When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask … - W. J. T. Mitchell

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The religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct.

W. J. T. Mitchell

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.

Cutting, Eye, Magical, Mother, Picture, Students

Same Author Quotes

Images are not only visual. They're also auditory, they involve sensuous impressions, bundles of information that come to us through our senses, and mainly through seeing and hearing: the audio-visual field.

Audio, Bundles, Hearing, Information, Senses

The great moment I think in human consciousness is when you realize that the object in front of you is perhaps not nameable or is new, it does not fit a stereotype, and so you need to reconfigure your whole structure of knowledge to account for it.

Doe, Human, Nameable, Needs, Stereotype, Thinking

Stereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status - so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn't just visual.

Carry, Class, Differentiations, Race, Simple, Visual

Writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the “imagetext” incarnate

Form, Graphic, Imagetext, Inseparable, Visual, Writing

Distinction between species and specimen is very much like the distinction between images and actual pictures, or, you know, objects that have a definite material identity. The classifications, the categories, the stereotypes, and the images are on one side, and the material pictures, statues, texts, and so forth are on the other.

Classifications, Identity, Side, Sides, Stereotype