Introduction

At the very end of his most recent book – Image Science – W.J.T. Mitchell poses a question in a somewhat rhetorical vein asking what, in the end, image science is, and whether something like that can exist after all – that is, after all the books, articles, lectures and graduate students to which he dedicated himself over the forty years of his career. He readily confesses that, if the answer could make any sense, then it would have to do with something of a decidedly hybrid nature, between “hard” and “soft” sciences, nature and culture. Drawing comparisons with boxing and a wrench, he describes image science not only as a tool for understanding or analyzing images (the “wrench” metaphor), but also as a way of interfering with them, making contact with them and ultimately fighting them (the “boxing” metaphor). According to Mitchell, images are always already responsible for two basic types of relation that exist in the world and are practically unavoidable in two crucial ways: intersubjective and interobjective. In the first case, images serve to instigate communicative action in order to tighten relations between sender and receiver, leading eventually to emotionally charged responses, as in iconoclastic gestures, pornography or other kinds of “undesirable” pictures. In the second case, images serve to establish a representational bond among objects, between images themselves and the objects they represent. Seen in this way, the science of images does not have to deal only with the objects of its enquiry proper but is always itself put under scrutiny by the very objects with which it is striving to come to terms.