ABSTRACT
In “From Iconology to Media Aesthetics”, W. J. T. Mitchell provides an outline of central ideas in the history of iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics and shows us, among other things, how entangled imagery is with language, with touch, and with power. In this way, Mitchell introduces a fundamental insight into intermedial studies, namely that no medium is ‘pure’ but always relates to other sensory modes or forms of representation than the one that seems the most dominant. Mitchell further discusses the idea that media aesthetics can be ‘triangulated’ by showing how various thinkers throughout history have related art, media forms, semiotics, and notions of immediacy and reality in (different types of) tripartite constellations such as the constellation of opsis (spectacle), melos (melody), and lexis (diction) by Aristoteles, or the constellation of icon, index, and symbol by C. S. Peirce.
