Instead of analyzing the similarities between an image and a text, linguistic message or language, Thomas Mitchell tends to ask what are the differences between them. His book ‘Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology’ reflects two most important questions: what is an image; and what is the difference between images and words.
It is very important to clarify the term of an image due to mark the close relation between an image and words, language. According to Th. Mitchell, there are so called the systems of power (Foucault) and canons of value — he calls them the Ideologies — that inform the answers to these questions and make them matter of polemical dispute rather than purely theoretical interest. As we saw in Barthes example of the ‘mythical speech’, the negro saluting to the French flag, images impacts thoughts, even opinions, so they can be used by the systems of power to influence our minds, and, of course, they do that, the most obvious example is advertising.
The theoretical study of icons, named ‘iconology’, starts with the idea that people are created in the image of their creator, God, and ends with the modern iconology – science of image making, advertising and propaganda. As to Th. Mitchell, the most renowned name in the studies of the icon, iconology, is Erwin Panofsky. Modern studies of iconology discuss such terms like ‘mental imagery’, ‘verbal or literary imagery’ and the concepts of man as an image and of man as maker of images. ‘If Panofsky separated iconology from iconography by differentiating the interpretation of the total symbolic horizon of an image from the cataloguing of particular symbolic motifs, my aim here is to further generalize the interpretive ambitions of iconology by asking it to consider the idea of the image as such.‘ – says Th. Mitchell in ‘Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology’[1].
Due to everything that was said previously, nowadays iconology turned out to be not just the science of icons, but the (political) psychology of icons, the study of iconophobia and iconophillia. So ‘the notion of ideology is rooted in the concept of imagery, and reenacts the ancient struggles of iconoclasm, idolatry, and fetishism.‘[2]
Therefore, we notice that when analyzing the similarities or differences between images and words, we should pay ‘attention to the way in which images and ideas double themselves, the way we depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure the practice of figuration‘[3].
[1] ‘Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology’ by Thomas Mitchell (University of Chicago Press).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
Žymos: icon, iconology, idea, image, thomas mitchell