Iconomy, Iconoclash ≠ Iconomics

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark, made in his The Imagination (1936), is used as a prefatory quotation by W.J.T. Mitchell in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), his classic study of the nature of images and the differences between images and words.1 Like everything else that Mitchell (and Sartre) says about these topics, this gesture is immediately relevant to the issues raised by the questionnaire. Indeed, the first two sentences of the questionnaire set up a relationship between images and imagery, or single images and the overall image flow, that is indeed “traditional,” in fact, ancient, as a presumption, one that is so instinctive to thinking about images that it is almost everywhere taken as fundamental. It is also, as Sartre suggests, problematical.