Farewell To Visual Studies: Edited by James Elkins, Gustav Frank, and Sunil Manghani

the stone art theory institutes : volume five
FA R E W E L L TO
V I S UA L S T U DI E S
Edited by James Elkins, Gustav Frank, and Sunil Manghani

FA REWEL L T O VISUAL STUDIES
THE STONE A RT TH EORY INS TITU T E S
Edited by James Elkins
Vol. 1
ART AND GLOBALIZATION
Vol. 2
WHAT IS AN IMAGE?
Vol. 3
WHAT DO ARTISTS KNOW?
Vol. 4
BEYOND THE AESTHETIC AND THE
ANTI-A ESTHETIC
Vol. 5
FAREWELL TO VISUAL STUDIES
The Stone Art Theory This series is dedicated to

Institutes is a series Howard and Donna Stone,
of books on five of the longtime friends of the
principal unresolved School of the Art Institute
problems in contemporary of Chicago.
art theory. The series
attempts to be as
international, inclusive,
and conversational as
possible in order to give
a comprehensive sense
of the state of thinking on
each issue. All together,
the series involves more
than three hundred
scholars from more than
sixty countries.
T H E S T O N E A RT T H E O RY I N S T I T U T E S V O LU M E 5
FAREWELL TO VISUAL
STUDIES
edited by james elkins , sunil manghani , and gustav frank
The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University
Publication Data The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Associa-
All rights reserved tion of American University Presses.
Farewell to visual studies / edited Printed in the
by James Elkins, Sunil Manghani, United States of America It is the policy of The Pennsyl-
and Gustav Frank. Published by The Pennsylvania vania State University Press to
pages cm—(The Stone art State University Press, use acid-free paper. Publications
theory institutes ; volume 5) University Park, PA 16802-1003 on uncoated stock satisfy the
Summary: “A transdisciplinary minimum requirements of American
collection of essays discussing National Standard for Informa-
the identity, nature, and future of tion Sciences—Permanence of
visual studies as a laboratory for Paper for Printed Library Material,
thinking about relations between ansi z39.48–1992.
fields including art history, cultural
studies, sociology, visual anthro- This book is printed on paper that
pology, film studies, media studies, contains 30% post-consumer
postcolonial studies, philosophy waste.
of history, the science of vision,
and science studies”—Provided by
publisher.
Includes bibliographical references
and index.
isbn 978-0-271-07077-3 (cloth : alk.
paper)
1. Art and society.
2. Culture.
3. Visual communication.
I. Elkins, James, 1955– , edi-
tor. II. Manghani, Sunil, editor.
III. Frank, Gustav, editor. IV. Series:
Stone art theory institutes (Series) ;
v. 5.
n72.s6f37 2015
701’.03—dc23
2015019619
This series is dedicated to
Howard and Donna Stone,

longtime friends of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
CONTENTS
Series Preface 7 A General Theory of Visual Johanna Drucker

ix Culture 200
109 Vanessa R. Schwartz
204
8 The Political
119 Bernd Stiegler
207
Introductions 9 Science Studies
First Introduction: 133 Lisa Zaher
210
Starting Points 10 The Place of the Image
James Elkins 143 Stephan Günzel
3 214
11 Envoi Bernhard J. Dotzler
Second Introduction: 153 215
Affect, Agency, and
Aporia: An Indiscipline Sjoukje van der Meulen
with Endemic 218
Ambivalences and a Charles W. Haxthausen
Lack of Pictures Assessments 222
Gustav Frank Preface Asbjørn Grønstad
10 Sunil Manghani 225
Third Introduction: 161 Øyvind Vågnes
Visual Studies, or, This Hans Dam Christensen 228
is Not a Diagram 166 Mark Reinhardt
Sunil Manghani Emmanuel Alloa 230
20 170 Charlotte Klonk
Nell Andrew 234
174 Yolaine Escande
Martin A. Berger 238
The Seminars 177 Linda Báez Rubí
Marta Zarzycka 241
1 Histories: Visuelle Kultur 179
31 Miguel Á. Hernández-
Theodore Gracyk Navarro
2 Histories: Anglo-American 181 246
Visual Studies, 1989–1999
43 Tom Holert Isabelle Decobecq
184 249
3 Histories: 2000–2010 Julia Orell Tirza True Latimer
57 185 252
4 Histories: The Present Kıvanç Kılınç Anna Notaro
Decade 187 255
67 Mark Linder
5 Histories: Bildwissenschaft 190
81 Michele Emmer
6 Image, Meaning, and Power
194 Notes on the Contributors
259
99 Terri Weissman
198 Index
267
S E R I E S P R E FA C E
In the usual course of things, art theory happens invisibly, without attracting
attention. Concepts like picture, visual art, and realism circulate in newspapers,
galleries, and museums as if they were as obvious and natural as words like dog,
cat, and goldfish. Art theory is the air the art world breathes, and it is breathed
carelessly, without thought. It is the formless stuff out of which so many justi-
fications are conjured. Art theory also happens in universities and art schools,
where it is studied and nurtured like a rare orchid. And art theory happens in
innumerable academic conferences, which are sometimes studded with insights
but are more often provisional and inconclusive. In those academic settings,
words like picture, visual art, and realism are treated like impossibly complicated
machines whose workings can hardly be understood. Sometimes, then, what
counts as art theory is simple and normal, and other times it seems to be the
most difficult subject in visual art.
A similarity links these different ways of using theory. In the art world as in
academia, it often feels right just to allude to an concept like picture, and let its
flavor seep into the surrounding conversation. That is strange because picture
is so important to so many people, and it leads to wayward conversations. The
books in this series are intended to push hard on that strangeness, by spending
as much time as necessary on individual concepts and the texts that exemplify
them. Some books are more or less dedicated to particular words: volume 1
focuses on globalization, translation, governmentality, and hybridity; volume 2
explores image, picture, and icon. Volume 3 is concerned with the idea that art is
research, which produces knowledge. Volume 4 is about the aesthetic, the anti-
aesthetic, and the political; and volume 5 concentrates on visual studies, visual
culture, and visuality. This series is like an interminable conversation around a
dictionary—or like the world’s most prolix glossary of art. That isn’t to say that
the purpose of these conversations is to fix meanings: on the contrary, the idea
is to work hard enough so that what seemed obdurate and slippery, as Wittgen-
stein said, begins to fracture and crack.
Each book in this series started as a week-long event, held in Chicago.
No papers were given (except as evening lectures, which are not recorded in
these books). For a week, five faculty and a group of twenty-five scholars met in
closed seminars. In preparation for the week they had read over eight hundred
pages of assigned texts. The week opened with a three hour panel discussion
among the faculty, continued with four and a half days of seminars (six hours
x series preface
each day), and ended with a five hour panel discussion. All thirty-five hours of it
was taped and edited, and the pertinent portions are presented here.
This series is a refinement of a previous book series called The Art Seminar,
which appeared from 2005 to 2008.1 Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Summer
Theory Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that
is more inclusive and less coherent than some art theory produced in North
America and western Europe since the advent of poststructuralism. The guid-
ing idea is that theorizing on visual art has become increasingly formalized and
narrow, even as art practices have become wildly diverse. Both of the book series
are meant to capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic,
and both include people at the far ends of the spectrum of their subjects—so far
from one another that in some cases they were reluctant even to sit together
in the events, or participate in the books. Some conversations are genuinely
dialectic, others are abrupt encounters, and still others are unaccountable mis-
understandings. All those species of communication are recorded as faithfully as
possible, because they are evidence of the state of understanding of each field.2
The Introduction to each volume is meant as a straightforward and clear
review of the critical situation leading up to the seminars. The Art Seminar
books then had a set of essays to help set the stage for the transcribed discussions.
There are no essays in this series, because it is not possible to usefully condense
the hundreds of pages of texts that informed these discussions. (References can
be found in the transcripts.) The omission of essays makes this series more “dif-
ficult” than The Art Seminar, but the literature of art theory has grown beyond
the point where it can be helpfully anthologized. The books in this series are not
introductions to the various subjects they treat, but attempts to move forward
given the current state of discourse in each field. In that they follow the lead of
the sciences, where more advanced textbooks necessarily presuppose more intro-
ductory material.
After each year’s week-long event, the editors selected excerpts from the
thirty-five hours of audio tapes and and produced a rough-edited transcript.
It was given to each of the participants, who were invited to edit their contribu-
tions and add references. After several rounds of editing the transcript was sent
out to forty or fifty people who did not attend the event. They were asked to
write assessments, which appear here in the order they were received. The asses-
sors were asked to consider the conversation from a distance, noting its strengths
1. The topics of the seven volumes of The Art of art criticism are discussed in an exchange
Seminar: Art History Versus Aesthetics (2006), at the end of The State of Art Criticism. The
Photography Theory (2007), Is Art History incoherence of theorizing on the Renaissance
Global? (2007), The State of Art Criticism, coed- is the subject of another exchange at the end
ited with Michael Newman (2008), Renaissance of Renaissance Theory. My own thoughts about
Theory, coedited with Robert Williams (2008), the very strange second volume of that series,
Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue Photography Theory, are in “Is Anyone Listen-
(2008), and Re-Enchantment, coedited with ing?,” Photofile 80 (Winter 2007): 80. And I
David Morgan (2008). All are published by Rout- have ended the Art Seminar series with a look
ledge (Taylor and Francis), New York. back at the different incoherences of all seven
2. One function of these two series is to subjects: “Envoi to the Art Seminar Series,”
demonstrate that different fields have different in Re-Enchantment, 305–10.
kinds of incoherence. The particular disunities
xi series preface
and its blind spots, in any style and at any length. As the assessments came in,
they were distributed to people who hadn’t yet completed theirs, so that later
assessments often comment on earlier ones, building an intermittent conversa-
tion through the book.
One of the central concerns of this series is making talk about art more dif-
ficult. For some readers, art theory may seem too abstruse and technical, but at
heart it has a different problem: it is too easy. Both the intricate art theory prac-
ticed in academies, and the nearly invisible theory that suffuses galleries and art
fairs, are reasonably easy to do reasonably well. As Wittgenstein knew, the hard-
est problems are the ones that are right in front of us: picture, visual art, realism.
The purpose of the books in this series is to do some damage to our sense that
we understand words like those.
A Special Acknowledgment
This is the kind of project that is not normally possible in academic life, because
it requires an unusual outlay of time and effort: a month of preparatory reading,
a concerted week without the distractions of papers being read or lectures that
are off-topic.
The originating events at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are called
the Stone Summer Theory Institute, after Howard and Donna Stone, whose gift
made this series possible. They are dedicated collectors of postminimal art, with
an eye for the most ambitious and characteristic pieces by a wide range of artists,
from John McCracken to Gerhard Richter, Steve McQueen, Janine Antoni, Luc
Turmans, Michael Krebber, and Marlene Dumas. What is remarkable about
their support is that it is directed to content and not infrastructure or display.
In the art world, there is no end to the patronage of display: corporate sponsors
can be found for most every art project, and galleries traditionally depend on
individuals and corporations for much of their programming. In that ocean of
public patronage there is virtually nothing directed at the question of what art
means. The market plummets onward, sometimes—as in the case of contempo-
rary Chinese painting—with very little serious critical consideration or inter-
pretation. The Stones’ gift is extremely unusual. Their own collecting interests
are in line with the subjects of this series: the theories addressed in these books
are only important if it is granted that the history of art theory exerts a pressure
on the dissipated present, just as postminimalism is crucial mainly, and possibly
only, for those who experience the modernist past as a challenge and not merely
an attractive backdrop.
So this series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone: if more patrons
supported art history, theory, and criticism, the art world might well make more
sense.
xii series preface
Special thanks, also, to Sunil Manghani and Gustav Frank, my coeditors

on this book, especially for their excellent work conceptualizing the event and
bringing order to the Seminars and Assessments.
The Topics in This Series

Volume 1, Art and Globalization, is about writing in the “biennale culture” that
now determines much of the art market. Literature on the worldwide dissemina-
tion of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the
same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in politics, postco-
lonial theory, sociology, and anthropology. The volume is an experiment, to see
what happens when the two discourses are brought together.
Volume 2, What Is an Image?, asks how well we understand what we mean
by picture and image. The art world depends on there being something special
about the visual, but that something is seldom spelled out. The most interesting
theorists of those fundamental words are not philosophers but art historians,
and this book interrogates the major theories, including those with theological
commitments, those based in phenomenology, and those concerned principally
with social meanings.
Volume 3, What Do Artists Know?, is about the education of artists. The MFA
degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving way to the PhD
in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art con-
tinue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories
that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education,
and the most promising current conceptualizations.
Volume 4, Beyond the Anti-Aesthetic, is about the fact that now, almost thirty
years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative
to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse
is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less
negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art.
Volume 5, Farewell to Visual Studies, is a forum on the state of the once-new
discipline (inaugurated in the early 1990s) that promised to be the site for the
study of visuality in all fields, inside and outside of art. Despite the increasing
number of departments worldwide, visual studies remains a minority interest
with in increasingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and subjects. Hence
our farewell.
INTRODUCTIONS
FIRST INTRODUCTION
S TA R T I N G P O I N T S
James Elkins
This text is adapted from the introductory lecture, given on July 17, 2011.
Why Farewell to Visual Studies? Our title is meant to raise the question of visual
studies’ successes and failures, and to promote a critical orientation in a field that
has, until now, often been content about its accomplishments and its history.
The three of us who organized the event and edited this book have very differ-
ent senses of what needs rethinking, what is promising, and what might be left
behind. In this brief introduction I will list some of my own concerns, things
that were on my mind when I first named and advertised this event in 2006.
Some of them appear in the pages that follow; others don’t, and that’s how it
should be. Each of the thirty people involved in the 2011 event, and the twenty
additional writers who have contributed Assessments to this book, have different
senses of visual studies. As in the other books in this series, the idea is to give
voice to as many perspectives as possible, and not to constrain critical discourse.
I like to think we are now in the third generation of visual studies. The
people who founded the first Anglo-American programs of visual studies are in
their late fifties, sixties, and seventies: Tom Mitchell, Douglas Crimp, Michael
Holly, Keith Moxey, Janet Wolff. Their first students are now well established—
people like Lev Manovich and Howard Singerman. I think of all those scholars,
and many others I’m not naming, as part of a single generation. I am in the
same group, except that I wasn’t trained by anyone engaged with visual studies.
A second generation, now in their thirties, forties, and early fifties, are the later
students of those scholars. In this event, we had Bridget Cooks and Jeanette
Roan, both graduates of the Rochester program, and now teaching in Irvine and
the California College of the Arts. Sunil Manghani, one of the faculty, would
perhaps be part of that group as well, and so would Gustav Frank, even though
he was trained in literary history. This kind of schema is of course impossible to
sustain, as Wilhelm Pinder discovered (he attempted to write a history of art by
generations), but I propose it in order to say that there is a third group, a third
generation, people now in their twenties and early thirties: current graduate
students. In my experience, their concerns are nearly disconnected from the
concerns that animate our discussions here. I raise that point several times in the
Seminars, just to signal that the concerns about history, politics, and visuality
are often put in ways that make more sense to the first- and second-generation
scholars than the current generation.
4 First Introduction
This was echoed in an interesting way in a book I was editing when the
Farewell to Visual Studies event was in progress; it has since been published as
Theorizing Visual Studies: Thinking Through the Discipline (2012).1 That book is
composed of seventy short chapters, all written by graduate students around the
world. My coeditors were also graduate students at the time we assembled the
book. The idea was to produce a next-generation reader for visual studies that
did not depend on midcareer scholars. My contributions were limited to the
introductory material. One introduction was an essay on the history of visual
studies, which has a fair amount of detail (including a number of texts and
institutions that are not mentioned in this book). I wrote it around the time
of the Farewell to Visual Studies event, well before we had gathered all seventy
chapters for the book. It turned out that overwhelmingly, the graduate student
authors were not interested in the deeper history of their discipline. I thought
that was striking, and I decided to publish the introduction anyway, with the
title “An Introduction to the Visual Studies That Is Not in This Book.” The
graduate students’ interests, their sense of visual studies’ history, their favorite
theorists, their preferred journals and zines, and their central visual practices,
artists, and objects are significantly different from what we talk about in these
pages.2
Farewells
I have a list of things I’d like to say farewell to, and another list of visual stud-
ies’ unfulfilled promises. Farewells and absences. Here they are, in no particular
order. Most of them are expanded in my Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction.3
Even though that book was written in 2002 and published in 2003, I would
defend most of its points—I think they still remain unsolved problems for the
field.
(1) Visual studies should be harder to do. At one point in the Seminars,
Keith Moxey quotes the end of my book, to the effect that I would like visual
studies to be more ambitious, more wide-ranging, more difficult, slower, and
less self-assured. I still find the majority of the writing in visual studies to be too
easy, by which I mean it is not difficult enough to write an essay that is fit for
publication. It would be good, I think, if visual studies interpretations, no mat-
ter what their methodologies, purposes, tactics, or strategies—we distinguish
those in the Seminars—would stumble over their assumptions, hesitate over
1. James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen event, and that tallies with my own experience
Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuennen, eds., elsewhere. In part that is as it should be, but
(New York: Routledge, 2012). it also points to a disjunction between what is
2. It can be argued that the journals and being published, in many cases by middle-aged
monographs of visual studies are not serving scholars, and what is currently of interest. The
current practice. This is quantified, and graphed, “third generation” of visual studies, I think, is
in It is also present, anecdotally, in this book: looking elsewhere. Even though , , , and others
in Section 4 of the Seminars, we talk about the fill some gaps in the periodical literature, single-
the preeminent publication for English-language authored monographs and readers are lagging
visual studies. Even though the Faculty assigned far behind the interests of current students and
a number of readings from it, the is apparently younger scholar.
not consistently read by the participants in the 3. Elkins, (New York: Routledge, 2003).
their terms, ponder their formal and contextual analyses. I would like interpre-
tations to slow, perhaps not to the extreme of writers like Joseph Koerner, Tim
Clark, or Georges Didi-Huberman (their slownesses are products of different
disciplinary concerns), but at least to the point where the author’s voice can
emerge, questioning her own thoughts and the adequacy of her writing. Fare-
well, then, to essays that are not as challenging as they possibly can be. I prefer
my essays to be uncertain, wavering, obdurately difficult, and rewarding on sev-
eral rereadings.
(2) Visual studies continues to depend on a relatively small, fairly fixed set
of theorists. When I wrote this in 2003, I was thinking of Lacan, Foucault,
Marx, Benjamin, Butler, and Barthes, and they are still as prominent. Now the
list would include Rancière, Badiou, Bourriaud, Muñoz, and Malabou, but the
general configuration is similar. I wonder how different visual studies would
look if it adopted Hugo Münsterberg or Béla Balázs (both are mentioned in
the Seminars), or contemporaries such as Hermann Broch. And why not stray
further away? In the book I proposed writing on some subject of topical interest
using Ranke, Burckhardt, Mario Praz or Waldemar Deonna, Henri Frankfort,
Elias Canetti or Robert Musil, Fernando Pessoa or Ludwig Hohl, Giambattista
Vico or Giordano Bruno? Why not take our cues in gender theory from Sor
Juana Iñes de la Cruz instead of Butler, Muñoz, or Irigaray? There are everyday
reasons why this might not work, and it isn’t a good strategy if you don’t have
a permanent teaching position. But that doesn’t mean the field as a whole can’t
stray beyond Benjamin. Farewell, then, to Benjamin, at least for a while.
(3) Visual studies continues to look mainly at modern and contemporary
visualities. This is explored in the Seminars by Michael Holly, Keith Moxey,
Whitney Davis, and Gustav Frank. As Michael Holly notes, it appeared at first
that visual studies would combine new theories with visual objects from all cul-
tures, and especially from the premodern West. It has not turned out that way.
The overwhelming majority of dissertations that engage visual studies are con-
cerned with art from modernism onward. Visual studies has evolved a more
or less predictable canon of interests, which includes popular imagery, kitsch,
and camp, mixed with some contemporary art.4 Its one medium whose his-
tory extends back before modernism is photography, for reasons that we explore
in the Seminars. Ideally, visual studies would be interested equally in art, and
visual practices, from any culture or period. It shouldn’t have a flavor or a taste:
it should range over the visual without prior aesthetic commitments. So, farewell
4. In the book , I proposed a list, which is Barbie, Burning Man, contemporary curiosity
only partly tongue in cheek: the examples in cabinets, snow globes, the history of buoys,
it are real ones, and they indicate the flavor of Pez, Sen-Sens, microscopic sculpture, utensils
Anglo-American visual studies, which prefers made for babies, macramé, marbled endpa-
camp and politics in equal measures. The list pers, reproduction Victorian half-hoop rings at
began “sex and sexuality, Las Vegas, Hollywood Claire’s Accessories, AstroTurf, ivory mah jongg
(and Bollywood and Nollywood), depictions of sets, underwater Monopoly, found footage from
death and violence, international airports, cor- 1950s health and safety films, email greeting
porate headquarters, shopping malls, contem- cards, tamagochi, restaurant decorations, Cat
porary fine art such as video and installation, Clocks . . . and many topics in photography.”
transgenic art, Balinese tourist art, Bakelite,
to the usual subjects. Let’s write on something new: the world is filled with
objects beyond our current interests.5
Absences
This is a wish list: things I’d like to see visual studies become.
(1) Images need to start arguing. If visual studies is to fulfill its promise
of thinking of images differently than art history, then the most fundamental
challenge is to stop taking images as illustrations of theories, exemplifications of
historical arguments, or mnemonics for encounters with the original, and begin
employing images to argue. This is an enormous subject, diffusely theorized and
hinted in many dozens of publications from Benjamin onward. The introduc-
tion to Theorizing Visual Studies sets out a theory about how images can argue,
how they can theorize, even philosophize; it gathers some crucial texts and con-
solidates a list of specific ways that images can work alongside, or even against,
the arguments in the text. Still, even though that’s the principal guiding idea of
the book, it has been very difficult getting that to happen. Despite the rhetoric
about “image theory,” images in visual studies continue to be simply illustrations
of the theories they accompany.
(2) Visual studies needs to make more adequate use of its images. This sounds
similar, but is a different problem, one visual studies has in common with art
history. Its images are underutilized, underdescribed. Here is an example of how
difficult it is to use images, and how important to keep trying. Two recent books,
Tom Mitchell’s Cloning Terror and Nick Mirzoeff’s Watching Babylon, are con-
cerned with contemporary images of war, and how they make their way through
the world. Both books, I think, read their images very quickly, and in Mirzoeff’s
case there is a reason for that: he says the images have been entirely packaged
by the military-industrial complex, leaving us little freedom to engage them.
Recently I came across a project headed by a man named John Pike, called
Public Eye. Pike commissioned surveillance satellites to photograph sensitive
sites like Dimona, Israel’s nuclear facility. He then got experts to interpret the
images, and he posted the analyses. In many cases, he ended up with a rela-
tively small amount of textual information, and the mesmerizing satellite pho-
tographs of Dimona, Pyongyang, and other sites remain largely uninterpreted,
5. I have, on my office shelves, books and outlining the use of the universal petrographic
pamphlets on the following subjects. I haven’t stage, a disused technology for mineralogy;
collected these for the purposes of writing visual a tabulated (visual) study of the ethnic slurs
studies essays about them, but they are as good used for different nationalities in Chicago in
examples as any of what waits for us outside our the 1960s; an account of image formation in
usual subjects: Middle Eastern camel tattoos; side-looking radar; and a study of the shapes
an atlas of sediments found in human urine; a of candle flames. And aside from this sort of
stereo slide set of human anatomy; a mono- endlessness, there is the central question of
graph on Mongolian postal stamps; several why visual studies ignores the very commonest
books on the “Messier marathon,” a stargazing sorts of images—the uninteresting, ordinary
competition; a book on the identification of advertisements and graphics that fill our cities
pollen with a light microscope; several guides and screens and are far more common than
to snowflakes; a small collection of mid- other images that are complicated, ambiguous,
twentieth-century passports with stamps and unusual, and therefore widely studied.
seals; a flier on stamped metal labels; a book
and ultimately unused. His project shows that even with complete control of the
visual material, and even with expert analysis and all the necessary technology,
the visual doesn’t seem to matter much.6 I take it this is an endemic problem
in visual studies. The nonvisual concerns of visual studies are often enough the
majority of what we do, and the visual is underutilized. We need to dwell on the
visual, in the visual.
(3) Visual studies needs conversations about its own history. The discipline
of art history has a complicated and continuously developing sense of its own
historiography. The history and historiography of art history are traditionally
taught at graduate level. Visual studies has a shallower history, so it would seem
that it could engage that history more readily; but there is not yet any common
or shared sense of what that history might be. I am writing these lines after hav-
ing completed the event in Chicago, and it seems clear to me that no matter
what else this book might accomplish, it spends enough time on visual stud-
ies’ histories (in the plural) so that the historiography of the field—by which
I mean discussions about the pertinence of different texts, written in different
decades—can more easily be a part of every student’s sense of the field. I hope
this book might be seen as marking a moment in the history of visual studies
in which it becomes more aware of its multiple histories, its deeper historical
connections.
(4) Visual studies shouldn’t bypass non-art images and scientific images.
The Faculty and Fellows in the Seminars include a disproportionate number of
scholars who are interested in science studies. Among the Faculty, I have been
engaged in these issues, and so have Whitney Davis and Lisa Cartwright. That
made the event a good place to raise, once again, the agnosticism of most of
visual studies in regard to science. In Seminar 8, an interesting contrast develops
between Whitney Davis’s interests and Lisa Cartwright’s. Whitney would like
visual studies scholars to read and engage with the findings of postwar vision
science, and he is interested in neuroaesthetics and the cognitive psychology of
vision. Lisa’s interests are in the sociology, ethnography, and historical study of
the sciences, in fields such as laboratory studies and media studies. From her
point of view, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense to look at the findings of recent
science: what matters, instead, are the contexts in which science has engaged
media. My own interests have been in the production and interpretation of
scientific images. All three of us, as different as our approaches are, are outliers
in relation to the bulk of work in visual studies, which remains almost entirely
uninterested in imaging in science, mathematics, and engineering. Especially in
the Anglo-American domain, that lack of interest is coupled with an agnosticism
about the truth of the claims of science: most younger scholars, I think, wouldn’t
go anywhere near that question—but it is crucial to orient any work that consid-
ers imaging in the sciences.
6. www.globalsecurity.org/eye/index.html,
accessed August 11, 2011 (the site has not been
active since 2006).
(5) Visual studies should be engaged with the phenomenology of the mak-

ing of images: like art history, it has yet to think seriously about what kinds of
knowledge can come from the making of art. Few writers in visual studies also
make art. Of the participants in this event, several of us—Sunil Manghani, Lisa
Cartwright, and myself—have either made art or experimented with making
in order to think about writing. This is a long-standing interest of mine, ever
since I moved from the MFA to the MA at the University of Chicago, and the
department in which I currently teach is constituted as one of the few visual
studies programs in which students also make art, and theorize the connections
to their practice. By and large, visual studies remains a university discipline, and
its spaces are seminar rooms, lecture halls, and libraries, and not studios. Visual
studies is often taught to art students, and it is part of the pedagogy in institu-
tions like Goldsmiths in London; but the theorization of the relation of practice
to historical and critical writing remains the province of UK-inspired art educa-
tors who work in practice-based PhD programs.7
(6) Visual studies needs to resolve the unclarities of its politics. Midway
through our event, Tom Mitchell sent us his latest essay, “New Rules for Visual
Culture.” One of the rules is that visual studies scholars should tell him what
the politics of visual studies really is. “Someone has to explain to me what the
purpose of visual studies is,” he writes. “What are we trying to accomplish? Are
we amassing a new knowledge project? Exposing and intervening in false con-
sciousness? Producing an archaeology of power?” Section 7 of the Seminars is a
good sampling of the range of ideas regarding the politics in, and of, visual stud-
ies. On the one hand, Anglo-American visual studies has been political from its
beginning; on the other hand, a great deal of current writing is nonpolitical or
apolitical. In Section 7 we consider a spectrum of positions in this respect, from
the idea that the most responsible politics of our moment is a practice of writing
which might not have any consequences in the world, and which is oblique and
ambiguous, to the idea that visual studies is a call to action, requiring scholars to
unveil ideological formations and help students understand the visual regimes in
which they live. From my point of view there are cogent arguments in support of
those and other positions: what concerns me is that there is no debate, in visual
studies, on this issue itself.
(7) Visual studies is confused about ideological critique. A concrete example
of a problem with a particular political position is the one I have called the
Case of the Calvin Klein Suit, and it is pervasive enough to be considered sepa-
rately from the general problem of politics. It is a thought experiment about
a classroom critique of Calvin Klein advertisements. The purpose of the class
is to analyze the desire to own the product, by revealing how the advertising
seeks to construct its viewers. In various forms, that move is a central strategy
of visual studies. The thought experiment is a way of noting that the intrinsic
logic of the class itself is incomplete, because the teacher demonstrates a strategy
7. (New York: New Academia, 2009); and for Art Theory Institutes 3 (University Park: Pennsyl-
an extensive discussion of the state of the field, vania State University Press, 2012).
see , coedited with Frances Whitehead, Stone
of unmasking without saying why it is appropriate to stop after one example.

