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Issue 15. Battles around Images: Iconoclasm and Beyond

The Anthropological Criticism of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Belting

Author: Ben De Bruyn
Published: November 2006

Abstract (E): This article discusses Hans Belting’s attempt to extrapolate the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser to the visual arts. Clearly drawing upon Iser, Belting’s “anthropological” criticism underlines the actor-like nature of man as well as the attempt of art to counter the inscrutable phenomenon of death. Although it ostensibly offers a more satisfying view of the imagination and the role of the medium, visual anthropology remains surprisingly close to Iser’s position.

Abstract (F): Le présent article analyse la tentative faite par Hans Belting de transposer l’anthropologie littéraire de Wolfgang Iser au domaine des arts visuels. La critique «anthropologique» de Belting, qui doit visiblement beaucoup à Iser, souligne l’importance des jeux des rôles dans sa vision de l’homme ainsi que l’importance de l’art dans les efforts de l’homme de dépasser la mort. Tout en offrant des perspectives nouvelles sur le rôle de l’imaginaire et du médium, l’anthropologie visuelle de Belting reste étonnamment proche des positions d’Iser.

keywords: anthropology, death, mental images, medium, Iser, Belting

Literary and Visual Anthropologies

Although the cross-fertilization of anthropology and art criticism has become a hot topic in recent years, the once-renowned reception theorist Wolfgang Iser has not. That is surprising, for the later work of this German critic has attempted to found a "literary anthropology", most notably in his monograph on The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993). One of the reasons this anthropological turn in Iser's work has not won the plaudits of the critics, is that the word "anthropology" - like that of "death", "image", or "medium" - means different things to different people. Eschewing an established research programme that records and compares the differences between cultures, Iser's "literary anthropology" designates a form of speculative reflection on the nature of human existence that is ultimately rooted in the philosophy of Helmuth Plessner. This interest in the similarities rather than the differences between human beings entails that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is right in noting that "Iser's use of the word 'anthropology' is, without any conceptual exaggeration, precisely the opposite of the word's general meaning in contemporary English" (Gumbrecht 2000). By using the term "anthropology", then, Iser's philosophical or - perhaps more clearly - existential criticism invites confusion. But the dismissive attitude of international commentators nonetheless fails to appreciate that several contemporary critics are gesturing towards an "anthropological" criticism akin to that of Iser, for instance Robert Pogue Harrison in The Dominion of the Dead (2003) or Terry Eagleton in his injunction in After Theory (2004) that future criticism should focus on - among other things - the fact that we, as human beings, "are bound to give the slip to any exhaustive definition of ourselves" (Eagleton 209) and yet invariably share the fate of death, for "[h]ow could anyone imagine that the various cultural forms assumed by, say, death matter more than the reality of death itself?" (193).

On top of that, Iser's literary anthropology has provoked continued reflection in Germany. Besides a research project on "Literature and Anthropology" for which his work was "one of the crucial impulses" (Graevenitz 2002), several critics have drawn upon it for their own theoretical and critical endeavours. An interesting case, in this respect, is Hans Belting's attempt in Bild-Anthropologie (2001) to extrapolate Iser's literary project to the visual arts. For Belting's work is not only potentially complementary to The Fictive and the Imaginary, but also addresses themes that are crucial as well as themes that are anathema to Iser. On the one hand, Belting clearly shares the latter's interest in death and the imagination, as he proposes to re-conceptualize the notion of the "image" to include mental images as well as non-iconic and non-artistic ones, so long as it remains linked to an absent body. On the other hand, Iser pays little or no attention to the material embodiment of literature, whereas Belting continually underscores the importance of the medium. Reformulating Belting's key-terms "Medium - Image - Body" (Belting 11), I will therefore discuss the views of both critics on the "anthropological" themes of death, image and medium. More specifically, the following paragraphs will demonstrate that Belting and Iser hold an analogous view of man and art, one which can ultimately be traced back to Plessner's philosophical anthropology. Furthermore, I will discuss their views on mental images and the role of the medium, arguing that, in the final analysis, Belting's ostensibly more satisfying position remains surprisingly similar to that of Iser.

