Between Picture and Proposition: Torturing Paintings in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Abstract

Art history is currently mining a number of disciplines to find adequate accounts of the differences between pictures, writing and other graphic marks. Anthropology, archaeology, semiotics, linguistics, speech act theory, various strains of psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism and literary criticism have all been pressed into service. In this chorus of ideas and contributors Wittgenstein’s name is largely missing. One reason for that omission is his emphasis on simple schemata, "games" and logical relations at the expense of pictures. Even though the entire system of the Tractatus is based on Wittgenstein’s "picture theory," it has seemed that he meant principally "proposition" instead of "picture," thus excluding the very nonpropositional elements that are of interest in actual pictures. Here I argue that the "picture theory" actually is about pictures in several important senses, and that it offers a more rigorous and logical model of graphic meaning than many later theories.