【贝尔廷】图像、媒介、身体：新图像学方法.pdfVIP

Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology Hans Belting 1. Why Iconology? In his 1986 book on iconology, W. J. T. Mitchell explained the task of iconology by using the terms image, text, ideology.1 In my recent book on Bild-Anthropologie, I also use a triad of terms in which, for obvious reasons, image remains but now is framed by the terms medium and body.2 This choice is not intended to invalidate Mitchell’s perspective. Rather, it char- acterizes another approach among the many attempts to grasp images in their rich spectrum of meanings and purposes. In my view, however, their significance becomes accessible only when we take into account other, non- iconic determinants such as, in a most general sense, medium and body. Medium, here, is to be understood not in the usual sense but in the sense of the agent by which images are transmitted, while body means either the performing or the perceiving body on which images depend no less than on their respective media. I do not speak of media as such, of course, nor do I speak of the body as such. Both have continuously changed (which allows us to speak of a history of visual technologies, as we are also familiar with a history of perception), but in their ever-changing presence they have kept their place in the circulation of images. Images are neither on the wall (or on the screen) nor in the head alone. They do not exist by themselves, but they happen; they take place whether they are moving images (where this is so obvious) or not. They happen via 1. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986). 2. The present essay is an attempt to summarize and to extend the discussion in my book Bild- Anthropologie: Entwu¨rfe fu¨r eine Bildwissenschaft(Munich, 2001). A French translation is due to appear this fall: Pour une anthropologie des images, trans. Jean Torrent (Paris, 2004). Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005) 2005 by The University of Chicag