Bridging the Gap: Image, Discourse, and Beyond – Towards a Critical Theory of Visual Representation

Abstract

Pictures and images play a central role in contemporary society. Not only do they mediate meaning in a seemingly universal language (Fromm 1981), but their relevance for the construction of perception and beliefs cannot be underestimated. In global, political and religious discourses, controversies often revolve around images. The influence visuality has on the forming of ideas has already been discussed in the 1930s (Freud 1932). Today, even neurobiologists acknowledge the influential power of mental images (Hüther 2004). 

But, despite the well acknowledged impact the Pictorial Turn has had up to date, discourse analyses are typically carried out solely on linguistic material. Nevertheless, even in the Foucauldian sense the term “discourse” relates to epistemes and power not only conveyed by language, but also by pictures and images, in “a mushy mixture of the articulable and the visible” (Deleuze 2006). 

Nonetheless, the specific characteristics of pictures and images render analysis ever more difficult. Visual representations are a case sui generis. They cannot be transcribed into language completely. Research on visual artifacts can be put to work as a disclosure of how symbolic orders and the accordant identities are constructed. Something present, a picture or an image, is analyzed with regard to its ideological implications, as studies related to Cultural Studies usually do. Yet, beyond the visible picture, if representation is the making-present of something that’s absent (Pitkin 1967), what respectively who is being made absent by the presence of the visible? The ambiguity of representation as “standing for” versus “depiction of” might at the same time enable a critical approach in the analysis of visual discourse.

In this article, I attempt to conceptualize a methodological approach for conducting discourse analyses on visual material. For this purpose, I will introduce a dialectical notion of representativeness as imagery that draws on Gayatri C. Spivak’s critique and Hannah Fenichel Pitkin’s Political Theory of representation, as well as on Siegfried Kracauer’s deliberations on film. Finally, I am going to give an example for putting this approach into research practice.