Art and Death

The most conspicuous similarities between the projects of Iser and Belting are their comparable conceptions of anthropology, man, and art. In a striking move, the introduction to The Fictive and the Imaginary proclaims that critics should focus on the anthropological function of literature without, however, taking recourse to the pre-established methodology of the anthropological disciplines. The alternative Iser proposes is that we reflect on the interaction between what he terms the "real" (Iser 1993: 3) - the heterogeneous amalgam of texts and thought systems circulating in a certain culture and work of art -, the "fictive" (ibid.) - the artist's intentional acts that reorganize and subvert these authoritative discourses in the work -, and the "imaginary" (ibid.) - the mental images that help to flesh out these fictive moulds in the act of receiving this work. As the interaction between these three components is exposed to change, literary anthropology should "simultaneously involve anthropological dispositions [namely the fictive and the imaginary] and try to trace the different historical manifestations and conceptualizations of the fictive and the imaginary" (xiv). It is understandable, perhaps, that Iser does not want to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of the conceptions of man implied by the various brands of anthropology. By programmatically rejecting an interdisciplinary approach, however, he immediately isolates his study from an established body of scholarship. This move conceals, moreover, that The Fictive and the Imaginary does draw upon existing anthropological theories. In fact, despite taking recourse to his alternative framework in order to sidestep anthropology's "axiomatic definitions of humanity", for instance the view of man as a "role-player" (xiii), this very view nevertheless forms the conclusion of his literary investigations.

According to Iser, more specifically, literature confronts us with the fact that there is no definitive human essence. As human beings, we are constantly exposed to different circumstances and therefore our nature can never be definitively pinned down. "Man" is not a rigid category, but a chameleon-like phenomenon with a constantly changing hue or "mask" (76). Rather than being himself, then, man is his own other, his double or "doppelgänger" (82). Drawing upon Helmuth Plessner's "On the Anthropology of the Actor", Iser thus maintains - perhaps paradoxically - that authentic living is akin to "the actor's protean art of metamorphosis" (Plessner 418), the role-playing of a theatrical actor. The role of artistic texts, literary anthropology continues, is that they function as tools in this process of self-transformation; their fictional restructurings of the authoritative discourses and doctrines of the "real" allow man "an ecstatic condition of being himself and standing outside himself" (Iser 1993: 76) and this "doubling" (81) clears the way for a restructuring of his habitual worldview and course of action. The fact that we can never have an objective perception of our continually changing self, however, is only one of the reasons for our engagement with art. Life, after all, confronts us with several phenomena that cannot be grasped definitively; neither our birth and death, nor the very fact of our experience - most notably the elusive experience of love - can be cognitively contained. Death, for instance, therefore triggers an endless game of reading, for such "play grants an illusory deferral of death" (222). As reading literature opens up our point of view and allows us to act out alternative lives, it turns these ungraspable phenomena into a source of continual self-transformation and thus enables human beings to fulfil their plastic potential to the utmost. In Iser's words, literary "staging" "allows us, by means of simulacra, to lure into shape the fleetingness of the possible and to monitor the continual unfolding of ourselves into possible otherness" (303).

Despite certain variations, Belting's Bild-Anthropologie entails a similar conception of anthropology, man, and art. Even though The Fictive and the Imaginary is not entirely insensitive to the "ethnological background" (33) of its literary object, Belting clearly pays closer attention to existing anthropological research. In contrast to Iser, he underscores the necessity of "an open, interdisciplinary conception of the image" (Belting 12) and explicitly compares ancient and modern as well as western and eastern cultures with regard to their conceptions of death, the body, the afterlife and, of course, the image. Belting remains reluctant, however, to equate his project to "the received discipline designated as anthropology" (9) and instead links it to "the publications of the research project on Anthropology of the Literary Sciences in Konstanz" (242). It is no coincidence, then, that he takes his recourse to the framework that helped found that research programme, namely Iser's literary anthropology. Belting approvingly notes that

