Image analogical medium

Image analogical medium is the content through which consciousness makes an absent or nonexistent object present without turning it into a real object of perception. Jean-Paul Sartre uses the concept to connect mental images, photographs, drawings, bodily performances, and works of art: their media differ, but each can serve an intention that aims beyond the medium itself. The distinction matters because an image is not a small object stored in the mind, nor is an artwork’s imagined subject identical to its physical support. What makes something function as a medium for an image is its place within an act of consciousness.

Definition and intentional structure

An image aims at an object that is not present, or, in the case of fiction, that does not exist. The intention does not proceed through arbitrary content: the content must bear some analogy to the object, and it functions as a representative rather than as itself. In imagining Pierre, for example, the intention is directed at Pierre, not at a photograph, caricature, or mental representation considered as an object in its own right. Each can help make Pierre present to consciousness, but none removes his absence.

The medium’s representative role depends on how consciousness apprehends it. A photograph can first be treated as a physical thing, examined for its colours or the materials used to make it; a caricature can likewise be studied as lines and colours without attending to what it depicts. Under an imaging intention, those same features serve another purpose: they evoke the absent person. The medium is not inherently an image in every context. Its function changes with the centre of reference established by consciousness.

Sartre extends this account to mental imagery, whose matter is harder to isolate from the intention that animates it. A person may initially try to represent Pierre without any content, then find something emerging that fulfils that intention. Mental images and physical representations therefore share a general structure, though the matter through which each operates varies. The mental image is not simply a private counterpart of a photograph; it is a distinct kind of medium whose significance arises within the imaging act.

Different media, one representative function

The account includes contents drawn from the world of things, such as illustrations, photographs, caricatures, and an actor’s imitation, as well as contents drawn from psychic life, including movements and feelings. Some cases combine external and psychic elements. A face may be discerned in a flame or in the arabesques of a tapestry; hypnagogic images, Sartre notes, are formed from entoptic lights. These examples broaden the concept beyond a mental picture while preserving its central distinction between the representative content and the object intended through it.

The same physical material can also support different readings. A schematic drawing, for example, may first appear as lines organized by perceptual form. Three segments meeting at a point can be taken as a fork, while another line remains separate. To see a face in the drawing requires a changed intention: one segment is taken as the forehead, another as an eyebrow, a descending segment as the nose, a point as an eye, and a sinuous line as the mouth and chin. The black marks alone do not supply the whole face. The viewer organizes them through eye movements and bodily activity, including the enactment of a line that is not actually drawn. In the image, those movements are projected onto the lines as representative properties.

Sartre contrasts this with perceptual figures that direct the eye through their own structure or through acquired habits. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the angles organize contrary or continuing eye movements, and these are attributed to the line segments as extension or force. Such a perceived quality remains on the ground of perception; it does not by itself make the figure an image. With a schematic image, by contrast, knowledge directs movements that are experienced as spontaneous and projected onto the drawing as hypothetical directions. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a running man in the lines while remaining aware that the movement has been freely projected there. The lines are the support; the imaged movements are the representative elements.

The medium and the real world

Image analogical medium does not mark out a separate realm of image-things. Sartre argues that the same objects can function in a present, perceptual way or as images, depending on the attitude of consciousness. The real and imaginary are not two inventories of objects; they differ in how consciousness groups and interprets what it encounters. The medium’s role is consequently relational: what matters is not only what content is given, but whether it is apprehended as itself or as a means of intending something absent or nonexistent.

This distinction also explains why an image cannot simply be inserted into perception to supply qualities that the senses supposedly leave out. The irreal Pierre and the real table before the viewer belong to radically distinct acts of consciousness; when Pierre’s image surges up, the table vanishes from the scene. Sartre therefore rejects an account in which perception is completed by projecting imagined qualities onto real objects. Drawing on work by Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka, he points instead to the persistence of formal structures across changes of position as one possible way to explain why perception can give more than is immediately seen. Perception also includes unformulated intentions that enrich the present object without positing separate objects: the visible upper face of an ashtray, for instance, is apprehended in a way that implies an underside and its relation to the table. These constituting intentions remain distinct from imaging consciousness, which makes its object present through an analogical representative.

Art and aesthetic experience

The concept is central to Sartre’s account of artworks. In a portrait, the canvas and its real layers of paint are not identical with the depicted person as an aesthetic object. The painted Charles VIII appears when consciousness turns from realizing the material painting to an imaging attitude. The canvas does not conceal an already-present aesthetic object; it provides the material medium through which that irreal object can be apprehended.

The painter does not, on this account, transfer an initially private mental image into reality. Real brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, and varnish make up the material support, but they are not themselves the object of aesthetic appreciation. The painter constructs a material analogon through which a viewer can grasp an image. Each stroke belongs to the intended irreal whole, and the painting is a physical thing that an imaging attitude allows to be visited by the depicted object. There is no passage that makes the imaginary object real.

This distinction separates sensory pleasure from aesthetic appreciation without denying that the former can contribute to the latter. A red pigment may give a direct sensual pleasure when considered by itself. In a painting, however, it is apprehended as part of an irreal whole—for example, as the red of a rug near a table. Its woollen quality and tactile associations, like the contrasting green of a stiff, shiny wall covering, belong to the way the depicted scene is imagined. Aesthetic enjoyment is real as an experience, but it is directed through the canvas toward the irreal object rather than treated as a pleasure produced by a colour alone. Sartre accordingly connects aesthetic disinterestedness to the imaging consciousness that apprehends its object as irreal.

The same structure applies to fiction and performance. A novelist, poet, or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal analogons; an actor uses the whole body as a medium for Hamlet. The actor need not believe in the realizing sense that he is Hamlet, yet his feelings, strength, and gestures can be mobilized as representatives of the character’s feelings and conduct. Even actual tears are apprehended by actor and audience as Hamlet’s irreal tears. The character is not made real in the actor; rather, the actor is irrealized in the character. Across these cases, the medium enables access to an imagined object precisely without abolishing its irreality.