While the “hypericons” are philosophers’ strategic use of image to their thought, the “metapictures” are in turn arts’ intervention to the philosophical process to ask the status of them. Nonetheless, both concepts are cooperative, or rather mutually constitutive. Mitchell thinks that the “metapicture is a piece of moveable cultural apparatus, one which may serve a marginal role as illustrative device or a central role as a kind of summary image,” and this is actually what he called “hypericon” which “encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge”(Picture 49). The “metapictures” or “discursive hypericons” – such as Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, Alain’s “Egyptian Life Class,” or Steinberg’s “New World” as well as camera obscura, tabula rasa, cave and so on – “epitomize the tendency of the technologies of visual representation to acquire a figurative centrality in theories of the self and its knowledges”(Picture 49). However, these metapictures “are not merely epistemological models, but ethical, political, and aesthetic “assemblages” that allow us to observe observers” and they “don’t merely serve as illustrations to theory; they picture theory”(Picture 49).
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