The class exercise posits unveiling as a desirable end, but nothing in the logic of
visual studies explains why such analysis would not be universally desirable—
why visual studies, in this context, wouldn’t be an unmasking with no end other
than a change in class consciousness.8 The Case of the Calvin Klein Suit comes
up several times in the Seminars, as a token of the difficulty visual studies has in
adjudicating and framing its ideological critiques.
In brief, in sum: at the moment, visual studies is the best place to study
visuality and images in general. It blends art history, cultural studies, sociol-
ogy, visual anthropology, film studies, media studies, postcolonial studies, phi-
losophy of history, the science of vision, and science studies. It promises a new
interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity, or subdisciplinarity, or indisciplinarity,
or postdisciplinarity), and it is effectively a laboratory for thinking about rela-
tions between fields that address the visual.
But it is not yet a general study of visuality and visual practices: it thinks
and works too quickly; it does not reach across the university, or, usually, far
back in time; it is undecided about how it engages politics; it doesn’t include
theories of making; it has a definable canon, including a disproportionate inter-
est in contemporary fine art; it continually returns to the same theorists; it has
an unresolved internal logic and purpose; and often its attachment to images is
unclear; it uses images too cursorily, as illustrations or information; its images
continue to merely illustrate or exemplify theories articulated in the texts, and
they do not, so far, live up to the hopes that a number of writers have about
them, namely that they contain, provoke, direct, or engender thoughts, theories,
and arguments.
8. Elkins, , 70.
SECOND INTRODUCTION
AFFECT, AGENCY, AND APORIA: AN INDISCIPLINE WITH
ENDEMIC AMBIVALENCES AND A LACK OF PICTURES
Gustav Frank
In the summer of 2013, an artist, sending me the catalogue of his recent exhibi-
tion on nonfigurative paintings that got their inspiration from Goethe’s and
Stifter’s novels, feels the need to add a postscript: I disagree with your farewell to
visual studies! What an intricate answer to a complex situation: a painter with a
strong commitment to verbal art defends an academic formation that is based
on a strong antiword affect and an emphasis on non-art imagery. It is exactly the
investment of passion for the visible world, the obsession with neglected sights
and insights, and the longing to find answers for questions that remain unan-
swered, problems that remain unsolved in more usual academic settings, art
institutions, or everyday media practices, and that cannot even be brought to the
fore of existing disciplines and discourses and within the range of their respec-
tive vocabularies—all of which makes up this field of meditations and studies in
visual culture. And it represents a high degree of confusion.
But even beyond the anecdotal level, irritations reign in the field and
remarkably confuse even books that could be understood as introductions to
visual studies (broadly conceived and covering German Bildwissenschaft, French
médiologie, and anglophone visual studies—though Bildwissenschaft and médio-
logie are perceived internationally as synonymous with all efforts in the field,
whereas in the anglophone world visual studies and visual culture seemingly are
reserved for attempts around the Journal of Visual Culture since 2002 (for this
see Sunil’s introductory remarks below). This warrants a brief look at the Ger-
man situation, in which six introductions to the field have been published since
2005.1 As we learned during the Chicago event, in close proximity to works of
art from all over the world in the Art Institute, a major obstacle to debates in
the field is the relatively small number of translations from and into English.
Though these introductions are anything but homogeneous and one could argue
against many of the assumptions and hypotheses they bring to the fore, I want
to draw attention only to highly problematic aspects of two of the volumes.
Bisanz’s strange book announces a cultural studies approach to image studies in
the subtitle, but astonishingly—even if we take into consideration that Kultur-
wissenschaft is indebted to nineteenth-century hermeneutic and historicist tra-
ditions and therefore mostly different from cultural studies—wants by that to
1. In chronological order: Martin Schulz, Ikonischen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspekti-
Ordnungen der Bilder: Eine Einführung in die ven der Bildwissenschaft (Bielefeld: Transcript,
Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2005); Matthias 2010); Sigrid Schade and Silke Wenk, Studien
Bruhn, Das Bild: Theorie—Geschichte—Praxis zur visuellen Kultur: Einführung in ein transdis-
(Berlin: Akademie, 2009); Gustav Frank and Bar- ziplinäres Forschungsfeld (Bielefeld: Transcript,
bara Lange, Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft: 2011); Marius Rimmele and Bernd Stiegler,
Das Bild in der visuellen Kultur (Darmstadt: Visuelle Kulturen / Visual Culture zur Einführung
WBG, 2010); Elize Bisanz, Die Überwindung des (Hamburg: Junius, 2012).
11 Second Introduction
“overcome the iconic,” as the title promises. In the whole volume there are basi-
cally no references to anything published in the field either by the older genera-
tion of Warburg, Panofsky, and the like (with the exception of Merleau-Ponty)
or by the usual suspects, such as Tom Mitchell, Gottfried Boehm, Georges Didi-
Huberman, and Nicholas Mirzoeff.
While Bisanz offers an introduction to a field of objects only, implicitly
denying that there is any relevant research and debate going on, Rimmele and
Stiegler in their introduction explicitly devoted to visual culture cover a broad
variety of initiatives in the field by addressing them through a list of “culturali-
ties” of the eye, reaching from the period eye and the postcolonial eye via the
observing and inner eye to the consuming/consumerist eye and to the scientific
eye. What strikes the reader here is the conclusion the authors draw from their
fresh compilation of the literature in the field in their final summary. They find
that there is no need for further institutional or even disciplinary consolidation
of the field in the German-speaking world because most of the work cited in the
volume is or could have been done within the existing academic disciplines and
their interdisciplinary openness or boundaries respectively. Clearly understood
and beyond any justified critical overview of the results in visual studies, the
claim here is that there can be no surplus value to the study of the eye’s cultur-
alities reached through visual studies. Thus it appears that ambivalence toward
crucial aspects of visuality and imagery is endemic to the field to an extent that
implies a farewell itself.
I will come back in more detail to another sort of ambivalence, the one
toward the agency of images, in a moment. Both are based in aporiae, that is,
they want to reach contradictory goals simultaneously by studying imagery,2
whereas the Chicago event was dedicated to showing a “way out” by saying wel-
come to the laboratory (despite Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar) for thinking
about the visual and saying farewell to certain interiors and narrow limitations of
laboratory space. What we wanted by saying farewell to certain approaches and
practices was not to provoke, but to initiate a process of thought and dialogue.
Rimmele and Stiegler’s assertion puts the crucial question on display insofar
as visual studies has to lay bare its genuine accomplishments that distinguish it
from any other theory and method dealing with the same or similar objects of
study. That difference cannot be the object, that is, image and vision, but how
it is theorized, in which theoretical framework it is conceptualized and studied,
and by which methods it is analyzed and interpreted. In regard to the funda-
mental bias against art history that was a crucial element in founding visual
studies, this means that their relation is like that of physics and chemistry toward
the atomic world: they share object areas but construct different theories about
them. Thus, art history and visual studies share high art artifacts but (must) have
to say different things about them as they appear in the framework of “art” in
2. I want to name just some of the contradic- and visuality, or scholars no longer feel forced
tions at only the institutional level: Scholars to embrace imagery but avoid seeing more than
want to act according to their disciplinary social, cultural, and medial impact on it in it.
protocols but also innovatively include imagery
the former case and in the framework of “visual culture” in the latter. Then a
conditio sine qua non for the existence of visual studies is findings that construe
high art artifacts within a visual culture, for example, within a theory of “inter-
pictoriality” which is interested not in outer relations of art to non-art images
but in inner differentiations and segmentations and emergences of hierarchies
of images.3 Visual studies then can be no longer a “dangerous supplement” of
art history, at least epistemologically, because it addresses art differently from art
history or is merely redundant, but still not dangerous.
All the people who came to visual studies from the 1980s to the 2000s and
still do so came because they were not satisfied with what they practiced, heard,
and learned about the visual within settings different from visual studies. The
main motor of visual studies was the fundamental deficits felt by scholars inter-
ested in imagery, image-making, seeing, observation, and so on. They encoun-
tered problems in their usual disciplinary work that proved unsolvable in their
usual disciplinary frameworks and also in the usual disciplinary framework of
other disciplines they used to join in interdisciplinary projects and programs.4
Though perhaps the nucleus of visual studies programs has been interdiscipli-
narity, putting components together and adding tools from disciplines pro-
vides necessary prerequisites but not the critical mass for a new way of thinking
things visual. It was a consensus about shortcomings, even failures and anxieties,
of established attempts (on a disciplinary and even more generally on an epis-
temological level, that is, the linguistic turn and the hegemony of disciplines in
its wake) that led towards innovation through recombination of their objects,
separated otherwise, and through mutual application of their theories and cross-
fertilization of their methods.
Whatever visual studies might be called right now, be it an indiscipline,
a field, a project, a bunch of competing programs run at various places, it does
not have to be something so much as to deliver a unique contribution to the
study of the visual—that is, vision and visibility and visuality and the practices
and artifacts that appear under that “perspective.” Under the pressure of a fare-
well, visual studies makes no further sense in remaining a special range of objects
of cultural studies; it makes no sense if it is just a refurbished art history that
enhances its objects and modernizes its methods, such as by opening toward
media art practices or relational aesthetics. Uniqueness and inevitability do not
mean being completely new and unexpected; a look at the history of physics as a
discipline shows that neither its objects nor its methods were new when it began
to escape from under the umbrella of philosophy at the end of the eighteenth
century. The opposite is true: because neither objects nor methods were new, its
autonomy produces immediate and easy accessible findings in the first instance.
3. Cf. Interpiktorialität: Theorie und their article on the institutional limitations of

Geschichte der Bild-Bild-Bezüge, edited by such projects: “Visual and Performance Studies:
Guido Isekenmeier (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). A New History of Interdisciplinarity,” Social Text
4. An “essay about irritation” is how Cath- 20, no. 4 (2002): 29–46.
erine M. Soussloff and Mark Franko describe
Because the problematics of visual studies lie somewhere in studying the

visual, this implies a farewell “to matters of geopolitical urgency”5 since they
can’t be dealt with properly within visual studies—optimistically put, maybe
they can at one point with the help of insights from visual studies.6 An indica-
tor that there is a high degree of dissatisfaction in the field, beyond the usual
controversies, is the persistent quarrel about its very name (visual studies, visual
culture, image critique; pictorial, iconic, visualistic turn; etc.). But what are the
problematics, then, that could give visual studies an identifiable unique face?
I want to briefly sketch out some areas in which visual studies has to sharpen its
theoretical profile.
(1) The first area is criticality, which goes beyond the question “how to
inhabit the current cultural and political transformations both in terms of aca-
demic work and in terms of practice more generally.”7 A polite reminder that
visual studies programmed that way is a one-way street is Sunil Manghani’s insis-
tence on image critique. Image critique, as I understand Manghani’s project,
is an appropriate “way out” of the cultural studies ambivalence toward mass for-
mative media by an image-centered critique of images and through images, not
a society- or culture-centered criticism of images: “a double procedure of both a
critique of images and their critical engagement.”8
In Whitney Davis’s thorough General Theory,9 he pushes criticality to one
pole by applying his critical version of analytical philosophy to the language
game around vision and culture. Davis does not provide a reconstruction of the
uses of its terms but a rigorous investigation into the potential of various new
combinations of these terms—a laboratory of thought experiments par excel-
lence. Thus, the volume demonstrates how heavily undertheorized or mono-
theorized visual studies still is. It also allows us to think a new inverted order of
the field, especially in its current subordination to the neurosciences, an order in
which art history and archaeology inform neuroaesthetics in the area of a natural
history of vision.
Nevertheless, missing is an investment in the other pole that also counters
halfway criticality, that is, getting rid of the authority of the etymology of the
Greek word krinein (differentiate). Instead of discriminating the observed object
5. Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Moos- Mediation does not necessarily require the aca-
hammer, “Motions,” in Space (Re)Solutions: demic intellectual speaking for the speechless
Intervention and Research in Visual Culture others. For more substantial argumentations
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), 10. see Panajotis Kondylis, Das Politische und der
6. Just one word about the theoretical Mensch: Grundzüge der Sozialontologie, vol. 1,
problem that arises with interventionist prac- Soziale Beziehungen, Verstehen, Rationalität
tices. It stems from critical theory following, (Berlin: Akademie, 1999); this work has not
e.g., Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communica- been translated into English.
tive Action. Social conflict is not about truth but 7. Mörtenböck and Mooshammer, “Motions,”
about different interests of different people— 10–11.
a conflict that cannot be solved by a consensus 8. Sunil Manghani, Image Critique and the
theory of truth where others are simply shown Fall of the Berlin Wall (Bristol: Intellect, 2008),
that they have been confused and misled by 31.
ideology, false consciousness, or other errors. 9. Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual
An “ideal speech situation” is desirable, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
however, because social conflict needs tools 2011).
and institutions of moderation and mediation.
in visual culture from the critical subject of visual studies, maintaining the intel-
lectual gap between the critic and the masses, and so on, visual studies has to
expose itself to experiences of (non)vision and (non)visibility and (a)visuality.
That is desirable on the side of (art) production, as James Elkins never tires of
reminding us when he makes the case for studio experience, but also on the side
of (all the ways and contexts of ) reception.
(2) Maybe such a criticality radicalized to its poles helps visual studies to
clarify theoretically and elaborate methodically Buck-Morss’s now commonplace
claim to allow “theories that are themselves visual, that show rather than argue.”10
Tom Mitchell launched his critique of visual studies through his famous contor-
tion of the household trope or familiar practice of “show and tell” from Ameri-
can elementary schools.11 His inversion of a didactical procedure into a methodi-
cal device to get insights into seeing and looking inspired the Journal of Visual
Culture to devote a whole issue to show and tell.12 The examples given there
meet with Manghani’s observation that image critique is “not easily explained
(more likely best performed or put to affect).”13 Pointing to performance (stud-
ies) and affect here uncovers deficits likewise in scholarly language and theory.
What once was a characteristic of images, the entire difference of word and
image, of seeing and saying, has now trespassed into methodology. Not that
this is rendering scholarly discourse impossible. To the contrary, it is constantly
increasing, but it is reluctant to turn its procedures into explicit protocols. Thus
no longer only the objects but even the research cannot be spoken about; they
just happen.
A way out of this double trap could be obtained from “showing” versus
“telling” as technical terms as they are in use in narratology, too, where they
organize a multilayered relation of voice and vision. Borrowing from narratology
then allows us to understand Buck-Morss’s initiative in an appropriate and more
workable way than usually deliberately managed by the critics of visualizing the-
ories, who fear speech being completely replaced by pictures in the sense of War-
burg’s Mnemosyne Atlas projects and the like.14 While telling mainly describes
the discourse of an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrating voice, showing is
reserved for a minimal version of mediation through a narrator; showing means
all sorts of unmediated embodiment of the depicted world. Thus, showing also
covers intradiegetic and homodiegetic voices that stem from forms of participa-
tion and experience.
10. Susan Buck-Morss, “Towards a Visual 14. W. J. T. Mitchell’s imperative to picture

Critical Theory,” October 77 (Summer 1996): theory is a thought experiment that expands
29–31, here quoted from Images: A Reader, traditional iconology, i.e., the cultural seman-
edited by Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon tics of images, into the realm of noneidetic
Simons (London: Sage, 2006), 100. notions, concepts, and theories: “But suppose
11. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Cri- we reversed the power relations of “discourse”
tique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture and “field” and attempted to picture theory?”
1, no. 2 (2002): 165–81. Picture Theory: Essays in Verbal and Visual
12. Cf. Martin Jay, “Introduction to Show and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Tell,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): Press, 1994), 9. As the cultural space where that
139–43. happens, Mitchell identifies the (nonallegori-
13. Manghani, Image Critique, 67. cal?) metapictures.
The early theorists of visual culture, however, remained skeptical toward

mere showing. There is Brecht’s famous remark from his critique of the film
industry when he sued for copyright infringement in the case of the movie ver-
sion of his Threepenny Opera: “A photograph of the Krupp factories or the AEG
tells [Brecht doesn’t use erzählt (tell) but ergibt (reveal)] almost nothing about
these institutions.”15 Brecht believes in his Threepenny lawsuit that the reifica-
tion of human relationships in capitalist society has rendered them inexplicit;
he avoids saying “invisible.” Hence he is looking for strategies of revelation,
for “something artificial,” as he has it. Benjamin seconds him in a review of
New Sobriety photography and opts for captions. Benjamin advocates tearing
down “the barrier between script and image”: “What we have to require of the
photographer is the ability to give his taking the sort of caption that preserves it
from fashionable wearout and provides it with revolutionary use value.”16 This
political agenda of the 1930s that is suspicious of the image begins to replace a
primary version of visual studies of the 1920s and paves the way for an emerging
media studies interested in mass formative image usage. By contrast, the earlier
version of visual studies, which conceptualizes visual culture as a theoretical term
according to Béla Balázs’s Visible Man or The Culture of Film of 1924, follows a
vitalist agenda that conceives especially the cinematic imagery as genuine and
irredeemable. Film, according to Balázs, enables unmediated access not to reality
but to the eternal “stream of life” which also runs through the subject’s uncon-
scious soul. Thus, filmic imagery is the source of hope for a wholesale reform of
society because it gives utterance to otherwise repressed and overwritten pivotal
aspects of man.
This ambivalence toward the image, which can be seen alternately as an
irreplaceable means of cultural self-understanding and reform or as a vehicle
of false consciousness that needs to be overwritten by analytical captions, still
rules debates. While visual studies today remains skeptical toward images with-
out captions and optimistic about the efficacy of its captions, Bildwissenschaft,
in the versions, for example, of Gottfried Boehm or Georges Didi-Huberman,
insists on the contrary of the “iconic difference” that can never be overtaken
by the word.17 It is the tension of that double heritage, Balázs plus Benjamin,
that image critique tries to bear. To find a way out, visual studies may replace
the culturally overloaded “image” with the less ambitious “picture.” Both visual
studies and Bildwissenschaft suffer from a plethora of culture-laden images and
a dramatic lack of pictures. Pictures then are to be conceptualized as the the-
oretical objects that neither elude per se any depiction of characteristics and
15. Bertold Brecht, “Der Dreigroschenpro- Schrift und Bild. Was wir vom Photographen zu
zeß” (1931), in Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden, verlangen haben, das ist die Fähigkeit, seiner
vol. 18 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 161: “Eine Aufnahme diejenige Beschriftung zu geben, die
Photographie der Kruppwerke oder der AEG sie dem modischen Verschleiß entreißt und ihr
ergibt beinahe nichts über diese Institute.” den revolutionären Gebrauchswert verleiht.”
16. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 17. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, “Ikonische Differ-
vol. 2:2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann enz,” Rheinsprung 11: Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1
Schweppenhäuser with Theodor W. Adorno (2011): 170–76, rheinsprung11.unibas.ch/archiv
and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, /ausgabe-01/glossar/ikonische-differenz.html,
1972), 693 (my translation): “Schranke zwischen accessed January 19, 2014.
reconstruction of functions nor provide anything that lies inside them beyond
the added value of captions. Pictures put pressure on visual studies to elaborate
on nonpropositional and irreducibly idiosyncratic aspects.
(3) The exposure to intellectual and sensual experiences (aisthesis) claimed
above includes, on the one hand, restoring “a certain agency to the objects them-
selves.”18 The basis of that restoration is to question the representational charac-
ter of images and to focus attention on their presentational character, employing
theories about the presence and agency of “pictures.” By and large, this ongoing
debate still remains grounded in the terrain of word/image studies: “Bored with
the ‘linguistic turn’ and the idea that experience is filtered through the medium
of language, many scholars are now convinced that we may sometimes have
unmediated access to the world around us” and favor “the idea of ‘presence’ ”
instead over “ ‘meaning.’ ”19 This focus has overshadowed the abundance of com-
plex relations between, and intersections of, different sorts of images, modes of
image production, and forms of visuality. For the sake of theorizing its field,
visual studies has to devote more attention to its margins in terms of sense per-
ception and sensual experience and explore the limits of aural and visual,20 tactile
and optical,21 olfactory and apparitional.22
To put productive pressure on its key terms, and in so doing contribute to
refining or even reshaping existing theories about the presence and agency of
artworks only, this conversation should be extended to include forms that so
far have played a minor role, such as dance. Dance is a presentational form that
inherently invokes a sense of immediacy or of presence, and hinges upon actual
bodily agency. Indeed, it was precisely the effects of immediacy in this corporeal
art, its seeming resistance to cultural semantics or even semiotic meaning at all,
that made it so popular among visual artists and writers around the turn of the
twentieth century. On the other hand, the dancer is not only a present body
but also artistic material that has been at least partly evacuated of agency (even
when, as often in that period, the performer is simultaneously the choreogra-
pher of the work). The plethora of photographs and films of dancers then mines
precisely these tensions between presentation and representation, between live
subject and inert material.
Situating this imagery between eighteenth-century concepts of the sub-
lime and a twenty-first-century aesthetics of performance could illuminate key
moments in the development of what was called “living presence response.”23
Such histories of agency would have to include not only the sublime as a visual
18. Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and 22. Cf. Gustav Frank and Barbara Lange,
Method,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 660. Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft: Bilder in der
19. Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the visuellen Kultur (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010), 93–98.
Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 23. Caroline van Eck, “Living Statues: Alfred
(2008): 131–32. Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response
20. Cf. Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: and the Sublime,” Art History 33, no. 4 (2010):
A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone 642–59.
Books, 2010).
21. Cf. T’ai Smith, “Limits of the Tactile and
the Optical: Bauhaus Fabric in the Frame of
Photography,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006): 6–31.
experience of overwhelming sensual perception beyond the faculty of reason,

but the less popular disgust as well, which provokes immediate and involun-
tary corporeal effects.24 Moreover, the nineteenth-century concept of the ugly,
predominantly incorporated by pornography, also provides an avenue to under-
stand and theorize presence and immediacy of imagery.25
I want to raise some ideas here that I voiced at the closing roundtable of the
Chicago event but that didn’t make it into the transcript. My hypothesis is that
visual studies has trouble dealing with imagery that, to put it metaphorically,
is either “too hot,” like porn, advertisement, and pictures in periodicals, which
have a lot of agency and succeed in creating immediacy, or “too cold,” that is,
that seemingly miss any agency, be it an ideological or political provocation or
be it involuntary corporeal responses, like tables, diagrams, and doodling in
thought experiments and sciences.26 Visual studies seems to be incapable of see-
ing the pictures that proliferate in the porn and media industries beyond what
is said about the “male gaze” and the “cultural gaze,” that is, about their state as
images.
While scholars affine with Bildwissenschaft sympathize with concepts of
presence and agency as long as they are ascribed to high art images, only visual
studies scholars see them as irrational premodern animism and dangerous sup-
plements to the criticality they fancy.27 Janet Wolff suspects that behind this dis-
course on the power of images lurks a certain allure.28 Wolff admits that the actual
or implied limits of cultural theory are to some degree responsible for the turn
toward a radically different model, one that rejects the relevance of “the social”
to varying extents. But the limits may go beyond what Wolff admits—and they
may be worth examining more closely, as the claim of agency simply inverts
the direction of influence. She is wary of the coalescence of humans and nature
and of the displacement of “the rational and the intellectual in human (and
social) action; and of the primacy of analytic methods in the social and human
sciences.”29 Wolff seems to distrust what one might call “mere experience” as
opposed to interpretation—and particularly experience based in the sensual
world. The picture then questions Wolff’s reassertion of the “fundamentally lin-
guistic” character of humans and society and reminds us of the contingency or
the partial nature of interpretation and “caption.”
As the invention of aisthesis/aesthetics is based on the Enlightenment proj-
ect to rehabilitate sense perception of the sensual world (i.e., nature), Wolff’s
rationalism, while implicitly associating cultural studies with logic or rationality,
24. Cf. Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Houghton Library and on www.cspeirce.com

Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans- /digitized.htm.
lated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: 27. On presence cf. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht,
SUNY Press, 2003). The Production of Presence: What Meaning Can-
25. Cf. Karl Rosenkranz, Die Ästhe- not Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
tik des Häßlichen (The aesthetics of the 2004).
ugly] (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1853), www 28. Janet Wolff, “After Cultural Theory:
.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/rosenkranz The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy,”
_aesthetik_1853. Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 3 (2012): 3–19.
26. For the latter see Charles Sanders 29. Wolff, “After Cultural Theory,” 4.
Peirce’s notebooks at Harvard University’s
dismisses the merits of the Enlightenment. By identifying animism with the

primitive, nonrationality, and “emotion,” she even feminizes the counterposi-
tion. Bernhard Waldenfels, less anxious about what he sees as a necessary heu-
ristic thought experiment, terms it “enlightened animism.” He distinguishes a
spectrum of at least three grades of that heuristic, from Tom Mitchell to Didi-
Huberman, with very different results and insights.30
It might be more convincing to study corporeal, mental, and emotional
effects of visual experiences more broadly and in mutual exchange with affect
theory than to work on another phenomenological approach to the arts. Brian
Massumi’s version of affect theory, which reflects on the fundamental differences
from language and radically denies that affective states can ever be cognized,
offers fresh arguments for those Bildwissenschaft scholars who attribute a rich-
ness to pictures that is mirrored structurally in the affects they unleash.31
(4) The exposure to experiences means, on the other hand, “to address the
character of the field between: the magnetism that perpetually binds subjects
and objects”32 or that constantly transforms beholders and the seen into each
other.33 But both aspects, agency of the material object (animism) and “mag-
netism” between object and beholder, are closely related. Without strong com-
mitment to the object, there is no animism. Above, as a way out of (the aporia
of ) animism, I proposed affect theory. As a way out of (the aporia of ) magne-
tism, I would draw attention to a cultural history of rhetorics. The figure of
energeia or hypotyposis—putting something absent in front of the eyes of the
beholder or ears of the listener—has constantly been the point of departure
for word-image bypasses. In a marginal remark when dealing with evidentia,
Quintilian gives crucial information about the dread or timidity of the ancients
about using this rhetoric. Quintilian gives no explanation, but it is obvious why
they were shy: because they believed in the magic of the word and were afraid
of the dead (i.e., the only relevant past for them) coming back into life. Mak-
ing the absent in time (or space) present is a sort of playing with life and death
and therefore has a religious, cultural aura. Hypotyposis is not only mimesis of
the eidola, as Plato and all the representation theories of artifacts have it; it has
always been and still is about the (affective) incantation to and evocation of the
dead.
All the issues I have mentioned so far are closely related and intersect not
only with each other but with their predecessors in history. So finally I want to
make a plea for (5) an archaeology of visual studies, a critical history that wants
to do more than add hagiography and tell the grand narrative of a continuous
30. Bernhard Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste e.g., in Robert Musil’s The Flypaper, about
im Wechselspiel: Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung Tangle-foot flypaper; the narrator notices that
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 78–83. flies possess a little glimmering organ which,
31. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: seen through the magnifying glass, turns out
Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke to resemble a tiny human eye. Cf. also Georges
University Press, 2002). Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui
32. Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992), and James
Method,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 660. Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of
33. This is an experience noted already Seeing (London: Harvest, 1996).
by Visual Studies 1.0 literature around 1920,
ascent of visual studies from Plato’s cave or at least from Warburg’s stamps and
Panofsky’s moving pictures. This archaeology is the opposite of canon formation
or the construction of an undisputed linear genealogy, since archaeology also
researches why cultures decline and in the course of this focuses on endemic
contradictions, ambivalences within the cultures themselves, and not only on
their hostile environment. Literally, this means archaeology is engaged in iden-
tifying self-contradictions and blind spots within the arguments used in the
crucial moments of discourse formation (there is a lot about that in Seminars 1
and 5).
If we successfully identify such premises and presuppositions that run unno-
ticed and therefore remain unquestioned by contemporaries and are imple-
mented in later stages of the project again, we will open up the field for fresh
attempts by a new generation of scholars graduating from the numerous visual
studies programs worldwide.
Potentially, canonical figures like Benjamin will no longer be read and
adored as the founding fathers of all our attempts to study the culture of moder-
nity, be it in media or cultural studies, but will offer illustrative material for
shortcomings and a failure to establish a field of research convincingly. Because
there is a huge historical gap between the first generation of scholars consciously
setting visual culture on the agenda in the 1920s and ’30s (roughly from Balázs,
who coined the term, and Musil around 1925 to phenomenology’s heritage in
Merleau-Ponty), an approach which was ousted and replaced by (mass) media
studies from the 1940s to ’80s, the recent shaping of the study of images and
visual culture should be aware of this history of intermissions. That means Visual
Studies 2 (James Elkins’s first generation of recent scholarship; see his introduc-
tion above) should also be aware of the implications of the different heritages
(e.g., of vitalism-based film theory of the twenties like Balázs’s and Arnheim’s
and quantifying mass media studies with a political agenda) and the related limi-
tations they carry with them. Among these heritages is the antisemiotic affect of
early visual studies, which arose from fin de siècle language and representation
criticism by Nietzsche, Mach, et al. The visual studies I am invested in is able
instead to model visual culture as a field where intersections with verbal, aural,
and notational forms occur and discourse (or viscourse, as Karin Knorr-Cetina
has it)34 can play a role.
34. Karin Knorr-Cetina, “ ‘Viskurse’ der virtuellen Welten, edited by Bettina Heintz and
Physik: Konsensbildung und visuelle Darstel- Jörg Huber (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2001),
lung,” in Mit dem Auge denken: Strategien der 304–20.
Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und
THIRD INTRODUCTION
VISUAL STUDIES, OR, THIS IS NOT A DIAGRAM
Sunil Manghani
I began to write this commentary as I traveled back from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, having attended the final Stone Summer Theory Institute,
which carried the controversial title of Farewell to Visual Studies. In my open-
ing remarks at the event, I found myself offering an analogy to Tolkien’s Lord of
the Rings. If we recall, the story begins with Bilbo Baggins addressing his kin at
his “Farewell” birthday party. He slips on the fabled Ring (One to Rule Them
All) and disappears for the last time. Was this to be the fate of visual studies?
Of course, in Tolkien’s novel we recognize it as only the beginning of a story, and
predictably the Theory Institute event proved to open things up, not close them
down. Indeed, like the unfolding adventure of young Frodo Baggins, visual
studies offers a wealth of intellectual journeys still to be taken. The route(s) to
Mount Doom will undoubtedly involve a great many more twists and turns
if we are finally to overcome visual culture as being some kind of “dangerous
supplement.”1
While it is obvious the “farewell” in the title raised eyebrows, it is also
worth pointing out that the term “visual studies” is in itself a point of debate.
W. J. T. Mitchell offers a pragmatic explanation: “I think it’s useful at the outset
to distinguish between visual studies and visual culture as, respectively, the field
of study and the object or target of study. Visual studies is the study of visual
culture.”2 The editor of the Journal of Visual Culture, Marquard Smith, agrees in
part with Mitchell’s account. Yet he is concerned that the word “studies” can take
us “too far from the objects of our study, to the point where these very objects
are almost ignored, obfuscated, dissolved into the study itself.” He also suggests
that “visual studies” too often “marks a bureaucratic impulse, an institutional,
administrative and recruiting initiative, a funding opportunity, and a publish-
ing program.”3 Nicholas Mirzoeff similarly favors “visual culture” over “visual
studies,” considering “culture” an important marker of the inherent “political
stakes.”4 However, visual studies perhaps needs a little more coverage, and/or
might even be usefully rephrased as “image studies”; something I personally lean
towards (more of which below).
As James Elkins notes in his introduction to this book, the title Farewell
to Visual Studies was set some five years in advance of the event actually taking
1. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: 4. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of

A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader,
Culture 1, no. 2 (2002): 166–69. 2nd ed., edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff (London:
2. See Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 166. Routledge, 2002), 6.
3. See Marquard Smith, “Visual Studies,
or the Ossification of Thought,” Journal of Visual
Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 247.
21 Third Introduction
place. Inevitably, the mere mention of a “farewell” ruffled feathers then, as much
as now. Yet, arguably, the more important word to train attention upon is “stud-
ies.” My impression is that in the years immediately following the millennium
the terms “visual culture” and “visual studies” were somewhat interchangeable.
Just gaining (shared) currency over the field of the visual was a primary objective.
And it worked. Publishers today have the phrase keyed into their databases—
so much so one leading academic publisher considered itself in “uncharted
waters” when I proposed a book on “Image Studies”; they asked that I incorpo-
rate “visual culture/studies” somewhere in the subtitle (though subsequently I
argued against it).
Five years ago I might have suggested Mitchell’s neat formulation of visual
culture as the subject of enquiry for visual studies was more than adequate.
Since the 1990s, visual culture / visual studies has been avowedly interdisciplin-
ary. And whether it was “culture” or “studies” in the title, a myriad of articles,
books, conferences, and events from a range of disciplines (including art history,
anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies) were all seemingly
on the same track. In the intervening years, however, we can mark the potential
for a significant shift. What emerged more clearly from the cross-disciplinary
discussions during the Stone Summer Theory Institute event was not just the
particularity of a visual culture–art history perspective, as well as a firmer footing
for Bildwissenschaft and even perhaps image studies (or Mitchell’s iconology),
but also crucially a widening distinction between visual culture and visual studies.
The uptake of poststructuralist theory in art history (bypassing structural-
ism and arriving late relative to other areas of the humanities) and the tensions
evident in the October “Visual Culture Questionnaire”—captured in Irit Rog-
off’s (2002) introduction to the Visual Culture Reader5—have arguably played an
overly dominant role in defining visual studies as visual culture. What emerged
at the Stone Summer Theory Institute was something rather more heteroge-
neous. Participation from Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey—both impor-
tant figures in the development of visual culture—was able to cast light on the
rich transformations of art history via readings of critical theory (see Seminar
2). Yet equally, quite different accounts of visual culture were provided from the
consideration of early twentieth-century thinkers such as Hugo Münsterberg,
Béla Balázs, and Walter Benjamin (see Seminar 1). In addition, more recent work
under the banner of Bildwissenschaft and the prolific work of the Swiss, publicly
funded Eikones project (under the directorship of Gottfried Boehm at the Uni-
versity of Basel) can be shown to be plotting new pathways.6 To date much of
this work has remained inaccessible to non–German speaking scholars, hence
the seminar session held at the Farewell event offers a valuable set of insights
for the uninitiated (see Seminar 5). Interest in the intersection between science
5. Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,”

in Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader, 24–36.
6. See Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradi-
tion? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical
Inquiry 29 (2003): 418–28.
and visual culture has also widened the field of visual studies. Engagement with
images and imaging practices across all disciplines, going well beyond the arts,
prompts the value of more analytical investigation into what is meant by and
what is understood between the terms “vision” and “visuality.”7 Whitney Davis’s
recent treatise A General Theory of Visual Culture offers a very thorough starting
point (see Seminar 7).8 Davis’s work reads very differently from that which is
typically associated with visual culture studies (as found, for example, in the
pages of the Journal of Visual Culture); these differences are usefully highlighted
in the discussions over science studies in Seminar 9.
Like cultural studies, visual culture can be said in a good number of cases to
have worn politics on its sleeve. In an article discussed during Seminar 2, Mieke
Bal notes “a political tone is less instrumental than analyses that expose politics
within the object.”9 But perhaps we need to take this a little further. Visual stud-
ies begins to emerge as a much broader, umbrella term. In attending to more
abstract and technical concerns, it might be thought to bracket out politics, cer-
tainly Politics with a capital “P” (it is worth noting that Seminar 8, a dedicated
session on “The Political,” was dominated by a discussion of neuroaesthetics).
But this need not be to say visual studies in its expanded sense eschews the politi-
cal. Attending more analytically to categories of vision, the visual, and visuality
demarcates a “slower” kind of politics, but a politics nonetheless—potentially
even the very construct(s) of the political.
Are we at a crossroads? Is visual studies truly different from visual culture?
I’m inclined to say both “yes” and “no.” Yes, because there do appear to be an
ever-widening array of interests and perspectives, pulling in different and poten-
tially opposite directions. Yet equally no, because whichever way we look there
are signs of intersection. If connections are currently failing, it might simply be
due to the lack of a shared discourse. Visual studies has yet to reach what I’d call
its “diagram moment,” when key findings can be quickly disseminated. Build-
ing on the ubiquitous diagram of Barthes’s second-order signification, cultural
studies had its own “diagram moment” with the publication (in various books)
of a diagram known as the “circuit of culture.”10 The efficacy of such a diagram
for both teaching and research in the field fits with Kress and Van Leeuwen’s
account of our contemporary “semiotic landscape,” in which images now fre-
quently carry the argument.11 This in mind, and not forgetting the current explo-
sion in infographics, one might ask why the more visually aware field of visual
studies has yet to produce its own “diagram moment.” Gillian Rose offers one
attempt in her book Visual Methodologies, but with copious labels, many of them
7. James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical (London: Sage in association with Open Univer-
Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003). sity, 1997); Kathryn Woodward, ed., Identity and
8. Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Difference (London: Sage in association with
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Open University, 1997).
2011). 11. Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen,
9. Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and “The Semiotic Landscape,” in Images: A Reader,
the Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual edited by Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon
Culture 2, no. 1 (2003): 5–32. Simons (London: Sage 2006), 119–23.
10. See Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cul-
tural Representations and Signifying Practices
written upside down, the circular diagram does not lend itself sufficiently to
being a sharable “tool.”12
A diagram, however, might be a long time coming, not least due to the
specter of the image. It is noteworthy for an event centered upon the subject
of visual studies (albeit an alleged sending off) that the most frequently uttered
word throughout the week-long set of debates was the deceptively simple word
“image.” As Mitchell argues in numerous places, “image” (at least in the English
language) is very usefully different from “picture,” being the intangible to the
tangible.13 Throughout all discussions at the Theory Institute it was necessary to
modulate the use of the word “image.” Indeed, going by Mitchell’s “family of
images,”14 there is no such thing as an image in the singular, but rather always its
movement, or process of imaging.
I worked with a graphic designer to produce a diagram for an “ecology of
images” as a classroom tool; it which now appears in the book Image Studies.15
It is too early yet to say how it will be received, but I am by no means expecting
it to finally offer our “diagram moment.” In truth, I think there already exists
such a thing, it’s just we hardly know what to do with it. The one diagram to rule
them all is surely Magritte’s most enigmatic portrayal of a simple pipe, the one we
know is equally nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is little wonder that of all Mitch-
ell’s examples of the metapicture, La trahison des images is the metapicture—the
one that most eloquently marks out the challenge of the image (as a plural), and
not simply the visual.16 The painting, with ironic didacticism, reveals where the
image is, isn’t, and many other possibilities besides—all in one instance.
As Mitchell puts it, “Metapictures are all like pipes: they are instruments of
reverie, provocations to idle conversation, pipe-dreams, and abstruse specula-
tions.”17 Similarly, this could describe the “dream” of visual studies, which else-
where Mitchell describes as a form of “indiscipline.” “If a discipline is a way of
insuring the continuity of a set of collective practices,” he writes, “ ‘indiscipline”
is a moment of breakage or rupture, when the continuity is broken and the prac-
tice comes into question.”18 In the second edition of the Visual Culture Reader,
Mirzoeff suggests the field of visual culture “is now sufficiently well established
and dynamic to sustain a plurality of views without fracturing into warring
camps.”19 I would like to agree, but in doing so urge visual studies to aim for an
ever deeper, richer set of problematics. Doing so will probably prove even more
controversial. Indeed, may its “indiscipline” live on . . .
12. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: 15. Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory
An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013).
Materials, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007). 16. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays
13. James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
Is an Image?, Stone Art Theory Institutes 2 University of Chicago Press, 1994), 35–82.
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University 17. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 72.
Press, 2011), 23–29. See also Sunil Manghani, 18. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdiscipinarity
“Images: An Imaginary Problem?,” in Elkins and and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (1993):
Naef, What Is an Image?, 226–28. 541.
14. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, 19. See Mirzoeff, “Subject of Visual Culture,”
Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19.
1986).
THE SEMINARS
The Participants: The Faculty: The Fellows:
The 2010 Stone Summer Theory Gustav Frank (Ludwig-Maximilians- Bridget Cooks (University of Cali-
Institute had seven Faculty, Universität, Munich), Sunil fornia, Irvine), Clemena Antonova
fifteen Fellows, six students from Manghani (Winchester School of (American University in Bulgaria),
the School of the Art Institute, Art, University of Southampton), Kristine Nielsen (University of
and an auditor. They are shown James Elkins (School of the Art Illinois at Urbana-Champaign),
on the panorama on the following Institute of Chicago), Lisa Cart- Anna Sigrídur Arnar (Minnesota
pages. wright (University of California, State University Moorhead),
San Diego), Keith Moxey (Barnard María Lumbreras Corujo (Johns
College), Whitney Davis (Uni- Hopkins University), Paul Frosh
versity of California, Berkeley), (Hebrew University of Jerusalem),
and Michael Ann Holly (Clark Art Takeshi Kadobayashi (Kansai Uni-
Institute). versity, Osaka), Elisabeth Fried-
man (Illinois State University),
Joana Cunha Leal (Universidade
Nova de Lisboa), Li Xi (Center of
Aesthetics and Aesthetic Educa-
tion, Peking University), Merja
Salo (Aalto University School of
Art and Design, Helsinki), Juliet
Bellow (American University,
Washington), Jeanette Roan
(California College of the Arts),
Inge Hinterwaldner (Institute of
Art History, University of Basel),
and Flora Lysen (University of
Amsterdam).
The School of the Art Auditor:
Institute Class: Anna Maria Guasch (University of
Joshua Rios, Dustin Yager, Barcelona).
Abraham Ritchie, Sara Helen Van
de Walle, Randy Powell, and Elise
Goldstein.
The photos were taken by Elise

Goldstein. People in the photos:
(from left) Lisa Cartwright, Elisa-
beth Friedman, Anna Sigrídur
Arnar, Inge Hinterwaldner, Keith
Moxey, Michael Ann Holly, Anna
Maria Guasch (in back), James
Elkins, Takeshi Kadobayashi,
Kristine Nielsen, Paul Frosh,
Merja Salo, Li Xi, Clemena
Antonova, Dustin Yager, Gustav
Frank; (right-hand section) Whit-
ney Davis, Sunil Manghani, María
Lumbreras Corujo, Flora Lysen,
Joana Cunha Leal, Jeanette Roan,
Bridget Cooks, Juliette Bellow.
The following conversations were recorded during the week of July 17–23, 2011, at the
School of the Art Institute, Chicago.
1. H I S T O R I E S : V I S U E L L E K U LT U R
The first half of the week was intended to open the question of visual studies’ histories.
The opening seminar, led by Gustav Frank, proposed a two-part history of visuelle
Kultur (an expression he used to designate several traditions of the cultural study of the
visual) as an alternative to existing models of visual studies and Bildwissenschaft.1
For this seminar participants read a range of texts by Walter Benjamin and others;
the excerpt here follows on from the discussion of one of the readings, Hugo Münster-
berg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study.2 The general notion was to ask about
visual studies’ sense of its own past. During the week there were six main models on
the table: (1) a generally accepted model in which a predominantly English-language
visual studies derives from English cultural studies; (2) a model that augments the
first with Scandinavian and Latin American visual studies and their emphasis on
visual communication and semiotics, and with German-language Bildwissenschaft;
(3) a model polemically proposed in October, which demonizes Anglo-American
visual studies as an ally of anthropology set against art history; (4) one set out by
Horst Bredekamp, which traces German Bildwissenschaft to Wölfflin, Warburg, and
Riegl; (5) a genealogy for art history proposed by Thomas Puttfarken, which sees
Riegl, Wickhoff, Warburg, and others as more central than Vasari and Winckelmann;
and (6) the model set out in this seminar, which divides the study of visuelle Kultur
into two phases, before and after the Second World War.
1. See further Frank, “Layers of the Visual: Writings, vol. 2, 694–98; Benjamin, “On the
Towards a Literary History of Visual Culture,” Mimetic Faculty,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2,
in Seeing Perception, edited by Silke Horstkotte 720–22; Benjamin, “The Rigorous Study of Art:
and Karin Leonhard (Newcastle: Cambridge On the First Volume of the Kunstwissenschaftli-
Scholars, 2007), 76–97. che Forschungen,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2,
2. For this seminar the participants read the 666–72; Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” excerpt
following texts: Hugo Münsterberg, The Pho- (Filling Station, Imperial Panorama, Attested
toplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Auditor of Books, Optician, Toys), in Selected
D. Appleton, 1916); Béla Balázs, “Three Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus
Addresses by Way of a Preface” and “Visible Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA:
Man,” in Visible Man, Or the Culture of Film, Harvard University Press), 444–75; Benjamin,
translated by Rodney Livingstone, edited by “The Author as Producer, Address at the Insti-
Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 3–15; tute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27,
Walter Benjamin, “Notes on a Conversation 1934,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 768–82;
with Béla Balázs” (1929), in Selected Writings, Benjamin, “Problems in the Sociology of
vol. 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, Language: An Overview,” in Selected Writings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: vol. 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland and
Harvard University Press), 276–77; Benjamin, Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
“Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European versity Press), 68–93; Benjamin, “The Formula
Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds
207–21; Benjamin, “Little History of Photog- Expression,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 94–95;
raphy,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 507–30; and Erwin Panofsky’s essay on motion pictures,
Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Selected cited below.
32 Farewell to Visual Studies
Gustav Frank: I would like to gather some ideas about the histories of the field, espe-
cially the German background. The fact that we have come together to talk
about the history of visual studies indicates that we’ve reached a certain point
in the development of the movement. Visual studies has now begun to write
its histories. At the moment this means three things: first, we are looking for
the longue durée, the deeper history, and perhaps even Plato and Aristotle as
practitioners of visual studies; second, there is a desire to connect to authorita-
tive discourses both past and present, such as neuroscience; and third, we are
invested in unveiling the primal scene, where the discipline constituted itself in
a foundational act—ideally, the pregnant moment in which the founding father
coined the field’s name.
This first session could therefore be used to do some justice to this moment
in visual studies and Bildwissenschaft, and close the gap between these newcom-
ers and the history of thought by saying, “Visual studies is not that new at all.”
A lot of people do so. About the founding father there is a wide consensus, with
little dissent. Ask Horst Bredekamp, Tom Mitchell, or Georges Didi-Huberman,
and you will be told it’s Erwin Panofsky or the Aby Warburg of the Mnemosyne
project. Both are said to have shown art history’s openness to visual culture.
That, in short, is how the story used to be told. I want to discuss another
story. Mine follows from three hypotheses. First, that the emergence of visual
studies is not centered on art; that visual studies depends on developments in
the experimental sciences, the study of perception and the psyche; and that what
makes such scientific projects visible in a broader cultural context is experi-
ments in media and perception around 1900. Second, that what I am calling
visuelle Kultur is a tentative depiction, a first theorization, of a set of phenomena;
it intermingles such things as the first photographic reproduction of the shroud
of Turin by Secondo Pia, made in 1898, with William Röntgen’s first X-rays of
his wife’s hand, taken in December 1895. In regarding such examples, those who
work in visuelle Kultur augment, fragment, appropriate, and otherwise reimag-
ine the scientific traditions I have mentioned along with traditions of philosoph-
ical aesthetics from the century of Lessing’s Laocoön onwards. Third, a broad
selection of these phenomena was successfully treated under the umbrella of
mass media studies from the 1940s to the 1980s. This period of media studies
predominance came to an end that is indicated, for example, by Friedrich Kitt-
ler’s turn to the hardware devices used in technical media; and in parallel visual
studies then re-emerged in the mid-1980s, this time as a solution for a crisis of art
history, on the one hand, and for society’s self-perception as dominated by visual
media, on the other. We need to be aware that this second attempt is driven by
the logic of disciplines that make use of an external, public desire to come to
terms with a new media landscape.
So there is a great discontinuity in visual studies. The first attempt failed to
constitute a study of visuelle Kultur. It came to an end in the 1940s, with Rudolf
Arnheim’s “Laocoön,” or Panofsky’s “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,”
33 Visuelle Kultur
or Kracauer’s “From Caligari to Hitler” of 1947.3 Visuelle Kultur in the 1920s

