How Images Think (review)

This is a book about the kinds of human experience that images engender. It is a good, wandering, meditative book. Unfortunately it has completely the wrong title.

First, thinking isn't really at issue. What Ron Burnett cares about is subjectivity, collectivity, sense of self, sense of community, links and networks and societies; for him images are woven into each of them. It does not really matter if images think. They prompt us, and they respond to what we do; they have agency and roles to play in our lives. How Images Work might have been better, or even How Images Work with Us, perhaps with a subtitle like The Interdependence of Humans and Their Images. Thinking is nearly the worst word he could have chosen for a title, because he is concerned with all sorts of actions and effects in the world that are much more effective, that do more, than just hanging on a wall and thinking. On the very last page of his book, under a heading called 'So, Do Images Think?' the first thing Burnett says is that 'intelligence has become a distributed interaction.' He cares about the distribution, the sharing, the collaboration, and not the generation of thought per se.

That is one reason why Burnett's title is wrong. It is also wrong because there is a tradition of theorizing how images think, and readers might think his book has something to do with it. That tradition comes mainly from Hubert Damisch, and is now being investigated by scholars such as Hanneke Grootenboer. Damisch, in turn, got it from Wittgenstein, for whom pictures seemed at one point to be a way of thinking about propositions in general. Grootenboer calls her research program 'The Pensive Image.' For Damisch, paint and other artists' materials could actually produce thought apart even aside from the things the paint depicted. Those are fascinating ideas, but they have nothing to do with what interests Burnett.

The book has a very different intellectual lineage. Burnett reads widely – who doesn't, these days? – and picks some authors that are unusual in visual studies. There is Brian Cantwell Smith, whose book On the Origin of Objects has made some very dedicated converts even though it has still not reached a large audience. Other sources of inspiration are Marshall McLuhan and John Berger, but (pointedly, I think), not Jean Baudrillard. (Simulacra are just too one-way.) And there is Bruno Latour, whose books give Burnett his sense of how images and people both have agency, how subjectivities include images as well as people.

Incidentally, in case you are still wondering whether to read the book: it is also instructive about the possibilities of new interactions on the internet. Here you'll read about AlphaWorld, seti@Home, muds, moos, and sites like Gnutella.

The book rambles in a benign way. Argument isn't Burnett's strong point: the book is rich in connections. Isn't it often the case that an author provides the best description of himself? At one point Burnett says: 'The viewer of images is potentially a raconteur of daydreams, visions, thoughts, and insights.'