Word and image from Lessing to the arrival of the digital

In his 1766 work, which went on to become a cornerstone in the Western studies on the relationship between word and image, G.E. Lessing (2009) argues that words are best suited for representing other words, images to represent images, and that, on no account, should the two be mixed. A visual depiction cannot duplicate speech, nor can a text imitate a picture. Therefore, Lessing feels, any kind of attempts of one to represent the other would be not only pointless, but also wrong. He claims to be reacting against the critics of his own time, who followed the principle of Simonides on painting and poetry as comparable modes of representation and evaluable in equal terms, i.e. the principle of ut

pictura poesis, which had held a dominant position in art history and art criticism for a long

time. Lessing laments that the equation of the two has led to ‘the love of description in poetry and allegory in painting’ (p. xvi). In his view, poetry has been reduced to speaking painting that does not know what it could or should paint, and painting to a mute poem, separated from its purpose and thus turned into ‘an arbitrary method of writing’ (p. xvi).

The principle took its name from a poem by the Classical poet Horace. In another Classical text, Cratylus, Plato has Socrates compare the creation of a word to the visual work of an artist, even as he states that there can be no perfect imitation of an object by its verbal signifier. Towards the end of the dialogue, Socrates seems to reject the study of names (and words) in favour of studying that which words represent – i.e. he expresses a certain preference over the visual over the verbal. During the Renaissance, the superiority of the visual art over other art forms was argued by Leonardo da Vinci, whose influence persisted for centuries afterwards. In the early 18th-century France, Abbé Jean Baptiste du Bos, in his analyses of different modes of representations, preferred visual art over poetry, due to the former addressing its audience through the visual sense which, he held, enabled the most emotional effect (Mikkonen 2005). Further, he argues, painting uses natural rather than artificial signs, which increases understanding and clarity. In England, at the same time, Joseph Addison emphasized pictorial realism and the mimetic faithfulness of art. Poetic

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language was to be directly transferable to painted images. K. Mikkonen (2005) observes that at this time, the reader was equated with the viewer. As will be seen below, the later tradition separated the reader and the viewer, and, in the case of ekphrasis, equated the viewer and the writer.

Lessing was not the first to separate the visual and the verbal, nor the first to express preference of the verbal over the visual. James Harris (cited in Mikkonen 2005) felt that poetry was better suited for expressing emotion and representing time than painting. Hence, he considered poetry superior. In 1756, Edward Burke (1990) emphasized the importance of imagination, which begins its work when the sensory input encountered is not too precise or material, i.e. visual. Burke argues that the reader is more efficiently captivated in circumstances of a certain unclarity, involving a sense of danger and unknowing. Poetry enables vision in the mind’s eye, rather than in pictures. In this respect, Burke was closer to the concept of ekphrasis in its original Classical form than most of the literary scholars of ekphrasis of the modern day.

Lessing explains what he sees as fundamental differences between the written word and the image based on his interpretations of various ‘natural laws’. The most basic difference between the two, on which he builds everything else, is the equation of the element of time with literature, and the element of space with the visual arts. In literature, a temporal sequence takes place through the narration of events and through the linear process of the reading. Visual art consists of material shapes in space and their relationship to each other. Lessing argues that, unlike text, visual art can be perceived immediately, that is to say, without the temporal element. Text, on the other hand, delivers details one by one, and by the time it is finished, the reader has forgotten the first detail, which makes the formation of a mental picture from words very difficult. Further, he notes, it is difficult to retain verbal details, while an object can be regarded over and over again. The conflict between word and image even had a political dimension. The visual arts have an effect upon the ‘national character’, Lessing warns. Further, he emphasizes the imagination-inspiring power of images on individuals by suggesting that mothers of ancient heroes, having gazed on divine images bearing serpents during the day, dreamt of them at night, and hence the stories of their conception of heroes by serpents came into being.

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Mitchell’s 1984 essay on Laocoon deconstructs Lessing’s treatise and traces the origin of its conclusions to political and personal values. Mitchell points out that there would be no need to argue that visual arts and writing should not be mixed, if they could not be mixed. Rather than discussing any unchangeable foundational limits, Lessing is, throughout his work, expressing a preference. According to Mitchell, Lessing uses this preference to speak up against French intellectualism in favour of German and English ideas. Such political opposition is also anti-Catholic, mounted by two mostly Protestant countries, and, more broadly, anti-religious. Opposition to ‘symbolic representations’ as present in visual art inspired by religion runs through Lessing’s work, as evidenced here:

[…] we should discriminate and call only those works of art which are the handiwork of the artist purely as artist […]. All the rest, all that show an evident religious tendency, are unworthy to be called works of art. In them art was not working for her own sake, but was simply the tool of Religion, having symbolic representation forced upon her with more regard to their significance than their beauty. (2009: 63)

Lessing approves of the destruction of ancient works with symbolic elements by iconoclasts. He suggests that the only proper function for art is to represent beauty, specifically the beauty of spatial bodies. Any symbolic or spiritual significance should, according to him, be left for the written word. A symbolic image is dangerous: it can influence not only individuals, but entire Churches and nations.