[i]n order to have a term that contrasts with the real and is nonetheless not solely subjectively determined, critics nowadays prefer to speak of the imaginary. […] This is how the imaginary distinguishes itself from the products in which it expresses itself, as the common ground and foundation of images in a cultural tradition, from which the images of fiction are culled and with which they can be staged. In this sense W. Iser relates the fictive and the imaginary "to anthropological dispositions", which consolidate themselves into a recognizable pattern only in their interaction. (Belting 74-75)

Upon closer analysis, it becomes clear that Bild-Anthropologie does not systematically refer to the fictive and frequently emphasizes the communal dimension of the imaginary, whereas Iser's view of the phenomenon is both more textual and individual in nature. But Belting's study of visual artefacts nonetheless draws part of its inspiration from the anthropological reflections of The Fictive and the Imaginary and, perhaps even more importantly, reaches similar conclusions. Both literary and visual anthropology, more specifically, suggest that modern art has increasingly replaced a referential programme with a search for imaginary worlds. Compare the increasing importance of "the performative character of representation" (Iser 1993: 291) in Iser's overview of representational theories, for instance, with Belting's remark that "[t]he modern perspective [Blick] rather orients itself towards the imaginary and even a virtual world, for which the real world is only an obstacle" (Belting 215).

Apart from the opposition between the real and the imaginary, Belting also makes use of the ideas that man is best conceived as an actor and art as a way to ward off the traumatic enigma of death. This view of man, first of all, can clearly be gleaned from Belting's terminology. Visual anthropology refers, for instance, to the "self-doubling" (42) of a represented body, to "digital masks" (84) as well as "virtual doppelgängers" (86), and connects this theatrical doubling to the Iserian notion of "ecstasy": "[w]ith this experience the old feeling of 'ecstasy' returns, in which your own body produces the impression that you have left this body" (84). This terminological overlap between both critics is perhaps not surprising, for Belting also refers to Plessner's view of man as a "Schauspieler" (94) in "On the Anthropology of the Actor". Even though he points out that conceptions of the body and self are inextricably connected to "a specific time or society" (141), Belting thus emphasizes a particular view of man, one that clearly rings familiar to readers of Plessner and Iser: "[t]he actor behind the mask is analogous to the so uncertain self in the game of roles [Rollenspiel] of society. Only the modern discovery of the self opened the possibility to name its old and new roles" (136). Bild-Anthropologie thus helps to illuminate The Fictive and the Imaginary by locating the birthplace of its Plessnerian conception of man in the humanist writings and paintings of early modernity. Rather than focusing on the contemporary terminology of Iser's study - "difference" (Iser 1993: 47), "play space" (65), "supplement" (274), "pleasure of the text" (278) - and seeing it as a pamphlet for a postmodernist view of the self, then, it might be more appropriate to pay attention to the privileged corpus of Iser's study - Renaissance pastoralism - and characterize it as a modern literary anthropology. According to Belting, in fact, both jeremiads and eulogies on the loss of a stable self forget "that the stable view of man that to their mind is disappearing has in truth never been held" (Belting 94). In the light of this conception of man, it is not surprising that both literary and visual experiences can be mapped onto the theatrical metaphors of Plessner's anthropology. For, in contrast to moralistic repudiations of his activities, the actor remains the perfect embodiment of the fluid nature of man.

Striking parallels can be drawn, finally, between the function of texts and images as described in literary and visual anthropology. Although he purports to be sketching "[a] general theory of visual media" (14), Belting wants to unearth a specific function of visual practices that is frequently repressed, but is nonetheless crucial to his conception of the image. Granted, "the technology of illusion" (204) allows it to function as a "medium of life" (ibid.) as well, but he nonetheless claims that the image is always fundamentally a "medium of the dead" (165): "[t]he image of a deceased person is therefore not an anomaly, but almost the Ur-sense of what an image always is" (144, emphasis added). The nature and media of images have undergone many changes in the course of human history, of course, but their fundamental function has always been to extend the spatiotemporal boundaries of a person's bodily presence, most vividly in the case of that person's death. As the image is the "medium of the absent body" (8), the "Ersatz-body" (168) of the image literally embodies the motivation behind our visual practices. In a similar fashion to the texts of literary anthropology, images thus help individuals to cope with the ungraspable enigma of death; "as re-embodiments [Wiederverkörperung] of the dead in the middle of the living, [images] are offered as a symbolic certainty in the range of the uncertain which is the experience of death" (177). In more general terms, Belting speaks of "the mystery of Being and Appearing, which has never failed to excite human beings" (146). Crucial in this respect, as we shall see further on, is that the image self-consciously discloses its own illusory or fictional qualities.

