Editor's Note: Users might be interested in some account of the origin of this project, how the Romantic Circles Praxis Series came to think of and to dilate upon so involved an entity. What follows is an e-mail exchange during the months of January and February 1997 between an editor at Praxis and W. J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Professor of English and Art at the University of Chicago, and editor of Critical Inquiry. Praxis had initially contacted Mitchell with the idea of doing an electronic volume that would contain a collection of his past work and new commentary by him. Mitchell then suggested an alternate format, in which he would be interviewed over e-mail, responding to a series of initial and follow-up questions about his long-standing interests in Romanticism and pictorial theory. Praxis enthusiastically agreed; as users will soon detect, however, the exchange very soon turned into something else, the implications of which are still yet to be seen. For documentary purposes the e-mails containing the original questions asked of Mitchell precede the two parts of his response. If nothing else, the epistles attest to the good faith with which the (then) somewhat naive editor attempted to discharge his interviewing duties. To help make more sense of what Praxis has **unleashed,** a gloss accompanies Mitchell's "answer" to the questions. Unfortunately, that writing also takes on its own life as well, veering away from the main text as much as engaging with it. Indeed, the gloss's mixture of sober commentary and fantasy veers toward the irresponsible. Apparently, Mitchell's prose carries something highly infectious within its form, not the least being the compulsive habit of referring to one's self in the third person. 
 
 

 

1/14/1997     

Before Mitchell was a Romanticist, a Blake scholar, or even a literary scholar of any kind, he was a mathematician--admittedly, a rather dull one, so he got out of the field in the nick of time. But one problem that continued to haunt him, and to haunt all his subsequent work with literature and visual art, was the curious relation between geometry and algebra, the strange ability of mathematics to translate words into pictures and back again.  This problem (which so far as he could tell, mathematicians regard as quite uninteresting) was simply the relation between linear, sequential strings of symbols or mathematical "sentences" like y=1/x, and the diagrams in Cartesian coordinates that transform these statements into visual images, in this case, a curve descending from an infinite height along the vertical y-axis, turning right and skating off into an infinite eastern distance along the x-axis. As one came closer and closer to either axis, as the value of one variable approached zero, the other value approached infinity. You could actually see this happening, precisely mapped in a firm, determinate material outline. The convergence of (and gap between) the abstract string of letters and numbers (with their readable, phonetic equivalents) and the silent, wirey bounding lines and forms of geometry struck the impressionable student as traces of a mystic rationality, a logic of the real.  In short, he was a bone-headed idealist, a Platonist, and a literalist of the imagination. 

It was only a step from all this to Blake, who actually preceded any commitment to Romanticism for Mitchell. Romanticism came third for him; he learned it as a professional necessity "on the job" at Johns Hopkins and Ohio State University, but since he learned it during the most Romantic moment in the late twentieth century, namely the sixties, it made a powerful impression on his far too malleable and mutable character, which was continually being reshaped in this period by utopian political fantasies of imminent revolution and liberal doses of gross and violent stimulants.   

Like most Blake scholars, Mitchell couldn't quite fit Blake into Romanticism, and so he didn't really fit into Romantic studies either. He tried in vain to retrain himself as a Wordsworthian, perhaps as a contrarian exercise. But Wordsworth himself never came into view: only his shadowy mental world, the fair trains of images, memories, and echoes that seemed to flow off from Wordsworth into something like "bourgeois consciousness" itself. Mitchell could never do more with Wordsworth than to cast him as a stereotypical, middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male sentimentalist. Since this was a bit too much like looking in the mirror, and Mitchell had plenty of sublime egotism to contend with in his own person, Wordsworth was only useful to him as an image of what he wished to avoid: ambivalence, guilt, anxiety, self-consciousness, vanity, smugness, narcissism. The fact that Wordsworth loved geometry almost as much as poetry, and that a book of Euclid's Elements shows up in the Arab Dream in Book V of The Prelude , may also have contributed to Mitchell's ambivalence. Later it would resurface in a strange little essay, an afterthought really, called "Diagrammatology." 

