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Issue 10. The Visualization of the Subaltern in World Music. On Musical Contestation Strategies (Part 1)

How Images Think

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: March 2005

Ron Burnett,
How Images Think.
Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 2004

This book had everything to become a smashing hit: a trendy subject, an author combining excellent reading with a personal commitment to art, a sexy title, a leading publisher, and so on. Yet the final result is highly disappointing.

The problem of How Images Think is not its main thesis, provocatively wrapped in a somewhat misleading title: thinking is always mediatized and one of the main vectors of this mediatization is the image, more specifically the digital image. The thinking image, therefore, is not to be understood as a mere object, capable of processing information independently of any human subject. It is the interface between object and subject, in ideal terms a "middle ground" where the interaction of the human and the visual produces cognitive processes.

So far so good. After nearly three decades of actor-network theory this should be common knowledge, and how could a reader disapprove with such a thesis? Things become a little murkier, however, when one starts reading Burnett's book itself. Not that one feels lost: the ideas and analyses of contemporary visual culture sound familiar, we are not in terra incognita. But the reader never gets any grip on what the author actually wants to say, beyond of course the dozens and dozens of rather empty overgeneralizations that these pages are stuffed with. Is there any personal contribution to ongoing discussions in the field here? How is the quoted literature really used? What is the point Burnett wants to make? What kind of dialogue is happening between all the texts mentioned throughout the book? Is there an over-all theory sustaining Burnett's writing? To all these questions the book gives no answer, in spite of several good local insights (unfortunately they never last more than three sentences) and also in spite of the enthusiasm with which the book has been written (yet Burnett is not Marshall McLuhan, who was both more mad and more methodic).

The first two chapters open with short quotations by respectively, T.S. Eliot and Les Murray. These few lines say more than the 250 pages of the whole book. The reader is warned.

Jan Baetens

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