These significant similarities notwithstanding, Belting's project also diverges from that of Iser in crucial respects. Whereas the latter identifies several aspects of the human condition that explain our interest in art - our chameleonesque nature, death, love, experience -, Bild-Anthropologie focuses exclusively on death. In a parallel fashion to Robert Pogue Harrison, moreover, Belting suggests that the rationale behind visual practices is the attempt to make sense of death of the other, not of the death of the self that Iser is preoccupied with: "[h]uman beings find their voice not in their own imminent death but in the other's already transpired death" (Harrison 65). Finally, literary anthropology describes the shifting configurations of the self in reading, whereas its visual counterpart investigates the shifting relationships between the mortal body, the immortal image and its historical embodiment in various media.

The Visual and the Imaginary

Apart from defining their anthropological projects in a similar fashion, Iser and Belting also share an interest in the image, especially the image in the mind's eye. Although the category of the "imaginary" implicitly reintroduces these issues in his literary anthropology, Iser's principal discussion of visual and mental images occurs in his celebrated study of The Act of Reading (1978). More specifically, this study maintains that a visual image implies the presence of the object being pictured, is optically rich and complete, and requires no participation from the spectator. A mental image, on the other hand, implies the absence of the object being imagined, is incomplete and semantically rich, and thus requires a lot of participation by the reader rather than being strictly controlled by the object. This opposition between an active imagination and a passive perception, of course, radically misconceives the nature of perception as well as imagination. As W.J.T. Mitchell has shown, the distinction "between the pictorial or graphic image which is a lower form - external, mechanical, dead, and often associated with the empiricist model of perception - and a "higher" image which is internal, organic, and living" (Mitchell 25) and associated with "the mysterious process of 'imagination'" (24), is not only widespread, but also deeply flawed. Both forms of images, after all, have more in common than might seem at first sight. Rather than simply dismissing his distinction, however, we should ask ourselves why Iser finds it necessary to maintain such a questionable view.

The reason, it seems, is quite simple. A truly aesthetic text, Iser holds, confronts the reader with something 'unfamiliar' (Iser 1978: 50) or previously unknown. As the mental image is not tied to a pre-existing object that is visually present, but instead endows a hitherto non-existent object with imaginary presence, the unknown and the imagined appear to be natural allies against the known and the perceived. It is therefore not surprising that he makes use of an opposition between the productive potential of the imagination and the purely reproductive potential of perception, misguided though it may be. It ís surprising, however, that several passages in the text implicitly undermine this opposition. Not only does Iser agree with the claim that the visual medium of film is able to conjure up "things that are beyond the reach of our senses" (177), but he also maintains that it would destroy the intended effect of films as well as texts if the audience always filled in their incomplete images, be they mental or visual. Furthermore, the spectator has to participate in the viewing process, as he has to connect the cuts and scenes of a movie along "precisely the same pattern" (196) as the reader has to knit textual fragments together. Certain films, finally, do not reproduce but question existing realities and thus confront us with something new or unknown: "[t]he fact that certain films gain their effect by an intentional reproduction of everyday reality in order to render such an obsessive repetition unbearable shows that the reality itself is not the reason for the presentation" (181). Despite certain statements to the contrary, Iser thus seems to be aware of the fact that "the pictorial artist, even one who works in the tradition known as 'realism' or 'illusionism,' is as much concerned with the invisible as the visible world" (Mitchell 39). He has even explicitly admitted that "perception cannot take place without a proportion of imagination" (Iser 1989: 273).