As luck would have it, tenure came soon and wisdom never did arrive, or Mitchell might have run off to start life over as an independent film maker. (His one and only experimental film, Metaphorsis (1970), gathers dust among the basement tapes). His dissertation (later his first book), Blake's Composite Art (1976), tried to work out the mystical, formal calculus that holds Blake's poetic and pictorial expressions together in the form of the illuminated book. This book required another semi-successful attempt to absorb some new training, this time in art history. Looking back later on his Blake book, Mitchell would find it embarassingly thin and even old-fashioned. Although begun at Johns Hopkins in 1968 and finished around 1974, it was almost completely innocent of either the structuralist or the post-structuralist revolution (a cautious footnote to Roland Barthes' semiology was the only sign of any textual hipness whatsoever; the Gallic mentors were existentialists and phenomenologists--Sartre and Bachelard). The book opened with an invocation of T. S. Eliot, of all people, and promised a "correction of [the] taste" by which Blake had been mistakenly appreciated. The art historical side was almost equally retrograde. Gombrich, Arnheim, Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Henri Focillon were not exactly the cutting edge of art history in this period, though at least they were significant theorists. On the literary side, it would be fair to say that Mitchell had no theory of the text of equal weight to what he was learning in the visual arts. 

Fortunately, this fetishistic obsession with the materiality of the text found its proper object in Blake's illuminated books, which Wasserman professed to find unreadable. The algebraic symbols of Blake's verbal allegory and the geometry of his wirey bounding lines wove together in a tangled web of signs, images, imprints, marks, stains, cuts, blots and blurs--all presented as a magical corpus of material objects whose heterogeneous "aesthetic autonomy" was precisely the condition for them to have agency and impact in the world. Formalism and aestheticism were not antithetical to political commitment, but technologies of utopian revelation. Mitchell spent a decade trying to unravel Blake's web of signs, trying to demonstrate its coherence and its efficacy. He evidently thought that the revolutionary, transformative impact of Blake's books would somehow be, not just revealed by a formal account of their internal necessity and rightness, but actually aided and amplified by this critique. The critical revelation was supposed to unlock the rational magic of Blake's work, which had (in Mitchell's view) been dulled by mystical obscurantism (a result of assuming the magical effects rather than demonstrating them), or crippled by the failure to attend to the dialectical materiality of Blake's visual and verbal compositions. Mitchell thought he had found the key to Blake's graphic style and his repertoire of verbal/visual icons in a set of hieroglyphs of the senses. These hieroglyphs (arch, spiral, circle, and S curve) made Blake's temporal and spatial forms literally congruent with the structure of human perception, what Mitchell would later rediscover under the rubric of Lacan's "scopic" and "vocative" drives, the parallel sensory-semiotic circuits of ear and mouth, eye and hand.    The widespread belief that Blake had "anticipated" both Marx and Freud (and Nietzche and Bataille) increased the sense that very high stakes were involved in the formal justification of his composite art.   

Romanticism at first seemed like the only way out, and Mitchell began to envision a book -- never written -- entitled Main Themes in Romantic Painting and Poetry (a good conservative rubric for grant proposals) that would have taken his rudimentary competence in art history and literary studies into the immediate neighborhood of Blake's contemporaries. A quasi-military notion of expanding frontiers of knowledge, of "control" over disciplinary and historical "fields" haunted Mitchell's thinking in the late seventies, and produced an ever-increasing sense of inadequacy and incompetence. The only traces of this moment were 1) the development of an interest in landscape, at first centered on the Romantics, and later expanded into a fascination with national, imperial, and colonial formations of "natural space" as ideological projections, and 2) a very strange essay called "Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Blake, and Turner," which tried to focus on an abstract formal image that "evolves" across the boundary between Neoclassicism and Romanticism and circulates as both a visual and verbal motif in an astonishing number of writers and artists during this transition. Symbol of dialectical transformation, form of turbulence, icon of revolution, the vortex linked politics to form at the foundations of semiosis. Landscape seemed to constitute a kind of zero degree of the image for Mitchell, a space of blankness, pure background, "nature" unmarked by artifice, a nullity that could then be unveiled as the most fundamental and decisive construction of all -- the very space which had to be provided prior to any mark or sign whatsoever. The vortex, by contrast, seemed to be a figure of ur-marking, the primal figure, mark, or trace that, like the "scribble" of a child's first writing or drawing, manifests the birth of form. Derrida's "Scribble," his introduction to Bishop Warburton's eighteenth-century treatise on hieroglyphics, became a master text for Mitchell during this phase.   

