Thinking about/on Thinking: Observations on the Thought Photography of the Early Twentieth Century

The essay starts out from the neuroscientific debate regarding the epistemic status of brain images. Even though it is widely acknowledged as common sense that such images bear no simple reference to their object, but rather are constructs that do not present immediate representations of the brain, their epistemic status is unclear. The essay focuses precisely on the ongoing debate on the epistemic status of such images. By assuming that cognitive science and the scholarly study of art are closely related, it will show that both fields are concerned with forms of inner and outer representation, in that for art, an image is at once a material substratum and a mental image. While the images of the cognitive sciences have come into existence against the background of cultural studies, the brain is an arena where intensive negotiations occur between traditional notions of the image and current innovations. The essay discusses this argument with reference to a paradigmatic historical example from the turn of the nineteenth century, located at the interface between discourses such as neurobiology, occultism, media technology, and iconic criticism.