The central portion of Horst Bredekamp’s Theorie des Bildakts (“Theory of the Image-Act”) closes with the verbal image of Aby Warburg as the figurehead of a ship, “gaze locked in apotropaic contact with the waves of destruction,” alone in propounding the “irritating life” possessed by forms of all sorts (305–6). Warburg’s dictum, “Du lebst und thust mir nichts” (“You live and do nothing to me”), is the implicit epigram to Bredekamp’s enterprise—given that Bredekamp frames Warburg’s declaration as more trepidatious adjuration than confident assertion (21–22).¹ Bredekamp maintains that Warburg’s thinking about art, craft, vision, and culture “approached more closely than nearly any other the duplicity of the anorganic and the living” (21). The task Bredekamp sets himself in the present book is to excavate the nature of this duplicity.

Bredekamp declares his intention to tackle a phenomenon he characterizes as both fundamental to the image-saturated world and as something theorists have previously shied away from—namely, the capacity of ostensibly “dead” matter literally to live by taking form in images. In Bredekamp’s account, to face the way in which images possess Eigenleben, an independent life force, is to face the ways in which images may act on humans, and to expose the “double-cross” (Doppelspiel) that images stage between the vivid and the lifeless.

The banner of Bredekamp’s investigation of image independence is the compound term “Image-Act.” Bredekamp approaches the term as a redefinition, not a coinage, tracing the genealogy of its use by theorists he criticizes for reducing images to the status of evidence of action or vehicles for action (in the manner of words in J. L. Austin’s entrenched concept of the “Speech-Act,” see 48–51). Bredekamp bids to shift the definition of “Image-Act” to cast images themselves as actors possessed of sovereign agency separable from their handling or their perception by people (51).

Because Bredekamp has developed a vocabulary to define his theory, sketching the parameters of the study is best done in the author’s own terms. Bredekamp distinguishes three classes of “Image-Act”: the “Schematic,” the “Substitutive,” and the “Intrinsic.” After an opening treatment of inscriptions ascribing life and agency to objects—designated as “witnesses” to the theory—the book devotes a section to each class of Image-Act and its Werkaussagen (expressions in works). The essays began life as the 2007 Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt, and a certain oral flavor is retained as Bredekamp presents a kaleidoscopic set of examples, periodically cross-referenced to highlight continuities and distinctions. Throughout, Bredekamp takes up Warburg’s standard again in coordinating an ecumenical diversity of “images” (Bilder) drawn from art, science, nature, and the everyday.

Bredekamp ends with a summary of the relationships between the three classes of Image-Act that greatly clarifies his overarching project; some readers might prefer to consider the “Scheme” included on page 327 before exploring the cases presented in the body of the text. This chart coordinates the three varieties of Image-Act through a sequence of interlinked attributes, designated as “Category,” “Medium,” and “Form.” Form corresponds to the type of “image” cited in the text. The Medium, a process or entity that disseminates an Image-Act, derives from a broader type, or Category, of Image-Act itself. The name of the Category indicates the principal “sphere” of action in which images are said to operate, and which they themselves may drive. For one straightforward summary case: under Substitutive Image-Act, the Category is punishment; the Medium is punishment through images; and the Form is defamatory images. The three classes of Image-Act are additionally paired with a one-word summary of their modus operandi: Schematic = Life, Substitutive = Exchange, and Intrinsic = Form. It is worth offering an extended translation of Bredekamp’s commentary on the “Scheme”—first for the sake of further elaboration on the essential terms of the book’s project, and also in order to convey something of the text’s tone.

All diagrams and models possess a double character as openers and as circumscribers. This ambivalence applies to the Scheme of the Image-Act with its three essential categories. It should be clear that, with its living images, its automata, and its biofacta, the Schematic Image-Act encompasses the patterns of thought and action for images that live through [human] bodies, through auto-motion, and through biological constitution. The Substitutive Image-Act, in contrast, does not evoke the living components of images; rather, it exchanges images and bodies for one another. In this way, effects are attained by direct means—sometimes deadly means in the case of destructive media. The Intrinsic Image-Act, equally effective in art (Kunst) and in nature, derives its profound effects from the irresistibility of form as form. Insofar as form is freed from contexts of constraint, this distance creates the autonomy from which the effectiveness of the Intrinsic Image-Act derives. In this, the Intrinsic is the purest form of Image-Act.

The ”Theory of Image-Act” presented here aims at an enlightenment (Aufklärung) that attends to the living autonomy of the image as one of its defining conditions. If a subject is capable of experiencing in the image’s right to life a domain that comes—self-determined—from without [the subject], then that subject encounters the possibility of unbraiding the narcissistic bonds of its I-fixation in favor of a dialogic liberty. This means overcoming the overwhelmingly limited sphere produced by the modern privileging of the subject as creator and keeper of the world. The “I” becomes stronger when it relativizes itself against the activity of the image. Images can be placed neither before nor behind reality, because they work to constitute reality. They are not reality’s consequences, but rather a form of its determination. (328)