Even though Belting corrects Iser's apparent position by underscoring the importance of both visual and mental images, Bild-Anthropologie betrays a preference for the imagination that reminds attentive readers of The Act of Reading. In several passages, Belting emphasizes that a visual anthropology should not separate "outer and inner images", but should study the interaction or "interconnection" (Belting 21) between mental and material images:

Both kinds, the images from the outside world as well as the internal images, however, cannot be captured solely with such a dualism, because this simply continues the old contrast between spirit and matter. […] mental and physical images [, after all, are] so ambiguously related to one another, that their respective contributions are difficult to separate, unless in a tangibly material sense. (20)

Belting's more inclusive stance seems a definite improvement on Iser's flawed opposition between perception and imagination. In fact, Bild-Anthropologie explicitly criticizes thinkers who equate images solely "with the visual range" (11), thus neglecting mental images, as well as iconophobic critics who prefer mental to visual images. In line with similar observations by W.J.T. Mitchell, Belting shows how the epistemological and theological problems surrounding the material replication of existing bodies led Plato, the Judaic tradition and Confucianism to eschew material pictures altogether. In their writings, we can see "nothing less than a complete reversal of the conception of the image, because the image becomes from now on a [purely] mental reality" (177). As this type of reasoning spelled the end of the ancestor cults Belting sees as the archetype of all visual practices, his negative evaluation of this exclusionary view goes without saying:

The historical movements that dedicated themselves to enlightenment in general as well as to that of images in particular already criticized images in the name of a rationalistic worldview in which the production of images in the cult of the dead no longer had a place. The embodiment [Verkörperung] of the dead in images was thereby rejected in favour of an imageless memory of the dead, which had a different meaning, as it can be understood as an embodiment in the consciousness of the living and thus in internal [mental] images. (144)
With regard to mental and visual images, in sum, visual anthropology apparently agrees with the claim that we should focus on "the reciprocity and interdependence of these two notions" (Mitchell 17).

In its own turn, however, Belting's seemingly inclusive stance is undermined by several passages that reproduce an Iserian preference for mental over visual images. Visual anthropology, for instance, unfavourably contrasts the "transitory images" (Belting 57) waiting in "the technical archive of photos, films and museums" (68) with the long-cherished mental images of "the I [das Ich]" (ibid.), which are interwoven with our "life experience" (58). His professed interest in material as well as mental images notwithstanding, moreover, Belting prefers works of art that cancel out their own materiality and thus liberate the mental images they contain:

The liberation of the image out of its primary materiality and technicality is the intention of this image in the image [in a work of art by Robert Frank]. The reflection on the image, even when it only occurs with photographic means, opens the boundaries of the medium. We suspect that we animate the medium in order to receive our own images back from it. (239)

As this passage already implies, the importance of mental images logically follows from Belting's view of visual communication. According to him, physical images function as relatively transparent mediators between the mental images of their creators and recipients:

[The image] only becomes an image if it is animated by its spectator. In this act of animation our imagination separates it again from the medium that embodies it. In this process, the opaque medium becomes transparent, revealing the image it is carrying: the image shines through the medium as it were, when we observe it. This transparency relinquishes its ties to the medium, in which the spectator has discovered it. (30)

In visual terms, this view might be represented as follows:

