2 What Do Pictures Want? ions about pictures in recent literature about story have been interpretive and rhetorical. We wai ‘The dominant qu culture and a signs and symbols, what sort of power they have to effect hum and behavior. When the question of desire is raise the producers or consumers of images, with the picture treated as an ex- a mechanism for eliciting the desires of the beholder. In this chapt themselves, and ask what ‘mean an abandonment of hope, make the question of pictorial meaningand power appeat sora yang iterpretive and rhetoric his isa bizarre, perhaps even objectionable, ing of images, a dubious ey Australia: Power appeared as "What Do Pic- tures Really Want” in October 77 (Sur ke to thank Lauren Berlant, Homi Bhabha, T “Annette Mcelson John Ricco Terry S Sayder, WHAT po PieTURES WANT? 29 stitious attitude toward images, one that iftaken seriously would return us to practices like totemism, fetishism, idolatry, and animism.' These are practices that most modern, enlightened people regard primitive, psychotic, or childish in their traditional forms (the worship of ‘material objects; the treating of inanimate objects like dolls as if they were alive) and as pathological symptoms in their modern manifestations (fe- tishism either of commodities or of neurotic perversion). {F'm also quite aware that the question may seem like a tas priation of an inquiry that is properly reserved for other peop! larly those classes of people who have been the objects of discrimi vi cd by prejudicial images—"profiled” in stereotype and caricature. The question echoes the whole investigation into the desire ofthe abject or downcast Other, the minority or subaltern that has been so central to the development of modern studies in gender, sex “What does the black man want?" is the question raised by Franz Fanon, risking the reification of manhood and negritude in a single sentence.’ “What do ‘women want?” is the question Freud found himself unable to answ: ‘Women and people of color have struggled tions, to articulate accounts of the ictures might do the same, or how any inquiry of this sort could be more than a kind of disingenuous or (at best) unconscious ventriloquism, as if Edgar Bergen were to ask Charlie McCarthy, “What do puppets w: issue in what f famous question, “Can the ‘ed Cary Nelson and Lawrence’ Heranswerisno,an answer incapable of speec be pictures want vei 1989), 670,tion were worth asking, partly as a kind of thought experiment, simply to see what happens, and partly out of a conviction that this is a question we are already asking, that wwe cannot help but ask, and that therefore deserves analysis. I'm encour- aged in this by the precedents of Marx and Freud, who both felt thata mod- em science of the social and the psychological had to deal with the issue the personhood of it both physical and sometimes figurativel personhood and anit they speak to us, somet _Dackat us silently across a “gulf unbridged by language.” They present not jjustasurface buta face that faces the beholder. While Marxand Freud both the personified, subjectfied, animated object with deep suspicion, tique, much of their ‘My own position is that the subjectivized, animated object in some form or other is an incurable symptom, and that Marx and Freud are better treated as guides to the understanding of this symptom and perhaps to some trans- formation of it into less pathological, damaging forms. In short, we are stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology. In saying that pictures have some ofthe features of personhood, ‘The literary treatment of pictures is, of course, quite unabashed in its Jebration of their uncanny perhaps because the literary image does not have to be faced directly, but is distanced by the sec- ondary mediation of language. Magic portraits, masks, and mirrors, living statues, and haunted houses are everywhere in both modern and tradi- tional literary narratives, and the aura of these imaginary images seep both professional and popular ans may “know” that the pict have been marked with colors and shapes, bu asif pictures had feeling, will, consciousness, agency, and desire Everyone knows that a photograph of their mother is not alive, but they reluctant to deface or destroy it. No modern, rational, secular person thinks that pictures are to be treated like persons, but we always seem to be swilling to make exceptions for special cases. ‘And this attitude is not confined to valuable artworks or pictures that have personal significance. advertising executive knows ‘mages, touse the trade jargon, “have legs’—that is, they seem to havea sur- prising capacity to generate new directions and surprising twists in an ad campaign, as if they had an intelligence and purposiveness of their own, ‘When Moses demands that Aaron explain the making of the golden calf, ‘Aaron says that he merely threw the Isr this calf came out” (Exod. 32:23 [KJ appearance and visual realism so " are to be infused into the obj3 mages. some idols have legs too." The idea that images have a cliché of contemporary visual culture. The spectacle, surveillance, and simulacra is not merely an i that images but for images, as someone who was himself seen as “nothing but an image? There is no difficulty then, in demonstra sonhood of pictures modern world a ies. ‘what to say next, How are traditional attitudes toward images—idolatry, ned in modern societies? Is our task as cul- tural critics to demystify these images, to smash the modern idols, to ex- it to discriminate between true and thy and sick, pure and impure, good and evil images? Are images the terrain on which I struggle should be waged, the site on which ‘There is strong temptation to answer these questions with a resound- ings, and to take the critique of visual cltureasastrightorward cay of images as agents of ideological manipulation and actual human damage. ‘At one extreme is the claim of legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon that, pornography is not just a repres lence toward and degrada- tion