Mitchell (1984: 109) demonstrates that Lessing’s thinking is strictly divided into two mutually opposing streams:

Painting Poetry

Space Time

Natural signs Arbitrary or man-made signs Narrow sphere Infinite range

Imitation Expression Body Mind External Internal Silent Eloquent Beauty Sublimity Eye Ear Feminine Masculine

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The dualistic division is valorized in favour of poetry and its supposed attributes. Mitchell suggests that Lessing’s perception of gender lies at the deepest core of his work: that paintings, like women, should be silent and beautiful, intended for pleasing observation of their ‘spatial’ bodily virtues, while poetry belongs to the realm of actualizing potential, outgoing expression, history, and masculinity. This division is supported by the separation of the artforms, while their blurring leads to confusion, chaos and breaking of the established norms. Mitchell observes that Lessing was, most likely, influenced in his dualistic thought by Burke’s essay on the sublime and beautiful, which connects poetry/sublime/masculinity and painting/beauty/femininity.

Lessing’s apparently rationalized iconophobia deeply penetrated the Western intellectual discourse on word and image. D. E. Wellbery (1984) has suggested that Lessing’s treatise is still located at the heart of comparative analysis in the arts, theory of narrative, and negative semiotics, visual expression of negatives or metaphors. In this thesis, Lessing’s relevance lies in this background he established for the study of word and image. He assigned negativized attributes – not overly negative in themselves, but presented in the negative light next to the more positive examples – to the image and focused on its supposed captivating, dangerous power. This was particularly linked to the feminized element of the visual and became the source of a number of issues relating to gender. The development of the concept of the image as more ‘primitive’ and ‘less complicated’ than the word begins around this time, in the works of Lessing, Burke, Harris and others. As documented by S. McCloud (1994) in his works about theories of comics and graphic novels, up to very recently, academic studies and even popular culture in the English- speaking world have been strongly prejudiced against bringing together word and image. Any illustrated or otherwise image-heavy literary works have been regarded as the domain of immature readers, language learners or those with linguistic difficulties. This thesis suggests that this prejudice against the image has also affected the study of digital graphics and their interaction with text.

As part of the discourse on theories of different art forms, the visual sense and the theoretical process of looking have interested scholars as long as word and image have been debated. Leonardo wrote that ‘he who loses his sight abandons his soul in a dark prison’

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(cited in Mikkonen 2005: 118). Enlightenment philosophers considered vision and seeing to occupy a special position in the pursuit of knowledge, to the point that metaphors of seeing and light gave a name to the entire era (Jay 1993). Lessing connected the eye and its function to the visuals, the ‘inferior’. At the same time, Lessing’s work, and that of others following him, has attributed a superstitious power to the process of the gaze. This may have been inspired by stories of Antiquity, in which gazing on that which was forbidden to look at, such as monsters like Medusa, could kill or turn people into stone.

Studies of ekphrasis, such as those by Heffernan and Mitchell, have tended to adopt the gendered approach to the gaze. According to it, the male viewer envoices the feminized object of the gaze by means of his writing. The fascination with the object of the gaze and the danger associated with gazing have become intertwined. Blanchot writes that the process of seeing becomes a kind of touch over the distance of the gaze, in place of a real, physical, touch. This touch, or contact, at a distance is the impression of the image. The fascination caused by this is passion for the image. The object seen ‘does not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminate milieu of fascination’ (1982: 32). Blanchot means that the psychological perception created in the mind differs from the ‘objective’ reality because it is infused with the viewer’s own passions and needs. Most traditional theories on the gaze and the visual can be interpreted and summarized in the following manner: the gaze, the means of control and the ultimate power, keeps the viewer away from, outside, the image, which exerts dangerous and captivating power in a struggle against the viewer. In order to maintain the superior position ‘in control’, the viewer stays at ‘a critical distance’ rather than becoming immersed in the image with his/her personal passions, abandoning the critical perspective. This presents an obvious challenge to the study of virtual worlds which require the viewer ‘entering’ the image and essentially becoming part of it.

The growing interest in visual/textual studies and in ekphrasis, as outlined in Chapter 1, has helped to rehabilitate the image. The interest in the study of the image has been spurred by the rapidly increasing visual nature of our current society, observed by many commentators such as E. H. Gombrich (1982), Mitchell (1994) and Bolter (1996 and 2001). In his 1994 work, Mitchell coined the concept of a ‘pictorial turn’, a new interest in the visual in the

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public culture and in academic discourse. He notes that ‘cybernetic’ technology has created new forms of visuality with significant power upon the spectator. As seen above in the works of Lessing and his colleagues, the power of the visual on the spectator is nothing new. One of the central concepts to Mitchell’s ‘pictorial turn’ is the realization that a picture presents ‘a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality’, which, at the time, meant the discovery that spectatorship could be considered at least as complex an issue as reading (Mitchell, 1994: 16). He connects the pictorial turn to a number of European philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Derrida and the Frankfurt School, noting that the fascination with the visual is mixed with unease, or outright fear. Mitchell writes:

[W]e still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them. (1994: 13)

This is a remarkable turnaround from the previous theorists, who set image directly opposed to word, attributed space to image as its element and considered beauty and appeal to emotions its primary functions. With the arrival and development of mass media, it can be safely said that displaying beauty is in no way the primary purpose of the image – if, indeed, it ever was. In mass media, image has been appropriated for the use of information dissemination, commercialism, propaganda, terror and counter-terrorism.