These essays in speculative iconology had two effects: 1) they encouraged Mitchell to think that maybe Romanticism was not his real field, but that he was suited to something more nebulous and general like "image theory," and its relation to language; 2) the vortex essay served as a job talk to land him the position as senior Romanticist at the University of Chicago. Mitchell celebrated his arrival in Chicago by writing his first "theoretical" essay ("Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory"), a piece that deliberately cut itself loose from any textual interpretation or historical explanation. This essay could not have been written at a worse moment. The academy was reeling with the impact of the theory revolution, when Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, women's studies, African American studies, Neo Marxism, New Historicism, and a host of other innovations were hitting English departments and spreading into the rest of the humanities and social sciences. Mitchell's "Spatial Form" essay tried to deconstruct the time-space opposition in theories of literary form at exactly the moment this distinction was being mobilized (by Fredric Jameson among others) to distinguish modernism from postmodernism. Mitchell's attempt to deperiodize the concept of literary space was hard to distinguish from a utopian Platonism, postulating iconic revelations of temporal structure in literary texts. "Spatial Form" fell into well-deserved oblivion, though the book in which it appeared, The Language of Images , did not.   

The essay did, however, elicit an invitation to join the editorial board of the recently-founded journal, Critical Inquiry . This, it must be said, was the luckiest turn of events in Mitchell's life. It freed him from any historical field identity, and allowed him to indulge his inveterate tendency to amateur dabbling and fickle curiosity under the cover of a professional occupation: magazine editor. It allowed him to rekindle his love for another Romantic hero, William Hazlitt, whose credo of "independent" criticism became the hidden agenda of Critical Inquiry.  CI , he thought, would try to emulate the great Romantic periodicals of the 1820s in England. It would pursue the advancement of critical thinking wherever it led, without allegiance to any single party-line, discipline, or profession. It would be a forum for sharp debate and polemic, for daring, passionate experimental writing, and for the most advanced, rigorous forms of speculation, no matter how esoteric or difficult. It would reinvent itself periodically (all puns intended) by drawing on the talents of younger editors and contributors, and assessing new critical movements as they emerged.   

Propelled into the center of theoretical debate in the postmodern era, Mitchell conceived his own grand theoretical project, an iconology or "theory of images" that would answer all the fundamental questions that had plagued his work since the beginning: What is an image? How is it different from a text? Why do these questions -- and the answers to them -- make a difference, not only to our understanding of literature and the arts, but to the whole fabric of human signification, and the ethical and political cultures that are mediated by it? He plunged into philosophy and aesthetics to find the answer; he read avidly in the "new art history" and in the founding texts of film and photographic theory; he went back to the ancients (Plato and Aristotle on mimesis) and to the more ancient (anthropological discussions of fetishism and image-magic; religious debates over idolatry and iconoclasm). He grappled with the newest, most glamorous image theories (Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Baudrillard's Simulations ) and with the old war-horses (Lessing's Laocoön; Burke's Sublime and the Beautiful ). He even went back to Blake, but this time in the context of Romanticism, where the time-honored debates over "imagination" now took on a new resonance, and the problem of the mental or psychological image, of fantasy, memory, dreams, perceptions, and the construction of the senses became (as always) literal, material, and engaged in dialectical relations with language. 