Figure 1. The transfer of mental image A between medium B and spectator C

Even though the reference to "the transparency of the medium" (213) might suggest otherwise, Belting rightly emphasizes that perception is not a straightforward or unidirectional process. On the contrary, the same physical images can be perceived differently, as the personal "censure" (21) of "memory images" (66) as well as the generic conventions of, for instance, "cinematographic images" (223) and the status of specific media in Western and Eastern "cultures of perception" (225) inevitably colour the way we perceive visual images.
Of course, Belting is right in pointing out the importance of mental images in the process of perception. By suggesting that physical images merely serve a mediatory function, however, he ultimately eliminates the need for a specific category of visual images; in the final analysis, there are only images - mental images - on the one hand and media - the material embodiments of images - on the other. Symptomatic, in this respect, is that Belting refrains from using Mitchell's term "pictures" but instead prefers "to speak of media in order to find a term for the embodiment of images" (15). In other words, "[t]he image always has a mental, the medium always a material dimension, even when they combine themselves in a unitary sensory impression in our mind" (29). This equation of image and imagination is problematic, because mental images are frequently defined in opposition to the visual relics which are used in ancestor cults and which are ultimately the epitome of Belting's conception of the image. Whereas his view of the function of images, in other words, requires the visual presence of a material relic, his view of the communication through images ultimately discards the material object conveying the mental image. Perhaps we should think of his enterprise, then, as an attempt to emphasize the importance of mental images, while nonetheless redefining them in terms of the emphatically material images used in ancient funeral practices. The emphasis on the imagination is problematic, furthermore, as it suggests that Belting himself fails to take visual and mental images equally into account. Despite effectively rejecting the need for a separate category of visual images, as we have seen, he keeps referring to both types of images in a way that implies that mental images are characterized by a superior endurance, meaning and freedom. It is striking, after all, that a critic who wants to do offer "[a] general theory of visual media" (14) ultimately subscribes to the highly normative Iserian idea that "the less they are limited by physical or visual images, as is well-known, the more unhindered our mental images unfold themselves: this can almost be seen as a general law for the interaction of external [visual] and internal [mental] images" (85). Although it seems to move beyond The Act of Reading, then, Belting's view of images ultimately reiterates Iser's partiality to the productive potential of the imagination.

The Medium is (Not) the Message

As the preceding paragraphs have already suggested, Belting's anthropology not only has an eye for the mortal body and the mental image, but also for the medium. This brings me to the third and final aspect of his "triangle of image, medium and body" (45). Although I will point out unsuspected similarities, Iser and Belting have a radically different attitude towards the medium in general and modern media in particular. In a programmatic gesture, the introduction to The Fictive and the Imaginary pits literature and "visual media" in "fiercely" (Iser 1993: x) opposing camps and strikes a thoroughly pessimistic note: "as a medium, literature is put on a par with other media, and the ever-increasing role that these play in our civilization shows the degree to which literature has lost its significance as the epitome of our culture" (ibid.). The anthropological function of literature, moreover, - and hence the very project of Iser's literary anthropology - is defined in opposition to these modern media; literature "has gained prominence as a mirror of human plasticity at the moment when many of its former functions have been taken over by other media" (xi). Implied, of course, is the idea that other media simply cannot fulfil this anthropological function. As Ludwig K. Pfeiffer notes, "[i]t is gripping […] to see W. Iser reflect upon contemporary media and the ways in which they have superseded books as cultural paradigms - and then to retreat into a 'literary' anthropology of the fictive and the imaginary" (Pfeiffer 1994: 8). Iser is not entirely insensitive to the implications of "the change from an oral tradition to a written one" (Iser 1993: 26) and even characterizes the fictive as "a medium for the imaginary" (20), but the material embodiment of the text never plays a significant role in his analysis.

Belting's Bild-Anthropologie takes a different - and ultimately more convincing - approach to new media as well as to the medium qua medium. In contrast to critics who see modern media as something radically new, he proposes that we integrate these recent phenomena into "[a] general theory of visual media" (Belting 14) that includes ancient and modern images alike. This explains the wide variety of visual materials referred to, from mummies and wax models to portraits and photography. In terms of the medium in general, it should be noted that Belting's visual anthropology entails a two-pronged approach to images. As I have already mentioned, he claims that visual anthropology should focus on the trans-historical, anthropological dimension of images in which certain universal, bodily experiences are returned to time and again. On the other hand, however, it should also take the historical, technological dimension of linearly evolving media into account: "images possess a temporal form in their historical media and techniques and yet are inspired by super-temporal themes such as death, the body and time" (23). As his impressive analysis of the relation between coats of arms and portraits clearly shows, visual anthropology mainly investigates the workings of "the intermedial force field" (140), the tug-of-war between images on shields, on walls, and in books and their respective functions and meanings:

