Picture Theory

Metapictures by W. J. T. Mitchell strives to see if pictures are able to provide their own "metalanguage" (38). Is it possible for pictures to be self-referential and "construct a second-order discourse without recourse to language." (38) ? From what I understand about picture theory thus far, according to Mitchell, is that in order for an image to be considered a "metapicture" it must undergo so some sort of self-reflexivity. This construction is something similar to that of Landow's hypertext theory.
In Metapictures, Mitchell provides us with the example about Saul Steinberg's drawing we gain insight into how a picture can be "self-reflexive". Steinberg creates "a world that is not merely brought into being by picture making, but actually constituted and brought into being by picture making." (41) Though we may not be able to directly identify with the physical attributes shown in the image, the picture still manages to say something about the world we live in. Circling back to the image of the bourgeois gentleman, ""I" the spectator may not be a well-to-do bourgeois, but this "I" knows that she or he lives in a world domintaed by business." (41) Given this example, I am able to put more meaning behind the idea of metapicture referring to a "picture-within-a-picture". Perhaps its not one physical image representing that of another physical image; but that an image can represent the much larger class of pictures that says something about the cultural discourse it rests "inside" and how that affects those on the "outside".

Metapictures does not restrict us to one reading pattern, but rather rests in the "argument or dialogue between them." (45) In the examples Mitchell offers with the cartoons (Steinberg & Alain), there is a dialectical relationship that occurs, "they contradict one another, oppose one another, and yet they also require, give life to, one another." (45) We are also invited to think about metapicture as being self-referential in the context of the Duck-Rabbit image. As readers we must reflect on nature of the image and how our mind visually represents the image as a duck or a rabbit, or both. Where as before we were looking at pictures as a class, really "any pitcure that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures is a metapicture." (57)