ABSTRACT
To say that the pictorial turn, proclaimed by Mitchell in 1994, is actually more about animals than it is about humans would certainly be an exaggeration. However, the role that three types of animal ‒ dinosaur, calf and sheep ‒ have played in Mitchell’s understanding and explanation of the development of modern visual culture may prove to be extremely revealing and shed new light on how humans have made sense of images throughout history. Even so, one important clarification has to be made at the outset: the species that Mitchell continually refers to are presented and discussed theoretically in his books primarily as incarnations in images of cultural symptoms that go beyond their purely symbolic or iconic meaning.1 I will start by considering them more like figures of the current state of images and of our relation to them, not as theoretical terms perse. Only as their meaning gradually unfolds will it be possible to discern in them some of the (in)disciplinary logic that broadly characterizes Mitchell’s image theory. I will accordingly conclude that Mitchell is less concerned with theory that preconceptualizes its objects of inquiry and more with the knowledge that deliberately escapes being shaped into a theory in a strict sense. Using different disciplines in order to arrive at different kinds of insight, the American scholar both de-ideologizes older humanistic epistemologies and, simultaneously, creates a foundation for the general study of visual culture that is now largely known as visual studies.