The processes that gain the name of action under the “Theory of Image-Act” are relatively clear: enlivenment, substitution, destruction, transmission. More complicated, in some respects, is the nature of the “images” recognized as agents. Everyone dealing with Bildwissenschaft—whether in English or in German—has to grapple with the capacious definitions allowed by Bild.² “Image” is Bild’s closest English counterpart and frequent translation, largely because it similarly resists—or can be made to resist—circumscriptions of medium and origin. By presenting a slew of varied examples in rapid succession, with distinctions of historical context and medium routinely elided, Bredekamp’s discussion prompts essential questions of terminology and categorization. What constitutes an image or picture? Is “image” opposed to the concept of “art”? Are we dealing with metaphorical, imagined, or material images? To what extent are pictures separable from their media? When we deal with an “image” are we speaking of something diagrammatic or something mimetic? To what extent should we distinguish the made from the unmade, the artisanal from the natural, forms crafted from forms recognized? Where do we draw the line between the work of human hands and the imaginative apprehension of the world at large? Bild permits Bredekamp a suspension of such distinctions within a single word—explicit lines to be drawn deliberately at moments of the author’s choosing. Essentially, Bild is defined as the lowest common denominator of everything that demonstrates even a modicum of human intervention in establishing its form (34). In later sections discussing “natural images,” particularly when focused on evolution, Bredekamp explicitly questions this definition (e.g., 316); but, as for Ernst Gombrich, recognition is ultimately counted more fundamental to the definition of images than is facture. A form becomes an image when it is perceived and understood.

The notion of perception fundamentally impacts the most pressing issue raised by Bredekamp’s discussion: that of human agency relative to image agency. Bredekamp himself calls this the “decisive question” (49). If Alfred Gell worked to frame the manufactured world as a crucible of social relationships (Art and Agency, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) and Hans Belting sought to locate the deep fusion between materialized images and the human body and imagination (Bild-Anthropologie, München: Fink, 2001) (click here for review), Bredekamp sets out to circumscribe a life principle in images that may be conceived not as a direct extension from the human body or society, but as a force emanating naturally from images themselves. This force, in his account, then turns to impact both body and society. Bredekamp repeatedly invokes the ideas of images’ Eigenleben (own or intrinsic life), Eigenkraft (own strength), and Lebensrecht (right to life). He introduces and deploys these terms casually, suggesting that his theory restores a radical absence of people to the native character of images. The language of the book seeks largely to isolate what Bredekamp defines as the self-sufficient forces of images, as distinct from their uses; and Bredekamp’s answer to the “decisive question” claims to carve new space for image-autonomy in relation to Bildakt’s previous identity as the name for a “symptom” of the “iconic turn” in efforts to understand human society (51).

An interesting tension in the book emerges here. Bredekamp frames his explicit “attempt at a definition” of Bildakt by interrogating “what power enables an image, when it is seen or handled, to spring out of latency into an outward effect on sensation, thinking, and action” (52). An essential corollary to Image-Act, then, is that images gain their power through perception and interaction. Another corollary to this point may be derived from Warburg himself. Bredekamp’s defense of images’ “right to life” is rooted in Warburg’s ideas regarding pathos in images (see especially 298–99) and the productive role for images in society achieved through images’ distancing effects. Through Warburg’s Distanzbildung, images create space for human beings to regard themselves—to fulfill their own potential in the recognition that humankind has only so much control over the manufactured world that exists in counterpoint to lived experience. While making room for image agency, this relationship rests on the premise that images in any form are media for human reaction, expression, will, and desire, for human perception of others and perception of self.

These points granted, it becomes impossible to extricate human agency from image agency. If it is impossible fully to disentangle that which is image act from that which is human act, and impossible to extricate humans from the creation of images (whether by perception or by facture), it then seems curious to resist a thoroughgoing argument that a theory of Image-Act is simultaneously an anthropology. In the book’s closing double-cross, image theory is ultimately offered as a theory about people after all—about the self-definition of human beings through foils and catalysts of their own making. The final chapter comes to rest on a clear note that seems to call for a tighter braid between viewing subject and image than other registers of the book would allow: “The ‘I’ becomes stronger when it relativizes itself against the activity of the image” (328).

Acknowledging the tenacity of human agency—whether of facture, function, or perception—perhaps paradoxically opens up the greatest power in Bredekamp’s theory, although it simultaneously (and perfectly reasonably) dilutes the claim to complete image autonomy. To my mind, the book’s strongest aspect is its political dimension. Since historical (and material) contingency is largely suppressed in the integrative force sweeping Bredekamp’s trans-temporal discussion, it becomes clear that the primary historical context and image discourse examined under Bredekamp’s theory is the contemporary one. Image agencies derived from sources of both the recent and the distant past prove most potent in the book’s implicit call for attention to the image politics of the present day. The work’s political face shows, on the one hand, in sections dealing explicitly with subjects such as war, communal symbols, and the law, and in particularly effective interludes with news photographs such as Colin Powell’s 2003 speech before a veiled Guernica and the 2006 deathbed of Alexander Litvinenko. The entire discussion, though, is shot through with political considerations. This tone sounds partly via Bredekamp’s insistence on terms such as Lebensrecht, but more importantly via the periodic recognition—allowed to define the close of the text—that images are inextricably entwined with human experience. Under this banner, the inscriptions marshaled in the opening section to “witness” the theory that life inheres in images in fact bear strongest witness to the durable perception that life may inhere in the products of our making, and that images thereby work to constitute human reality. This is a socially and politically charged argument, reinforcing the idea that claims for greater image agency readily circle back to confirm how central images are to people’s definition of the world, and location of themselves within it.