ABSTRACT
Although there are numerous traditional theories of pictorial representation, contemporary thinking on the subject is dominated by only two. One, based on the psychology of art, examines the constitution of the picture from the perspective of the psychology of visual perception, taking into account what is involved in the process of image making. 1 Of course, what is actually involved in the process of image making is always open to controversy, and theories based on the psychology of art range across a great number of hypothetical models of visual perception. The other approach to pictorial representation is based on language-oriented theories, which are likewise varied, but have certain common features. 2 Most notable among these is a tendency to analogize pictures to verbal narratives, and to attach importance to resemblance and symbolic models and their various components. Obviously, both theories take pictorial representation as the result of certain symbolic or cognitive operations that are intelligible and analyzable. It might, however, prove interesting to follow a line of thought that provides an alternative to these predominant theories of pictorial representation—one which is perhaps best expressed in the writings on aesthetics of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-François Lyotard. Generally speaking, their approaches to this subject, though differing in certain important ways, take as a starting point not the picture as a symbolic construct—as a collection of created images or visual data that stand in place of something else— but rather various bodily, libidinal, figural, gestural, and perceptual experiences, which, taken along with a picture’s formal elements, constitute the pictorial surface. Thus, in their general view, pictorial representation cannot be seen wholly in terms of some static theoretical construct (e.g., a psychological hypothesis or an analogous linguistic model), since, on the contrary, it is constituted by nonrational forces—desire, drives, affectations, perceptions, etc.— which are not necessarily reducible to intelligible models, to theorization. In fact, we could say that both of these thinkers stress the very elements which tend to undermine the traditional idea of the unity and intelligibility of the pictorial surface, and thus the very distinction between knowing and seeing.
