The Politics of Pictures: Approaching a Difficult Concept

The article takes Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the ‘political imaginary’ as an invitation to reflect on the role of pictures in politics and in facilitating alternative policies. For this purpose, pictures are not understood as merely rhetorical or propagandistic representations of political statements, which are actually to be thought of independently of the particular picture. Instead, by means of their specific pictorial qualities, pictures also influence the ways politics are negotiated or pursued and, moreover, they can stimulate alternative forms of political thinking. In order to argue for this understanding of the politics of pictures, the article proceeds in three steps: a brief review of the research on political iconography is followed by thoughts on Jacques Rancière and his concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’. On this basis, an understanding of pictorial politics is finally sketched that asks for genuinely political potentials that are directly linked to the specific qualities of the image: its duality, its vagueness, and its temporality.