I created a (post-publication) “reader’s guide” for my last monograph, because it was really three (short) books in one and I didn’t think all readers would be equally interested in all three of them, so I figured a road-map would be helpful. My new book, The New Lives of Images, which Francesco Casetti rightly calls “two books in one,” doesn’t really need a reader’s guide because the Preface provides that. But for those who want an even quicker overview, here it is.
Book One (i.e., Part One) is theoretical and philosophical. It rethinks what “images” and “imagination” are through a process-semiotic lens (more on that in a moment). It provides a loosely historical typology of images and how humans have related to them — from the very beginning of imaging to the world of digital media. And it examines what’s at stake politically and ecologically with the latter.
Introducing the process-semiotic understanding of images and imagination takes some time, but here’s the nutshell version. “Imagination” is made of images by which we perceive and transform the world. And “images” are events of meaning-making mediated by things that bear some resemblance to — they look, sound, smell, taste, or feel like — other things that we have encountered before or elsewhere. Images, in other words, are not just those things that contain some depiction of something — photos, maps, sonic or musical gestures, and other kinds of objects. (And they also aren’t only visual.) They are the events in which those things connect us to other things and, in doing that, create meaning. By connecting the present to the past or the not-present, images weave the worlds in which we, meaning-dwelling beings, live. Images are supplemented by words and language, but in crucial respects images are more primary, and are therefore more important for us to understand.
Book Two is practical and empirical: it’s a critical-interpretive journey through a set of compelling imageries or “imaginaries” — artistic works (visual, audio-visual, musical, literary) that embody specific kinds of image-relations — which have to do, respectively, with the relationships between humans and the Earth (the “Anthroposcene”), humans and other animals (the “Therioscene”), and humans and our divinities (the “Theoscene”). The publisher’s description tells you some of the key artists I look at. They are chosen in order to highlight the creative edges of human thinking about these three “boundary zones.”
The upshot is that we live in the Mediocene, a time when images conveyed via digital media have become central to the ways we shape our world. The interpretive choices we make within that profusion of images will create the future that comes of it. If we don’t make appropriate choices — ones that recognize our embeddedness within an unstable and dynamic more-than-human world — our future prospects will be dim.
Review copies, comp teaching copies, and pre-orders are available now. The book will be out in September.