This reformulation of the question allowed Mitchell to stumble forward in his theoretical grail quest even while admitting defeat for the original project. It was a perfect compromise formation between a general, a priori claim (the irreducible distinction between word and image, the sayable and seeable, the vocative and the scopic) and a kind of heuristic, methodological "wedge" that could be inserted into any specific text or image in any particular historical situation. It played out a classical Marxist fusion of theory and practice, invoked a Wittgensteinian pragmatism to relax the insistence on metaphysical grounding, and invoked the authority of Foucault and Deleuze on the "strata" of discourse and representation. In fact, it was too good an idea to be true, too simple and reductive. It threatened to turn into a visual/verbal version of the old "appearance and reality" shell game, and to reduce every formal question to a political allegory. Mitchell was attacked on the one side for giving up on theory too quickly, for bypassing semiotics without a proper hearing. On the other side, he was accused of reducing everything to binary oppositions that reinforce the most familiar stereotypes of gender, race, and class. 

Mitchell's range of reference (and of incompetence) was growing by leaps and bounds. Picture Theory contained essays on American slave narrative (specifically, the problem of memory and visually descriptive "digressions"); on ekphrastic poetry (poems on works of visual art); on modernist abstract painting in the Greenbergian tradition; on postmodern sculpture and visual-verbal "objects" (specifically, the work of Robert Morris); on photographic essays (Barthes, Alloula, Agee and Evans, Said and Mohr); on Nelson Goodman's theory of realism and Gombrich's theory of illusion; on violence and public art, on Oliver Stone's JFK and the power of television news during the Gulf War. It tried to frame these essays inside a reflection on the pragmatic, self-theorizing potential of images seen as "metapictures," or representations that stage for us the self understanding of representation. The theoretical moment was thus seen as immanent to, embedded in, specific visual/verbal constructions and practices, not as standing outside them in some master theory. Along the way, a niche was found for Blake's theory/practice of écriture , and for a methodological polemic against the comparative method in interarts studies. The vortex and spatial form essays remained homeless.  

Subject: Part II   

If Iconology was generally received with tolerance and approbation, Picture Theory elicited a markedly different reception. The book was denounced on the left for its neglect of semiotics, and for daring to suggest that, with the end of the Cold War, postmodernism might be over. It was reviled on the right for its leftist politics. Even those in the middle who generally liked it probably felt that it was trying to do too many things, and picked out the one or two chapters they could use, ignoring the rest. The only unqualified approval of the book came from the College Art Association, which gave it their 1996 prize for art history in a totally unprecedented act of disciplinary generosity (less than half the essays are about the visual arts in any familiar sense of the phrase). This award allowed Mitchell to feel, if only momentarily, that perhaps his true profession was art history. Its long range effect was to make him love his fat, ungainly little book even more, in spite of all its blemishes and deformities, and in defiance of all the well-aimed criticisms it received.   

The most important criticism of Picture Theory appeared within a few days of its publication, in an editorial notice by the Voice Literary Supplement . VLS thought the book was "on the money," but that it had the wrong title: it should have been called "What Do Pictures Want?" This observation immediately struck Mitchell with a combination of consternation and elation. Why hadn't he thought of that? How could an anonymous magazine editor who probably spent five minutes with his book have seen what had escaped his notice over a ten year period and compose a better title to boot? On the other hand, there was the elation of feeling that the truth about oneself might actually be coming to light. Of course the question had always already been, always would be, what do pictures want? How could he have missed it? This was the hidden agenda, the animistic sentiment toward objects, images, and texts that Mitchell had never overcome, and which was now offered to him as an (apparently) free gift of insight. 

