The pensive image.
Seminar Syllabus 2007
Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrecht, The Reverse Side of a Painting (c. 1670, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)
Description and goal
The pensive image is a research project on thinking images. This project studies the extent to which images (painting, photography, cinema etc.) are able to philosophize on the nature of vision and on the status of their own representation. The pensive image is based on the hypothesis that monocular models of vision such perspective and the camera have shaped our binocular perception of the world. Following Hubert Damisch, W.J.T. Mitchell, among others, the pensive image aims at formulating a theory as to how images “think” about vision through a study of images that “look back” at us, viewers. To this extent, this project intends to rethink the notion of the gaze as extremity (Starobinski) by looking, for instance, at the difference between the photographed and the painted gaze in historical and contemporary portraiture (Barthes, Kracauer), animal gazing (Derrida), representations of single-eye vision and blindness, etc. as well as the various modes of looking such images solicit. The pensive image claims that such representations have a double investment in the visual as agent as well as representation of vision. As such, they may form the foundation of an alternative, reciprocal model of vision, initial ideas on which have been developed, among others, by Merleau-Ponty in his idea of the flesh, by Lacan with his schism of the eye and the gaze and by Foucault in his dyad of seeing/being seen, and the visible and the articulable (Deleuze). This research project aims at developing a theory on the thinking image.
The issue of Image[&]Narrative on 'Thinking pictures' edited by Hanneke Grootenboer as part of the Pensive image project is now available online at: http://www.imageandnarrative.be
Among others with contributions by Jan van Eyck (ex) researchers: Anthony Auerbach, Nikolaus Gansterer, Sönke Hallmann, Benda Hofmeyer, Antony Hudek, Ils Huygens, Tom Van Imschoot and Charlotte Mott.
Seminar sessions have the format of a workshop or round table and are meant to be platforms of intellectual exchange. Participants are invited to do (short) presentations on the assigned texts, on their own work, or on visual materials in relation to the topic. Each session, Hanneke Grootenboer will bring in images related to the topic to discuss. After each session the participants decide what the readings for the next session will be. Everyone is welcome to suggest further readings.
In addition, short presentations will be held by participants on their contribution to the special issue of the Belgium electronic journal Image[&]Narrative on Thinking Pictures (expected publishing date early Fall 2007)
All sessions take place on the first Wednesday of the month, from 15:00-17:00 in the Auditorium, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht.
Jean-Luc Marion, “The Crossing of the Visible and the Invisible,” in The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford, 2004), 1-23
Gerard Wajcman, “The Birth of the Intimate, I” in Lacanian Ink 23 (photocopy on reserve)
Gerard Wajcman, “The Birth of the Intimate, II” in Lacanian Ink 24/25 (photocopy on reserve)
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, chapter 1, "The House. From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut," and chapter 9 "The Dialectics of Inside and Outside," 3-37, and, 211-231.
Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking", in Poetry, Language, Thought, 143-162.
Selection of the following texts:
Walter Benjamin, "N, [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]" The Arcades Project, (Harvard University Press, 2004), 456-488; "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations; "One Way Street (selection)" in Reflections
Susan Buck-Morss, "Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing," Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (University of California Press), 309-337; "The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception," The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis (Westview Press, 1994), 45-63; Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991) (selections)
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (selections)
Theodor Adorno, selections on the dialectical image
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: From Baudelaire to Benjamin (selections)
Roland Barthes, "Diderot, Barthes, Eisenstein," Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977), 69-78
— guest lecture and workshop
The pensive image is proud to present guest speaker John Rajchman, associate professor of theory, criticism and twentieth century art and philosophy in the art history department at Columbia University in New York. Before he taught at Columbia, Rajchman held positions at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and The Cooper Union, among others. Professor Rajchman’s numerous publications include Michel Foucault: Freedom of Philosophy (Routledge, 1985), Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics (Routledge, 1991), Philosophical Events: Essays of the 80s (Columbia University Press, 1991), The Deleuze Connections (MIT, 2000) and Constructions, with a preface by Paul Virilio (MIT, 1998).
Professor Rajchman’s lecture and workshop will be devoted specifically to the notion of the image of thought. Readings: Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’ and ‘What is a creative art?’ from Two regimes of madness, ed. David Lapoujade (2006), as well as Rajchman’s essay ‘Foucault’s art of seeing’ (originally published in October; reprinted in: Philosophical Events.)
Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Look of the Portrait,” in Multiple Arts: The Muses II (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006), 220-247.
Jan Hein Hoogstad
Kittler and the notion of the image
— presentation
Reading material: Friedrich A. Kittler, "Introduction" and "Film" in: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz), Stanford UP, pp 1-20; 115-182.
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Presss, 2002), (selections)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill&Wang, 1983) (especially part II)
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (Routledge, 2004), Part I, section 2 The Image Family, especially chapter 1, “Image, Portrait, Caricature,” and 2 “Sign and Portrait” (17-25).
Spring 2008: Towards a Theory of Photography
For info please contact: Hanneke Grootenboer at hanneke@janvaneyck.nl
The pensive image is made possible with support of Provincie Limburg.