{"id":14459,"date":"2026-04-14T17:45:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T22:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=14459"},"modified":"2026-04-14T18:10:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T23:10:39","slug":"situating-the-new-lives-of-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2026\/04\/14\/situating-the-new-lives-of-images\/","title":{"rendered":"Situating “The New Lives of Images”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

While Stanford University Press has made the first chapter of The New Lives of Images<\/a><\/em> available to readers on the book’s web site<\/a>, what it hasn’t made available is the Preface, which lays out the problem the book is intended to address, as well as the book’s relationship to the three books that preceded it. Here is that Preface (at least the uncorrected proofs, which are close to the final version). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m also attaching a PDF of the final version of the Preface and the book’s 30-page index, which my indexer, Greg Fisher, did a great job with. (That’s for those who’d like to get a better idea of what’s in the book before purchasing it. And if the book is too pricey for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me by e-mail<\/a>.) Click on the black racetrack shape at the bottom of the white space below to get the PDF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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THE NEW LIVES OF IMAGES<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PREFACE<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Our civilization doesn\u2019t have adequate images, and I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. — Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe<\/em>, 1980[i]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without an image of tomorrow, one is trapped by blind history, economics and politics beyond our control. \u2026 Only by having clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one can go, will we have any control over the way we may actually get there in a reality tomorrow will bring all too quickly. — Samuel Delany, Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction<\/em>[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The imaginal is not a world, but it is what makes a world possible in the first place. \u2026 [T]he imaginal is a field of possibilities.   — Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary<\/em>[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This book is rooted in a conviction that I have pursued in my writing for the last few decades: that most modern accounts of the human imagination misunderstand and underestimate its role in shaping the world that humans inhabit. Imagination is not something that is \u201cjust in our heads\u201d; it is not merely an error-prone way of making sense of the data brought to us from the world by our senses. On the contrary, imagination is something like the medium in which we and others live. There is<\/em> a universe outside of the one we can grasp with our imagination(s), but it is not a universe that is free of the kinds of meanings we impart to it. This is because meaning is inherent in the universe for meaning-bearing beings. We humans are one such being, though far from the only one, and the idea that our (human) ability to bear or create meaning is not only special but somehow separate from the physical universe is a flawed premise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this sense, I begin with a rejection of what Alfred North Whitehead called the \u201cbifurcation of nature\u201d: the idea that there is a physical realm of \u201cmolecules and electrons\u201d that is separate from, or more \u201contologically primary\u201d than, the world of \u201csecondary\u201d data\u2014\u201cthe greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, the feel of the velvet,\u201d and the like.[iv]<\/a> Each of the latter presumes a perception, an interpretation, or a meaning. If this conviction is true\u2014that meaning does not separate us humans from the universe, but, if anything, that it situates and emplaces us within it\u2014then I believe it is also true to say that the main way in which meaning-bearing beings grasp or bear meaning is through what can be called \u201cimages.\u201d As I will explain in the first chapter below, images are central to understanding what it means to live in a world, or to \u201clive a world.\u201d Images are neither subjective nor objective, or, rather, they are both; they are what links subject and object, and what connects our concrete experience with the abstraction that makes sense of that experience. They are small and they are large. As Gilbert Simondon has put it, \u201cimages impregnate civilizations and energize them with their power.\u201d[v]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understanding our capacity to make and use, or at least to bear,<\/em> images\u2014which is how I will define the imagination\u2014is central to understanding both ourselves and our universe. What is most important, and what I will attempt to shed light on, is what we do with those images and how they shape, enable, and constrain us as we navigate our relationship with the more-than-human world around us. Our capacity to bear images is inherent to our perception of the world, but also to our creative transformation of that world. This dual aspect of images\u2014as perceptual and as creative, as reproductive and productive\u2014will be our key. As philosopher Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei writes in The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World,<\/em> imagination both reveals<\/em> and makes<\/em> the world for us. It is \u201cthe presentational and transformational activity of human consciousness,\u201d where \u201cpresentational\u201d refers to \u201csomething that is brought to the fore or made present for consciousness,\u201d and \u201ctransformational\u201d refers to the possibility of \u201cchange\u201d in the \u201cobject or expression of imagining.