Some Problems of Bazin's Phenomenological Image - 2

First of all, phenomenology is itself an answer to the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. This distinction in Kant leads to the strange conclusion that everything is phenomenological representation. In phenomenology, as we have seen, there is no such distinction. The only place to talk about objective knowledge is consciousness and moreover, there is no “outside” of consciousness, the objective world shows itself to consciousness and by doing phenomenology we gain objective knowledge about the world. In this sense, it would seem that whatever we find in consciousness should be equally legitimate for objective knowledge but this is not exactly the case. Rather it is the mechanisms of the cognition, of formations of thinking that is objective and not specifically the content but these mechanisms are the basis for objective knowledge.

Now if montage imposes a certain meaning on the viewer through ingrained symbolism on the image and therefore eliminates ambiguity, this would mean that, in turn, the image created by deep focus is itself more in line with how our cognition works because it is rich with possible meanings. Yet if our consciousness cognizes a world rich with ambiguous meaning, why would it stop cognizing the world like this when it is faced with an image imbued with symbolism? Since it would not shift into another mode of cognition when faced with a graphic image, every image, whatever the style of representation, should be imbued with ambiguousness by consciousness itself. Photographic image is not another mode of cognition; it is another means of representation. And every “object” in the world is cognized by the same mechanisms that phenomenology discusses.

Iconology: image, text, ideology by Mitchell begins with the chapter titled “What is an image?” and this chapter opens with a quote from Sartre (who is a phenomenologist by the way):

“It is one thing…to apprehend directly an image as image, and another thing to shape ideas regarding the nature of images in general.”

Mitchell uses Wittgenstein to question the privileged position of the graphic image in certain discourses. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is very unique in its approach to language. Although he is similar to structuralist / post-structuralist movement in the importance he gives to language, his approach is very distinct. Very roughly, he argues that the philosophical problems are in fact only problems that exist because of the uncritical use of language and if we can somehow show how these are not actual problems we can get rid of them. In this sense, he argues that there is no essence to language or mind (the word “essence” is also problematic), that words gain meaning through context (the meanings are “fuzzy”, no one-to-one correspondence between a word and its meaning) and what we think as essential features of things such as “games” are only related through family resemblances i.e. “overlapping similarities”. He gives the example of games to explain his concept of family resemblances. We call hide and seek, chess and Grand Theft Auto all as games. But these activities we call games do not have one essential feature. In some games you do not win or lose, some you play alone and so on.

I will be talking about Mitchell’s application of Wittgensteinian investigation of the uses of words in different contexts in order to show that photographic image may not actually have this privileged status, that maybe there is no distinction (aside from ontological differences which are not enough to warrant psychological realism) between any kind of image, imaginary or photographic.