Recently, there has been some insistence on the need to include images as objects of study within geographical research inspired by non-representational theories. While digging through promising non-representational theories, Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison felt the need to specify that “everything happens, everything acts. Everything, including images, words and texts” (2010: 14). While discussing photography in urban studies, Gillian Rose recently identified the shift towards a consideration of images as more than representational: an approach that requires a “bodily and emotional stance rather than interpretive or hermeneutic work” (2014: 9). The geographies of embodiment, multisensoriality and practice, thus, include work on images, provided that those images are thought of as performative, relational, corporeal and affective. In this apparently paradoxical inclusion (the nexus of body-image) lies one of the main points of interest in Hans Belting’s book from the point of view of current cultural geographical debates. The leitmotif of this book, well emphasized by the subtitle chosen for the English version, is in fact the relationship between bodies and images, and in particular, the idea of considering the human body to be a living medium for images.
For Belting, art history has alienated the image from the body. First published in Germany in 2001, his book appeared as an intervention (or a manifesto) directed mainly at art historians, with the precise aim of contesting the established idea of the work of art in favor of a wider notion of Bild (which in German means both "image" and "picture," but is used here in the sense of "image"). Advancing the need for a “science of the image” (Bildwissenschaft) in order to transcend the borders of art history, Belting was contributing to the field of studies now identified as visual culture studies, visual studies or image studies (with distinctions from the field of media theory, as he maintains). An Italian image theory reader (Pinotti and Somaini, 2009), for instance, includes Belting among scholars like W.J.T. Mitchell, Gottfried Boehm, James Elkins, Louis Marin and David Freedberg, while presenting the polyvocal reflection on the set of problems inherent to the image which animates contemporary debate.
In this review, however, I do not wish to directly engage with the (already much discussed and criticized) contributions of an influential scholar (for example, see Wood, 2004). Instead, I would like to direct an oblique gaze on this book by adopting the perspective of the map scholar. For this purpose, I will replace the words "picture" and "image" with the words "map", "cartography" and "mapping". Cartography is very often neglected in image studies. One of the main contributions of visual studies, with respect to art history, has been to widen the horizon of the image and the canon of the media taken into consideration. This widening of the territory of images, together with the opening of the boundaries between different media, is one of the cornerstones of Belting’s book. However, as James Elkins (1999) noted, images that are usually classified as “informational” (as in the case of maps) have scarcely been considered. As Elkins suggests, theoretical advancement in art history (or image theory) could also contribute to the understanding of those informational images.
In truth, cartography has been researched in the past with some reference to art historians and/or theorists of the image (such as Gombrich, Panofsky or Arnheim), but this has been limited mostly, to historical cartography, and often within the framework of critical cartography. My contention is that recent theoretical approaches to maps and mapping (and, in particular, so-called post-representational cartography) have been much less impregnated by updated image studies. One of Belting's strongest statements is the need to free the notion of the image from the confines in which the various academic disciplines have imprisoned it. Even the map, in my view, needs to be freed. There is a vast terrain for experimental exchange between map studies and image studies, and I would like to provide some quick examples in the form of open questions (hinting at a research agenda) by drawing from Belting’s book.
What if we think in terms of an “anthropology of maps” in the precise sense in which Belting adopts the expression “anthropology of images”? As the author explains in the introduction to the English edition, here anthropology does not refer to the academic discipline of anthropology (nor to the subdiscipline of visual anthropology), but rather, to a more general “European (continental, I would say) definition” (page 2) that implies an interest in the human being, and human nature in general. This anthropological approach enables Belting to see the image as a phenomenon, both internally and externally; physical images on the walls are entangled with the living repertoire of images in our bodies (our minds as parts of our bodies). Belting’s theorization is based on the idea that an image must be addressed not only as the product of a given medium, be it painting, photography or another medium, but also as a product of ourselves (indeed, in his subsequent research on the history of the gaze implies the living body as a whole).
Belting argues that the interactions between our bodies and external images include a third parameter, namely the medium which hosts the image. The medium is a sort of artificial body that images need in order to become visible, and image perception animates pictures as though they were living things, or different kinds of bodies. The mediality of images, Belting writes, “is thus rooted in a body analogy” (page 3), and our bodies themselves function as living media: images colonize our bodies and our brains; images happen within our bodies; the body is a site where images take place; the human being is the natural “locus of images”; the body is a living organ for images; images inhabit the body. For Belting, while semiotics has separated the words of signs from the words of bodies, the notion that pictures are images embodied in media brings our body, a living medium of its own, back into the discussion. What, then, if we apply this shift from the semiotic, to the sensory realm, to the perception of maps? “When external pictures are re-embodied as our own images, we substitute for their fabricated medium our own body, which, when it serves in this capacity, turns into a living or natural medium”, Belting contends (page 16). What happens when we replace the word pictures with maps in this sentence? Can we compare it with research on embodied mapping (for example, see Perkins, 2009)?
It is worth noting that, for Belting, the body analogy also functions in the case of digital media and the disembodiment of images through virtual experiences. Following Belting, this is just another form of body-experience for which historical parallels exist (page 11). In his view, an anthropological perspective is useful to reject proclamations that, with digital technology, we have put an end to the previous history of images. Images remain tied to the body, even in our present-day virtual world; rather, since imagination remains a corporeal activity, even when it means “leaving the body”, virtual reality transforms the individual body even more, into a “locus of images”. Following Belting, digital technology can suggest ways of reconsidering the entire concept of images, including past ones. Effectively, this is what is happening in the realm of map studies. A new myriad of mapping practices is now stimulating the rethinking of maps in general. As Kitchin, Perkins and Dodge (2009) noted, the proliferation of new mapping technologies over the past twenty years has been followed by a productive period of philosophical development in mapping theory.