\u201d[vi]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two modern philosophers whose work provides rich insight into this, if in quite different ways, will be my touchstones here. Whitehead is one of them; the other is Charles Sanders Peirce. The work of both has been applied to the interpretation of images and to understanding media, including today\u2019s digital media, but not necessarily in the way that I will do this. Their work is not entirely unique, and it is related to and echoed by a diverse cast of others today and in the past\u2014westerners and non-westerners, women and men, philosophers and poets, scientists and shamans.[vii]<\/a> Even as Whitehead and Peirce frame my own thinking about images and imagination, neither of them detailed the many implications, nor for that matter the causes, of the \u201cbifurcation of nature\u201d they each, in their own way, identified. All of that has required generations of philosophers, historians of science, and others who have probed the ways in which this bifurcation both affects and has been affected by variables including race, gender, and histories of colonialism and extractive capitalism, variables whose influence will become evident in the interpretations taken up later in this book.[viii]<\/a> And all of this work remains to be successfully synthesized into a popularly resonant form.[ix]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I tease out of the work of these thinkers is this idea that the perceptual<\/em> and the creative\u2014<\/em>what and how we perceive, and what we do with those perceptions\u2014constitutes a kind of unified field within which images, or imaging<\/em>, plays a central role. Today that field is shaped increasingly by the world of digital media, and it is my overarching goal to understand how that world affects and changes the possibilities for imagining the world into existence. The reason such an understanding is needed, to quote political artists Mihnea Mircan and Jonas Staal, is in order to address the \u201ccrisis of the imagination,\u201d which they define as \u201ca lack of imagination to understand our disastrous present as much as to project our desired future.\u201d[x]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book is the fourth in a series devoted directly to some dimension of this image-centered understanding of the contemporary world. The first, Claiming Sacred Ground<\/a><\/em>, focused on how imagination features in conflicts over land and in perceptions and interpretations of its meanings. Those interpretations included claims for land\u2019s alleged significance or \u201csacredness\u201d in places where environmental conflicts appeared outsizedly acute. While its analysis of images was more implicit than explicit, the book\u2019s attempt to theorize \u201cplace-images\u201d in the context of human activities\u2014\u201cpractices of place\u201d that shape those places into what they become\u2014is something that is directly relevant to the present volume. Most especially, the way in which that volume moved between activities thought to be religious or spiritual and those considered secular or modern\u2014between ceremonial rituals on one hand and tourist promotion, recreation, and real estate speculation on the other\u2014is something I will pick up again in this book. All such activities are still with us, but now they are found within a context shaped increasingly by digital media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of that first volume, the second in the series, Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/a><\/em>, may have appeared a detour into an altogether different line of study, though it is the book that most directly leads into this one. Understanding images today necessitates a rigorous analysis of the kinds of images that came, most dramatically, to populate and to shape the world over the course of the twentieth century: moving images. Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/em> attempted not only a thorough refashioning of our understanding of moving images, but a kind of excavation of them from within a world reshaped by them. It presented a multi-leveled analysis of cinema in terms of the worlds it produces, which are material, social, and perceptual (or animate); the ways we viewers engage with those worlds\u2014their moment-by-moment spectacularity, their sequential narrativity (or one-thing-after-anotherness), and their referentiality to all kinds of other worldly and imagined things; and the ways our engagements with film-worlds changes the worlds that precede and outlast those film-viewing experiences (which, again, it does materially, socially, and perceptually). Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/em> was in this sense both phenomenological, to do with how we experience films, and ontological, to do with what films and their worlds (film-worlds) are and how they relate to other dimensions of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next volume, Shadowing the Anthropocene<\/a><\/em>, deepened the philosophical basis of my previous work, relating it especially to the \u201cspeculative realisms,\u201d \u201cnew materialisms,\u201d and \u201contological turns\u201d that have marked certain segments of the philosophically inclined academy (though not so much analytic philosophy departments as cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and social sciences). Then I applied this philosophy to the practice<\/em> of living and to the theorization of cultural and religious \u201cimage wars\u201d or \u201ciconoclashes,\u201d all within the context of the \u201cAnthropocene predicament,\u201d which an increasing number of intellectuals take to mark the present time. With its forays into the practical and the \u201ciconoclashic,\u201d Shadowing<\/em> returned me more directly to the concerns of the first volume in this tetralogy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The present volume effectively brings all of these concerns together. It proposes, in the most complete form to date, a theory of the imagination that is also a theory of images\u2014what they are and what they do\u2014and that accounts for a broad spectrum of people\u2019s use of images, from the religious and political to the scientific and aesthetic, and from the pre-modern to the world of digital media. If anything, it takes such categorical distinctions\u2014between religion, science, magic, aesthetics, politics, as well as modernity, secularism, and others\u2014as categories to be set aside so that their common substance can be recognized. That common substance is imagination and the forms it takes: images or imaginings (image-events), image ecologies (or imaginaries), image regimes, and the icono-couplings and iconoclashes that occur in the mixtures of images we find in the world; all these terms will be defined soon enough. And it continues the work of analyzing moving images\u2014images that move<\/em> us\u2014in a world where those images have gone if not viral, then at least digital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This book is, in a sense, both a genealogy and the beginnings of an analysis of the heavily mediated present. That makes it an ambitious book. Fortunately, its division into two absolves me of some of that ambition. Where the first half presents the theory in its most holistic form, the second selectively focuses on a series of locations or sites of interest to understanding the Anthropocene condition. Like the three books preceding it, this one aims to help us navigate the set of circumstances humans collectively find ourselves inhabiting today. I (and others) have argued that the term \u201cAnthropocene\u201d is a misnomer, both because the \u201cAnthropos\u201d is hardly a responsible and unified agent\u2014the \u201ccause\u201d of the Anthropocene is far more complex than the term suggests\u2014and because humans are far from equally implicated in this condition. At any rate, the case I make is that the Anthropocene condition<\/em> or predicament<\/em>\u2014a shared situation rather than a geological epoch (as geologists themselves have recently asserted)\u2014is not just one in which human activities today risk the physical and biological foundations on which we depend, so that those activities need to be reassessed and remade. It is also a predicament that requires epistemological and ontological regrounding. This book hopes to contribute to that task by helping us understand the image-world in which we live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use this term \u201cimage-world\u201d in a double sense. It is, on the one hand, the world of images that surround us increasingly, and that do this by virtue of imaging technologies that are primarily electronic and digital. This is the digital<\/em> image-world, and while the digital is not reducible to images, digital technology makes possible the networked, participatory, and \u201chypermediated\u201d world that so many of us live with and, to a large degree, live within. It is where we find the bulk of the images, as well as the stories and texts, that shape and make sense of our lives. On the other hand, I also intend to recognize that every<\/em> human world is an image-world; it is a world brought forth in and through our imaginative capacities and acts. The book aims to contribute to both of these: an ontology of the<\/em> image-world (which is every world) and an ontology of the particular<\/em> image-world\u2014that of digital images and networks\u2014that grows around us and enfolds us increasingly today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will do this, first, by identifying a series of patterns or configurations, which I call \u201cimage regimes,\u201d according to which humans have negotiated their relationships with the larger world through the use of images. These present multiple variations on the triad \u201chumans\u2014images\u2014reality.\u201d Since human ideas about each of these\u2014about images, about reality, and about humans ourselves\u2014have changed over time, this will be a way to establish some reference points amidst an ensemble of moving pieces. In the second part of the book, I will apply this understanding of image regimes to three sites of image production. The first of these pertains to the Anthropocene itself, in the shape of a set of multi-media art works dealing with ecological, climatic, and geological changes affecting humanity today. The second examines an array of online audio-visual materials documenting and commenting on trans-species animal encounters, that is, encounters that cross commonly assumed boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals. The third looks at art, music, and poetry that refers to and engages, or at least claims to engage, with agential forces that exceed or transcend \u201chumanity\u201d as it