As for Mitchell, he is probably disappointed with this outcome in his heart of hearts, but you would never guess it to look at him. He continues to think that something called "visual culture" has a future as an area of research and reflection, and he hopes that someday a book entitled What Do Pictures Want? will lay down its basic principles. This will be a book that will finally get down to the irreducible core of representation, explain to what extent there can (and cannot) be something like a "linguistics of the visual field." It will connect the fine arts to the ordinary language of images, the media, and the social construction of the visual field. It will show why our visual encounters with images and objects are ultimately grounded in our encounters with other people, and how a phenomenological/psychoanalytic theory of the gaze (as debated by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lacan) can be elaborated as an intersubjective account of beholders' relations to images.  It will explain how desire and violence, love and hate, hope and fear are condensed and aggregated in artificially constructed sensuous forms that have lives and voices of their own, speaking from the political unconscious of the societies in which they are born. It will explain how we must listen to these voices and look upon the faces of the objects from which they emanate, making them "friends and companions," as Blake admonished. It will let us return to those "living educts of the imagination" that Coleridge saw in powerful "ideas," and come to terms with the uncanny sense of personhood that attaches to images. It will outline the principles of a "natural history" of images, the forces of "cultural selection" that determine their mysterious origins, evolution, and extinction.   

Mitchell, alas, is as usual attacking this challenge by fleeing from it. He is currently writing a book on dinosaurs as cultural icons. If you were to ask him, he would tell you that this is a logical outgrowth of all his previous work, and a step toward the larger project on visual culture. He would say that it provides a perfect laboratory specimen to test hypotheses about the birth, evolution, and (perhaps) death of an image. He would tell you a very long story about the birth of the dinosaur as a cultural icon in the 1840s, and its repeated reconstructions under the pressures of scientific/technical revolutions, political movements and ideological transformations, right down to its present appearance as the most hyper-publicized and universally recognizable animal in global popular culture. He would point out (what you already know) that the dinosaur image migrates across the boundaries of every imaginable medium, appearing in everything from movies to novels to national museums to children's books and television shows; that it perfectly instantiates the ambivalence endemic to imagery as such: the dinosaur is both monumental and trivial, sublime and ridiculous, terrible and cute, alive and dead. He would, finally, try to convince you that the dinosaur image explodes the whole rhetorical/theoretical discourse of fetishism, idolatry, and iconoclasm that we have erected around images, demanding a more supple and ambiguous formulation, which (he will be glad to explain to you) is none other than a complex form of modern totemism.   

All these things are promised by Mitchell in his new book, which bears the inauspicious title of The Last Dinosaur Book . My own suspicion, however, is that this will be nothing but another thinly disguised Romantic autobiography. We'll see.   

Chicago, January 30, 1997  

 

2/2/97    

The Blakean image that, for Mitchell, always epitomized the Romantic ambivalence toward the image was plate xv of Milton: A Poem, showing a sculptor laying his hands on the half-finished statue of a patriarch while a chorus of musicians performs in the background.   

 

This image, usually read as an illustration of Los creating a body or "Definite Form" for Urizen, is perfectly equivocal, reading equally well as a scene of creation or destruction, icon-making or icono-smashing. Los could be molding the body of Urizen from the clay, or pulling down the idol of patriarchal reason. Mitchell had written at some length about this in an early essay ("Style and Iconography in the Illustrations to Blake's Milton," Blake Studies VI, Fall, 1973: 47-72), and had always felt that it summarized the uncanny, indecidable status of the image in Romantic thought:   

For all the talk of "imagination" in theories of Romantic poetry, it seems clear that images, pictures, and visual perception were highly problematic issues for many romantic writers. "Imagination," for the romantics, is regularly contrasted to rather than being equated with mental imaging: the first lesson we give to students of romanticism is that for Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, "imagination" is a power of consciousness that transcends mere visualization. (Picture   
Theory , 114-15)

Perhaps Mitchell should have been more worried that he was discovering the "same thing" and discovering it "everywhere," and no doubt he should have been more disciplined, more rigorously historicist. In fact, he probably should have stayed at home and written a book about Romantic iconoclasm. But for Mitchell Romanticism always meant the road of excess, going too far. Besides, he was encouraged by the example of such wide-ranging iconologists as Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim, Erwin Panofsky; by the persistent reappearance of critical reflection on imagery in every culture and period,  and by the recursive appearance of the problem of the image in the very act of critical "reflection" itself. Richard Rorty's assurance that contemporary philosophy had gone beyond "the mirror of nature" into a "linguistic turn" struck him as wishful thinking, an all-too-familiar symptom of the Romantic effort to smash or "get beyond" the image. He was struck by the (repeatedly frustrated) effort to transfer the science of linguistics to the problem of imagery, to incorporate the image within a general theory of the sign and semiosis. 