Another crucial statement contained in Belting’s book deals with the relationship between the subjective and the social, the personal and the collective. For Belting, notwithstanding all the devices that we use today, it is only within the human being that images acquire a living sense, in a way that is “difficult to control no matter how forcefully our machines might seek to enforce certain norms” (page 37). Images happen, take place, and are each time negotiated. Here, the human being (the body) is not considered in biological terms, nor only in cultural and socially-conditioned terms but in “existentialist” terms (Wood, 2004: 371). As a “locus of images,” the body proves difficult to control, not only in dreams and visions, but also in its encounters with official, institutional and powerful images. This is very true for our mobile and globalized society, where images (and maps) travel and migrate with the bodies in each individual archive. The human body is “a place in the world” and, Belting contends, the images that take place in it are linked to our life experience in space and time. In our bodies, even though we bring together the personal and the collective (imagination and imaginary), we adapt, transform and recreate imported images without fixed laws; it is the individual who manipulates the collective imaginary with his personal imagination. For Belting, “We see images with our corporeal organs ... Much like our bodies, our personal images are ephemeral and thus different from the images that are objectified in the external world. And yet we store them for a lifetime” (page 38). What if we substitute the word images with maps in this sentence? The study of the memory of maps, already carried out in the research on memory and spatial cognition, could be developed from an additional anthropological perspective, with different methodologies.
In one passage particularly influenced by geographical concepts, Belting reflects on the places of images (the places in which images live) and on the idea of visiting pictures in those places (from the traditional public locations of the museum or the theatre, to the realm of new ephemeral pictorial media). Reflecting on the body as a “locus of maps,” as well as on the external locations and various spatialities of maps in the pre-digital and digital era prefigures a very interesting line of research for map scholars (for instance, see Rossetto, 2013).
The passages that I have mentioned above are drawn from the first and second chapters of Belting’s book, which are the more theoretical ones. The book includes four additional chapters devoted to specific case studies, which are somehow based on the assumptions derived from the first two chapters. Significantly, these chapters deal with images before and after “the era of art” (16th-18th century), as Wood (2004) has noted.
In the third chapter, Belting demonstrates how the medieval coat of arms was the precursor to the panel portrait, in the sense that both are intended as media of the body, or second bodies for the owners (respectively a genealogical body and an individual body) on the basis of their uses in action. It is interesting, here, that Belting accords corporeality to the heraldic sign, and not only to the physiognomic portrait. What if one accords some form of corporeality to maps? Here I do not refer only to anthropomorphic maps or to Christian Nold’s famous Bio mapping, but to the idea that maps could be thought of as non-human subjects with a life of their own (see Mitchell, 2005).
Belting investigates, in the fourth chapter, the ancient cults of death, contending that the deep, original relationship between image and death has fallen into oblivion, but needs to be revived in order to understand the body-image nexus. In fact, images in ancient times primarily served as vessels of embodiment (and not simply as means of remembrance) while replacing the lost bodies of the dead. Those image-place holders of the bodies of the dead needed to be called to life by an act of animation. Subsequently (with the classical Greek concept of the image), images have become incapable of embodying life; the image has itself become dead, and a distance has been created between the beholder and the physical image. Can maps help revive that “plastic conception of the world, which preceded the theoretical conception of the world” (page 115), and in which images held a life force? Are maps dead objects? Do they embody lost places or are they merely lifeless means of remembering those past places? Do we animate them with our gaze, or look at them with a distant eye?
In chapter five, Belting discusses Dante’s image theory and his treatment of virtual bodies (living shadows) in the Divine Comedy. Of interest here, again, is the ability to confront literature, painting (Giotto, Masaccio and Michelangelo), film (TV Dante by Peter Greenaway) and cyberspace in a very uninhibited manner. What if we learn to discuss maps and mapping with a greater ability to compare them with other types of images (as in Aitken and Craine, 2011)? The hermeneutic juxtaposition of images with very different backgrounds is a method normally used by image scholars, but it is less adopted in map theory.
The fifth chapter of the book, finally, is devoted to photography, and emphasizes how an anthropological approach contests the specificity of the photographic medium. An approach focused on the anthropological uses of images (for instance, the use of images to take possession of the world) helps to open up not only the boundaries between different epochs, but also the boundaries between different media; both perception and images are inherently intermedial. Photography, then, is not an anthropologically new kind of object, and might be considered in the larger horizon of the life experience of images. If the media and techniques follow historical linearity, the images conform to anthropological patterns. Reflecting on intermediality (and drawing from image theories on intermediality) seems crucial at a time in which cartography has become part of the wider phenomenon of geovisualization, and ranges from GIS to map art (and even GIS as map art), and from map-based infographics to map-inspired design. What about reasoning on the intermedial strategies and potentialities of today’s cartographic domain?
Belting’s book is full of statements that evoke inspiring images, sometimes vivid and sometimes blurry, in spite of the fact that the book has been translated into English with a certain difficulty. In my view, some of those inspiring statements, should be confronted with map research. This confrontation would breathe life into a field that is already very vital, but could be further animated once we open up the cartographic realm to be free for inhabitation using image theories.
References
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