The ‘Intellectual Image’ conceives the image as a site where multiple so-called conceptual personae are confronted with each other. ‘Conceptual personae’ is a term introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to designate the immanent, intelligent agents that can be found in philosophical texts. In coining this term they implicitly respond to Roland Barthes’ death of the author and Michel Foucault’s claim that the the word ‘author’ refers to a “… complex variable of discourse …” Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, argue that the author – as an agent of discourse rather than a variable – is reborn inside the text, exactly at the empty space that his death left behind.
The object of the research proposed here will be the figure of the intellectual. In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’(1984), Cornel West emphasizes the critical potential of his protagonist that stems from the fact that this situated individual is always caught between two discursive practices, that of the white society and the black community. These practices force conflicting roles – in other words personae – upon the black intellectual. As a result, this figure functions as an arena in which these discursive tensions intersect and clash. In other words, not the situated individual but the conceptual personae are the actual agents of discourse.
According to this line of thinking, the fact that the intellectual is a site rather than a person implies that this concept can no longer be restricted to human beings. Differently put, a text, image, record or movie can also function as an intellectual in this new sense of the word. The situated individual has become a medium amongst others. In my research, I want to show that this so-called medial turn transforms the image from a representation to a collision point where heterogeneous conceptual personae and their corresponding discursive practices come together.
This project resulted in two articles — New Adventures in Low-Fidelity and Oh Baby, I Like It Raw – and several lectures.
about intellectual image
The ‘Intellectual Image’ conceives the image as a site where multiple so-called conceptual personae are confronted with each other. ‘Conceptual personae’ is a term introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to designate the immanent, intelligent agents that can be found in philosophical texts. In coining this term they implicitly respond to Roland Barthes’ death of the author and Michel Foucault’s claim that the the word ‘author’ refers to a “… complex variable of discourse …” Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, argue that the author – as an agent of discourse rather than a variable – is reborn inside the text, exactly at the empty space that his death left behind.
The object of the research proposed here will be the figure of the intellectual. In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’(1984), Cornel West emphasizes the critical potential of his protagonist that stems from the fact that this situated individual is always caught between two discursive practices, that of the white society and the black community. These practices force conflicting roles – in other words personae – upon the black intellectual. As a result, this figure functions as an arena in which these discursive tensions intersect and clash. In other words, not the situated individual but the conceptual personae are the actual agents of discourse.
According to this line of thinking, the fact that the intellectual is a site rather than a person implies that this concept can no longer be restricted to human beings. Differently put, a text, image, record or movie can also function as an intellectual in this new sense of the word. The situated individual has become a medium amongst others. In my research, I want to show that this so-called medial turn transforms the image from a representation to a collision point where heterogeneous conceptual personae and their corresponding discursive practices come together.
This project resulted in two articles — New Adventures in Low-Fidelity and Oh Baby, I Like It Raw – and several lectures.