Introduction: Word and Image

The present chapter is going to address the issue of word and image, the much-contested possibility of the generation of meaning from a combination of these two different types of representation. The words of Michel Foucault in The Order of Things epitomise the perceived and generally accepted dichotomy:

Yet, Foucault's analysis of Diego Velasquez's Las Meninas as metapicture – as though pictorial representation were a form of discourse on the nature of representation itself – is now well known (Foucault 1982: 3–16). In addition, his extended conversation with Magritte on words and images in This Is Not a Pipe is imbued with the resolution to redefine the ‘reality’ to which words and images refer (Foucault 1982). W. J. T. Mitchell in his comprehensive Picture Theory seems to go along with Foucault, so that both, in their different ways, are committed to finding ways to speak about word and image: Mitchell's text is an extended analysis of the ways that images and words collide (Mitchell 1994).

However, Mitchell admits that the hope that a way might be found to speak about an arena of meaning in which the two kinds of representation might coalesce is somewhat utopian: ‘The “scientific” terms of the otherness are the familiar oppositions of semiotics: symbolic and iconic representation; conventional and natural signs; temporal and spatial modes; visual and aural media’ (Mitchell 1994: 156). The fact then that the two sign systems ‘refer’ to the world in opposite ways suggests that any overlap between systems would be coincidental – the fact that words are bound by conventional symbols which have only an arbitrary relationship with the referent but are bound in a deterministic way to a grammatical system is clearly utterly opposed to an iconic sign which relates to the referent by mimesis.