had shrunk, by the 1940s, to a monomedia study of film. I am not interested in
the primal scenes of visual studies, and I am not advocating that we continue
what the “founding fathers” began. But the first effort to establish visuelle Kul-
tur should interest us because it was a failure. Part of my concern, therefore,
is to reconstruct the problematic of this first period of visual studies, because it
appears that similar problematics have been implemented in contemporary visual
studies and Bildwissenschaft. I recommended Münsterberg’s essay, first published
in 1916, to show that the central, problematic object in the initial phase of visuelle
Kultur was film; perhaps we can discuss why film was central then, and photog-
raphy has become central in visual culture studies after Barthes. Münsterberg was
a disciple of Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first laboratory of experimental
psychology at Leipzig University; and Wundt was a student of Johannes Müller
and Hermann von Helmholtz, two of the foremost researchers of the physiology
of the senses: Münsterberg can be seen as the culmination of the nineteenth-
century tradition of philosophical, and then medical, and then physiological, and
finally psychological study of sight.4 It is with this background that Münsterberg
created a new place for the psychology of film in aesthetic theory, and so he is an
apposite exemplar of what I am calling the initial phase of visuelle Kultur.
Whitney Davis: I find this genealogy deeply attractive and important, not just histo-
riographically, as it pertains to the ways visual studies understands its histories,
but on its own terms. The rhetoric, the conceptual apparatus, the political and
cultural concerns, of this first phase of visuelle Kultur seem to me to warrant
being taken very seriously. Therefore I would like to ask what in it should be
described as a failure: what led to its shrinking or weathering away such that we
would need to engage in reconstructing it?
Gustav Frank: There are two answers, I think. The easier answer is institutional:
since the 1940s, the entire field of visuelle Kultur has been absorbed by media
studies—film, advertising, and all the things that interested Benjamin in One-
Way Street. I am not the sort of researcher who knows exactly how that worked
3. The markers proposed here as end points Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford:
of the first phase of visuelle Kultur are Arnheim, Stanford University Press, 1999).
“A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the 4. Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und
Talking Film (1938),” in Film as Art, edited by Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche
Rudolf Arnheim (London: Faber and Faber, Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus
1958), 164–89; Panofsky, “Style and Medium in und Positivismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986);
the Motion Pictures,” in Film Theory and Criti- Johannes Müller und die Philosophie, edited
cism: Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald by Michael Hagner and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt
Mast and Marshall Cohen (London: Oxford Uni- (Berlin: Akademie, 1992); Michael Heidelberger,
versity Press, 1974), 151–69; and Kracauer, From “Philosophische Argumente in empirischer
Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the Wissenschaft: Das Beispiel Helmholtz,” in Inter-
German Film (Princeton: Princeton University aktionen zwischen Philosophie und empirischen
Press, 1947; London: Dobson, 1947). The mark- Wissenschaften, edited by Hans Jörg Sandkühler
ers proposed here as end points of the media (Frankfurt: Lang, 1995), 211–24; Michael Hei-
studies interregnum are the classical writings delberger, “Beziehungen zwischen Sinnesphy-
at the beginning of visual studies and Friedrich siologie und Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert,”
Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: in Philosophie und Wissenschaften, Formen und
Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), translated as Gramo- Prozesse ihrer Interaktion, edited by Hans Jörg
phone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey Sandkühler (Frankfurt: Lang, 1997), 37–58.
institutionally. Normally you would argue that there was a break in 1933, which
resulted in emigration, and so forth. Visuelle Kultur could not survive without
an academic basis. Balázs and Benjamin, for example, were linked to very spe-
cial conditions of publication. I would prefer a second and more complicated
answer, which is that there was something immanent in visuelle Kultur that was
highly problematic: it was too smart, as it were, and it relied on a vitalism.
What strikes me about Bildwissenschaft and visuelle Kultur in the 1980s and
1990s is that they have a semblance of the arguments of Balász and Benjamin,
without developing them; but they do not have the organizing ideology, the
vitalism, that lay behind Benjamin’s and Balázs’s positions. So when the argu-
ments pop up in Gottfried Boehm’s writing, or Hans Belting’s writing, there is a
lack of understanding of the pertinent ideological background.
I would like to know: What is the underlying theory of Bildwissenschaft or
visual culture which organizes their arguments? What is the underlying structure
now, if the originating vitalism is gone?
Flora Lysen: Gustav, before we pursue that, is there a body of critique on Bildwissen-
schaft (as proposed by Boehm, Belting, and Bredekamp) in German-speaking
countries? I wonder, for example, to what extent discussions of postcolonial
studies and gender studies are being taken up by proponents of Bildwissenschaft
vis-à-vis visual culture studies. There are, for example, scholars who critique
Bildwissenschaft for systematically excluding female scholarship and also the
approaches developed by gender and queer studies.5
Inge Hinterwaldner: Gustav, for me this question is problematic because it suggests
that we are speaking of homogeneous blocs. Even if we ignore all the other
approaches in the German-speaking area besides the most prominent ones of
Bredekamp, Belting, and Boehm, we are confronted with a huge variety regard-
ing their influences; they wouldn’t even necessarily agree on the notion Bildwis-
senschaft as a label for what they practice.
Gustav Frank: I guess one could answer Flora by developing Inge’s remarks. Diversity
is definitely a characteristic of the second and third generation of scholars who
graduated from the Karlsruhe program Bild/Körper/Medium: Eine anthropolo-
gische Perspektive (which began in 2000), from the Humboldt University pro-
gram Das technische Bild (which began in 2000), or from Eikones: Bildkritik,
Macht und Bedeutung der Bilder in Basel. And the book market has meanwhile
adopted the terms Bild, Bildwissenschaft, and Bildtheorie (picture theory), what-
ever theoretical or methodological orientation the book in question may follow.
But if we want to know what the standard references are, the field is not as wide
open as recent studies like your book on iconicity in IT-based real-time simula-
tions might suggest.6 Hence diversity and certain limitations go hand in hand.
5. Sigrid Schade, “Bildwissenschaft: A New 6. Inge Hinterwaldner, Das systemische

‘Discipline’ and the Absence of Women,” Bild: Ikonizität im Rahmen computerbasierter
in The Institutes of the Zurich University of the Echtzeitsimulationen (Munich: Fink, 2010).
Art, edited by Hans Peter Schwarz (Zurich: ZHdK,
2008), 162–71.
35 Visuelle Kultur
These projects mostly exclude the majority of the interests of UK visual stud-
ies and the gender perspective in Bildwissenschaft’s anthropology.7 No surprise,
then, that in 2007 we saw a relaunch of the art history journal FKW, founded in
1987, as Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur.
Michael Holly: Gustav, I remember Georges Didi-Huberman saying that the problem
with these thinkers, such as Münsterberg, Benjamin, and Balázs, is that they
were killed twice. First they were slain by their enemies; and then the fragments
of their thought that reached this country were destroyed by the authors’ heirs
in American art history and cultural studies. During the 1950s and 1960s, in the
Cold War, when their ideas arrived in the United States, their theoretical force
went into a deep freeze. In his Anglo-American period, Panofsky became a very
different thinker. He had to be.
Gustav Frank: Yes, that is part of the first answer I proposed: an institutional, historical
explanation for the failure.
Whitney Davis: What exactly seems to you to have become unsustainable as an imma-
nent feature of the early work? It seems to have something to do with the doc-
trine of expression: the expressive gesture, the transparency of the Innenwelt to
visibility and the Umwelt, by way of nonverbal or extralinguistic expressivity.
Gustav Frank: Yes, I think so, exactly. There is the hope that pictures allow us a unique
immediate access to the essence of life, that they make sense not only in a seman-
tic but in an ontological way.
James Elkins: Gustav, you once mentioned Kracauer as an author who is in some sense
missing from our awareness of contemporary visual studies. Who else, aside
from the readings we have done for this seminar, would you want to reread?
Gustav Frank: Certainly Rudolf Arnheim; there is also Dolf Sternberger, who writes on
the panorama.8 Also some pre-1900 sources, such as Wilhelm Wundt, who has
corporeal arguments on philogenetic language theory; and some literary sources,
such as Musil’s dissertation, in philosophy, on Ernst Mach (later he worked in
the psychological laboratories in Berlin).
Clemena Antonova: I would like to attract attention to a very little-known tradition
from the period we are discussing, namely work on visual studies that was done
in Russia by thinkers from a variety of disciplinary angles, but especially from
the hard sciences. There were, for instance, exciting projects going on at the Rus-
sian Academy of Artistic Sciences, an institution co-organized by Kandinsky and
in existence between 1921 and 1929. What is of interest is the Russian reception
of German authors, like Wundt and Ernst Mach, the huge emphasis on scien-
tific images, as well as the impact of this work on fields as semiotics (the famous
7. This is a long-standing issue that will be

addressed in more detail in Section 5 of the
Seminars, on Bildwissenschaft.
8. Sternberger, Panorama, oder, Ansichten
vom 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Insel, 1981).
Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics). This Russian tradition belongs, too, to the

history of visual studies. More importantly, many of the problems that plagued
the Russian projects have resurfaced, in different guises, in more recent work in
the West.9
Keith Moxey: What is wrong with the sources that are invoked by visual studies in the
1980s and 1990s—Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty? What has contemporary
visual studies missed by not going back to Balázs and these other authors?
Gustav Frank: It is the other way around: we should reflect on why the earlier genera-
tions failed to set up a core, stable, consensual visual studies program, and why
their ways of setting arguments did not work after the 1940s. Your construction
posits more of a continuity: Benjamin is in the mix, and we also have Heidegger.
I would propose that the history is more discontinuous, but the arguments are
reused, recycled: we are trying to continue a project that has already failed, for
endemic reasons. I would prefer to understand how they argued, to achieve a
sharper criticality in relation to their project.
Keith Moxey: What strikes me is that what intervened was the Second World War, and
the related immigration. One of the consequences, in critical theory, was the
condemnation of popular culture by Adorno, Horkheimer, and others. For a
long time, that account colored how people approached popular culture.
Gustav Frank: It is very useful to bring Adorno into the discussion in this context. Ben-
jamin was too smart for the Marxist project: he introduces the concerns of writ-
ers like Balázs, recycled in a more reflective mode. I would like to use Adorno
to ask why the visuelle Kultur project failed, because if it failed with people so
close to it, then the project was insufficiently animated by the objects Benjamin
brought forward.
James Elkins: Gustav, your bipartite history, broken by a “failure,” is a very provoca-
tive model. I would contrast it with two other revisionist projects: Horst Bre-
dekamp’s sketch of the history of Bildwissenschaft, which traces it to Wölfflin,
Riegl, and Benjamin; and one of the last essays Thomas Puttfarken wrote, which
was intended to criticize the notion that contemporary art history descends from
Vasari and Winckelmann as much as it depends on Wickhoff, Riegl, and others.10
Both of those accounts, Bredekamp’s and Puttfarken’s, gloss over the gap at
midcentury. The virtue of your account is that it makes it possible to ask about
9. See the journal Experiment 3 (1997), (Brussels: Academic and Scientific Publishers,
especially my essay on Kandinsky’s “Work 2012), 80–89.
Plan for the Visual Arts Section of the Academy 10. Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art
(Theses),” 157ff. I discuss some of the work at History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry
Kandinsky’s Visual Arts Section in my “Visual 29 (2003): 418–28; Puttfarken, “Thoughts on
Studies and Iconology at the Russian Academy Vasari and the Canon,” in Renaissance Theory,
of Artistic Sciences: Insights from an Unfinished coedited by Robert Williams and James Elkins,
Russian Experiment of the 1920’s,” in New vol. 5 of The Art Seminar (New York: Routledge,
Perspectives on Iconology: Visual Studies and 2007). Thomas Puttfarken died on October 5,
Anthropology, edited by Barbara Baert, Ann- 2006; his incomplete essay was transmitted by
Sophie Lehmann, and Jenke van den Akkerveken his colleague, Neil Cox.
37 Visuelle Kultur
the possibility that visual studies has a discontinuous history rather than a his-
tory that is adequately explained as a series of accumulations.
Gustav Frank: The Danish scholar Anders Michelsen also sees this gap, but from a
different point of view.11 And it’s true of Bredekamp that he talks away the
discontinuity, in a very simplistic manner, developing a model that works by
accumulation.
María Lumbreras Corujo: Hans Belting has also spoken of failure, although from
a completely different perspective both from yours, Gustav, and Michelsen’s.
He talks about the “interrupted paths towards a Bildwissenschaft,” blaming art
history for having put an end to, rather than expanding, Warburg’s project of
a Kulturwissenschaft.12 What I find interesting and challenging in your proposal
is that you see this failure as an endemic one. Belting, as maybe also Georges
Didi-Huberman, sees Warburg’s project as failing from without, while you see
visuelle Kultur failing from within. It is challenging because the very desire of
reconstructing the history of that failure entails a question about where our
own limits, today in the present visual studies project, might be. This makes me
think of Douglas Crimp’s words “what history, whose history, history to what
purpose.”13 In a way, your genealogy is more self-questioning.
Gustav Frank: Thanks, María, I couldn’t have summarized that better myself. I guess
that’s why we have come forward with our “farewell” and why we’re drawing
heavily from the field’s history. We think the problematic is deeply implemented
in the makeup of current studies and in the references they frequently use as
authorities.
Michael Holly: Gustav, do you explain Panofsky’s uninterrupted history?
Gustav Frank: That depends on how you understand the reception. Is there a lively
discussion of the perspective essay, or is it quoted as a classic?
Michael Holly: I think it is different in Germany and in the United States. Willibald
Sauerländer was conscripted and went to graduate school in the 1940s; he told
me once that he never heard Panofsky’s name when he was in graduate school.
That is evidence of a dramatic interruption, but I don’t think it was the same
here in the States.
María Lumbreras Corujo: In Germany, that dramatic interruption also affected other
important figures such as Warburg and, to a lesser extent, Benjamin.14 When
11. Michelsen, “Nothing Has Meaning 13. Douglas Crimp, “Getting the Warhol We
Outside of Discourse? On the Creative Dimen- Deserve,” Social Text 59 (Summer 1999): 60.
sion of Visuality,” in “Art in the Age of Visual 14. Benjamin’s texts were widely read in
Culture and the Image,” special issue, Leitmotiv the second half of the sixties, and this critical
5 (2005–6): 89–114. (Leitmotiv is an e-journal; reception, along with an increasing interest in
see ledonline.it/leitmotiv.) ideology critique, helped recuperate Warburg’s
12. “Unterbrochene Wege zu einer Bild- work. But that only happened in the seventies,
wissenschaft.” Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: after decades of oblivion. See Michael Diers,
Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cul-
Wilhelm Fink, 2001): 14–18. tural History,” New German Critique 65 (1995):
59–73.
you look at the Anglo-American world, you find that both the history of all
these early twentieth-century thinkers’ reception and the various ways in which
it connects with the emergence of visual studies in the nineties differ from what
happened in German-speaking countries. So I agree with you, Keith, but I also
see a difference. I have the impression that in terms of genealogies, Bildwissen-
schaft and visual studies might not share a common stem, even if their histories
intersect or appear to be parallel at some points.
Paul Frosh: Of the texts you set us, most are concerned with a hermeneutics of redemp-
tion, resurrection, or renewal. That has partly to do with the vitalist background,
I think: the idea of reviving a gestural language that had been repressed in the
Gutenberg era. In Benjamin, for example, there is an argument about messianic
time. But there is also a hermeneutics of suspicion, and of unveiling, and that is
ultimately about the war.
What’s refreshing about that now, I suppose, relates to the brief on the
announcement for this event, which refers to the predictability of certain kinds
of mass culture critiques.15 It also reminds me of your example, Jim, of the
advertiser—
James Elkins: Calvin Klein.16
Paul Frosh: Which is also a hermeneutics of suspicion. For me, Gustav, your history
provides an alternative.
Lisa Cartwright: Münsterberg and the other readings on film you assigned us are
completely canonical. They were read in the late 1970s and 1980s, so if we are
willing to take this study outside of art history proper, and into film studies, and
to trace the texts through France and the United States, we will find a different,
less discontinuous genealogy.
Flora Lysen: Panofsky’s essay on film has been quoted and reprinted throughout the
twentieth century, but not so much for its argument (a rather iconographic
reading of film), but much more because of the significance that the stature of
Panofsky, as an eminent art historian, could lend to the nascent discipline of
film studies.17
Gustav Frank: Well, Lisa, Balázs is quoted in film studies, but he is quoted for his
contribution to film studies. There is a complete ignorance of the fact that he
is providing a fuller account of film: it is not a film studies text at all. It is not a
monomedia text.
15. “Despite the appearance of new journals 16. This is the “Case of the Calvin Klein Suit,”
and online sites devoted to visual studies, and described in the first introduction to this book,
despite the continuously increasing number of under “Absences,” no. 7.
departments worldwide, the field of visual stud- 17. This argument is put forward at length
ies remains a minority interest with an increas- in Thomas Levin, “Iconology at the Movies:
ingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and Panofsky’s Film Theory,” Yale Journal of Criticism
subjects.” www.stonesummertheoryinstitute 9, no. 1 (1996): 27–55.
.org, as posted July 28, 2011. [—J.E.]
39 Visuelle Kultur
Lisa Cartwright: There are studies that take up Balázs in that sense, for example
Thomas Levin, who works on sound, or David Rodowick, whose work has never
been situated in film studies per se.18 So I don’t think that it is accurate to say that
Balász is not continuous with present interests.
Jeanette Roan: Gustav, I’m interested in the idea that film was the central object of the
initial phase of visuelle Kultur. What do you see as the relationship between the
history of film/media studies and the history of visuelle Kultur? What happens
to film as an object of study? It is almost nonexistent, for example, in the read-
ings we’ve been assigned for this week, with a few exceptions in your readings
and Lisa Cartwright’s readings.
Gustav Frank: When visuelle Kultur was shaped in the 1920s, it was one among several
attempts to theorize an emerging field of media that were having an enormous
impact on society. Some approaches foregrounded media’s ability to organize
mass audiences. Some burgeoned along the obviously crucial line between the
sayable and the invisible. Hence film was central to both of these emerging path-
ways of theorizing. For about four decades, the public and political interest in
mass media dominated over the interest in the picture. When visual studies and
Bildwissenschaft gained shape in the 1990s, they had to mark the older modern-
ist line between the sayable/dead word and visible/vivid picture, as well as the
later divide between picture and mass media. And let’s not forget about a third
academic rival, art history, with its focus on painting as its privileged object.
Visual studies has a certain logic in taking photography as its primary object: it’s
in part to gain theoretical profile.
Bridget Cooks: I wonder if we can address the feeling of loss that I’m getting from this
conversation. I’m getting this sense that we’ve lost something, that something
about visual studies has failed. The entire title of our week makes me wonder
if we’re asking: Are we getting it right? Are we doing something wrong? Are we
paying proper homage to our forefathers? I think visual studies is a success.
James Elkins: Actually, if we adopt Gustav’s genealogy, we are saying farewell to a fare-
well, in the sense that obliviousness to a certain history is something we wish to
address. We hope to reclaim or rethink something we have lost.
Bridget Cooks: I don’t feel loss. I don’t mean to sound defensive, but I don’t feel there
is something in need of correcting.
Michael Holly: Bridget, as an art historian writing on melancholy, I see loss as cen-
tral. But there is something to be said about visual studies’ refusal to see loss.
Through loss an opening might be created once again: there is courage involved
in bringing certain theorists back in, because they make us see things in a new
and brighter light. We juxtapose works with Heidegger, Benjamin, and others in
18. See Levin, Resistance to Cinema: Read- (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Rodo-
ing German Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton wick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA:
University Press, 1990); Rodowick, Reading Harvard University Press, 2007).
the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media
ways that an older art history would never ever allow us to do. I would hope that
is still part of the excitement, the reason why we do visual studies.
James Elkins: Certainly for me, one of the “farewells” I’d like to say would be to a kind
of visual studies that is content with its received sense of its past. Opening that
question will certainly involve a sense of loss, even if it is only loss of euphoria.
Anna Sigrídur Arnar: My understanding of how we are using the term “farewell” does
not entail saying “goodbye” to visual studies (that would be a loss!) but that the
field can “fare well” by taking time to assess its methods, its assumptions, its
gaps. In that sense, it’s not a loss but a gain.
Elisabeth Friedman: If there is a sense of loss, it may be for another sort of art history
which was interrupted by Nazism and the war, and which congealed in such a
way that we find challenging, whether or not we are art historians. Perhaps there
is a sense that art history could have been visual studies if some of these tradi-
tions that you’re talking about, Gustav, could have been sustained.
Whitney Davis: Here is another possible difference between what we might call Visual
Studies 1, up to the 1940s, and Visual Studies 2. When Benjamin, Adorno, Kra-
cauer, Balász, Cassirer, Husserl, Heidegger, and other authors were writing, they
were responding to what were for them live and credible theories of vision and
visuality, which were contemporary to them. Visual Studies 2 seems to have
no comparable engagement. If Visual Studies 2 is still referring to Benjamin
and others, then it is excluding fifty or sixty years of scientific, psychological,
and physiological work on vision and visibility. It is as if that work was of no
consequence. Visual Studies 2 would be using a vocabulary that is scientifically
defined, but without its context.
Gustav Frank: Visual studies scholars see Benjamin as dealing with visuality and not so
much with vision.
James Elkins: I think this is absolutely correct, but it is prone to a misunderstanding.
We aren’t saying, I take it, that visual studies could discover the optical, cogni-
tive, and neurological work of the last half-century in the way that the earlier
practices, “Visual Studies 1,” had done. That’s because even if recent science were
presented to contemporary visual studies, the field is currently predicated on an
agnosticism about reality so pervasive that it would prohibit any sense of the
pertinence of the science itself. There are strains within art history that aren’t
constituted this way, and later in the week I think we’ll be talking about them
in your seminar, Whitney. But visual studies as I see it practiced could not bring
itself into a relation to vision science analogous to the relation earlier practices
had. Contemporary visual studies can only see science as a social phenomenon,
and see its claims as socially contextual.
41 Visuelle Kultur
Keith Moxey: It is actually harder, after the poststructuralist critique of linguistic ref-
erentiality and psychoanalytic critique of the autonomous subject, to view “sci-
entific” theory as any more foundational than humanistic theory. We no longer
have the same faith in the theoretical models offered us by the sciences.
Gustav Frank: But the problem is the consequences that follow from taking as our point
of departure Heidegger, Lacan, and others. I think you’re implying we should
not trust this scientific stuff because it is culturally and theoretically naïve. But
the scientific practitioners have also gone through Bruno Latour, and are aware
of the problematics of what they are doing.
Flora Lysen: And from within the “visual turn” scholars are also increasingly aware
of this. Martin Jay, for example, has argued (pointing to Latour) we might be
overstating the cultural dimension of vision. The “visual turn” seems to have
completely dismantled the idea that images could somehow have a universal
capacity to communicate, though that critique is based on a simplistic reversal
of the modern faith in natural universalism.19
19. Jay, “Cultural Relativism and the Visual

Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 274.
2. H I S T O R I E S : A N G L O - A M E R I C A N
V I S UA L S T U D I E S , 1 9 8 9 – 1 9 9 9
This seminar was led by Michael Holly. The participants read a half-dozen texts by
Norman Bryson, Douglas Crimp, and others, along with interviews with scholars
active during the decade 1989–1999.1
Michael Holly: Today we’re going to talk about the early days of visual studies: where
the excitement came from, the origins of the programs, the first decade of writ-
ing under its rubric. This is my own autobiographical account, to be sure, but
it’s also institutional history as much as intellectual history. I was there at the first
visual culture graduate program in the United States. I didn’t know much about
European developments.
In the Warburg Institute, in the 1970s, when I was writing my dissertation
on the intellectual history of art history, I was absolutely enchanted with the
early German writers we talked about in Gustav’s seminar. My ultimate dis-
sertation advisor was Michael Podro, and I had come to art history from an
undergraduate major in history, where figures like Hayden White were central.
When I had first attended graduate school in the United States, however, I was
shocked by what seemed to me the moribund discipline of art history, which
was preoccupied with the who? what? when? and where? sorts of questioning.
After my dissertation was long finished, I was hired as an outside chair at the
University of Rochester, which had not had a graduate program in art history
for a long time. There was huge resistance from the administration for the new
program we gradually developed, first called Comparative Arts—
Lisa Cartwright: Comparative Studies.
Michael Holly: I remember it as Comparative Arts, but in either guise it sounds rather
tame. The proposal went to the New York State Regents Board in that form,
about the same time, perhaps 1989, that Keith and I conducted several summer
institutes on the theory and interpretation of the visual arts.2 In the accreditation
1. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: and selections from Margaret Dikovitskaya,
The Logic of the Gaze (London, 1983), preface, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the
xi–xiv; A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello, introduc- Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005),
tion to The New Art History (Atlantic Highlands, 125–30, 162–80, 193–209, 224–57, 268–84.
NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 2. There was another institute at Hobart and
2–10; W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Really William Smith in 1987. The books that resulted
Want?,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 71–82; were Visual Theory: Painting and Interpreta-
Scott Heller, “Visual Images Replace Text as tion, edited by Michael Holly, Keith Moxey, and
Focal Point for Many Scholars,” Chronicle of Norman Bryson (London: Polity Press, 1991);
Higher Education, July 19, 1996; Douglas Crimp, and Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations,
“Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text 59 edited by Michael Holly, Keith Moxey, and Nor-
(Summer 1999): 49–66; selections from “Ques- man Bryson (Middletown: Wesleyan University
tionnaire on Visual Culture,” October 77 (Sum- Press, 1994).
mer 1996): 25, 27–36, 39–44, 52–62, 68–70;
process, the biggest objection was “You’re doing great harm to your graduate stu-
dents: they won’t be able to get jobs with this degree. Do you really know what
you’re doing?” And in fact, we didn’t know what we were doing! We changed the
courses we proposed from year to year. Eventually the Regents Board approved
the program, and we accepted our first graduate students, Lev Manovich, Walid
Ra’ad, and Howard Singerman and others, as I remember.
Lisa Cartwright: And Alla Efimova.
Michael Holly: Yes, we also took on artists who wanted doctorates; they were encour-
aged to include their artwork as part of their dissertation, but only part.
James Elkins: Michael, it’s interesting that you accepted artists, given the subsequent
history of visual studies as an academic pursuit.
Michael Holly: I suppose so, but yet many visual artists were genuinely conversant
with poststructural theory, so we wanted to secure them a place in the academy
other than in ancillary MFA programs. Bridget and Jeanette, when did you two
come?
Jeanette Roan: 1993.
Michael Holly: Did you feel safe, coming into the new program?
Jeanette Roan: I came to visit, and I asked Janet Wolff: “What do your graduates go on
to do?” and she responded, “Well, we haven’t graduated anyone yet.”
Michael Holly: Why did you take a chance on us?
Jeanette Roan: I was interested in contemporary art and in critical theory. I had read
Mieke Bal’s and Norman Bryson’s piece on semiotics and art history, and I was
familiar with Douglas Crimp’s work on postmodernism. I had encountered
some of the “new art history” and was just discovering British cultural studies.3
I was tremendously excited by all of these ideas and scholars, and the Rochester
program brought them together. I felt an extraordinary sense of possibility.
Michael Holly: That’s a great way of characterizing the 1990s, Jeanette. I don’t mean
there isn’t that sense now, but it’s different, less political, I suppose. When I was
rereading these “sociological” texts I set for the seminar, I felt that sense of possi-
bility again. Norman Bryson called it “intellectual turbulence.” We hired Bryson
largely because of the three pages he wrote in the text I required here—especially
the lines where he looks at art history and declares, “in art history there has
reigned a stagnant peace.” Art historians, he wrote, represent “the leisure sector
of intellectual life.” At least when I was chair, the Department of Visual and
Cultural Studies revolved around three things: it was an embrace of Continental
theory (we could read anyone we wanted, think about any issues we wanted);
3. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics edited by Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum
and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991): of Contemporary Art, 1984), 175–87; Rees and
174–208; Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” in Art Borzello, New Art History.
After Modernism: Rethinking Representation,
45 Anglo-A merican Visual Studies, 1989–1999
it involved the social aspects of art; and there was an expanded notion of the
kinds of visual objects that could be studied.
Lisa Cartwright: I was recalling the moment, and the difference between the name
Visual Studies and our department’s name, Visual and Cultural Studies. It was
important to some of us to include the term “culture,” as it has been for the new
International Association of Visual Culture, to signal the field’s debt to cultural
studies, and the importance of studying culture whether or not one is engaged
in the cultural studies disciplinary framework.
Michael Holly: At the time there was also the so-called new art history; A. L. Rees and
Frances Borzello were looking into the past of art history, to see what had gone
wrong, what could be changed. Now, I would be happy to call visual studies “art
history”; the stakes aren’t the same. One of the most serious issues raised by the
discipline of art history is whether its cultural and intellectual foundation can
sustain the practices done under the name of visual studies. Ten years ago, when
I last taught undergraduates, they would ask, “What is visual studies?” and I
would answer, “It isn’t a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic.
It shakes up complacency. No objects are excluded. Visual studies names an
attitude in relation to visual things, rather than a department.”
Clemena Antonova: I think that describing visual studies as an “attitude” rather than a
disciplinary field is useful especially when we want to consider the longue durée
of visual studies. This view opens visual studies to scholars from fields outside
film theory, digital media—that is, to the fields frequently accepted as the appro-
priate domains of visual studies.
Anna Sigrídur Arnar: Regarding Bryson’s comment about art history’s “leisure prob-
lem” and especially the essays in the Rees and Borzello volume, it’s worth noting
that the critique of art history from the UK perspective is not just a critique
about art history’s methods but a critique aimed at class and privilege associated
with established art historians in the British system. It’s no coincidence that
many of the contributors to the Rees and Borzello volume were faculty teaching
at various polytechnic universities across the UK.
James Elkins: Michael, you named three components of visual studies: freedom to read
new theorists, social commitment, and a broader set of objects. Yesterday [in an
informal conversation] you were talking about visual studies as the place that
creates unexpected juxtapositions of visual objects and methods. That could be
thought of as a consequence, and perhaps the principal intended effect, the first
and third of those. I that light I wonder about your second point, social com-
mitment: it is different.
Michael Holly: Yes, and it has its own genealogy, going through the Birmingham school
and on into the work of, say, Janet Wolff and Nicholas Mirzoeff: he is still very
invested in discerning social practices in the making of art that translate into
political. That may even be the principal strain of visual studies today. Whitney,
you work through the analytic tradition—
Whitney Davis: I have a somewhat different trajectory, coming through a traditional
art history department. My transformation, from around 1980 to 1986, involved
social art history, including Marxist traditions: but the people involved were art
historians. I am not sure they were especially affiliated with what you’re calling the
“new art history.” There was very little influence of analytic philosophy either in
social art history or the new art history, and possibly even in visual studies today.
James Elkins: There is an interesting contrast between this genealogy, Michael, and
the one Hal Foster presented in last year’s event here, called Beyond the Aesthetic
and the Anti-Aesthetic. He was presenting what happened in Manhattan begin-
ning around 1980 as pre-eminently social—the second of your three points.
It then helped, sometimes, to bring in your favorite theorists: a very different
configuration.
Lisa Cartwright: Hal was briefly at Rochester.
Michael Holly: He and Craig Owens, at one point, were even competing for the same
job at Rochester. How lucky we were to have such candidates! What we con-
tributed, at Rochester, was a home for what might seem to be unrelated strands:
the work of Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, Janet Wolff, Kaja Silverman, Lisa Cart-
wright, Douglas Crimp—
Joana Cunha Leal: Michael, you say you could call visual studies “art history.” Do you
subscribe to our event’s keyword, “farewell”?
Michael Holly: No, not really! [Laughter] When I left Rochester, it was for a very dif-
ferent kind of job: it was running a research institute in art history. I realized
visual studies has gone a different way than I had ever imagined. I guess that
a decade ago it did disappoint me in some ways. The visual past before 1980
completely dropped out of visual studies. It just wasn’t there, and as a medieval
and Renaissance historian, I thought the salvation of visual studies would come
from those earlier periods. I thought: there will be lots of new questions about
the past; the past will live again. But it did not happen, perhaps because of the
centrality of photography and film.
Clemena Antonova: I really don’t see why this should continue being the case. The
study of medieval and Renaissance art has posed questions relevant to visual
studies no less urgently than photography and film. For instance, the recent
revival of interest among medievalists in what has been called “theology through
the arts” and “theology through images” touches on many of the fundamental
questions of visual studies.4 The Byzantine iconoclastic controversy in the eighth
4. There is an ongoing project, entitled associated with this project in my Space, Time,
“Theology Through the Arts,” at the Univer- and Presence in the Icon (Farnham: Ashgate,
sity of St. Andrews, UK, directed by Jeremy 2010), in the section “Theology Through the
Begbie. I discuss some of the work by scholars Arts.”
and ninth centuries has produced interesting work on the specificity of the visual
image, which can’t be reduced to a textual concept.
Whitney Davis: In the mid-1980s, there was an exciting possibility in some art history,
archaeology, and related subjects that those periods would open up: There was
my own work on prehistoric and Egyptian art, for example, or Michael Camille’s
in medieval studies—very influential in his field. And there was fascinating work
arriving into art history from anthropology—I think of Nancy Munn and How-
ard Morphy—and philosophy (I think of students of Nelson Goodman and
Richard Wollheim, younger philosophers like Catherine Elgin and Flint Schier,
whose analytic work impressed me when I encountered it) and even visual psy-
chology and vision science (here one of the commanding voices was David Marr,
whose Vision strongly influenced by my doctoral dissertation filed in 1985). But I
don’t think some of this work was widely read, even noticed, in the discipline—
though of course writers “internal” to the field, such as Camille, were read and
vigorously discussed and debated (and often criticized). Perhaps we’ll be able to
come back to this matter when we discuss the relation between visual studies
(or history of visual culture) and science studies.
James Elkins: It is important to note that here, in this room, we have a disproportion-
ate number of faculty who engage in visual practices before Warhol or before
modernism: you, Whitney, and Keith, Michael, and me. Sunil, Gustav, and I
chose the faculty intentionally in order to open conversations like this one about
deeper history. Our fifteen Fellows and auditors are much more representative of
visual studies: in my count, only two—Clemena Antonova and Li Xi—do work
on objects before modernism.
Michael Holly: What irks me most is the art historians who were in the first reaction-
ary wave towards visual studies, who said, “We don’t have to know that.” That
attitude is so benighted: the new intellectual world, I thought, is going to run
over them. But in some sense, they won. Art history is still art history: you don’t
have to read theorists from the beginning of art history until now. You don’t
have to know the challenges that were once so alive. I have reviewed a number
of art history departments in the United States, and there are often one or two
faculty who call what they do visual studies—but the jobs and positions are still
arranged by period. The graduate students at the institution where I work, the
Clark, still mostly identify themselves by periods: they say, “I’m in nineteenth
century,” or “I study medieval art.” I wish one of them would come up to me,
as Rochester graduates once did, and name some topic or theorist they were
interested in.
I don’t want to say “farewell,” because things get new lives, but—
James Elkins: You could say farewell to the art history we hoped to cure!
Michael Holly: Right.

Kristine Nielsen: Michael, you mention that art historians in the 1990s often refused
to engage in visual studies. So, could today’s parallel be visual culture practitio-
ners who refuse to engage in historical eras or canonical texts about the picto-
rial? Hal Foster’s description comes to mind of visual culture as “a passport that
can lead to fairly touristic travel from discipline to discipline,”5 because making
expertise and nomadism compatible is difficult. So, I wonder how you would
have responded to Foster’s comment in 1996, or even today, about the problem
of expertise and visual studies?
Paul Frosh: This is all very interesting, because I haven’t come through art history. I’m
going to say this politely: if the visual culture that emerged in the early 1990s
was a potential cure for art history, isn’t it also possible that the “cure” is also a
poisonous side-effect for any independent project, or for anyone coming in from
the outside? At what point can visual studies let go of art history as its founding
paradigm, the thing it both models itself upon and defines itself against? For
example, what is the status of semiotics as a “transdisciplinary science,” which is
something visual studies reacted against in art history? I’m especially interested
in Tom Mitchell’s article “What Do Pictures Really Want?,” but I suppose that
comes into play in a slightly later stage.
María Lumbreras Corujo: I found surprising that in some of the interviews we read
for this seminar, visual studies is still defined in opposition to art history. They
were written in the first years of the 2000s, and what struck me about these com-
ments was that the comparison is often built on a reductive view of art history
that I don’t think represents how the discipline was practiced at that moment.6
Jim already made this point in his Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, calling
attention to the implications of such a procedure.7 In this respect, I also think
that the idea of visual studies as a “cure” might not always be productive.
Jeanette Roan: Well, Bridget and I imagine ourselves as products of visual studies.
To return to Jim’s remark about social commitment in visual studies, I think
of our required first-year colloquium with Douglas Crimp, who is represented
in our readings by the essay on Warhol. I recall, in particular, two essays that
we read by Stuart Hall that were critical in helping us to imagine a politically
committed practice of visual studies.8 The social was central to why we chose
Rochester, and cultural studies gave us a theoretical and political framework for
5. Heller, “Visual Images Replace Text.” “An Interview with Brian Goldfarb,” in Dikovit
6. Brian Goldfarb, for instance, seems to skaya, Visual Culture, 164.
equate art history with connoisseurship: “Art 7. Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Intro-
history has in fact turned the study of art into duction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 24.
connoisseurship; it would be interesting to con- 8. Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural
sider in what ways art history has functioned as Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,”
simply a mechanism or framework for furthering October 53 (1990): 11–23; Stuart Hall, “Cultural
and supporting connoisseurship via the values it Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cul-
confers. In visual and cultural studies, however, tural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg,
we want to move away from connoisseurship, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York:
since in fact there’s no depth to it, depending Routledge, 1992), 277–94. The latter essay in
as it does purely on taste which is at a certain particular addresses the politics of theory and
level arbitrary, and which can be critiqued, intellectual practice as a politics.
as history itself shows.” Margaret Dikovitskaya,
the study of everyday life, a way to respond to the desire to understand the cul-
ture that is all around us. So I think cultural studies was central to how we were
thinking of the differences between visual studies and art history.
Clemena Antonova: In this sense, your experience is analogous to that of many schol-
ars in Eastern Europe and Russia, who have come to visual studies from cultural
studies. Sofia University, where I did my first degree, is the largest university
in Bulgaria, and it doesn’t have an art history department. Students who were
interested in visuality would pick up topics at the cultural studies department.
Of course, I suspect that we were exposed to a very different tradition of cultural
studies. I had never heard of the Birmingham school while a student in Bulgaria.
James Elkins: Jeanette, for me, that description of your interest in everyday life is a perfect
formula for the difference between visual studies in its first decade and visual stud-
ies now. The next-generation visual studies reader I’m working on, which is writ-
ten by a hundred graduate students from around the world, is definitely presentist;
and politics, identity, and the everyday are among its guiding interests.9 There is
relatively little investment in finding exciting new juxtapositions of theorists and
objects—by which I mean it happens, but it isn’t the authors’ guiding concern.
Michael Holly: Richard Meyer and Darby English, for example, both happily teach
contemporary art, but they simultaneously worry that most of the graduate stu-
dents who come to them want to do only contemporary art, thus altering the
kinds of things they could say and the questions they could ask. In my genera-
tion, no one could do a dissertation on contemporary art. I think it was Richard
who did a survey, about five years ago, for his and Darby’s colloquium at the
Clark called “What Is Contemporary Art History?” that showed that eight out
of ten people entering graduate school wanted to study contemporary art.
James Elkins: Joel Snyder, who is currently chair of art history at the University of Chi-
cago, says 60 percent of incoming graduates study modern and contemporary.
Keith Moxey: The College Art Association figures that there are more dissertations in
modern and contemporary than in all other fields put together.
James Elkins: In our context, it is important to remember that these are statistics from
art history. In contemporary visual studies, the question of premodern interests
is so uncommon that it doesn’t even come up. The field is constituted differently
in relation to history: we’re developing an account based on loss, as Bridget says,
and affectively that isn’t the appropriate way into these issues.
But I’d like to develop the first of your criteria, Michael: the freedom to
engage new theorists. It goes to the point of the interdisciplinarity that was a
crucial part of visual studies’ self-definition in the 1990s.
9. James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen

Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuennen, eds.,
Theorizing Visual Studies: Thinking Through the
Discipline (New York: Routledge, 2012). See the
first introduction to this book.
Michael Holly: I don’t want to claim that the 1990s constituted the utopian period of
visual studies, and thus we need to articulate our farewell to it. We wouldn’t have
what we have now if there hadn’t been this thing called the “new art history”—
a bankrupt term today, but important then as prophesying a moment of absolute
unsettlement in the discipline. I have a chart here that a graduate student gave to
me sometime in the 1990s, which asks, “What is visual cultural studies?” It is a
flow chart, with a litany of topics that comprise visual cultural studies: “Aesthet-
ics, anthropology, archaeology, architectural history, art criticism, art history,
black studies, cultural studies, deconstruction, design history, feminism, film
studies / theory, heritage studies, linguistics, literary criticism, Marxism, media
studies, phenomenology, philosophy, photographic studies, political economy,
postcolonial studies, poststructuralism, proxemics [pause, and laughter], psycho-
analysis, psychology of perception, queer theory, Russian formalism, semiotics,
social history, sociology,” and “structuralism.”
What is proxemics, anyway?
Paul Frosh: The study of spatial relations in personal interactions.10
Michael Holly: The list is a bit intimidating, but to think that art history might have
something to do with this amazingly bold list was liberating.
Inge Hinterwaldner: I would like to pick out some statements on methods that can
be found in the famous October “Questionnaire” and the other texts we read.
In 1983, Norman Bryson writes that without a “radical re-examination of the
methods art history uses” the discipline is not going to free itself from lethargy.11
Also Brian Goldfarb criticizes art history for applying traditional methods.12
On the one hand, it seems that art history is at its end because of its poor inter-
est in theory and its outmoded methods. On the other hand, Tom Mitchell says
visual studies wants what it lacks, namely a systematic methodology.13 I guess
Michael would agree that there is no methodological canon.14 Nonetheless, Tom
himself prefers a wild or anarchic epistemology. So, when it comes to a compari-
son with visual studies, part of the argument seems to be based on a stand-off of
old art-historical approaches and methods. But at the same time, at least some
scholars react to the necessity of renewing the methodology by saying that they
do not want to restrict themselves to a set of methods.
Whitney Davis: Michael, I don’t want to disagree with that, but regarding discussions of
the methodological pluralism of visual studies, from my point of view it wasn’t
the pluralism, but the cogency of the arguments. Visual culture studies was
more right than wrong about substantive questions of psychology, sociology,
history, and the mind. Norman Bryson was more correct in arguments against
10. See for example the diagrams in Edward 12. Brian Goldfarb, in Dikovitskaya, Visual
Hall, “A System for the Notation of Proxemic Culture, 162.
Behaviour,” American Anthropologist 65 (1963): 13. Tom Mitchell, in Dikovitskaya, Visual
1003–26. [—J.E.] Culture, 239.
11. Bryson, preface to Vision and Painting: 14. Michael Ann Holly, in Dikovitskaya,
The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale Univer- Visual Culture, 198.
sity Press, 1983), xi.
Gombrich than some others were; Richard Wollheim had a better account of
depiction than Arthur Danto, and Goodman had a better account than Woll-
heim; both of them had a far better account than Tom Mitchell. There were
canons of criteria of argument in different subjects, so it is odd for me to hear
the situation described as “let a thousand flowers bloom.”
Keith Moxey: I would say something along the same lines, namely that there is no
positionless position. Anyone who teaches a methodology course is aware of
theoretical historicity. I think that goes back to what we called the “new art
history”: new theories were convincing for contextual reasons; the question is,
why did they matter? The answers had to do with the nature of the enterprise,
the politics of the cultural situation. There aren’t any eternal answers, only argu-
ments of greater and lesser conviction, which serve a purpose and which are then
replaced by others.
Joana Cunha Leal: They were important precisely because they weren’t eternal answers.
As Bryson puts it in the closing paragraph of the essay we read: the stimulating
condition of this new art history was that it could no longer lay claim to final or
absolute knowledge of its object.
María Lumbreras Corujo: I see the enterprise you’re describing, Keith, as part of a
general interest in epistemology that was very strong in the early days of visual
culture, sort of a basis that has gradually lost its force. Some early texts on visual
culture studies convey a strong commitment to a completely new way of pro-
ducing knowledge. I’m thinking of Mitchell’s “What is Visual Culture?”15 and
of some responses to the October “Questionnaire.” They convey optimism and
confidence in the relevance of new theories and methodologies. By contrast,
many of the texts written in the next decade show just the opposite: Mieke Bal
and Marquard Smith seem very suspicious about all that.16
Whitney Davis: The debate between Bryson and Gombrich, ca. 1980–85, was a defining
moment. An analogue today might be the dispute between visual studies and
emergent neuroasethetics. There may be a deep dispute that could occur within
visual studies between a broadly social, cultural model and a broadly biological
model.
James Elkins: From my point of view this may well be a discussion that has become
visible on the horizon of some—not the majority—of art history, but not, so far,
in visual studies.
Whitney Davis: I would expect a genuine theoretical debate about those matters:
I would hope for such a debate.
[The seminar took a twenty-minute break at this point.]
15. Mitchell, “What Is Visual Culture?,” 16. Smith, “Visual Studies, or the Ossifica-
in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the tion of Thought,” Journal of Visual Culture 4,
Outside; A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin no. 2 (2005): 237–56; Bal, “Visual Essentialism
Panofsky (1892–1968), edited by Irving Lavin and the Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of
(Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995), Visual Culture 2, no. 1 (2003): 5–32.
207–17.
Michael Holly: Let’s consider some of the readings I set for this seminar. The Octo-
ber “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” emblematizes an especially important
moment.17 It was unsigned, as if all the October aficionados were warning us
away. The inquiry assumed many things were wrong with visual studies. Those
who were solicited for responses to three leading declarations were only given a
short time to respond, and we were not to write more than three hundred words,
or some such number.
Keith Moxey: It seemed parochial, as if there were some problem with art history. These
powerful figures, associated with the editorial board of October, were paradoxi-
cally the very ones who had opened the doors to the sorts of theories that ani-
mated visual studies. They had introduced Derrida, Foucault—
Michael Holly: Semiotics, psychoanalysis—
Keith Moxey: into the realm of historical interpretation. And yet here they were, turn-
ing on people who were using similar theories. I think that moment can be
understood as two positions on the left, confronting one another. One position
comes out of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the Enlightenment, and their
critique of popular culture in relation to fascism; the other comes out of the
Birmingham school in postwar Britain, with people like Dick Hebdige, Stuart
Hall, and others who were also inspired by Marxist thought, but were interested
in the visual life, the visual culture of ordinary working-class people.18 (One of
their first studies, for example, was about the uses of literacy among members of
the British working class.)
So you have an argument between two wings of leftist politics: one has no
use for the entertainment industry, and the other thinks popular culture is where
it’s at.
Joana Cunha Leal: I think the “Questionnaire” was a turning point; it is interesting to
see the dissensus in the history of the young discipline, visual studies. As an art
historian, I am sympathetic to the defensive stance of art history (Tom Crow,
for example, saying that visual culture “deskills” students), and with the fact
that some of the methodologies visual studies now claims as its own were being
developed within art history. So what I see here is a strong reaction to the aban-
donment of the field of art history: what mattered was to make the field stronger,
rather than defending it or letting it go.
Michael Holly: Yes, that’s a very perceptive thing to say. When you read the “Question-
naire” now, does it seem like a tempest in a teapot? Or does the language still
have a purchase on our arguments in the academy today?
17. October 77 (Summer 1996). This is also 1979); see also Hebdige, Hiding in the Light:
discussed, by Hal Foster and others, in Beyond On Images and Things (London: Routledge,
the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, edited by 1988). For Hall, see “Cultural Studies and the
James Elkins and Harper Montgomery, Stone Art Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,”
Theory Institutes 4 (University Park: Pennsylva- in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in
nia State University Press, 2013). Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall,
18. See, for example, Dick Hebdige, Subcul- Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis
ture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, (London: Routledge, 1980), 2–36. [—J.E.]
Whitney Davis: I think some of these debates are alive and well. There remains, among
several of my colleagues at Berkeley, a decisive commitment to the avant-garde,
to modernism, and to the possibility of critique. These discussions seem to be
still alive and well in some circles.
Jeanette Roan: I agree that many of the issues the “Questionnaire” raises are relevant
today. I continue to teach the text as a historical document of the period, as an
index of the anxieties that visual studies provoked. What’s interesting is how we
might see these debates fifteen years later. Were the critics of visual studies right
to be concerned? How might we respond to the same questions today, with the
benefit of a decade and a half of hindsight?
James Elkins: I’d like to note the term “anthropology” in the “Questionnaire,” in order
to place it in its historical setting—since I consider that in the time scale of visual
studies, 1996 is now a measurable distant point in time. “Anthropology” was
famously demonized in the “Questionnaire,” but there have been at least three
stages in the reception of “anthropology” since then. One would be the sort of
inclusive list Michael quoted, which gave some support to a kind of accumulative
sense of interdisciplinarity that became important in the following decade (in the
texts by Mieke Bal, Tom Mitchell, Marquard Smith, and others, published after
2002, that we’ll be reading in the next seminar). Anthropology appears on lists
like Michael’s in an undemonized form, a neutral form. Second would be Hans
Belting’s book Bild-Anthropologie, also from the next decade, which we’ll discuss
later this week. Third would be the Anglo-American anthropology and ethnogra-
phy that currently figure in visual studies. In my experience, younger visual stud-
ies scholars see this demonized anthropology and just don’t care. That careless-
ness, that insouciance, is significant. Part of that is what is meant by presentism,
when it is used as a pejorative term against current senses of visual studies.
Anna Sigrídur Arnar: Reading this questionnaire again after many years saddened
me, especially since it came from scholars whom I greatly admire. I felt that it
represented a missed opportunity to have a genuine conversation about visual
studies. The opening questions were poorly framed, the tone disembodied and
sanctimonious. This was not was not an invitation for dialogue, but a call before
a court of self-appointed judges. I don’t disagree with their basic claim that there
are problems with some methodological assumptions in visual culture or visual
studies, but these issues are still being worked out.
Paul Frosh: I’m concerned about our use of the word “presentism.” It can be taken as
a term of abuse, especially when we’re looking back in time, and particularly in
the context of an event called “farewell to visual studies.” I prefer Georges Didi-
Huberman’s formulation, “anachronism”: the “Questionnaire” has the potential
to be anachronistic in his sense if we reread it now, in a different cultural con-
figuration, and put it to different work. Moreover, in the disputes around the
“Questionnaire,” and even in our discussions today, a central characteristic of
“visual studies” is that it remains resolutely organized around the visual object
or image. To use a term from cultural studies which might be confusing in this
context, it is overwhelmingly “textualist” in that it focuses almost exclusively on
the signifying object and medium (the text or the image), rather than on social
and cultural processes of production and reception. Crucially, it rarely moves
beyond analytic encounters with distinct visual objects, image-text ensembles or
genres. Its limit point is where empirical social science tends to begin, including
anthropological research—the relations between these objects and the people
and systems that create and consume them. Visual studies recapitulates the gap
between literary reception theory, on the one hand, which theorizes an abstract
reader from analyses of the text, and the sociology of culture, on the other, which
traces the interrelations between texts and actual readers: the gap between, for
instance, Barthes’s work theorizing the reader, and Janice Radway’s account of
romance readers.19 There seems to be almost no awareness of a possible border
zone between the concerns voiced in the “Questionnaire” and visual sociology,
the sociology of culture, and visual anthropology.
Gustav Frank: You are right, Paul, the main concern of this first phase of visual studies
was to establish images. The plural is crucial here as well, as an object proper,
and notably for the first time. Priority was given to vision and even to visuality—
to the social, cultural, and anthropological encounters with this object. It’s fair
enough for you accuse this project of “textuality.” But to go back, via reception
studies, to the social constructedness of imagery, instead of accepting the visual
constructedness of the social, cultural, anthropological sphere, is even worse
than this so-called textuality.
Michael Holly: But of course art history has always been text-based. A frequent criti-
cism of Panofsky is that in his work the word always came before the image; the
scholar had to locate the textual source to explain why the visual object looked
the way it did. I am always surprised that text-based image reception theory, for
example in Wolfgang Iser or Hans Robert Jauß, has rarely entered the discussion
of what art history is.20
Inge Hinterwaldner: Wolfgang Kemp is a representative of an aesthetic of perception;
he adapted the account of the “Konstanzer Schule” to art history.21
Whitney Davis: In art history, if not in visual studies, a number of people have explored
reception theories. Don’t you think Joseph Koerner’s work is involved in recep-
tion history?
19. Barthes’s main theorizations of the 20. See, for example, Wolfgang Iser,
reader and reading can be found in “The Death “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological
of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, edited Approach,” in Reader-Response Criticism:
and translated by Stephen Heath (London: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, edited
Fontana, 1977): 142–48; S/Z (New York: Hill by Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
and Wang, 1974); and The Pleasure of the Text University Press): 50–69.
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). In contrast, see 21. Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwis-
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, senschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, edited by
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Wolfgang Kemp (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 1991).
University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Paul Frosh: That’s my point, Michael. I was taught by Bryson, and he had us read Iser
and Barthes, and then he said, “Okay, they stop at a certain point. So here’s
Bourdieu.” Bourdieu’s work, especially Distinction,22 makes the crucial jump
from a text-, image-, or object-oriented hermeneutics to a sociology of culture
and an engagement with empirical production and reception processes. So when
in visual studies we talk about visuality and visual modes, in addition to images,
was a similar jump to a more sociological engagement with empirical viewers
ever made? Or was it evaded entirely? Is the invocation of scopic regimes, visual
modes, viewer positions, etc. in visual studies anything more than a gesture or an
idealization, a theoretical construction of abstract viewing possibilities derived
from the researcher’s own interpretive encounters with images? Do visual studies
scholars ever conduct research involving actual image makers or image view-
ers? Obviously in historical scholarship there are some good examples, but in
research on contemporary visual culture I think we tend to leave that kind
of thing to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and communications
scholars—in other words, to social scientists—and all too often shy away from
engaging with their work.
Michael Holly: It happens in film studies.
Lisa Cartwright: Yes, and there was Griselda Pollock and Jonathan Crary.
Gustav Frank: I agree with Paul’s emphasis on the sociological and empirical deficits in
visual studies. But I would also claim that it is visual studies’ business to keep an
eye on the makeup of such studies. For example, if the basis of reception analy-
ses is textual protocols, then that leads to talking about texts again instead of
images. In terms of empirical approaches to image use and vision, neuroaesthet-
ics also makes a strong claim, although it should be informed by visual studies
from an early stage: otherwise a “farewell” really will be justified.
22. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Cri- A Middle-Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press,
tique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Rout- 1990); and The Field of Cultural Production
ledge, 1986). See also Bourdieu, Photography: (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
3. H I S T O R I E S : 2 0 0 0 – 2 0 1 0
The discussions transcribed here were led by Sunil Manghani. Participants read texts by
Mieke Bal and others, many from the Journal of Visual Culture.1 W. J. T. Mitchell par-
ticipated in part of these conversations, on the subject of his own essay “Metapictures.”2
Sunil Manghani: Today we come to the recent history and the present condition of
visual studies. Our task is to think about what survived, and what are the key
events or texts. The reading I set of Nick Mirzoeff’s is from the second edition of
the Reader, which is different from the text in the first edition. Irit Rogoff’s piece
stays the same in both editions, so it dates to 1998. So, just some headlines from
those pieces: in Mirzoeff’s essay, “visuality” is described as “the intersection of
power with visual representation”; he talks about visual culture as a “tactic,” and
it’s interesting how “tactic” and “strategy” are related; and he talks about “visual
events,” which is something he retains from the first edition, although he tries
to temper it.3 Both Mirzoeff and Rogoff make an analogy between visual studies
and feminism; they don’t want to place visual studies, or make a department out
of it, but they mean it to intervene, to have something to say. Mirzoeff uses the
term “postdisciplinary,” and the expression “dwindling discipline,” but from my
perspective, I find there’s a return to traditional subjects.
Whitney Davis: Can you expand on that?
Sunil Manghani: Sure, I can certainly comment from a UK perspective. There has been
a lot of energy and excitement about moving disciplines and disciplinary homes,
and there is talk of postdisciplinarity. But we also come up against the barrier of
administration, student numbers, and marketing departments. All that is very
1. The readings included Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2. See Mitchell, “Metapictures,” in Pic-

