How do you know when you’ve really seen something? Beleaguered by the 24-hour news cycle and endless scrolling, we are overwhelmed with images, so many that we see each one only for a moment, flashing by but never captured. This flood introduces an anxiety about what’s real. Vision, for people who have sight, is the way that we verify something: “I have seen this thing with my own eyes.” But laying eyes on something is not itself sufficient for verification if we don’t know what we’ve seen. The latest AI nightmare, the sketchily provenanced war photograph, the doctored image of “gang tattoos” that seem to prove someone’s allegiances—we’ve all seen these things, but only some of us (or perhaps none of us) have understood them.

Calls to pay close attention to images are proliferating, with thinkers like Anna Kornbluh, Anne Duformantelle, and Jonathan Crary echoing a refrain from now-classic scholars of visual culture like W.J.T. Mitchell, T.J. Clark, and John Berger. They theorize our fear that we are so stupified by a daily barrage of images that we are more and more apt to accept them at face value. A lack of time and space to interpret images factors into our vulnerability to misinformation and a decline in media literacy, conditions with profound social consequences. If we see the same things but cannot agree on a shared reality, where has the visual mechanism failed?

We believe that ekphrasis can mitigate this crisis. Ekphrasis is the literary description of a visual phenomenon, a practice that dates back at least to the Iliad and a focus of this little magazine for almost as long. The term is most commonly applied to poetry composed in response to a work of art, but any translation of pictures into words is a mechanism for dispelling the illusion of the image’s immediacy. We tend to think of images in terms of absorptive or transporting feelings—putting those feelings into words transforms an immediate feeling into a sequential one, simply because we experience words one after another. The temporal frame of language shifts us into a different kind of critical capacity. To write ekphrastically is to mediate the visual experience through time. It is to compound your first impression with many long looks, to check your interpretation and check again. 

Ekphrasis requires a type of aesthetic judgment not always accomplished through the visual. It is a machine for realizing that we are all capable of misreadings. As we get increasingly confused about images, we get increasingly determined to be certain, and ekphrasis helps us remember our own fallibility. It also reminds us of our own capacity to read well, a capacity vital in a world that is drowned in images and over-conviction. Your reading may or may not be better than the last one, but it also isn’t the final one (which is both an admonition and a comfort).

We believe ekphrasis can help us do the work of interpretation together and help build a social world. We want to see if we’re right, and we are inviting contributors to argue with, against, or slantwise to us. This frame expresses our willingness to admit we have misread—so come talk about ekphrasis, and we’ll try to figure this out together.

Dilettante Army invites scholarly contributions about ekphrasis. Topics might include: words after pictures, words in pictures, words instead of pictures, Ways of Seeing, the Shield of Achilles, AI, disruption, the grindset, imagination, distraction, misreading, (historic) revisionism, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” displays of academic prowess, media literacy, performative yearning, lost originals, fashion do’s and dont’s, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the long now, immediacy, the death of painting, the death of photography, visibility mandates, Glissant’s “opacity,” abstraction, platform capitalism, common sense, mediation.

Pitches should be emailed to DA editors Sara Clugage, Christine Elliott, and Rebecca Ariel Porte at  dilettantearmy [at] gmail [dot] com by Monday, June 23. For more information on what we publish and how to pitch, please refer to our submission guidelines.

Image: Sir James Thornhill, Thetis Accepting the Shield of Achilles from Vulcan, c. 1710. Image via Wikimedia Commons.