Significantly for the current study, Mitchell also considers the prospect of the merging of the visual and the textual. He illustrates this by an example from an old radio programme, the presenters of which were in the habit of looking at pictures in the studio and expressing a wish that the listeners could see them as well. By verbally re-creating the visual images in their conversation in order to enable the listeners to see them in their mind’s eye, the presenters engage in an act of producing ekphrasis. Mitchell outlines three stages of this ekphrastic process. The first stage he names ekphrastic indifference: a belief that words and images are fully separate and attempting to represent one with the other is largely pointless. The second stage, ekphrastic hope, is the encouragement that words and image may use certain techniques to approach each other. The third stage, ekphrastic fear, expresses the disquiet born from the prospect that by means of words alone, the listeners of Mitchell’s

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radio might actually see the images in a concrete manner: that the visual and textual become one and the same. Mitchell effectively prioritizes human imagination over a straightforward visual depiction. If the verbal were able to fully reproduce the visual that it seeks to represent, there would be no function left for the verbal. It would be rendered obsolete, essentially non-existent. Likewise, no room would remain for imagination, as experiencing the visual in a text would no longer be a matter of a personal mental process of associations, familiarities and interpretations. In such circumstances, the visual would become invasive. To avoid this, Mitchell argues, the borders between the text and image must remain in place, and the two must treat each other as rivals and ‘others’.

As we have seen, the image is perceived as dangerous, or, at the very least, powerful and worthy of caution. If this is the case, why is it so attractive? Although Blanchot explains the desire for an image with the viewer’s distance for it, he does not fully elaborate on what arouses the initial fascination in the first place. Krieger (1992) addresses the question by linking ekphrasis with a semiotic desire to the general preference of the visual over the verbal. Manifesting as an ‘ekphrastic impulse’, this semiotic urge strives towards what Krieger calls a ‘natural sign’, a theoretical (and impossible) sign which is that which it represents. A word for ‘apple’ would be represented by an actual apple. An actual physical apple is understood far more quickly than the word ‘apple’, even by a native speaker. The verbal always, inevitably, mediates the visual. If such a natural sign existed, representation would become meaningless. Histories, fiction and visual artistic representations would effectively cease to exist. Consequently, word and image must remain separate.

The attractiveness of the visual and the theoretical desire for a natural sign are well demonstrated by shifting practices in the digital media. The visuality of today’s internet does not simply manifest in virtual worlds. Bolter has suggested that new media provides for a reversed ekphrasis of sorts. Using examples from traditional and new media, he proposes that rather than words striving to represent images, images are now used to represent words. Bolter’s argument is supported by what might be termed ‘legacy iconography’. A decreasing number of users today know why the sign for ‘save file’ in the Windows operating system is a dark rectangle with a smaller white rectangle and a white dot inside it, having never seen a floppy disk. Original representation of the command in

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terms of appropriate technology approaches Krieger’s desire for the natural sign very closely. As technology has moved on, the sign has transformed from its original signification to a representation of an idea, an action. These graphic signs for actions and commands, known as ‘icons’ are omnipresent on most modern operating systems and in most virtual worlds.

Related to the development of technology is the fact that the increased overall visuality acts as a status symbol. Since first becoming available to the general public in the beginning of the 1990s, the internet has become a household essential, comparable to the television or the telephone. This has enabled the growth of computer processors and the bandwidth required for transfer of data, which, for their part, have made possible the handling of more and more complex graphics. In the beginning, everything was based on simple ASCII text. Later, simple 9-bit graphics appeared. Later still, more complex graphics and digital photography became possible. In the area of games, a drive for more and more complex and believable graphics has continued up to today. Even operating systems seem to signify their development in terms of graphics. Having started out as pure text, operating systems have steadily increased their graphics to text ratio. Today, icons are dominant in market leaders such as Windows and Mac OS. Across the board, the digital image has come to signify progress, top of the line. This is in remarkable contrast to the traditional Lessingean notion of the image as inferior and more primitive. This thesis suggests that virtual worlds are the ‘peak’ of digital graphics, not necessarily in terms of some subjective quality, but in expression. With their distinctive features and the great degree of interactivity and immersion, they have come to disrupt the existing theories of the relationship between word and image, like nothing else previously.

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