The old relationships between the media of representation which I call media of the body, shifted in the sixteenth century. Until that time, the coat of arms had possessed a symbolic reference to the body, so that it was not preoccupied with similarity, which became the objective of the iconic reference of the portrait. But one missed the similarity with a subject even in the most lifelike description of the body. In the representational gap which was thus created mottoes [Devisen] positioned themselves and their function changed accordingly. (140)

In more general terms, Belting holds that "[t]he historical media have always already measured and defined themselves against one another" (221). His attention to all sorts of images and media is clearly more convincing than Iser's neglect of the medium. It might even help to open up literary anthropology to a study of how all sorts of textual media allow us to reshuffle existing discourses and don new masks. Such a textual anthropology might controvert the elegiac introduction to The Fictive and the Imaginary by showing how literature has always interacted with other visual and textual media, for instance in emblemata and epistolary novels, and will probably continue to do so with more recent phenomena such as games and blogs.

In a similar fashion to his discussion of the image, however, Belting's treatment of the medium is not without problems of its own. His purported interest in all sorts of visual practices notwithstanding, he remains convinced of the banality of mass media and the critical supremacy of artistic images. In this sense, there is an explicitly socio-critical dimension to Belting's work that is ultimately not very different from Iser's rejection of modern media. In the light of his interest in the mortal body, it is perhaps not surprising that visual anthropology frequently refers to the compulsive influence of popular images on the body: "[t]his cult of the body [in phenomena such as plastic surgery and fitness-mania] is but the flipside of the loss of the body of which we hear so much nowadays. It belongs to the hectic encirclings of an empty centre, which humans occupy with their bodies without being perceived there by the contemporary visual media" (92-93). The interplay between image and medium that is so crucial to Belting's model, conversely, is only truly embodied in aesthetic artefacts: "[o]nly in art the ambivalence that obtains between image and medium exercises a strong attraction on our perception" (33). In fact, his essays often start out from a critical examination of everyday visual practices before discussing visual works of art that self-consciously reflect upon the unacknowledged assumptions behind these practices. Parallel to Iser's remarks on textual fictions, what distinguishes artistic from "pragmatic" (Iser 1993: 230) images, it seems, is the fact that art is ultimately "an 'as-if' construction" (13); it does not "mask [its] fictional nature", but "reveals its own fictionality" (12). As Belting points out,

The strangeness of images is only cancelled out by the self-deception of the spectator. In the current time iconomania and the desire to escape the body have become complementary attitudes. We do not need to descend into the underworld anymore [as in The Aeneid, for instance], but simply meet images, which we mistake for real life, in the virtual world of the media. In Virgil's epic the speaking images [of the dead] represent comfort and memory, but they hold disenchantment [Enttäuschung] ready, as soon as they are misinterpreted. (Belting 196)

Important, artistic images, then, do not allow us to deceive ourselves into thinking they are reality - for instance by portraying impossibly beautiful bodies -, but self-consciously expose their own artifice. Whereas Iser's texts expose the limitations of accepted systems of thought, Belting's images thus entail "criticism of the fictionality of ordinary images" (111).

Turning to the medium as such, it is equally clear that Belting's work shows a conflict between an attention to and a rejection of the constraints imposed by a certain medium. Despite emphasizing the importance of the technological as well as the anthropological dimension of images, it goes without saying which component of his approach is most important: "[o]nly an anthropological approach gives man, who experiences and acts in terms of media, his place back. In this respect it distinguishes itself from those medium theories and analyses of technology that do not perceive humans as users, but only as inventors of new techniques" (14). As my discussion of mental images has already shown, moreover, Belting argues that the truly artistic image moves beyond the boundaries of its specific medium in order to liberate our mental pictures from the stifling constraints of its material embodiment. He prefers forms of visual art that aim at "[t]he liberation of the image out of its primary materiality and technicality" (239) because he believes that human perception and true images ultimately defy the boundaries of specific media: "[h]uman perception has always adjusted itself to new visual techniques, but it naturally transcends the boundaries of such media. Images themselves are by definition intermedial. […] Images are the nomads of media" (214). Actually, the socio-critical dimension of the artistic images preferred by Belting often seems to lie in their critical attitude towards their own medium and is frequently borne out by their incorporation of and dialogue with other media. Convincing historical examples notwithstanding, his visual anthropology is undoubtedly influenced by contemporary artistic practice in this respect. As he himself notes, "[i]ntermediality is a widespread practice in contemporary art, in which the reflection on the style of the medium is always made conscious in the perception of the work" (48).

