The anti-sign: anti-representationalism in contemporary art theory Ian Verstegen ABSTRACT This essay addresses the ‘lure of immediacy’ in visual studies that rejects the sign, semiotics and interpretation. Placing this trend within a larger debate over representation, it first politicises anti- representation by showing the limitations of such a position within contemporary politics. Next, it reviews how anti- representation has been treated in discussions of works of art. Noting the unfruitfulness of an irreconcilable double truth, it proposes the duality of structure from social theory as a way to overcome limitations in visual theory. Then it shows how an image has a perfectly understandable duality. Finally, addressing the issue of presence that is held to be important to anti- representationalists, the paper concludes with a semiotic account of its mode of being. most strictly speaking, even an idea, except in the sense of a possibility, or Firstness, cannot be an Icon. (Peirce 1955: 105) Words such as image, picture, and Bild work in art-historical discourse as placeholders: we do not put much pressure on them, or expect them to carry much of the argument . . . the words image, picture, and Bild in art history, theory, and criticism, and in visual studies, may work by not being analyzed. (Elkins 2011: 2) A number of writers have recently argued that images are not things, meanings or con- cepts. They are transparent, immanent, present without mediation. We are post- human. We are immanent. The image is immanent. 1 Typical is John Lechte, a student of Julia Kristeva, who after rehearsing arguments about image culture in ancient Greece argues that the quasi defiance of the concept is not just an occurrence in relation to the effigy and apparition, as was the case in Ancient Greece, but is the same across the ages. This is part of the ontology of the image. The image, then, is essentially nonconceptual. It is not the object of any mode of theoria: theoria, which from Plato to the church fathers means contemplation, meditation, vision. The image is an invisibility – or at least is ‘independent of visibility’– as Marie- José Mondzain shows in the context of Byzantine culture. (Mondzain 1996, 2005; Lechte 2013) Of course, ancient Greece and Byzantine Greece had two very different traditions of images, both from each other and from our own traditions. Yet these are taken to © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Ian Verstegen ianverstegen@yahoo.com CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE, 2016 VOL. 57, NO. 2, 215–227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2016.1149500 Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 12:28 11 May 2016