Opening Up the Indexicality of the Image, Again

This virtual roundtable was conducted from May 10 to June 2, 2020 over e-mail, across four rounds of statements and responses. The participants were Christopher Ball, Meghanne Barker, Elizabeth Edwards, Tomas Kolich, W. J. T. Mitchell, Daniel Morgan, and Constantine V. Nakassis, who also functioned as the moderator of the discussion. Oriented by the question of the indexicality of the image, the roundtable covered a wide range of topics—from COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. protests against racial injustice to indexical desire and anxiety, animation, realism, ideology and ontology, Peircean semiotics versus Saussurean semiology, the concept and use of indexicality in art history, linguistic anthropology, film studies, photography studies, among other topics.