(University of the Free State, 2010) De Villiers-Human, Suzanne
English: This article confronts possible effects of the crisis of intercultural communication by
investigating the transforming power of images to reorient or transfigure accepted
cultural meanings. With current image theorists such as W J T Mitchell and Hans
Belting it emphasises that the image’s power to self-create or to possess a life,
presence or soul of its own – that aspect of the image that makes it seem animated
and able to trap or immerse – is not merely a relic of ritual, cultic or idolatrous
comprehensions, but may rather be one of the constant features in ontologies of
the image.