Even though one might claim that the interaction between media if not the medium itself thus remains central to Belting's work, his considerable interest in the medium is nonetheless mitigated by the frequency with which he associates the rejection of the medium with a condition of freedom. He refers to a piece of installation art, for instance, which is "a hybrid construction out of the media of painting, film, video and installation, and these are blended together so seamlessly that they release [freisetzen] images of fantasy and memory in the spectator" (83). Or, perhaps most clearly, "[t]he liberation [Befreiung] of images follows from the liberation [Befreiung] from the conventional laws of the medium" (233). In sum, Bild-Anthropologie offers stimulating observations on new media as well as on the interaction between various historical media that are a definite improvement on Iser's silence on the matter of the medium. But in a similar fashion to his treatment of perception, Belting's position with regard to the medium seems to advance beyond Iser's position, but ultimately shares the latter's distrust of popular media and rejects the stifling constraints of specific media.

In conclusion, Belting's observations on visual practices entail a form of anthropology that is akin to Iser in its reluctance to associate itself exclusively with ethnography as well as in its emphasis on the existential themes of art. Bild-Anthropologie, moreover, clearly draws upon the conception of man and art that can be found in the work of Plessner and Iser; human beings are Schauspieler or actors with constantly changing roles and the texts and images that surround them allow them to make sense of ungraspable phenomena such as death, be that the death of the self or the death of our loved ones. This common framework notwithstanding, literary and visual anthropology unmistakably show different emphases. Belting corrects Iser's iconophobic emphasis on the imagination by underscoring that perception also requires the spectator's participation. His discussion of mental and visual images, however, nevertheless reveals that Belting also prefers mental to visual images. Furthermore, Bild-Anthropologie points out that modern media are important and the medium as such is a crucial dimension of visual practices, in sharp contrast to Iser's hostile reaction to modern media and his neglect of the medium as such. Although he astutely emphasizes the importance of the tug-of-war between various media, Belting's interest in socio-critical images that transcend their medium shows that his attention to the medium is countered by an underlying preference for that which lies beyond the medium. As I hope the preceding analysis has indicated, a dialogue between literary and visual anthropology might yield fruitful insights. The interchange between both projects, moreover, is by no means restricted to the matters of death, the imagination and the medium. Seeing that Belting's theory does not offer a finely-grained typology of the various ways in which spectators can interact with images, future research might try to extrapolate Iser's distinction between different types of textual games to our ways of playing with images.

Works Cited

Belting, Hans. 2001. Bild-Anthropologie. München, Fink.

Eagleton, Terry. 2004 [2003]. After Theory. London, Penguin Books.

Graevenitz, Gerhart v. e.a. "Literatur und Anthropologie. Forschungsprogramm des Sonderforschungsbereichs 511". Sonderforschungsbereich 511: 'Literatur und Anthropologie'. 29 January 2002. Universität Konstanz. 15 September 2006. http://www.sfb511.uni-konstanz.de/

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. "'Literary Anthrology'?". Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts. 27 January 2005. Stanford University. 15 September 2006. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/iser/gumbrecht.html

Harrison, Robert Pogue. 2003. The Dominion of the Dead. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1978 [1976]. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1989. Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1993 [1991]. The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 1986. Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Pfeiffer, Ludwig K. 1994. "The Materiality of Communication". Materialities of Communication. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht e.a. (eds.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Plessner, Helmuth. 2003 [1948]. "Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers". Gesammelte Schriften VII. Ausdruck und menschliche Natur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Ben De Bruyn, FWO, KULeuven

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