Whereas the English language differentiates the words “image” and “picture” on the basis of their referent’s materiality, the German language refers to both of these concepts as “Bild.” From an Anglo-Saxon perspective, mental images are ontologically distinct from material ones; from a German perspective, however, they need not be. This terminological variation from English to German hints at the extent to which language plays a fundamental role in shaping our understanding of images. Yet, scholars interested in the study of images in Central Europe posit that there exists a “intrinsic logic that is specific to the image,”[1] and which is therefore independent of language. While this may hold true, the image’s distinct status still does not ensure its universal reception: there is no iconic lingua franca enabling us to overcome the synchronous and diachronic boundaries of language and culture without changing the image’s meaning.

Since the early 1990s, at least two interdisciplinary fields dedicated to understanding images attest to the differences in cultural/academic approaches to the study of images: Visual Studies in America, andBildwissenschaften in German-speaking Europe. Each of these fields traces its roots back to the Linguistic Turn, and both currents stem from the Pictorial or Iconic Turn (cf. W.J.T. Mitchell’s Critical Iconology and G. Boehm’s notion of Bildkritik), which followed the Cultural Turn that precipitated the development of Cultural Studies.

Whereas Bildkritik emphasizes the singular image, its inner tensions and structures, and its temporal and affective interplays, Visual Studies often focus on the social and political contexts of image production and reception, thereby broadening the field in which images are considered. In the English-speaking academy, Visual Studies explores “the cultural construction of the visual in the arts, media, and everyday life.”[2] Drawing from various disciplines marked by poststructuralist theory and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies consider the image for its hand in both shaping and responding to social, economic, and political processes. The image is considered not as an isolated object, but as a mediator of relations and as a locus of praxis: its performative dimension is thus also examined.

In contrast, current research in Central Europe concentrates on the image per se. Drawing on phenomenological (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and hermeneutical approaches (Gadamer), “Bildkritik” or Iconic Criticism seeks to gain a better understanding of how images convey their meaning. Its goal is not to aim at a general theory that would do away with the problems distinctly posed by each image; rather, with Iconic Criticism, one departs from the analysis of the single image in order to better understand the power and meaning of images at large. Iconic Criticism particularly focuses on the qualities of the image that transgress the boundaries of language and its predicative structures. Just as Visual Studies opens the field of inquiry to popular and everyday images, so Iconic Criticism addresses phenomena as diverse as gesture, deixis, dance, architecture, and even seemingly non-visual or non-iconic forms such as lyric poetry.

The joint Eikones-McGill Graduate Conference aims to confront these diverse critical cultures of the image through case-study presentations by international scholars. Rather than risking to reinvent the wheel of Image Studies from one academic culture to another, Iconotopoi seeks to productively disturb the “site-specificity” of contemporary analyses of the image’s functions and meanings in society. The conference forges a constructive dialogue between German-, French-, and English-language academic cultures, at a time when allegedly international scientific discourses tend to lose sight not only of the singularity of the image, but also of singular approaches to understanding images that can be found in different cultures.

[1] „eine eigene, nur ihnen zugehörige Logik.” Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen – Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin University Press, 2007), 34.

[2] Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (MIT Press, 2005), 1.