is currently understood in its dominant formulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have chosen these three sites in order to give us a sense of what is at stake in our imagination both of ourselves\u2014the human, the Anthropos<\/em>\u2014and of three significant kinds of others<\/em>-to-the-human. The first of these others is the Earth as a whole, the geological or biogeochemical other in its singularity. The second includes the ranks of animal species to which we humans belong, as animals ourselves, but from which we have disavowed our belonging insofar as we have considered ourselves humans and not<\/em> animals. The third of these others is less easy to pinpoint: it is not one that is obviously scientifically knowable, and depending on one\u2019s convictions, it may or may not exist except as a product of imagination. And yet it represents the kind of other that has been looked to as the most significant by many societies over millennia: the other referred to in discourses commonly labeled religious, spiritual, mythological, supernatural, or at the very least poetic. Together with the second (the animal other), this third \u201cother\u201d raises a question that has haunted humanity across the period marked by the rise of what is loosely called humanism: the question, Are we alone?<\/em> If most forms of humanist thought, including the very humanist idea of the Anthropocene, suggest that humans constitute a central character on the stage of the world, then this question \u201cAre we alone?\u201d becomes a complex and open site: a site of denial, of haunting, of speculation, and of utopian imagining. And if we are to move to a \u201cpost-humanist\u201d embrace of the more-than-human world, a \u201cmore-than-humanism,\u201d this question will need to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To that end, the three chapters that make up Part Two of this volume will treat these three image formations as, in effect, construction sites. It is these kinds of sites that are, to use Chiara Bottici\u2019s words (cited above), \u201cwhat makes a world possible in the first place.\u201d They are part of the \u201cimaginal\u201d that can prepare us, or fail to prepare us, for the world Werner Herzog and Samuel Delany foresee in the accompanying epigraphs. I will name them \u201cscenes\u201d\u2014the \u201cAnthroposcene,\u201d the \u201cTherioscene,\u201d and the \u201cTheoscene\u201d\u2014to highlight the ways in which they serve as settings for image-formation unfolding at three kinds of boundaries, thresholds, crossroads, or encounter zones: those between humans and the Earth, between humans and (other) animals, and between humans and the more mysterious relations that anchor us in our sense of passage between the past that grounds us and the future that beckons.[xi]<\/a> It is this sense of movement within temporality, and in fact within multiple temporalities, that makes this project a \u201cchronopolitical\u201d one, a way of navigating time that encompasses aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all this talk of the \u201canthro\u201d and its \u201c(s)cene(s),\u201d I wish to make clear, and hope that my analysis bears out, that the human world is neither singular\u2014one shared human world\u2014nor is it exclusively human. Humans are one kind of being that bears worlds; many worlds do we bear, and their convergence and divergence is a real issue for us to contend with today. The argument developed in this book builds up to a focus on how certain decolonial, Indigenous, and Afrofuturist artists are contributing to the elicitation of imaginaries that may help us with this world-crafting. This is a world-crafting that involves redefining ourselves as well as our animal kin and our other<\/em> others\u2014those ancestral, invisible, and mysteriously present to us in ways that may be accessible to us via the imaginal practices of artists and other \u201cdiviners.\u201d My premise here is that grappling with a world of growing ecological precarity, political and economic instability, late-imperial resource rivalry, and general \u201cfeverishness\u201d\u2014the twenty-first century world of late-capitalist crisis\u2014requires cultural and imaginative resources from beyond its dominant, institutionalized strains, and significant creativity in their uptake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many other worlds exist alongside our human worlds, and some of them elude even the least of our human contributions. Each of them points to a larger, all-encompassing reality within which these worlds arise and by which they get subsumed. We can call that reality \u201cthe more-than-human world,\u201d as my subtitle does, or we can call it, much more broadly, the universe, even if physicists (and anthropologists) aren\u2019t sure if it is one universe or many, a multiverse or a pluriverse, or something altogether unknowable\u2014an agnoverse (to coin a term). Each of the worlds making up this pluriverse, polyverse, or agnoverse, situates the bearer within some understanding of that more encompassing reality, a reality that is actively turning (from the Latin vertere<\/em>) in one direction or many. This is what it means to bear a world, to image, and to live and dwell in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That we bear and share worlds with other dwellers, and other kinds of dwellers, is the starting point for any philosophy worth promoting today. The fruit of that philosophy will be a contribution to the task of living with those others. I dedicate this book to all of those others, whoever and wherever they are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n