“The Subject of Visual Culture,” in The Visual ture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Culture Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Nicholas Press, 1994), 35–82; and Manghani, “Making
Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 3–23; Irit Metapictures Political: Public Screenings of the
Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in Mirzoeff, Fall of the Berlin Wall,” Northern Lights 7 (2009):
Visual Culture Reader, 24–36; W. J. T. Mitchell, 113–31.
“Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” 3. Mirzoeff, “Subject of Visual Culture.”
Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2002): 165–81; Mirzoeff suggests the need to revise his previ-
Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object ous formulation (from the first edition of the
of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture Reader), which he suggests privileged the
2, no. 1 (2003): 5–32; James Elkins, “Envoi,” viewpoint of the consumer in a given visual
in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction event. A decade on from the original publica-
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 197–222; Bal, tion, Mirzoeff argues that the “event” is not
“The Commitment to Look,” Journal of Visual necessarily always fully knowable since it occurs
Culture 4 (2005): 145–62; Marquard Smith, within a network of exchanges. Thus, whilst he
“Visual Studies, or the Ossification of Thought,” retains the notion of “visual events,” he places
Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 237–56; much more emphasis upon network society and
and Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic the need to differentiate the networks and levels
Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2005): to which events belong.
131–46.
pressing, especially since the new government has put up fees threefold and has
basically taken all public funding out of the university system. So the UK uni-
versity system is desperately trying to reinvent the story of why one should study
at university, and that has produced a reaction, a return to traditional subjects.
James Elkins: This may be the point to add that we tried to advertise this event in the
Journal of Visual Culture; Marq Smith, the editor, declined our request. He wrote
me a long, impassioned, and convincing e‑mail about how it just wasn’t the time
to give anyone in the administration ammunition that might help them under-
mine a “postdisciplinary” or interdisciplinary venture like visual culture studies.
However, that is one reason—a very grounded reason—why our Fellows this
year are exceptionally diverse, internationally, with an apparently low propor-
tion of UK scholars.
Sunil Manghani: So, in regard to Mirzoeff’s essay: at the end there is a fantastic line:
“If visual culture is a ghost, how do we see it?” I am not sure what he means,
but he talks about the anticapitalist movement, and he wants to use technolo-
gies that haven’t been touched by Bill Gates. It’s almost as if there was this panic
room of defunct media, and you could rewire it and come out fighting. I find it
very strange, and it’s repeated in his most recent article, “Right to Look,” which
is in advance of his book.4 Here it is pertinent that 9/11 has been written about
largely in terms of spectacle, but it can also be seen as a turning point: after 9/11,
a number of people who were interested in visual culture as activism or in its
political dimensions became interested instead in social media. For a few years
following 9/11, there were countless conferences about the visual, and now I see
an equally large number of conferences and events around social media.
Whitney Davis: I’m not sure where we are in our trajectory of visual culture: is this
decade Visual Culture 2 or 3? At any rate, the trajectory from the later 1990s into
the present century is marked by the Gulf War and 9/11. The first editions of
the textbooks, from the early 1990s, are in response to the Gulf War; the second
editions respond to 9/11. The difference between those two correlations is that
the earlier texts are very active in their responses, but the second iteration seems
repetitive. So it makes sense that there would be a flooding out of people from
visual culture studies to digital and social media. I don’t find that surprising.
Sunil Manghani: I agree. I think Mirzoeff and Co. are still working their way out of the
earlier version of visual culture.
James Elkins: It’s also worth noting that Mirzoeff’s Watching Babylon is a pessimistic
book, but the signs are that Right to Look, the forthcoming book, is activist: that
is, it is a strong continuation of the earlier position.5
4. Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Routledge, 2005); Mirzoeff, Right to Look;
Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 473–96; and The Right at the time of this seminar (July 2011), Right
to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: to Look was advertised on Mirzoeff’s blog,
Duke University Press, 2011). nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL.
5. Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War
in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (London:
59 2000–2010
I’d like to see if we can continue Gustav’s notation: Visual Culture 1 would
be the early twentieth century; Visual Culture 2 its reinvention out of cultural
studies and poststructuralism. In that case, we’re talking about Visual Culture 3
now: a less directly politically inflected set of practices, more engaged with social
and digital media, which emerged close on to the beginning of this century, with
the emergence of just the first few visual studies textbooks.
Juliet Bellow: I’m not sure I would agree that Visual Culture 3 is less, or less directly,
political. There has been a lot of meaningful politically engaged work, both in
theory and practice, in the last decade, of the sort that Douglas Crimp called for
in “Getting the Warhol We Deserve.”6 Do you see this scholarship as a continu-
ation of what you are calling Visual Culture 2, or is it outside of visual culture
entirely?
James Elkins: It’s true that political engagement continues, often I think in more atten-
uated, more sharply focused forms. But the newest work, I find, is often disen-
gaged from activist politics—but we’ll be developing that theme, I hope, later
in the week.7
Regarding the decade we’re considering here: it might be useful to review
the chronology. The previous decade ended with the first reader, Nick Mirzoeff’s
Visual Culture Reader (1998), and the first anthology, his Introduction to Visual
Culture (1999). Just two years later, at the beginning of the decade we’re consid-
ering, there is Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken’s Practices of Looking (2001),
the second English-language textbook.8
In the first half of the decade we’re studying, textbooks proliferated: the
second edition of Nick’s textbook (2002); my own Visual Studies: A Skeptical
Introduction (2003); Amelia Jones’s Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2002);
Richard Howells’s Visual Culture (2003), which is important because it is one of
the few translated into Chinese; Matthew Rampley’s anthology Exploring Visual
Culture (2005); and, if we want to stretch the years just a little, Sunil’s anthology,
edited with Jon Simons and Adrian Piper, Images: A Reader (2006).9 So I think
6. In the realm of practice, I would cite colin Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, edited
lectives such as the Yes Men, Yo Mango, and by Suzanne Hudson and Alexander Dumbadze
WochenKlausur. Scholarship in this area, which (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
stands at the crossroads of art history and visual 7. See Section 7 of the Seminars.
culture, primarily deals with the relationship 8. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture
between contemporary art and political practice. Reader (London: Routledge, 1998); Mirzoeff,
Examples include Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Building An Introduction to Visual Culture (London:
a Marker of Nuclear Warning,” in Monuments Routledge, 1999); Marita Sturken and Lisa Cart-
and Memory, Made and Unmade, edited by wright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to
Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 183–204; 2001).
The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the 9. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture
Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, edited by Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002);
Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette (Boston: Amelia Jones, The Feminism and Visual Culture
Mass MoCA; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Reader (London: Routledge, 2002); Richard
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photogra- Howells, Visual Culture (Cambridge: Polity,
phy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Carrie 2003); Matthew Rampley, Exploring Visual
Lambert-Beatty, “Twelve Miles: Boundaries of Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts (Edin-
the New Art/Activism,” Signs: Journal of Women burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Sunil
in Culture and Society 33, no. 2 (2008): 309–27; Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons, eds.,
Terri Weissman, “Freedom’s Just Another Word,” Images: A Reader (London: Sage, 2006).
it’s not an exaggeration to say that the first half of the 2000s, which is the exact
period of the debates about interdisciplinarity in the Journal of Visual Culture,
was the period of English-language textbooks.
Sunil Manghani: Although perhaps I can just add, the Images: A Reader volume was an
attempt to redraw the interdisciplinary boundaries once more. In the introduc-
tion we suggest visual culture can be subsumed within a broader image studies.10
Admittedly, it remained very much wedded to English-language texts, indeed
the Western canon as a whole. This was a clear limitation we sought to acknowl-
edge. The inevitable barriers remain, and as it was, the book was a difficult
enough pitch to the publishers.
Gustav Frank: If we recall last year’s debates about postcolonial aesthetics with all our
suspicions about the major presses in the U.S. colonizing global academic dis-
course, and our talk about the activist subversion of the everyday by the young-
est generation of critical theorists and practitioners, then it seems likely that the
project of visual studies has not fulfilled its promise to gather political energy
around the war of pictures.11 Traditional areas of cultural studies and small-
scale projects that promise to combine theory and practice have regained their
centrality.
James Elkins: Later in the decade, books proliferated. In my provisional listing, there
is Marq Smith’s collection of interviews, Visual Culture Studies (2008); my own
Visual Literacy (2008); the second edition of Practices of Looking (2009); and
Visual Cultures (2010), which came from the same conference as Visual Literacy.
And now, at the beginning of the 2010s, there is the second edition of Mir-
zoeff’s Introduction to Visual Culture (2008); Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell’s
Handbook of Visual Culture (to be published in 2012); Sunil’s multivolume Image
Studies anthology; and the anthology I’m editing, written by graduate students
from around the world, which is due in 2012.12 I don’t see any clear break in the
building of the academic discipline.13
10. Images: A Reader takes Mitchell’s (New York: Routledge, 2008); Marita Sturken
revival of iconology and the study of a “family of and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking:
images” as its starting point. It attempts to look An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd ed.
across many different image types, or at least (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); James
the range of writings concerned with images Elkins, ed., Visual Cultures (Bristol: Intellect,
in all their variety and ambiguity. The book 2010); Nicholas Mirzoeff, Introduction to Visual
defines image studies as needing to go beyond Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Taylor and Francis,
the humanities, to step outside anthropologi- 2011); Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell,
cal interests in the visual. It does not advocate Handbook of Visual Culture (London: Berg,
an interdisciplinary approach as such, rather 2012); Sunil Manghani, Image Studies: Theory
it considers how and why multidisciplinary and Practice (London: Routledge, 2012) and
approaches cohere in some cases and fail in Image Studies: A Practical Approach (London:
others. Routledge, 2013); James Elkins, Kristi McGuire,
11. See Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti- Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuen-
Aesthetic, edited by James Elkins and Harper nen, eds., Theorizing Visual Studies: Thinking
Montgomery, Stone Art Theory Institutes 4 (Uni- Through the Discipline (New York: Routledge,
versity Park: Pennsylvania State Press University 2012).
Press, 2013). 13. The first major visual culture anthol-
12. Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Stud- ogy appeared in Denmark in 2009: Visuel
ies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (London: kultur—viden, liv, politik, edited by Hans Dam
Sage, 2008); James Elkins, ed., Visual Literacy Christensen and Helene Illeris (Copenhagen:
61 2000–2010
Sunil Manghani: Image Studies: A Practical Approach was pitched to Routledge as some-
thing very different from Mirzoeff’s projects: I told them I don’t really see myself
in the stream of visual culture studies. My proposal knits together small tasks—
ways of thinking about making images together with studying them. It’s about
what it might feel like to be engaged in science imaging, in drawing, and so
forth. One of the people at Routledge said, “That’s great, but can you maybe put
‘visual culture’ in the subtitle?” And I replied, saying something like, “I’d rather
not: visual culture will be a chapter in the book.” It’s an already established
field.14
James Elkins: And as far as I can see, the graduate student–authored anthology will be
entirely different once again, with a radical depoliticization, and an emphasis on
the everyday, on gender as understood through Muñoz and Butler, and with dif-
ferent visual materials. So maybe we’re marking the start of a new phase: Visual
Studies 4!
Paul Frosh: There’s another reader, Stuart Hall and Jessica Evans’s Visual Culture:
The Reader, which appeared in 1999.15 Does anyone use that?
Lisa Cartwright: Yes, and there’s also the Stuart Hall text Representation: Cultural Rep-
resentations and Signifying Practices.16
Sunil Manghani: Hall and Evans’s book is a very good one, and it projects a very dif-
ferent sense of visual culture. It is more contained in a sense, because it brings
together existing, canonical text. In retrospect, Nick Mirzoeff’s Visual Culture
Reader really was an attempt to do something entirely new, and in the sec-
ond edition he consolidates that, and makes a positive point out of diversity.
Indeed, he says the “field of visual culture is now sufficiently well established and
dynamic to sustain a plurality of views without fracturing into warring camps.”17
Lisa Cartwright: Some of these differences have to do with individual editors, such as
Bill Germano, who played an important role in shaping the growth of the field
Multivers, 2009); and the first Nordic journal of 14. Manghani, Image Studies: A Practical
visual culture (more specifically: “visual culture Approach.
and aesthetic expression”) emerged in 2010 15. Stuart Hall and Jessica Evans, Visual Cul-
with a home in the Department of Information ture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999). The book
Science and Media Studies at the University of presents a compilation of many canonical texts
Bergen, Norway: Ekfrase: Nordisk Tidsskrift for from authors such as Roland Barthes, Michael
Visuell Kultur. The journal’s first volume includes Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Guy
a questionnaire by the journal’s editors, Asbørn Debord, Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Frantz
Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, asking a selection Fanon, and Laura Mulvey, as well as frequently
of Scandinavian scholars to define what visual cited texts from the domains of art history and
culture is to them. Several of the replies empha- cultural studies, including entries by Norman
size the role of social and digital media and Bryson, Victor Burgin, Dick Hebdige, Rosalind
refuse to give the visual special status compared Krauss, Douglas Crimp, John Tagg, and Kaja
to the other senses. The questionnaire also Silverman.
reveals an expressed uncertainty about how to 16. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural
proceed after the shift from a semiotics-based Representations and Signifying Practices (Lon-
visual culture studies to one that is phenom- don: Sage in association with Open University,
enologically oriented. “Hva er visuell kultur?,” 1997).
Ekfrase: Nordisk Tidsskrift for Visuell Kultur 1, 17. Mirzoeff, “Subject of Visual Culture,” 19.
no. 1 (2010): 30–43. [—K.N.]
through his role at Routledge in the 1980s and 1990s, or Ken Wissoker at Duke,
who continues to play this role.
Michael Holly: To Sunil’s comment about how visual culture is now an established
field. I think there’s a sense among editors that the expression “such and such
and visual culture” is such a flabby notion that if you put it in your title or sub-
title, the book will be doomed. Editors of major presses speak sometimes about
how they don’t encourage the expression in the title unless it’s really justified.
Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon.
Lisa Cartwright: Which editors report having this sense of visual culture?
Michael Holly: I don’t remember, specifically; we had a major conference at the Clark,
including editors from Duke, Minnesota, Chicago, Yale, MIT, and Berkeley.
Whitney Davis: That is a complete inversion of the situation in art history around 1985,
when the best way to get a book published was to redescribe it as visual studies.
Lisa Cartwright: I don’t think it’s helpful to characterize an emergent field as a pub-
lishing trend. Certainly there is certainly no longer a sense of newness about the
concept, but it does describe a disciplinary context that is now widely recognized
internationally. Publishers recognize that shift.
Michael Holly: The executive editors, who were at our conference, were suspicious of
the expression because they felt they had to stay ahead of the curve.
James Elkins: Maybe our book should be retitled as just Farewell To.
We have been talking about textbooks; let’s look at some of the other essays
for this seminar, such as Mieke Bal’s “Visual Essentialism and the Object of
Visual Culture” (2003), her “Commitment to Look” (2005), or Marq Smith’s
“Visual Studies, Or the Ossification of Thought” (2005). It might be interesting
to consider how those discussions about interdisciplinarity sound alongside the
emergence of textbooks.
Keith Moxey: I think there are two versions of visual studies at work. Marq Smith says
that for his generation, “It was something not just to see the results of decades
of struggle as the histories, theories, and practices of women, of the postcolonial
or subaltern subject, of queer communities came to the fore, but to see these
discourses integrate themselves into, embed and structure academic study. It was
an interesting historical fact rather than historical reductivism when political
impulses, from feminism and Marxism to modernism itself, were all prefixed by
a ‘post.’ And, it was something when it didn’t seem that there was anything left
to fight for.”18 One sentence points to something, and the next seems to take it
away. So one view of visual studies has to do with feminism, postcolonial stud-
ies, and queer theory; but Smith also sees all of these as things as “post”: post-
feminism, post–queer theory, and so on: there’s a kind of disappointment that
there is nothing left to fight for.
18. Smith, “Visual Studies,” 245.

63 2000–2010
The other view of visual studies comes from Jim’s “Envoi” at the end of Visual
Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. After considering four proposals to expand or
revise visual studies, he says visual studies “needs to become more ambitious,
more wide-ranging, more difficult.” Then he says, “A slower and less self-assured
interpretation is also a more reflective interpretation, one whose author is more
likely to doubt her disciplinary contexts and purposes. I hope this short book
can work like a weir, slowing the torrent of interpretation. I love visual objects
and practices because they are often—by their nature—tremendously difficult
to put into words, and so I would like to hobble the interpretation of visuality,
making it less smooth and confident.”19
So one the one hand, you have a series of projects, methods, and political
positions; on the other hand, you have the view that it is not at all clear what
visual studies is about.
James Elkins: Well, anecdotally, some of the impetus behind that passage was that I was
reviewing visual studies essays for different publications, and it struck me that
it was easier for authors to publish their work as visual studies than as, say, art
history. The rules of adequate interest or competence or success were unformed,
and in that sense it was the same as it is with new media like performance or
video when they first started: it was not difficult to produce a work that could be
taken as an acceptable instance of its field.
Michael Holly: When I was on the board of the College Art Association, I tried to
introduce a new category, visual studies. That proposal caused an enormous dif-
ficulty: not because of the issues of interdisciplinarity in Mieke Bal’s texts, but
because of issues related to Marq Smith’s and Nick Mirzoeff’s work; you could
not be openly political and also be part of art history. Now, ten or twelve years
later, the term “visual studies” is in everything; for the hundredth anniversary of
the CAA, there was even talk of changing its name to include visual culture or
something similar. What is the CAA saying by their interest in the subject now?
Are they saying visual studies involves deep philosophical questioning? I don’t
think so. Are they saying they welcome its politics? No. It’s something about the
rounding off of the sharp corners of visual studies. What does that rounding off
consist of? Where did visual studies lose its revolutionary flavor? Was it done in
by politics itself? It has been incorporated into the intellectual mainstream.
Flora Lysen: Perhaps it has something to do with this Calvin Klein argument.20 I feel
we are opting for a slower, more reflective, less self-assured kind of interpreta-
tion, something that permits us to question the critique of ideology. Maybe now
we’re at a point where we’re doing weak criticism, philosophically speaking.
And yet, if I take the Case of the Calvin Klein Suit as a metaphor for an
overconfident, insufficiently reflective practice, what are we to do now?
19. Elkins, Visual Studies, 200–1.

20. See the first introduction to this book,
under “Absences,” no. 7.
Lisa Cartwright: Calvin Klein is something certain students buy secondhand and wear
now in order to reference an earlier moment in fashion, but without the irony
or the reflexivity implied in the 1980s, when appropriation of styles from earlier
decades came with an edge of critique. After you understand your symptom,
there is no longer the necessity to be critical. Following up on Flora’s question
about weak criticism, I wonder if we need to consider visual studies in the light
of the less certain place that weak theory occupies in the discipline today.
Michael Holly: What does that mean?
Lisa Cartwright: There were many different strands of thought about how to do theory
after poststructuralism, after the decline of actually existing socialism, and after
the realization that criticism and grand theory narratives might not have the
impact on politics that some had hoped. Eve Sedgwick, in the essay “Paranoid
Reading and Reparative Reading” (contained in her book Touching Feeling), sug-
gested that criticism all too often works off of affects such as humiliation, gener-
ating negative feelings about the things that make us feel bad, and anticipating
failures.21 She used the term “weak theory”—adapted from the concept’s use by
American experimental psychologist Silvan Tomkins—to describe the kind of
phenomenological and theoretical tasks that can be accomplished through local
theories and nonce taxonomies, the making and unmaking of categories, so we
can grasp complexity and variation so we can anticipate something other than
failure when we do the work of criticism.
Gustav Frank: If I think back to the list of disciplines Michael read, it occurs to me that
in the best case they could converge on a new kind of theorizing, a weak theory.
On the other hand, if we think of it as a random or indefinitely extensible list,
then we have to wonder if visual studies has a central coherence.
James Elkins: Although we haven’t talked about it, this decade, 2000–2010, is the one
that saw the most concerted discussion of visual studies’ disciplinary nature.
At the moment, there are at least five terms in circulation to describe the posi-
tion of a project such as visual studies: “interdisciplinary,” “postdisciplinary,”
“indisciplinary,” “subdisciplinary,” and “transdisciplinary.” We have been look-
ing at these in our own department at the School of the Art Institute, and to
some extent they have clearly different usages. But the very idea of thinking
about this issue came into visual studies during the first half of the decade we’re
discussing, so it is a distinct part of the history of visual studies’ descriptions of
itself.22
Paul Frosh: There’s a lot of work going on in cultural economy that doesn’t explicitly
call itself “weak theory,” but uses concepts of immaterial labor to think about
21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid 22. My own Visual Studies: A Skeptical Intro-
Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So duction is part of this literature, in that it spends
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About some time distinguishing pertinent forms of
You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, interdisciplinarity using essays by Douglas
Performativity, 123–51 (Durham: Duke University Crimp, Stephen Melville, and others.
Press, 2003).
65 2000–2010
the kinds of agencies, subject positions, aesthetic positions, and pleasures that
are being produced. In those studies there is a different sense of labor, one that is
not dependent on the unveiling of false consciousness, of the notion that labor
is “tricked.” What matters instead is the accumulated pedagogical efficacy of
an ongoing project. That is perhaps where weak theory is important. We aren’t
going to stop people from buying Calvin Klein just by showing how capitalistic
they are. We might get people to think about how complexes of discourses work
and how consumer culture and commodities involve diverse and often conflict-
ing practices.23
Sunil Manghani: That’s an important point, because critiques like the one in the Case
of the Calvin Klein Suit are ubiquitous. When Barthes was putting together his
semiotics, that became so popular the marketing director of Renault became his
PhD student. And what does Renault do? It took Barthes’s methodology and
produced it on an industrial level. Now that process has sped up even more, and
there is more urgency to find viable alternatives.
James Elkins: We’ve come to an interesting point here, where most of the textbooks we
have been discussing would be very difficult to imagine—except maybe the one
Sunil is planning. I’m not yet convinced that “weak theory” is the right name
for what we’re after, but clearly it is different from the kinds of political unveil-
ings and empowerments that are described in the earlier texts. Perhaps this is the
place to begin thinking about the current decade.
23. Crucial rethinking of the nature of con- Culture and Society 14, no. 2 (2000): 297–314;
sumerism and the commodity has been under- Giles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dress-
way in recent years in sociology, anthropology, ing Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton
and media studies, problematizing—though University Press, 1994); Arjun Appadurai,
by no means always rejecting—neo-Marxist introduction to The Social Life of Things: Com-
critiques. For a range of positions, see Daniel modities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun
Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consump- Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University
tion (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Colin Press, 1986), 3–41; Mica Nava, “Framing Adver-
Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of tising: Cultural Analysis and the Incrimination
Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Black- of Visual Texts,” in Buy This Book: Studies in
well, 1989); Ann Bermingham, introduction to Advertising and Consumption, edited by Mica
The Consumption of Culture: Image, Object, Text, Nava, Andrew Blake, Iain MacRury, and Barry
1600–1800, edited by Ann Bermingham and Richards (London: Routledge, 1997), 34–48;
John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995): 1–19; Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in
Natan Sznaider, “Consumerism as a Civilizing Media Culture (London: Routledge, 2006); Celia
Process: Israel and Judaism in the Second Age Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy
of Modernity,” International Journal of Politics, (London: Routledge, 2004).
4. H I S T O R I E S : T H E P R E S E N T D E C A D E
Here we discussed developments in Anglo-American visual studies up to the pres-

