Picture Theory

In 1996, on the pages of October, W. T. J. Mitchell (who appears among the "boomer" contributors to this volume) had the temerity to ask: "what do pictures really want?" I say "temerity" because, as Mitchell—author of "The Pictoral Turn"—acknowledges, the question verges on the fanciful or at best animist, indeed he quickly characterizes his essay as a thought experiment. In the end, he says virtually nothing about what pictures "really" want ("want" receiving far more attention than "really"), but he stuns us just long enough to puzzle over "picture," or, put differently, to feel the rattling of convention fastening the word and its sense. He does not take us to, "picture yourself on a boat in a river," but nor did he need to. Latin had already set the noun within the frame of the verb, etymologically agitating the agency that Mitchell handles so gingerly. Maybe it not much of a stretch after all to think that a picture pictures, that is, really (?) wants to hail us. Picture that.

What then does my title really want? Who is to say? But at a minimum it says, whether wanting to or not, picture (verb) theory, and picture (noun) theory, an effect perhaps best rendered by reading a half note rest between the two words. This effect will matter in what follows because my attention here, my response to The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism will concentrate entirely on the 20 some illustrations that dot the text. Two such illustrations stand out: the "map of theory" on page 58 and the photograph of Richard Macksey taken at "Chez Macksey" (Veeser 2020, 26) the latter of far greater interest than the former.

Readers who have been following Mitchell's endless and impressive scroll will know that a decade before he pondered what pictures really wanted, he wrote a lengthy study of Wittgenstein's imagery, "Wittgenstein's Imagery and What it Tells Us." Although worried there more about the therapeutic value of Wittgenstein's cautions about "imagery" for literary scholars, I invoke it here primarily to remind us that pictures and theory met on the pages of The Tractatus not long after the war in which its author fought. One might wish to quibble that Wittgenstein was not a theorist, but given the orthopaedic tone of his work it would be hard to say that he was simply a philosopher either. Indeed, official philosophers like Russell and Moore had their doubts. Be that as it may, the aphorisms gathered around the number 2.1 advance several important, and never clearly repudiated, propositions about pictures (Bilder in the opposing German). Among them: thoughts and propositions are pictures; a picture is a model of reality (what is the case); pictures are comprised of elements that together form the picture; and pictures attach to reality by reaching right out to it. Notoriously, nonsense, that is, propositions without sense, is said not to picture anything. Is it a picture that is blank, empty, or, is "it" nothing like a picture at all? Endless forests have been sacrificed to such puzzles and here is not the place to either sort or mourn their loss.

Instead, I will ask: do the pictures to be found in Veeser's study picture the rebirth of theory, do they model the reality of its advent and decline, or, perhaps more to the point, what do they really propose? What, in other words, are they doing there where they are? Responding here obliges one to be prudent and to consider, among other things, whether they might propose something broadly medial, that is, whether they attach the volume to the insistent going-graphic of theory. In this spirit one thinks of the series begun in the early 70s by Eduardo Humberto del Rio Garcia, better known as RUIS. Derived from two Spanish publications, Marx para principantes and Cuba para principantes, RUIS's Marx For Beginners (translated in 1976 by Richard Appagnanessi) at once began the much imitated "for beginners" publishing concept, and modelled the encounter of pictures and theory that now manages to bleed into any subsequent assemblage, including, one might argue...