The concept of a "life of forms" also had a number of more general connotations: 1) "form" had to be understood, not as static or spatial in contrast to dynamic or temporal processes, but as a figure that unites time and space, motion and structure, style and subject-matter; 2) form had to be studied as if it were indecidably organic and mechanical, natural and artificial, "born" and "designed"; 3) while individual art works are "forms," form itself transcends the individual object, and is capable of migrating, travelling over time and space, crystallized as what Adrian Stokes called the "image in form," a mutable figure (like a vortex, ellipse, a hieroglyphic stick-man, or a dinosaur type) that sails through the ether from one medium to another, crossing the boundaries of word and image, the sayable and the seeable, as much at home in the subjective media of memory or fantasy as in stone, copper, or paper. It is like the genotype or genetic program of the phenotype, the individual living organism, the principle of its "constitution" or articulation and unfolding of its parts and phases. Mitchell found himself, quite unexpectedly, being drawn back to Focillon as he puzzled over the history of the dinosaur as a cultural icon and scientific image. It's not just that the dinosaur is one of those rare images whose birth and origin is quite determinate (first named by Richard Owen in 1842; first depicted in sculptural form in 1854). Focillon, Mitchell realized, had been something like a "Darwinist of form." He believed that the "life of forms" was not simply something that goes on within art as an analogy with what happens in nature, but that life itself--organic, biological nature--has to be understood as a diachronic process of formal engendering, transmission, proliferation, differentiation, and (presumably) extinction. 

All these developments were in Mitchell's peripheral vision, as it were, while he plodded along with his cultural history of the dinosaur image. He read Higher Superstition's catalogue of humanistic incomprehension of science with alarm and nausea, increasingly convinced of his own incompetence in the history of dinosaurology. What was he doing dabbling in a field where veterbate paleontologists and historians of science commanded a body of knowledge that had taken a lifetime of professional training to accrue and pass on? What did he know about biology, especially about the principles of animal taxonomy and their development from the static Linnaean system to the evolutionary model (born along with Romanticism) to the current, nominalistic science of "cladistics"? Not nearly enough, he was told, and repeatedly, by his scientific advisors. Still, it was too late to back out of the project. An advance had been paid, a sabbatical had been granted, and he had a track record of chutzpah to defend. Besides, a few of his new scientific friends--some of them even qualified paleontologists--were encouraging. They thought he might be on to something.    

What he hoped he was on to, ultimately, was not just an interesting and true account of the evolution of the dinosaur image, and the forces of "cultural selection" that had influenced its changes over a century and a half, but something that might bring him back to Focillon's intuition about the "life of forms," not only in art, but in nature.  Suppose iconology, and the problem of the image, was not just an "anthropological universal,"  but an issue that reached right down into the subhuman, even suborganic slime? Well, that was a speculation that would have to wait for a twenty first century Marxian-Darwinian iconologist, one who began with the invention of the computer and the discovery of the gene as taken-for-granted "discourse networks" (to echo Friedrich Kittler's phrase).  Mitchell felt himself to be growing old in a time that Walter Benjamin might have named "the age of biocybernetic reproduction." He was rapidly becoming a dinosaur himself, incapable of "surfing the net," and repelled by what seemed to him the banality and sensuous poverty of cyberspace. The new synthetic world-picture of the contemporary age would have to be worked out by one of the "New Ones," as Italo Calvino called them in his marvelous short story, "The Dinosaurs."