WJT MITCHELL  I was raised Roman Catholic and became an altar boy. Anyone growing up that way knows that images are magical and special. Yet, the Church taught us not be idolaters: not to worship images, but to venerate them instead. So, one of the first things you had to learn was how to make that distinction. Images are powerful: maybe dangerous, maybe wonderful. How do you negotiate that? You can see the influence of that fascination with visual representations as I went on to write books like Iconology, Image Science, Picture Theory, What do Pictures Want? However, the image is always in relation to language. There is something to say about it. But it is saying something too. And there is something that it cannot say. The relation of words and images has been a very steady concern to me right down to the present moment, when one of the key inventors of AI has told us that AI is nothing but a machine for generating words and images. When I read that, I said: ‘Aha!’ Now I have to write about AI because here it comes again, that same familiar but mysterious problem which is so very interesting.

WJTM  When I was writing my dissertation on William Blake in the 1960s, it was purely exploratory. It was just a practical question of confronting an artist who is a poet and a painter, equally gifted at both. That is very unusual. Even among most artists who can do it, most hide one side of it. Very few people knew that Victor Hugo could draw as well as write incredible novels. But Blake put the two media together in illuminated books, and everyone thought they were like medieval manuscripts. The question was: what goes on between words and images? Are images just illustrations? And what is an illustration? Sometimes you name a figure and there is a picture. What if the picture is not a portrait, but something radically different from the text? An example that always sprang to mind was Blake’s poem The Tyger, about the sublime, and about ‘the fearful symmetry of the tiger’, ‘burning bright’ in the era of the French Revolution. But then you look at the picture and there is just a little tabby cat, a peaceful thing. What was Blake doing? He was not simply illustrating that. He was putting his images into a dialogic relation of interchange, exploding the word into something unexpected. All this led to further reflection on the relation of words and images as a theoretical problem. There were multiple theories, of course. The oldest one probably went back to Lessing, and is later reinforced by Gombrich, involving the distinction between a natural sign and a conventional sign. But is a picture a natural sign because we automatically see it? Why do we refer to nature, when there are clearly different kinds of artifice on both sides? I was led to other philosophers. Nelson Goodman explored the distinction between the digital and the analog, defined not in computer terms, but as notational systems. The digital is a system of meaning with a finite number of characters, but the analog has an infinite number of characters. That is the difference between words and images, and it then led me into theorizing about those categories of significance in the first place.

WJTM  Everybody has their own story. I was an English professor writing about William Blake, so I had to learn how to look at pictures in a way that was informed by art history, but not totally controlled by it. The immediate provocation was twofold: one was a great book by the philosopher Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn. He said that we began with thinking about objects and then we turned to concepts. Philosophy started with material things, then it turned to ideas. But in the last century, he says, we turned to language. All of our problems were about language. But what about the image, which is at least half of what representation and signification is? The other thing was the turn in French philosophy, with Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, and with the arrival of the ‘simulacrum’ and the ‘spectacle’ as big issues, both bad and dangerous things. It was about a new kind of image after cinema, which was already canonized, and after the evil television, the ‘idiot box’ or ‘boob tube’ said to be training a whole generation on how to sleepwalk through life. All of this looked like a very threatening ‘pictorial turn’. Then finally I got to the right philosopher, my guide, Charles Sanders Peirce, who said that all signification is reduced to three sign functions: the symbol, the icon, the index. This roughly meant language, the image by likeness, and the index connecting the two. That simple triad of representation struck me as a revelation. I had been talking about words and images all this time, but it had never occurred to me that I was also talking about the index, the connective tissue. That was the existential sign in which meaning comes completely from context: where it appears, when and why.

All things merged. French philosophers told us there was a pictorial turn occurring and that it was a bad thing, it was terrifying. I wanted to tell a story where it is neither good nor bad, but it is happening, for good and ill. In a way, it was similar to my current approach to artificial intelligence, walking a tight rope between utopia and dystopia in order to understand what the possibility of the new medium is. But back then, I thought: isn’t it time to update Rorty? We did have a linguistic turn; philosophy went that way. But then, the great Gilles Deleuze also claimed that philosophy had tried to escape from the image with abstractions, that it wanted to go back to ideas that have no bodies, but it failed. Philosophy always falls back into iconology. And I said: ‘Right. That is where I am.’

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