Dime para qué sirve y te diré qué es una imagenLos usos de las imágenes y su incidencia en el conocimiento sobre las imágenes

Zusammenfassung

Never before in history have human beings lived in an environment so surrounded by images. Indeed, knowledge of images is important. And this is evidenced by the increasing proliferation of publications, seminars, conferences, etc. on the subject of images that has emerged since the publication, in 1960, of Ernst H. Gombrich's book Art and Illusion. However, there is a certain uneasiness among those academics who are most committed to theorizing on images. The current canonical doctrine on images states that images are a modality of the sign. But this approach generates a feeling of dissatisfaction, not only among those who think that this understanding of images ignores or neglects various – and sometimes highly important – uses of images, but also among the very advocates of this way of looking at images. W. J. T. Mitchell, the proponent of what has come to be called the “Pictorial Turn”, and arguably one of today's foremost international experts, begins his book Image Theory by stating that, “Although we have thousands of words about pictures, we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of them”, and goes on to state that he does not believe that this can be remedied. In this paper I only deal with artificial images deliberately created by people. I start from the following premise: insofar as images are artifacts deliberately made by people, images are a modality of artifact-utensil that, just like any other useful artifact purposely produced by humans, is an instrument that has been conceived and produced for the purpose of being used and employed as a useful utensil (“útil útil”). The idea is that every image is an artifact-utensil whose raison d'être and existence are determined by the “final cause” that has created it. This approach allows me to focus on uses of images with which we are all highly familiar: those that make use of them as works of Art, as means of communication and as sources of information. But it also allows me to point out the existence —until now practically ignored— of a whole constellation of images that coexist with us on a daily basis, often without us noticing that they are images. Images such as decoys used by hunters and fishermen that mimic a duck or a fish, dolls and toy trucks our children play with, candies that are perfect copies of a river pebble, dental prosthesis, baby bottles, paper airplanes, wigs, globes, anatomical models used to show the organs of the human body, “fake eggs” used to stimulate domestic birds to lay, “crash test dummies”, and anthropomorphic or zoomorphic robots (many of them equipped with Artificial Intelligence) that increasingly assist us by being our pets, acting as seeing-eye dogs (such as Tefi, the robotic dog manufactured by the CSIC), as “companions”, etc. Taking this premise as a starting point, the hypothesis supporting this work is the following: the study of images that considers them as a modality of artifact-utensil will make it possible to reconsider both forms of using images, and modalities of images, that are normally neglected or ignored; it will also be able to account for them (all images and all forms of their use) by describing and explaining them in a way that is unattainable for the doctrine of images that assumes that images are a form of sign. The understanding of images proposed here, which considers them as a form of artifact-utensil, will allow — and this is the hypothesis from which this paper starts, as well as the objective of this work— the knowledge of images currently considered canonical to be freed from the impasse in which it currently finds itself, contributing to the development – the purpose of this research – of a much broader understanding of the subject and with a much more empirical (and factually applicable) orientation towards the things that happen with the images that, and in more and more anonadant forms, coexist alongside us. In this paper, an account is given of the current Status Quaestionis concerning knowledge of images; some methodological issues are raised and discussed: the definition of the “object of study” of this research, that of the notion of “artifact-utensil”, that of the distinction between images employed in uses that take place in mente and images employed in uses that take place in mundum, and so on. Finally, on the basis of the understanding gained from the wide selection of “case studies” analyzed, the conclusions are outlined, the hypothesis proposed for this research is considered validated and the objective of this work reasonably achieved. From the enormous range of authors studied, I will highlight only the three who, in some way, constitute the poles between which this work is situated: W.J.T. Mitchell, Jacques Aumont and Ernst H. Gombrich