Image and Context. A Few Terminological Remarks on the Semantic Anomaly of Images

Images shape the human relation to world and self. Presumably, they do this as fundamentally as language. However, the mechanisms we rely on in pictorial display and linguistic communication are very different. The proposition I would like to discuss in this presentation is that the objective basis of these different mechanisms lies in a semantic anomaly of images which connects perceptual immediacy with communicative uncertainty in a characteristic way. In contrast to language, this anomaly gives images greater efficacy at the expense of increased dependence on context.