Decentering and Recentering in Self-Reflexivity

While grappling with Mitchell’s Metapictures, the most obvious connection to the readings of our most recent theorists was multiplicity’s effect on decentering and recentering. In Landow’s discussion of hypertext, he argues that it is “an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader” (36). The multistable iconography that Mitchell discusses, like the duck-rabbit and the necker cube, explicitly embody this decenterable and recenterable system, not through word-based text as we so often think of when considering self-reflexivity, but rather through a direct spatial representation of how our perceptions of a seemingly static object is capable of shifting, calling attention to the absurdity of the notion that pictures, and text in general for that matter, contain one point of view.

Landow argues for the existence of hypertext networks long before the advent of relatively modern computing networks, arguing that “some of the first applications of hypertext involved the Bible and its exegetical tradition” (37). While this statement does seem a bit centered around the originality of Judeo-Christian dogma, seeing as these “quasi-magical entrances to a networked reality” probably existed before the advent of Christianity, his point is received that the human condition constantly entails overlaying present reality with a networked reality (37). Moreover, the mere structure of the universe is concerned much more with webs, and the connections between those webs, than with originality. This is apparent not only in Landow’s discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor, but also by drawing on Pagel’s reference to networks within our own biological systems.

Mitchell’s discussion of metapictures provides a supplemental theory which can be seen as extending Landow’s hypertext to encompass self-reflexivity. In other words, the de-stability that is depicted in the pictures he showcases explicitly decenters our primary reception of it, and recenters it in an entirely new way. His idea of “dialectical images” represents the combination of different readings in single pictures (45). Thus, the multiplicity of these readings causes the picture to almost interact with itself, question itself, to “show themselves in order to know themselves” (48). By referring to the multiplicity of points of view in itself, metapictures can be seen as “an emblem of resistance to stable interpretation” (50).