; that both include judgements (he asserts in ethics we have 'absolute judgements' compared to aesthetic 'relative judgements'). His problem is that absolute judgements cannot be, or be implied by, statements of fact:

And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it.

Now what's obvious to Wittgenstein is less obvious to me, though I think I can understand what he means. I'm also interested in his choice of words (not only given how they relate to some of my current studio work) - 'ethics is supernatural', after reading Mitchell's description that the philosophy of language was 'haunted by the suspicion' that beneath words, our thoughts are ultimately pictorial (43). While I had (lazily) thought about the limits of words versus images in expressing ideas before, feeling like I thought in words I hadn't ever considered this. Like Mitchell goes on to mention, I had definitely been previously thinking about it 'in political terms' (43). Mitchell's conclusion that we should appreciate both the 'eloquence of the image and the perspicuousness of language' (46) is similarly appealing to me, and with Wittgenstein's worry over the inadequacy (or just impossibility) of language to discuss ethics, I've enjoyed thinking that maybe it's just that something else could do it better.

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Works cited:

Mitchell, W.J.T. "What Is An Image?", Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp.40-46.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. "Lecture On Ethics", The Galilean Library. 23 March 2009 http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43866 .