of women but an act of violent degradation, and that pornographic pictures—especially photographic and cinematic images—are themselves agents of violence. There ae also the familiar and less controversial argu- ments in the political critique of visual culture: that Holl constructs women as objects of the “male gaze”; that the unlettered masses Or seings, My collage Wi enon in Chines legends. WHAT Do PICTURES WANT? 33 are manipulated by the images of visual media and popular culture; that people of color are subject to graphic stereotypes and racist visual discrim- ination; that art museums are akind of hy igious templeand eration that are designed to produce surplus aesthetic and economic value. want to say that all these arguments have some truth to them (in fact, ve made many oft self), but also that there is something radically unsatisfactory about them. Perhaps the most obvious problem is that the critical exposure and demolition of the nefarious power of images is both easy and ineffectual. Pictures area popular political antagonist because one can take a tough stand on them, and yet, at the end of the day, everything ther visual or political culture. In Mac- iance, passion, and futility ofthis enterprise is quite re the energies ofa progressive, humane politics that seeks social real diversion of progressive pol ous forms of political reaction? Or even better, is Macl and animate imag lead us toward iconological insight? In any event, it may be time to rein in our notions of the political stakes in acritique of visual culture, and to scale down the rhetoric ofthe “power wages.” Images are certainly not powerless, but they may bea lot weaker than we think, The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their powerand the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what Pictures do o what they want, from power to desire, from the model ofthe ower to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be rogated or (better) to be invited to speak. If the power of images is like the 18. The most egreg testing designeda MAGES: power ofthe weak, that may be why their desi to make up for their actual bestronger than they actually are in order to give ourselves sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them. altern model ofthe picture, on the other hand, opens up the ac- tual dialectics of power and desire in our relations with pictures. When Fanon reflects on negritude, he describes it as a “corporeal malediction” that is hurled in the immediacy of the visual encounter, “Look, a Negro.” But the construction of the racial and racist stereoty] ercise of the picture as a technique of dominatior ththe subject and the ol is correspondingly strong: is not a simple ex- isthe knotting of a two, rending and rendering it simultaneously hypervisible and invis an object of, in Fanon’s words, “abomination” and “adoration.” Aborai- nation and adoration are precisely the terms in which idolatry is excoriated e abominated by ce the black man, is both despised and wor- shipped, reviled for being a nonentity, a slave, and feared as an alien and supernatural power. Ifidolatry is the most dramatic form of image power known to visual culture, it isa remarkably ambivalent and ambiguous kind 14, Fanon, “The Fat of Bl For a subtle analysis of Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Locaion of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 66-84. 16 Ralph Elison's classic novel, The nvsile Man, renders thi aradax most vividly: i ‘Shall fll down before a Block of wood?” The online edition ofthe Orford English Dictionary lays out the doubtfal etymology: “Abominable, regularly spelt abominable, and cxplained as ab homine, and explained a ‘aay from man, inhuroan, beastly” The associa ‘on of the animate image wi crucial feature of pictorial desire. Abom- ination also a terme Ginzburgon the idol as WHAT Do PICTURES WANT? 35 and visual culture are infected by a kind of idolatry and the evil eye of racism, itis no won- eye” itself as vision as something that has been repeatedly subjected to “deni- gral f pictures are persons, then, they are colored or marked per- sons, and the scandal ofthe purely white or purely black canvas, the blank, ‘unmarked surface, presents quite a different face. Bryson’s words, “around an opposition between woman as image and man as the bearer of the look” —not images of women, but images as women.” ‘The question of what pictures want, then, is inseparable from the question of what women want. Long before Freud, Chaucer’ “Wife of Bath’ Tale” that women most de- and who is given a one-year reprieve on his death sentence to go in quest ofthe right answer. [fhe returns with the wrong an- swer, the death sentence will be carried out. The knight hears many wrong answers from the wom terviews—money, reputation, love, beauty, tery” by right or consent, and the power that goes with superior strength he official moral of Chaucer’ tale is that consensual, freely given mastery is best, but Chau ‘cynical and worldly Wife of Bath, knows that women want (that is, ack) power, and they will take whatever kind they can get. the moral for pictures? Ifone could interview all the pictures one encounters in a year, what answers would they give? Surely, many ofthe pic- ‘tures would give Chaucer's “wrong” answers: thatis, pictures would want to be worth a lot of money; they would want to be admired and praised as 19, See Martin Jy, Downcast Eyes The Denigraton of Vision in Twentieth Century French ‘Thought (Berkely and Los Angeles: Uni 21, My thanks to Jay Schleusener for hs help wth the Chaucerian notion o36 IMAGES: ey would want to be adored by many lovers. But above ll they would want a kind of mastery over the beholder. Art historian and ‘these terms: “a painting. and finaly to enthrall the beholder, ths bring him to a halt in front ofitselfand hold him there unable to move.” The paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyze the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture in what might be called “the Medusa