Some Problems of Bazin's Phenomenological Image - 3

Mitchell uses the concept of family resemblances in order to deconstruct the use of image in certain discourses. He draws a diagram in which certain uses of the word “image” is shown:

I added photography to show its place in Bazin’s hierarchy. Mitchell’s argument, as well as Wittgenstein’s, is that this hierarchy does not reflect reality. It only reflects language in use. The graphic image, or in Bazin’s case the photographic image is the most “literal” use of the word image. As we go towards right, the use of the word image becomes more and more figurative. In other words, the photographic image is the image that is most realistic because the other images are somewhat improper copies of the real objects. For example the impressions of objects in our minds are not as stable as photographs so we tend to argue that mental images cannot represent reality as successfully as photographs can.

So Mitchell tries to make a Wittgensteinian move by describing a situation where there are no minds. If there were no minds, than there would be no more images. Not because we could not make any more images, but because there would be no one to recognize an image as an image. This is a “paradoxical trick of consciousness”. When we see a photograph of an apple, we recognize the apple as “there” and “not there” at the same time. We do not say that there is an apple there, but we recognize that it is an apple. However when a duck responds to a decoy duck, it is not responding to an image of a duck, it is responding to a duck itself. This is because the duck does not recognize the image of the duck as an image. The same thing happens when people see TV for the first time in their lives, they cannot discern images from real people or things.

When we try to point to a mental image and say that there is a mental image we are unable to recognize it as an image because we do not know how to recognize it as an image. We do not have that knowledge because we cannot point to it. Can it be the only difference between a photograph and a mental image? That we cannot point to a mental image?

In order to understand how our consciousness works, we try to imagine it as things which reflect images. In certain points in philosophy, mind has been imagined as a mirror, a camera or a camera obscura. Bazin imagines mind as a camera which takes pictures of the world. Although it is a camera which works with language (I know this is a very crude metaphor), it is still another picture of how consciousness works. Wittgenstein argues that mind can have an image of itself in anyway it fancies or it may not have an image of itself at all. But when the mind is pictured as a camera, this is not a necessity or in other words, this is not an ontological claim. The mind can refuse to represent itself just as it can refuse to see a painting as a representation of something. There are no rules of representation in painting or in cinema; it is my opinion that otherwise we would not have those dialectic movements that Bazin talks about. If there is something necessary, maybe it is the necessity for different representations or schemes of formation of mental and material images.

Bazin privileges photographic image because mental image is a mystical thing. On the other hand, is it not more natural than a photograph to have a mental image? We can move from right to left in the above diagram just as easily we move from left to right:

“We  could just  as  easily replace  what  we  call  "the  physical  manipulation of  signs"  (painting, writing,  speaking)  with locutions such as "thinking on paper, out  loud, in  images,  etc."

I really like the idea that we can think painting as “thinking on paper” and argue that photograph itself is a false representation of how we perceive or think about the world. Although I get how photographic image is more similar to our ordinary perception, I think that is only one way to think about our perception. We are also capable of having extraordinary perceptions of reality. And why would we want to get rid of these different ways of imagining or perceiving the world just because they are not similar to our ordinary perception?