Images in Language, Media, and Mind (original) (raw)

Word and Image: Theory in the 21st Century

2011

Issue 5 of Interfaces – which is reproduced in this number – contains among other contributions papers by John Dixon Hunt, W.J.T. Mitchell and Jean-Michel Rabate as well as by Marie-Odile Bernez and Maurice Geracht. Michel Baridon also provided a survey of research centres and periodicals, and an up-to-date bibliography devoted to the question, in which he carefully listed the then most recent major contributions to text/image theory in the fields of arts and literature, psychology, linguistics and sciences. His concluding words were “les perspectives qui s’ouvrent sont neuves et profondes […] Tout cela n’ira pas sans beaucoup de travail […] mais toute demarche novatrice court des risques qui sont a la taille de ses ambitions, et qu’est-ce qu’un chercheur qui recule quand une voie s’ouvre ?” (246). Those encouraging words were to find an echo in Dijon in June 2010 when the most recent Interfaces conference attempted to look once again at the question of the theories underlying the i...

A Linguistic Anthropology of Images

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2023

This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists' research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image in discourse. In this article, I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology on prototypic images to show how these advances (e.g., entextualization, performativity, perspective, and enregisterment) can be leveraged to theorize images more generally. In doing so, I argue against any hard distinction between language and image. I conclude by expanding out from a linguistic anthropology of images to what I call "a linguistic anthropology of.. . ," a field characterized by an open-ended horizon of objects and modes of inquiry, all linked together as linguistic anthropology.

Rhetoric of the visual : metaphor in a still image

Jyväskylä studies in humanities, 2011

Lehtonen, Kimmo E. RHETORIC OF THE VISUAL – Metaphor in a Still Image Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2011, 174 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities ISSN 1459-4331; 166) ISBN 978-951-39-4546-6 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-4547-3 (PDF) Diss. This study includes an introduction and six articles. The articles return to the problem of visual meaning as a content-intensive quality of an image. The elementary questions are in which ways does an image represent itself when it is published, and how much does the genre in a single visual presentation metaphorise itself before presenting its message, narrative or argument through the visual means? The goal of this study is to make new openings for the analysis of the content in visual presentations in the field of humanities. It considers media studies and cultural studies in terms of semiotics and genre studies. The texts look at a variety of theoretical disciplines, especially semiotics, rhetoric and to some extent, hermeneutics and various th...

Seeing Voices and Hearing Pictures: Image as discourse and the framing of image-based research

This paper addresses an increasingly popular technique for eliciting student ''voice'' through the analysis of young people's images as a medium of expression, focusing in particular on photography. Of course, there has been considerable critical interrogation of student voice activities in the recent past and the complexities and challenges associated with the analysis of images is longstanding. Where critical scrutiny is less apparent, however, is in the interpretation of children and young people's visual ''statements''. We argue that young people's images should be subject to the same processes of deconstruction as other texts produced under the aegis of voice activities and conclude by suggesting that the crisis of representation familiar in most interpretive genres is sometimes absent from what tends to be an uncritical celebration of representation in this particular context.

Images: An Introduction

Semiotic Review, 2020

One persistent ideological ambivalence in Western academic thought is the differentiation and slippage between language and image. As historians of philosophy have pointed out, Western philosophy has often construed language as a species of vision and imaging. In this line of thought, the meaning of linguistic discourse is (or is like) an image, imprinted in the mind. Just as frequently, however, it is asserted that there is a radical caesura between language and image (and between representation and our sensory modalities), the latter being a space of non-representability and thus before or beyond the enclosure of language. Here, images exceed language, which is unable to capture their affect, materiality, or sensoriality. This special issue confronts these two persistent problematics by critically asking, how can we productively (re)think the relationship between language and image, text and the sensorial, representation and presence through a holistic semiotic framework? And how can we do so without reducing one side of these seeming antinomies to the other or instating their radical difference? As with all issues of Semiotic Review, “Images” remains open to new submissions (essays, reviews, interviews, etc.).

What the Image Wants: From the Pictorial to the Sociocultural Representation

The Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2010

Through the multifarious conceptual net, the first preoccupation is to limit the image senses that will be adopted, that is, the picture, the visual, pictorial, symbolic and those related to this semantic field. The meaning ax does not separate the abstract-mental ...

Image Politics: a call to struggle, play, and hope

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies , 2019

When I entered the field of communication, I was surprised to find that the discipline had not taken images seriously until the 1980s and 1990s, largely due to an adherence to the superiority of the written and spoken word, much to the detriment of all other forms of communication. I had come from a different academic background-one that mixed art, art history, literature, and poststructuralist theory, and that engaged images in a sustained fashion. When I studied Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida in these other fields, in addition to their most famous works, I read their monographs that focused on art, which each scholar used to inspire and think through the new theories they were proposing. Images offer challenges to thinking that words cannot. They also serve as a call to creativity and invention. Thus, the refusal in communication to study images in a sustained fashion for such a long time stunted the field in consequential ways.