Beyond Pictures

The Medial Organizations of Vision

Abstract

Building on Max Imdahl’s concept of »seeing seeing« (»sehendes Sehen«) this article develops a social-scientific perspective on the diversity of contemporary forms and possibilities of iconic articulation. Imdahl has demonstrated that formal pictorial values such as surface ratios or line structures constitute autonomous modes of organizing the seeing and understanding of images. This insight is here employed conceptually for the analysis of everyday visual communication. The focus lies on image phenomena beyond the closed pictorial surface – particularly image montages and image transfers, as they appear, among other contexts, in digital spaces. The article argues for taking Imdahl’s concept of »seeing seeing« as a heuristic point of departure, while at the same time expanding it with a figurative hermeneutics that is empirically attentive to the medial diversity of iconic relations. On the basis of a discussion of various examples, the article develops the thesis that iconicity is not static, but rather a malleable, practical know-how that unfolds within different social, medial, and historical contexts.