ent. Tom Mitchell joined the seminar, and we walked mostly about his essay
“Metapictures.” 1 He reviewed the history and interpretations of the duck-rabbit illu-
sion, and then showed some images of prohibited images such as Poussin’s painting
Adoration of the Golden Calf.2 He showed a still from the end of Jurassic Park,
in which a dinosaur has its DNA code projected onto its skin. His presentation
ended with some “brand new” metapictures, including a widely disseminated image
of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others watching an unseen monitor that
displayed the killing of Osama bin Laden. The transcript opens with the discussion of
metapictures; afterward he wanted to know what we were saying farewell to.
Michael Holly: In a sense all images are potentially duck-rabbit images, if they incor-
porate, either metaphorically or actually, the kind of overwriting that is liter-
ally present in the Jurassic Park raptor. The image becomes the duck, and the
critical response to it becomes the rabbit, or vice versa. So is it that only some
images, which have the potential to become paradoxical, duck-rabbit images,
or metapictures—whatever we want to call them—reflect, initiate, or instigate
their own critical reception?
Tom Mitchell: The image, for me, is always an image-text. It has some relation to lan-
guage. Images are things made by language-using creatures. There are no images
before there is at least gesture, or some form of language. The relation between
the words you use and the image you encounter or make is an empirical ques-
tion. There’s one relation in the raptor image, which is that the text is the secret
inner life that makes this image possible. Here we get to see it: the image makes
it possible to see its own generative text. With Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden
Calf, there is a different animal, the calf, coming to life—into dangerous life.
I think most of the art-historical discourse around the image has been to rein-
force the authority of the law, to side with Moses and say, Yes, the truth of the
painting is in the Second Commandment, and in the tablets. I think that is an
absolutely wrong reading of the picture, and I want to contest it. I think Poussin
was a great artist, and on the side of Aaron.
One of the things that makes me still feel hopeful about visual culture, even
as we say farewell to it, is that it has allowed for an expansion of art history,
and in some senses a challenge to art history. In the art-historical reading, the
1. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metapictures,” in Picture with red spray paint at the National Gallery in
Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, London, defacing only the dancing idolaters
1994), 35–82. depicted in the painting and not the golden calf.
2. Incidentally, just a few days before the www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/17/poussin
seminar, a man had attacked Poussin’s painting -attack-national-gallery. [—K.N.]
painting just reinforces the story; you don’t need to look at the picture very long:
you only need to reread Exodus 32 and the historical discourse, and conclude
that Poussin hates the golden calf.
Michael Holly: Can’t you say that writing about pictures, whether it is in the context
of art history, visual studies, or literary studies, is in some way allegorized by this
picture? There is a hidden text here: not the kind iconographers such as Panofsky
would find, but one that comes from our constant and incessant desire to write,
to speak about something that is of a different order of discourse, our belief that
there are words that are the “secret code” to unlock the picture? There is a desire
that our writing might manifest itself on top of the image, like the genetic code
on the raptor. In that sense potentially all pictures are metapictures.
Tom Mitchell: I’d go along with that, yes.
Joana Cunha Leal: I’d like to recall Louis Marin, who quotes a letter of Poussin’s: “lisez
l’histoire et le tableau” (read the story and the picture).3 Poussin is the perfect
example of a painter who uses biblical stories and narrative issues, but also has a
sense of painting as something else. I think this is very important, because Pous-
sin is the source of much academic pedagogy: the importance of composition,
the metalanguages of painting that were inculcated by the academies. So for me,
the Adoration of the Golden Calf is an example of a painting that thinks the image
beyond Panofsky.
Inge Hinterwaldner: I’d like to ask what metapictures want. If the desires of pic-
tures were to be triggered by the features pictures actually exhibit, I would
expect there to be a difference between what ordinary pictures want and what
metapictures want. However, in “What do Pictures Really Want?” you introduce
the deficiency—what they do not have—as the cause of their specific wanting.
You write that pictures might not want anything from us.4 You also say they
might want to have power over the beholder; but elsewhere you say that pictures
might want to have a clearer figure-ground relation, and you give several other
formulations. Now, when we try to figure out what a single picture is lacking,
this list has virtually no end. Could you please give us some hints which kinds of
missing features are especially worth looking for, in order to find out what they
want? And to return to my first point: as metapictures are additionally defined
differently, so why shouldn’t they have special desires?
Tom Mitchell: Great question. It’s strange that the form of the question “What do
pictures want?” has misled people into thinking I know the answer, or that I’m
holding something back. But when people asked, “What do pictures mean?”
no one expected that the questioner had the answer. If pictures want something,
then they are in some sense like living things, and they might have desires—not
3. Poussin, letter to Chantelou, quoted in to Chantelou; the first chapter of Marin’s book is
Marin, Sublime Poussin, translated by Catherine devoted to its analysis.
Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 4. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Really Want?,”
1999), 5–28. The letter announces the delivery October 77 (Summer 1996): 71–82, especially
of The Israelites Gathering the Manna (1639) 82.
69 The Present Decade
necessarily human desires, but perhaps animal or vegetable desires, but in any
case pictures would have something of an animistic character. There would then
be lots of different desires. There is also the question of wanting, and not just in
the Lacanian sense of the triad want, desire, need. Do pictures demand some-
thing? Or do they lack something? And if it’s simply a question of lack, then
animism begins to fade as an issue, and I wanted to allow for that.
Gustav Frank: I got the impression there might be different sorts of metapictures. There
is a gradual scale of metapicturality. Perhaps the greatest surplus is in images like
Poussin’s, because each time we return to the image we find more self-reflexivity
in it. I am not sure that the Poussin deserves more scholarly devotion than Witt-
genstein’s duck-rabbit drawing. In light of this, Tom, I wonder if you could give
us a clearer distinction between what you mean by images that are able to picture
theory and metapictures. The latter are self-reflexive: but to what extent are all
images able to picture theory?
Tom Mitchell: I have no trouble with the idea that some images deserve more atten-
tion than others. Empirically, some get more. But to me it’s the quality of the
attention more than the quantity. Artistic status doesn’t guarantee it, for one
thing. Ninety-eight percent of the art produced gets no attention whatsoever.
The duck-rabbit has received an inordinate amount of attention. One of the
things visual studies recovered, or made possible, was the ability to see images
more broadly, and to consider scientific images, the design image, the decorative
image—all of them are fair game.
James Elkins: To me, it’s clear that our interest in metapictures, illusions, Poussin’s
Golden Calf, Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas un pipe, and so many others, follows on
from what works in academic writing. We’re interested in clever, intricate,
ambiguous, and self-referential images, in nested narratives, in paratextuality,
and we ignore most others in what Sunil calls the ecology of images.5 I don’t
think of this as an issue that demarcates visual studies or art history. Dull images,
repetitive images, images without much desire, uninventive images, unexcep-
tional images, average images, unintellectual images—those are the things we
ignore. Tom, you mention images with no desire, but you study complicated
images, with multiple layers of political and historical significance. For me, the
category of metapictures is indefinitely expansible because it includes anything
that appears to us as self-referential, up to the abstract complexity that Michael
mentioned in relation to Poussin.
Lisa Cartwright: I want to come back to Inge’s question. In regard to the question
“What do pictures really want?” my memory is that a number of people who saw
parallels with Freud’s and Lacan’s question “What do women want?” So given
that your essay is a staging of the limitations of ideology critique, I wonder if
5. Points made in Why Are Our Pictures

Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Com-
plexity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 19–54, and
in Visual Studies, 112–16.
you can say something about the relation between your essay and those other
kinds of critique, both at the time you wrote it, and also later—I am thinking of
Žižek’s question, fifteen years after your essay: “What does Europe want?”
Tom Mitchell: Well, for sure the whole idea of the essay was to start a conversation
about the issue. I first gave the talk in Montreal, in front of the whole October
board, and Hal Foster informed me it was the wrong question to ask. The Sur-
realists, he said, had already asked the question, and it had failed. But it’s true
that one of the goals of the question was to shift the conversation around images
from ideology critique, which always seemed to treat images as “bad object” that
had to be demystified by the superior acuity of the critic. This (like the semi-
otic ritual of “decoding” images) had become a kind of routine that reinforced
the self-importance of the critic by providing easy victories over bad pictures.
I wanted to shift attention to questions of desire and emotion, the affective field
between an image and an observer.
Lisa Cartwright: It is more the answer, “Nothing,” rather than the question, “What do
images want?,” that was the potentially inflammatory element—
Tom Mitchell: Well, that’s only one possible answer—
Lisa Cartwright: You seemed to make that answer in the text—
Tom Mitchell: Yes, but it is not the answer. I tried to go through a number of possible
answers, and also to think not so much about Freud’s staging of the question,
but Chaucer’s. He sends his knight out to interview women, to find out what
they want. The answer is “maistrye,” which is from a Middle English word that
equivocates between imposing power and permitting power. Chaucer’s answer
to the question is that women want power over men, in both senses: they lack
it, and they desire it. But they don’t want to take it by force; they want men to
acknowledge their superior wisdom, and subject themselves willingly. That’s the
dialectical power in images. Really, I believe that they have no power of their
own; they are entirely dependent on us—quite unlike women or black folks,
which shows one stark limit to the analogy. Some are constructed so that we
wish they did, and yet they fail. Advertising images are an example, but there
are other kinds of power: the power of quiet seduction, the power of pretending
not to want anything. So the answer “Pictures might not want anything at all”
just seemed logically necessary, but the more interesting possibility is Chaucer’s.
Clemena Antonova: I find the idea of the image as a living organism very interesting,
and especially two questions: Can an image speak? and Can an image die? I have
an example of both. Looking at medieval manuscripts, for example, there are
instances in which the image is not an illustration of the text; there is no direct
connection. Such images add meaning more to the text; they speak in a way
analogously to the text.6
6. See Robin Jensen, Understanding Early in early medieval manuscripts was not always
Christian Art (London: Routledge, 2000). passive, as it “paralleled, commented upon, and
As Jensen notices, the role of visual images expanded texts” (5).
Here is an example of the question, Can an image die? Iconoclastic move-

ments have attempted to kill images. In the 1920s in Russia, the Bolsheviks
transferred Andrei Rublev’s Holy Trinity icon from the monastery of the Lavra
of Saint Sergius of Radonezd to the Tretyakov Gallery.7 The idea was to turn a
ritual object into an aesthetic object, i.e., to destroy the original meaning of the
image and impose another one. Interestingly, some visitors to the gallery have
been noticed to pray before Rublev’s image.8
Bridget Cooks: No one has mentioned Tom’s use of race in the essay. Tom, you make
assertions about how we can understand asking an object questions by analogiz-
ing pictures to black people or women.9 In the same paragraph you suggest that
asking pictures what they want would be like asking a ventriloquist’s dummy
what it wants. These scenarios are each presented as if they are equivalent. In no
way is asking a woman or a black person what she wants like asking a picture
what it wants. If we want to talk about sloppiness in visual studies and why we
need good critical approaches to cultural studies within visual studies, we need
to discuss this kind of cavalier and disrespectful understanding of difference as it
is discussed in this part of the essay.
Tom: Of course you are right that these scenarios are not equivalent; they are merely
analogous, and in a sharply limited way. I can understand why you react this way.
In fact, as you might have noticed, I discuss this possible objection in my essay,
and try to ponder the impropriety of the question. If I may quote from the third
paragraph of “What Do Pictures Want?”: “I’m also quite aware that the question
may seem like a tasteless appropriation of an inquiry that is properly preserved for
other people, particularly those classes of people who have been the objects of dis-
crimination, victimized by prejudicial images.” My remark about asking puppets
what they want was precisely aimed at raising just the doubt you have expressed:
“It is hard to imagine how pictures might do the same, or how any inquiry of this
sort could be more than a kind of disingenuous or (at best) unconscious ventrilo-
quism.”10 I don’t think it’s fair, then, to characterize me as cavalier or disrespectful
because I am pursuing the question of desire across the border between human
and nonhuman, animate and inanimate objects, persons and things. My essay
anticipates exactly the objection and question you have just made. The subaltern
model of otherness, whether based in gender or race or species, is simply an inevi-
table and unavoidable feature of human encounters with images, especially when
they take on uncanny properties, as in the phenomena of totemism, fetishism,
and idolatry. (Categories of race and gender are, for their part, deeply implicated
with images, so the relation of images and others is two-way, and reciprocal, even
as they are fundamentally distinct; I never say that images are people or vice versa.
7. Gabriel Bunge, The Rublev Trinity: The Icon Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis (Cambridge:
of the Trinity by the Monk-Painter Andrei Rublev Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171–94.
(Moscow: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007). 9. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Want?,”
[—J.E.] in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves
8. Lindsay Hughes paid some attention to of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
this phenomenon in “Monuments and Identity,” 2006), 29.
in National Identity in Russian Culture, edited by 10. What Do Pictures Want?, 29.
The relation is one of analogy, modeling, and metaphor.) The fact is that, as I
said in the essay, the question of what pictures want “is a question we are already
asking, that we cannot help but ask, and that therefore deserves analysis.” That
doesn’t strike me as “sloppy” by any reasonable measure.
Li Xi: When it comes to the idea of a living organism, I think it’s necessary to mention
John Dewey, the first one who came up with the concept “living organism,”
in his Art as Experience. Yes, the image has changed our lives, and here it seems
very important to emphasize the image’s subjectivity and its own logic. But actu-
ally we cannot forget that the change is made by both images and ourselves.
As Dewey mentioned, doing and undergoing are continuous processes. We can-
not have one logic by peeling it away from the other. The two are connected with
each other very closely. So when we discuss metapictures, we should also add the
experience of spectator in Dewey’s sense.
Tom Mitchell: Clemena, I think it’s extremely difficult, and maybe impossible, to kill
an image, in the sense of utterly annihilating it, so that it no longer appears in
the world. The picture/image distinction is crucial because it is easy to destroy a
picture, but not to destroy an image. If I tell you, “Don’t think about the image
of your mother,” you will find that the prohibition has the effect of conjuring up
the image. Michael Taussig has lots to say on this subject.11 “No smoking” signs
have the same effect on me. The most extreme statement of this, I think, is that
images cannot be destroyed, and maybe they can’t be created either. Michael
Fried once said to me, “You realize that no one creates images. They are immor-
tal.” I don’t know about this; I’m just proposing it for discussion.
Whitney Davis: You have been talking about the ontology of metapictoriality. I want
to shift the conversation a bit, to the epistemology of metapictoriality. There
seems to be a sliding scale of endlessly graduated logical possibilities of nested
metapictorialities, including a series of ontologically different metapictorial
internal reference, ranging from fairly standard examples, such as pictures of
people imaging, to somewhat more subtle and complex things, such as the way
the duck-rabbit grapheme draws attention to the ways in which it is a multi-
stable picture. At some level, all pictures, in order to secure themselves as picto-
rial, must have a metapictorial moment.
Would these possibilities, in your view, be managed historically? Is it your
view that part of the study of metapictoriality is to define, identify, solidify,
or consolidate certain types or order of ranges of metapictoriality? To work
to exclude, or possibly prohibit other order? To set up, to define certain cor-
ridors about what is empirically the case with specifiable communities of human
agents? My hunch would be that something like that would have to be the case,
but we don’t have a systematic study of the relation between such cultures and
the logically possible forms of metapictoriality.
11. See, for example, Taussig, “What Do

Drawings Want?,” Culture, Theory and Critique
50, nos. 2–3 (2009): 263–74. [—J.E.]
Tom Mitchell: In some ways your question answers itself. If you’re going to have any
sort of interesting empirical or comparative account of a specific image reper-
toire in a particular culture, you have to have at least a range of logical possibili-
ties. I think we already do: “Metapictures” was intended to think the question
of self-reference, and beyond that, so ask the question, What would it mean to
elevate pictures to a nonparasitic position in the project of theory? This is related
to the argument in Picture Theory, in which I want to elevate pictures to the level
of strong theoretical objects, things that are good to think with.
Whitney Davis: Would you see the metapictorial work accomplished in pictures in
some way resisting or reordering or reorganizing the other regimes of reflexivity
or self-reference that might be contemporary with them? It would not be espe-
cially interesting, for example, if Poussin’s metapictoriality turned out to express
or articulate received ideas of self-reflexivity such as Hegel’s; but it would be very
interesting if it could be shown that Poussin’s metapictoriality was a strong and
robust pictorial alternative to standard, widely disseminated Hegelian accounts
of self-reflection.
Tom Mitchell: Well, another precedent for the metapicture was the modernist work of
art; but I am interested in thinking beyond the work of art. I am more interested
in social ontology, phenomenological ontology, or to put it plainly, an image’s
way of “being in the world”—including the world that the image makes visible.
The philosopher I would want to help look at Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden
Calf is not Hegel, but the Nietzsche of the preface of the Twilight of the Idols,
in which he says he wants to sound idols, with a hammer as with a tuning fork.
This is a metapicture not just about images in general, but also about idols, and
the discourse of idolatry and iconoclasm would be very useful in thinking about
this image now.
Whitney Davis: I appreciate that is what you are suggesting: I’m only saying that inter-
pretations of what is at stake in this artifact depend on culturally well-secured
perceptions of reflection. So it would be interesting to discover that the pic-
ture’s metapictoriality had found some way to opt out of or reorganize those
metalanguages.
Tom Mitchell: That’s exactly my argument. I think the picture has not been seen; it has
only been read. I think the reading has been excessively pious, and dominated by
what we think we know about the meaning of a biblical text—that is, “cultur-
ally well-secured perceptions.” One part of Poussin’s brain said, Yes, I know this
painting has to have this cast of characters, the Calf, the Israelites, and so on;
but Poussin’s hand was thinking something as well. I think visual culture helps
us engage in a tactical naïveté in relation to overread canonical masterpieces.
Whitney Davis: T. J. Clark would say these images are written to death.
James Elkins: Sorry to play the skeptic here, especially because I entirely agree with
both of you that what is at stake for visual studies is the capacity to take images
as models and not examples or illustrations. And I also think the awareness of
this issue is crucial for the last few years and the present moment of visual stud-
ies. But I can’t resist noting that nothing we have said about Poussin’s image
actually depends on the fact that it is a painting. All our claims could have been
made about a cartoon with the same outlines. We haven’t been using it as theory,
either in Tom’s sense or in Whitney’s more fundamental sense.
Tom: I’m glad you pointed this out. To me the fact that it is a painting of a sculpture is
precisely the critical nexus of its intermediality, and its status as a self-reflexive
object. In this sense, it might be better to call The Golden Calf a metaimage
rather than a metapicture, or what in Iconology I called a “hypericon.” That is,
it is not a picture of a picture, an image of an image at the moment of its cre-
ation, and more precisely, a picture of a statue, and of the moment of unveiling
or first exhibition. The migration of the image from sculpture to painting is
essential to its force, and explains why Poussin thought he could get away with
painting a magnificent idol without committing a sin (it’s “only a painting,”
after all; it is not a carved idol). But the leakage of the image from sculpture to
painting explains why a literal-minded iconoclast might want to slash the part
of the painting that shows the calf, which, as we all know, actually happened.
I take it the recent vandal wanted to paint over the idolaters, on the other hand.
What did Poussin believe about his own representation of this tainted, danger-
ous object? I think his pious intellect believed one thing, and his eye and hand
believed another. His stand-in, therefore, is Aaron, the artist who gestures to the
Israelites and to us to behold his miraculous work of art. Aaron is not punished,
remember, for making the calf, but some three thousand of his countrymen are
slaughtered. This is artistic license with a vengeance!12
Keith Moxey: I have a question that comes from a different moment in the history
of visual studies. Identity politics, class, and gender figured importantly in the
development of visual studies. Doesn’t it matter, then, who asks, “What do pic-
tures want?,” and doesn’t it matter whom the pictures address? Is the nature of
the subjectivity that responds to images of any interest? How can the responses
you discuss, the subjectivities that are implied in your accounts, be reconciled
with others?
Tom Mitchell: I think it does matter, more or less, who poses the question, “What do
pictures want?” Sometimes it matters less. Some pictures are what I call multi-
stable, and the game they propose has minimal requirements: you just have to
be a receiver, a language-using animal, and that is enough. That’s on the phe-
nomenological end of the spectrum. But long ago, when I was talking about the
12. For a more extended argument on this

point, see my essay “Idolatry: Blake, Nietzsche,
Poussin,” in Idol Anxiety, edited by Joshua
Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford
University Press, 2011), 56–73.
duck-rabbit, and saying to the seminar that the received doxa was that you can
either see the duck or the rabbit, an African American student raised her hand
and said, “Just a minute. I can see both.” I said, “What do you mean?” And she
said, “Why do I have to explain what I mean? I can see both.” I think there was
silence for a quarter of an hour while we thought about that. And finally she
said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what I mean. I’m thinking of the phenomenon of the
mulatto. Am I black or white? What is my identity, and how do you name it?”
This is a fundamental problem of classification: it starts at a phenomenological
level, and moves inexorably to other levels, which may or may not be social.
Jim wrote something about this—about how when you move further from the
ordinary objects of visual studies, the less the gender of the spectator might
matter. He used the example of crystallography.13 When I read that, I thought,
well, maybe so. It doesn’t always matter. How is the duck-rabbit dependent on
someone’s gender or race? I don’t think it particularly does.
James Elkins: I think of metapictures as a city. The tallest buildings are the now-
canonical metapictures. Here in Chicago, I’d say the duck-rabbit is the Sears
Tower, and maybe the image from Jurassic Park is the Trump Tower. I suppose
the Poussin painting would be the Art Institute. Anyway, the idea is that the
further away from the center you go, the lower the buildings get, until you’re out
in some far suburb or farming community.
For me, this allegory raises two possibilities: in one, buildings just get lower,
and every picture is a metapicture, as Whitney and Gustav suggested. Some bor-
ing, everyday pictures, of the kind that I think we’re talking around, would have
metapictoriality, but in homeopathic strengths. In the other possibility, the city
would be divided, as Chicago actually is, into wards and postal codes and census
blocks, and some buildings—some pictures—would really not be metapictures.
It just wouldn’t be helpful to try to talk about metapictoriality, or even desire,
in relation to those images. I wonder if we could muster any interest in such
things, or if we’re all city dwellers.
Tom Mitchell: If you lived in L.A., there’d be no way to make those divisions!
James Elkins: In my experience, people who cite your idea of metapictures are some-
times attracted to it from great distances. They aren’t studying the duck-rabbit;
they’re studying Byzantine icons, like Clemena, or any number of other things.
So the homeopathic model is the default one, and in my reading, it’s the one
that draws people to your work. But on the other hand, there are the existing
accounts of self-reflexivity in other areas, such as the Hegelian models Whitney
mentioned, and they are not structured as continua.
In my experience, looking at the work of people in various parts of the
world who are influenced by your work, the attraction of the metapicture, the
desires of pictures, and other ideas, is dependent on the permission people give
13. Elkins, The Domain of Images: On the a thought experiment about trying to apply art-
Historical Study of Visual Artifacts (Ithaca: Cor- historical categories such as styles and periods
nell University Press, 1999), chap. 2, on crystal- to the history of the illustration of crystals.—J.E.]
lography. [The essay has a particular context,
themselves to not notice when there might be boundaries between their work
and the images and concepts you develop.
Sunil Manghani: Tom, Jim and I thought it might be interesting if we end this seminar
by letting you ask us questions.
Tom Mitchell: Okay, fine. I wonder if I could begin by asking for a show of hands: how
many of you believe that visual culture has failed?
James Elkins: You might have to say which visual culture!
Tom Mitchell: No, I don’t want to say that. The title of your event this year is Farewell
to Visual Studies. All in favor of saying farewell to visual studies and getting on to
something else, raise your hands.
[No one raises their hands; everyone laughs.]
Sunil Manghani: My feeling is that from the UK perspective, art history departments
have said farewell to visual studies, and media and film studies departments have
turned away from it. But as a topic, I don’t see it failing.
Whitney Davis: I have some deep discontents with visual culture studies, but doing the
reading for this event, the diversity and an internal resilience of visual studies on
the international stage is becoming forcibly evident. We have heard alternative
histories; Gustav began with a fabulous presentation of early twentieth-century
visual studies that I knew little about, and we’ll be talking about Bildwissenschaft
and other possibilities as the week goes further along.14 So it becomes difficult
to say farewell to any particular visual studies. That doesn’t mean one can’t be
discontented with visual studies operating in particular situations. So it might be
irresponsible to have the show of hands until the very end of the week.
Tom Mitchell: Is there any consensus that there is some form of visual form, whether it
is located in England or elsewhere, or a practice that uses a particular methodol-
ogy, that we want to say goodbye to?
Gustav Frank: I would put it the other way around, echoing your formulations: there
are many ecosystems of visuality and vision that are not yet properly researched
and deserve our attention. I think visual culture studies and Bildwissenschaft
just fail to address problems in the right way: the task is there and most of us
who have come to projects affiliated with visual studies have a similar feeling.
James Elkins: I have been accumulating lists of particular kinds of inquiries I’d like to
say farewell to, and a complementary list of visual studies’ unfulfilled promises,
things I’d like to see visual studies do.15
We have talked about one sort of farewell: the question of how easy visual
studies is and how it might be made more difficult, slower, and less confident.
14. For Bildwissenschaft see the following

Section.
15. These are all set out in the first introduc-
tion to this book.
We’ve also talked about three unfulfilled promises. One is the problem of mak-
ing visual images work in visual studies instead of using them as illustrations of
theories; another, as Gustav just said, is the idea that visual studies should look at
the visual world outside of modern and contemporary visualities. I have others
in mind, but at the moment I’ll just add a third absence: visual studies has not
developed a discourse about its own history, its historiography. No matter what
else we accomplish this week, we have already started some lines of thinking
about visual studies’ histories. That hasn’t been done before, and so no matter
how the week turns out, the book we produce should mark a moment in the
history of visual studies in which it becomes more aware of its multiple histories,
its deeper historical connections.
But before we get too far into our conversations, I’d like to ask for another
show of hands. Following on from what Sunil said, and from Tom’s mention of
the UK, I’d like to know: How many of us have read, let’s say, two issues of the
Journal of Visual Culture in, let’s say, the last two years? I mean, for whom is this
a crucial journal that needs to be watched?
[Six or seven hands out of thirty-one people.]
Tom Mitchell: Let me ask: how many have read Critical Inquiry in the last two years?
[At least twenty hands.]
Michael Holly: And how many of you know that there’s going to be a new interna-
tional visual studies association?16
[All hands up.]
Michael Holly: Not that I necessarily approve of everything that goes under the rubric
of visual studies. The one arena in which I think visual studies has failed is in
regarding images older than the last hundred years. When we first conceived of
visual studies, it was to consist of contemporary questions, rubbing against old
art—Renaissance art, Assyrian art, medieval art. With a few exceptions, that
hasn’t happened.
Tom Mitchell: You mean like duck-rabbits next to Poussin paintings?
Michael Holly: Yes, sure. I was once so excited about visual studies in its infancy
because it promised to shake up the complacency of its parent, traditional art
history. But I think the questions of visual studies are no longer being refracted
through older art.
James Elkins: I agree. Gustav mentioned that, and it’s also on my own list of my unful-
filled promises. I’ll add another lack or absence in visual studies: non-art images,
scientific images.17 Again there are exceptions, and again they’re at the table here.
Michael and Keith are among the most prominent exemplars of writing from
something that might be called a visual studies perspective, but about premodern
16. www.journalofvisualculture.org/2010
/11/international-association-for-visual-culture
-studies-an-invitation.
17. See Section 8 of the Seminars.
images. And of course Lisa Cartwright and I have written about scientific imag-
ing practices.
Whitney Davis: If you define visual studies as visual culture studies, the question of
farewell would have to be played out in a certain way. If you define visual studies
as I do, distinguishing visual culture studies from visual studies, so that visual
culture studies might be a subset of visual studies, then the prospect is different.
Visual studies might include ophthalmologists, psychiatrists, and engineers. The
field wouldn’t just be the study of images they produce, but of their substantive
accounts of vision. That’s something that hasn’t even been encountered in visual
culture studies. The fact that that conversation hasn’t happened in visual culture
studies would be a reason for me to bid farewell to visual culture studies in that
sense, but the farewell would be in the service of that wider-ranging visual studies.
Tom Mitchell: I think it depends on where you put the emphasis when you pronounce
these terms. When you say “visual culture studies,” I hear “cultural studies with a
visual emphasis.” There is also the notion that visual studies was just the study of
visual culture, that is, of the social constructedness of the visual field, in a man-
ner that was distinct from cultural studies. I’m always wanting to keep the study
of visual culture at a little bit of a distance from the default position of cultural
studies. It does include ophthalmology, neuroscience, and other fields.
Lisa Cartwright: I find it curious to see ophthalmology and these other technical fields
mentioned as things that haven’t been addressed. There is a very active field of
science studies among people who claim to do visual studies, but don’t come out
of a culture studies tradition. These people study knowledge production, ontol-
ogy, and epistemology, other issues in science. What I’m seeing here is therefore
a need for new cross-cultural combinations.
Whitney Davis: I might have been misunderstood, because I’m not saying farewell to
that—I’m saying farewell to whatever has prevented the conversation you’re dis-
cussing from gaining traction.
James Elkins: I wonder if the now-traditional discourse about visual studies’ interdis-
ciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, postdisciplinarity, subdisciplinarity, or indiscipli-
narity doesn’t in fact work to obscure the kind of connection Whitney has in
mind. Whitney, as I understand it, you’re not asking for science studies as much
as discourse about the findings of science—the unfulfilled potential expansion
of visual studies into a field that would engage and utilize the actual findings
of vision and visuality outside the historical disciplines. That kind of encoun-
ter is radically outside even the most science-oriented of visual studies projects,
including mine.18 It’s a subject we’ll be discussing later in the week.
Gustav Frank: In all the varieties of our subject, whether it’s Anglo-American visual stud-
ies or Bildwissenschaft, there are strong traditions in operation, whether they’re
18. For example, Visual Practices Across practices outside the humanities, is a “study of
the University (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), images [scientists and others] produce,” and
a detailed, technical look at image-producing not “their substantive accounts of vision.”
art history, cultural studies, or others. Alongside ideas like the metapicture, there
has to be image critique that involves the practices that guide the different proj-
ects. For Bildwissenschaft, for example, there has to be a strong image critique
of the specific forms of art history against which Bildwissenschaft defines itself.
This brings us close to what Sunil has proposed, a kind of image critique that
involves the historians’ own practices.
Elise Goldstein: I haven’t heard anyone talk about who visual studies serves. What
is the audience of visual studies? As I know it, from my experience in graduate
school, it’s an audience that’s arranged by interest and topic, rather than by dis-
cipline, narrative, or methodology.
James Elkins: Theorizing Visual Studies—the anthology I’m working on that is written
by graduate students—certainly fits that description. One of the things I’ve been
toying with for the introduction, which is the only part of the book I’m writ-
ing, is some kind of graphic that would show the discontinuity between all the
normative interests of the field, including its disciplinary affiliations, its meth-
odologies, and its theoretical sources, from the constellation of interests that the
graduate students exhibit. That disconnection doesn’t necessarily mean that the
new work is radical in relation to some field called visual studies. It might have
different radicalities, because the students write from different positions of igno-
rance or insouciance about disciplines, methods, and commonly cited theorists.
Elise Goldstein: I wonder if there’s a risk in thinking of visual studies in the way we
have been, as a shared geekery. Visual studies might be shared obsessions, rather
than shared disciplinary ambitions.
Elisabeth Friedman: Our visual culture MA program is housed in a school of art
with large studio and art education graduate programs. Visual culture has been
celebrated for its interdisciplinarity or postdisciplinarity, but I find that to be
limited in our context, where it is often taken as yet further proof of a theory-
practice divide. For example, many of our favorite theoretical sources contain
implicit concepts of pedagogy that we don’t choose to pursue—what does it
mean to teach or learn to make images? Here it seems more important to ask
about pedagogy than about the nature of visual culture.
James Elkins: In smaller programs like yours, where art-making is ostensibly integrated
with academic subjects like art history and visual studies, it becomes, at least for
me, glaringly obvious that visual studies isn’t interested in questions of making.
Again there are counterexamples: Sunil is interested in making, and I understand
Whitney has been visiting MFA students’ studios here this week—but those are
exceptions. Visual studies isn’t much different from art history in its lack of
interest in what might be gleaned from studio practice—from actually produc-
ing visual images. That’s on my list of lacunae: visual studies remains disengaged
from the phenomenology and from the empirical data of making images.19
19. The full list is in the first introduction to

this book.
Paul Frosh: Tom, to continue answering your question: my model for the interdisci-
plinarity of visual studies would be hospitable disputation. By that I mean a
field of tolerant but passionate disagreement. My preference would therefore
be for a visual studies that is informed by “strong” theories and methodolo-
gies, rather than a radically heterogeneous “supermarket” of more modest ideas
and methods. Such heterogeneity can be stultifying: there is no need for ardent
debate because one can pick any kind of approach without having to justify one’s
choice. In a suitably hospitable intellectual culture, “strong” theories are useful
precisely because they produce disagreement, inviting dissent as well as assent,
and help give shape to a common core of concerns about which we care—and
often differ—passionately, rather than producing an amorphous ensemble of
disparate interests which do not connect to one another, however mutually tol-
erant they may be. For example, I was and remain dissatisfied with the way that
the reading list for this seminar has produced a de facto canon of topics and texts
for visual studies, a canon that I think imposes an overtly art-historical bias and
largely ignores the social sciences, especially communications. As a result, how-
ever, I’ve had to think deeply about what is missing from this list, how it relates
to the things we have discussed and read, and to advocate and defend my posi-
tion in what has been a very hospitable—and also disputatious—environment.
I think this is a good model for the field as a whole, especially since canonization
and institutionalization are well underway.
Tom Mitchell: If anyone is hardcore visual studies, it’s me. I just do it, and occasion-
ally theorize about it. In the mid-1990s, the University of Chicago Art History
department had a discussion about whether it should change its name to Art
History and Visual Culture. I actually argued against it, because I want to be a
blister on the rump of academia. I don’t want to have a letterhead, and institu-
tional status. In the 1990s, at least, visual studies was still enjoying its status as
a marginal, dangerous field of study, a supplement that wasn’t easily swallowed.
My fundamental epistemology is anarchist. Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method
is my methodological bible. It shows that scientific discovery (and humanistic
knowledge as well) are best fostered by speculative experimentation and rigorous
questioning of received ideas and procedures. Methods are, as they say, fool-
proof, which means any fool can master them—and vice versa. The only reliable
method is to be very, very intelligent. So I want to prolong the indisciplinary
moment of visual studies as long as possible.
James Elkins: I think that’s an appropriate last word: farewell to the incipient institu-
tionalization of visual studies, and its defanging.
5. H I S T O R I E S : B I L D W I S S E N S C H A F T
Here and in the following section, the subject was the German-language tradition
known as Bildwissenschaft. Readings included a collection of translated tables of
contents, which were intended to give the participants a sense of the breadth of the
literature.1 In addition, participants read a number of essays by Horst Bredekamp,
Hans Belting, Gottfried Boehm, and others.2 For some of the conversation tran-
scribed here, participants also read texts assigned by Keith Moxey, related to the com-
parison of Anglo-American and German-language writing. They included essays by
1. Tables of contents from the following (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005); Eva Schürmann,
books were included: Alexander Honold and Ralf Sehen als Praxis: Ethisch-ästhetische Studien
Simon, eds., Das erzählende und das erzählte zum Verhältnis von Sicht und Einsicht (Frankfurt:
Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Thorsten Suhrkamp, 2008); Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder
Bothe and Robert Suter, eds., Prekäre Bilder Sinn Erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens, 3rd ed.
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Johannes Grave (Darmstadt: WBG, 2010); Bildwelten des Wis-
and Arno Schubbach, eds., Denken mit dem sens: Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik,
Bild: Philosophische Einsätze des Bildbegriffs edited by Horst Bredekamp, Matthias Bruhn,
von Platon bis Hegel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, and Gabriele Werner (2003–) (this is the twice-
2010); Inge Hinterwaldner, Das systemische yearly publication of Bredekamp’s project
Bild: Ikonizität im Rahmen computerbasierter “Das technische Bild”); Horst Bredekamp, The-
Echtzeitsimulationen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, orie des Bildakts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010);
2010); Lena Bader, Martin Gaier, and Falk Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed., Bildwissenschaft:
Wolf, eds., Vergleichendes Sehen (Munich: Wil- Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Frankfurt:
helm Fink, 2010); Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Suhrkamp, 2005); Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed.,
Egenhofer, and Christian Spies, eds., Zeigen: Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle
Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren (Munich: Wilhelm Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn (Frankfurt:
Fink, 2010); Gottfried Boehm, Birgit Mers- Suhrkamp, 2009); Martin Schulz, Ordnungen
mann, and Christian Spies, eds., Movens Bild: der Bilder: Eine Einführung in die Bildwissen-
Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt (Munich: Wilhelm schaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005); and Matth-
Fink, 2008); Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra ias Bruhn, Das Bild: Theorie—Geschichte—Praxis
Schneider, eds., Transmission Image: Visual (Berlin: Akademie, 2009).
Translation and Cultural Agency (Newcastle: 2. Karin Leonhard, “Blut Sehen,” in Hinter-
Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Inge Hinterwaldner waldner and Buschhaus, Picture’s Image, 104–
and Markus Buschhaus, eds., The Picture’s 28; Host Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition?
Image: Wissenschaftliche Visualisierung als Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry
Komposit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006); Horst 29 (2003): 418–28; Anders Michelsen, “Nothing
Bredekamp, Bilder Bewegen: Von der Kunstkam- Has Meaning Outside of Discourse? On the Cre-
mer zum Endspiel, edited by Jörg Probst (Berlin: ative Dimension of Visuality,” in “Art in the Age
Wagenbach, 2007); Ingeborg Reichle, Steffen of Visual Culture and the Image,” special issue,
Siegel, and Achim Spelten, eds., Verwandte Leitmotiv 5 (2005–6): 89–114 (Leitmotiv is an
Bilder: Die Fragen der Bildwissenschaft, 2nd e-journal; see ledonline.it/leitmotiv); Matthias
rev. ed. (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007); Claudia Blümle Bruhn and Vera Dünkel, “The Image as Cultural
and Armin Schäfer, eds., Struktur, Figur, Kontur: Technology,” in Visual Literacy, edited by James
Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 169–78;
(Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007); Gustav Frank and Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Picto-
Barbara Lange, Einführung in die Bildwissen- rial Versus Iconic Turn” (this is an exchange of
schaft: Bilder in der visuellen Kultur (Darmstadt: letters from March 2006, originally published in
WBG, 2010); Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: German in Hans Belting, Bilderfragen: Die Wis-
Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: senschaften im Aufbruch [Munich; Wilhelm Fink,
Wilhelm Fink, 2001); Klaus Sachs-Hombach, 2007]; Hans Belting translated Mitchell’s letter
Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente into German; the seminars read an unpub-
einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft (Cologne: lished English MS provided by Boehm for the
Von Halem, 2003); Lambert Wiesing, Artifizielle 2008 Stone Summer Theory Institute: see James
Präsenz: Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What Is an Image?,
Georges Didi-Huberman, Gottfried Boehm, and Tom Mitchell.3 The transcription

is excerpted from seminars led by Gustav Frank, James Elkins, and Keith Moxey.
The participants also read Moxey’s essay comparing Anglo-American and German-
language studies of the visual.4
James Elkins: This is our last seminar on history. It’s got a somewhat ridiculous burden,
because Gustav and I are going to try to present something resembling a précis
of a really enormous literature, the German-language writing that is now usually
called Bildwissenschaft. It’s an impossible task, but it is only part of what Sunil,
Gustav, and I wanted to do, because there are actually more visual studies, in the
plural, than just Anglo-American and German-language. We don’t have the
faculty here to address that, but our fifteen Fellows are the most international
we’ve ever had. In my count, we have people at this table who are either from,
or working in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, China, Portugal, Den-
mark, Japan, the UK, Germany, Israel, Spain, the U.S., and Iceland. And the
people who write Assessments for the book can, we hope, broaden that. I think
there are at least five differentiable strains of visual studies:
1. Anglo-American visual studies, which has been theorized and prac-

ticed mainly in the UK and the U.S., but also in Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and various countries
mainly in the north of Europe, including the Netherlands, Scandinavia,
Estonia, and Lithuania.
2. German-language Bildwissenschaft, which is our subject this morning,
and is practiced in German-speaking countries and also read, to a lesser
degree, in Scandinavia.
3. Latin American visual studies, which in my experience is more affiliated
with visual communication and semiotics, and less with identity, gen-
der, and politics. It occurs, sporadically, in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay,
Chile, Paraguay, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
4. Scandinavian Bildvetenskap, which began in the 1970s.5
Stone Art Theory Institutes 2 [University Park: MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011]); 2003), 128–43; Hans Belting, “Image, Medium,
Boehm, “It Reveals Itself: Gesture—Deixis— Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical
Image,” unpublished MS, ca. 2008; Boehm, Inquiry 31 (2005): 302–19; W. J. T. Mitchell,
“Iconic Knowledge: The Image as a Model,” “What Do Pictures Want?,” in What Do Pictures
unpublished MS, ca. 2008; and Hans Belting, Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago:
“Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28–56; Horst
Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 302–19. Bredekamp, “Das Modell der Koralle,” in Dar-
3. W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?,” wins Korallen: Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme
in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: und die Tradition der Naturgeschichte, 2nd ed.
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7–46; (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2006), 18–28.
Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” 4. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic
in Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2008):
1994), 11–38; Georges Didi-Huberman, “History 131–46.
and Image: Has the ‘Epistemological Trans- 5. See, for example, Nils-Arvid Bringéus,
formation’ Taken Place?,” in The Art Historian: Volkstümliche Bilderkunde (Munich: Call-
National Traditions and Institutional Practices, wey, 1982), and especially the work of Lena
edited by Michael F. Zimmerman (Williamstown, Johannesson, for example Images in Arts
83 Bildwissenschaft
5. The situation is entirely different in China, where a long tradition of art

pedagogy has linked art-making to its study. To use the Western terms,
“art history,” “aesthetics,” and “studio art” are mingled. Art historians
and people interested in visual studies are commonly also painters. Like
art history, the strains of visual studies that happen in China are com-
monly mixed with aesthetics.6
So this session on Bildwissenschaft should ideally be the second in a longer

series of seminars.
Gustav Frank: Okay. First, there is a problem of translation both sides: even though
people in the Bildwissenschaft area have an acceptable knowledge of English,
visual studies tends to be in the first footnote of publications, as if to say, There
is a Tom Mitchell out there, and now I have acknowledged that, and I can con-
tinue with more pertinent references.
James Elkins: On the other side, I think it needs to be said that English-language schol-
ars very rarely read the German literature, and that means they are also often
unaware of its extent. There’s a conceit in academia that language competence
isn’t a barrier, but I think it is.
Gustav Frank: I will begin by naming two general points. First is the difference between
visuelle Kultur, which is often cited as a precursor of current practices, and both
Bildwissenschaft and visual studies.7 That difference is institutional. Visuelle
Kultur originated from people outside academia; some were independent intel-
lectuals in the Weimar Republic. This is quite different from the situation of
Bildwissenschaft or visual studies.
A second difference is perspectival. We have been looking at the history of
visual studies as seen by insiders: Michael Holly, Lisa Cartwright, Tom Mitchell.
Today, Jim and I will be presenting outsiders’ perspectives. I am trained in the
German tradition, but not in Bildwissenschaft; Jim is an art historian, but not
trained in the German tradition.
Historically, art history has been in the center of developments in Bildwis-
senschaft. There are conventionally three sorts of practices, identified with three
scholars.
Hans Belting followed an art-historical tradition by occupying the chair in
art history in Munich in 1983; he was a follower of Heinrich Wölfflin and Hans
Sedlmayr. His inaugural lecture was called “The End of Art History.” At the
time, the art market and media connections were at the point where they seemed
to overtake art history; and at the same time, society at large was demanding
and Sciences, edited by Johannesson et al. 6. See, for example, the ethically and
(Göteborg: Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, socially attuned program in Beijing, www
2007); and Niels Jensen, Billedernes Tid: Teorier .aeschina.cn/en/Introduction/1293.html, and Li
og Billeder i den Visuelle Kultur (Copenhagen: Xi’s comments in these Seminars.
Afdelingen for Kunsthistorie, Københavns 7. See Seminar 1 for visuelle Kultur.
Universitet, 2001), which is an attempt to bridge
cultural studies with semiotics and other fields.
information about images that aren’t art, and art history was not responding.
Later, Belting developed his answer into an account of “image anthropology,”
which has gotten a fierce critique, especially from feminist art historians, because
the anthropos in Belting’s account is definitely a middle-aged, middle-class white
male.8
A second practice is associated with Gottfried Boehm, who we will consider
later. His phenomenological account is predicated on concepts of iconic differ-
ence and the inherent properties of images.
Third in this conventional listing is work associated with Horst Bredekamp
in Berlin. It is interested in sciences and technical imagery, and it overlaps with
subjects in science studies. The Humboldt-Universität has links to the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and we have also been asked
to read a paper by one of the three current directors there, Lorraine Daston.9
There is a specific sense in which Bildwissenschaft is art history, and vice
versa, in Germany. If you look at the job postings, you see calls for people
doing picture theory (Bildtheorie) and for people doing the history of visual
media (Bildmedien), and at the end of the day it’s always art historians who get
those jobs, even if they never participated in one of the three practices I just
named. As Michael Holly said in relation to the publishing label “visual stud-
ies,” it’s a matter of names: it is accepted that art history should somehow be
Bildwissenschaft.10 Of course, not every art historian would like to be called a
Bildwissenschaftler.
Around the principal practices of Bildwissenschaft I would constellate phi-
losophy, media studies, semiotics, and other fields. All of them share what I
would call an antisemiotic affect. In relation to semiotics, I’ll quote from an
interview Horst Bredekamp gave: he says “the Bild is put in preventative deten-
tion by the word.”11 That’s strong language, because it puts the word in the role
of the Nazi, and the image in the role of the Jew, or the politically unwelcome
leftist. Nevertheless, semiotics had, and has, a strong influence on Bildwissen-
schaft. I was interested in Göran Sonesson’s work for a while, but there are issues
with semiotics’ insistence that every image must be decoded, deciphered, read.12
Roland Posner’s position is interesting: he has a kind of code minimalism.13
8. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Amongst 9. The pertinent readings here are Matthias

his critics are Sigrid Schade, “Vom Wunsch der Bruhn and Vera Dünkel, “The Image as Cultural
Kunstgeschichte, Leitwissenschaft zu sein: Technology,” in Elkins, Visual Literacy (Bruhn
Pirouetten im sogenannten “ ‘Pictorial Turn,’ ” in was in Bredekamp’s group Das technische
Horizonte: Beiträge zu Kunst und Kunstwissen- Bild); and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
schaft (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 369–78; “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40
Hanne Loreck, “Bild-Anthropologie? Kritik einer (Autumn 1992): 81–128.
Theorie des Visuellen,” in Medien der Kunst: 10. For Michael Holly’s claim about the
Geschlecht, Metapher, Code, edited by Susanne expression “visual studies” in book titles, see
von Falkenhausen, Silke Förschler, Ingeborg Section 3 of the Seminars.
Reichle, and Bettina Uppenkamp (Marburg: 11. Bredekamp, “ ‘Drehmomente’: Merkmale
Jonas, 2004), 12–26; Schade, “Scheinalterna- und Ansprüche des Iconic Turn,” in Iconic Turn:
tive Kunst- oder Bildwissenschaft: Ein kultur- Die neue Macht der Bilder, edited by Christa
wissenschaftlicher Kommentar,” in Visions of a Maar and Hubert Burda (Cologne: DuMont
Future: Art and Art History in Changing Contexts, 2004), 15.
edited by Hans-Jörg Heusser (Zurich: Swiss 12. Sonesson, “Die Semiotik des Bildes: Zum
Institute for Art Research, 2004), 87–100. Forschungsstand am Anfang der 90er Jahre,”
85 Bildwissenschaft
He says deciphering isn’t what’s interesting: the principles that organize human
interaction are of more interest. The theory is about interaction, not code.
In relation to philosophy, there is also a strong antisemiotic interest. Bern-
hard Waldenfels’s books are examples, and so are Lambert Wiesing’s. He has
a book called Artifizielle Präsenz.14 A person like Klaus Sachs-Hombach, for
example, whose work is very much in the analytic tradition, feels that he has to
incorporate a certain part of semiotics; at one point he says the image is a sign
that is “close to perception.”15
So much for semiotics and philosophy. A third element in the constellation
around Bildwissenschaft is media studies. It appears as a dangerous supplement,
or a potential adversary. This is especially true of the media-hardware orientation
of Friedrich Kittler, who argues for a technical a priori that supersedes interest
in the contents of a text or image.16 He is interested in structures of agency and
perception. Kittler wrote a book in 1981 proposing that there should be an “exor-
cism” of the spiritual out of the humanities (as in the word Geisteswissenschaften,
meaning humanities, but literally “spiritual sciences”): that’s a claim against the
Hegelian tradition, against hermeneutics. Boehm’s iconic difference, on the
other hand, builds on the hermeneutic tradition, especially as it is developed in
his teacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Kittler’s appearance in the 1980s was really
shocking, not just for people engaged in what became Bildwissenschaft, but for
people in the humanities generally. That’s why I would place media studies as an
adversary of Bildwissenschaft.
Gustav Frank: We are running short of time, and I want to be sure to say something
about the other authors we set as readings. Regarding Hans Belting, I will be
brief and, I hope, provocative. Many of the issues that Boehm and Bredekamp
raise could be seen in the light of early twentieth-century approaches to what I
called visuelle Kultur: the language problem, the body problem, and so forth.17
When I first read Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie,18 I thought, the book doesn’t even
make use of the language and body problems current in the 1920s: it is deeply
Zeitschrift für Semiotik 15, nos. 1–2 (1993): 15. “Bilder als wahrnehmungsnahe Zeichen,”
127–60; “On Pictoriality: The Impact of the quoted from Sachs-Hombach, Das Bild als
Perceptual Model in the Development of Picto- kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer
rial Semiotics,” in Advances in Visual Semiot- allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft (Cologne: Halem,
ics: The Semiotic Web, 1992–1993, edited by 2003), 73.
Thomas Sebeok and Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok 16. Friedrich Kittler, ed., Austreibung des
(New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 67. [—J.E.] Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Pro-
13. Posner, “Ebenen der Bildkompetenz,” gramme des Poststrukturalismus (Paderborn:
in Was ist Bildkompetenz? Studien zur Bildwis- Schöningh, 1980); Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme
senschaft, edited by Klaus Sachs-Hombach 1800/1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), trans-
(Wiesbaden: DUV, 2003), 17–23; Semiotik: lated as Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans-
Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen lated by Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford
Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, edited by University Press, 1990); Kittler, Grammophon,
Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, and Thomas Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose,
Sebeok, 3 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 1986).
1:1–13, “Das Bild in der Semiotik,” in Wege zur 17. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
Bildwissenschaft. Interviews, edited by Klaus 18. The Seminar participants read a con-
Sachs-Hombach (Cologne: Halem, 2004), 22–52. densed précis of the book: Belting, “Image,
14. Wiesing, Artifizielle Präsenz: Studien Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,”
zur Philosophie des Bildes (Berlin: Suhrkamp, Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 302–19.
2005).
concerned with nineteenth-century historicist thought. Especially in the pas-

sages where he talks about death: that’s how mid-nineteenth-century realism
in literature was haunted by what archaeology has unearthed. They were over-
whelmed by all the things that history was showing them—the heavy weight
of all the dead that historicism revealed. It is a presemiotic way of thinking
about the question of replacement, taking the semiotic procedure literally with
a lightly animistic undertone. It even opposes Lessing’s division of corporeal and
arbitrary signs and therefore is pre-Enlightenment thought.
Keith Moxey: It’s certainly a good question as to what sort of anthropology this might
be, this Bild-Anthropologie. You’re arguing it’s presemiotic. I would argue it’s
antisemiotic. I think that this is the reaction of someone who has been through
the semiotic mill and come out the other side. Semiotics doesn’t quite do what
Belting thinks semiotics should do. And that’s not surprising: he’s a student of
the middle ages—his book Bild und Kult (Likeness and presence) argues that as
religious images begin to lose their magic, as their sanctity leaks out of them, it is
replaced by aesthetics and the affirmation of the place of the artist and art. I’m
being terribly reductive, of course—
James Elkins: Less than our account of the entirety of Bildwissenschaft!
Keith Moxey: Anyway, according to this account, images are more than what they say,
they have a kind of magical status. Belting goes back to a presemiotic moment,
for antisemiotic purposes.
Gustav Frank: Interestingly, it is also a pre-art interest.
James Elkins: It matters in our context that Hans’s book is not anthropology in the
Anglo-American sense, with its emphasis on interpretation and witness, on the
emic and etic, on thick description, and so forth. It is also not the anthropology
of the October “Questionnaire on Visual Culture,” which was a largely empty
label—a demonized anthropology set against art history.19 Belting’s anthropol-
ogy is Continental: it is one of the human sciences.
I think of this as one aspect of the general problem of how he positions
himself in relation to existing disciplines. In his recent conferences, exhibitions,
and books under the title Global Art Museum, he considers contemporary world-
wide practices of exhibition and curation, partly as a sociologist might, partly
as an anthropologist might, but not as an art historian, an art theorist, or an art
critic.20 I am interested in how he proposes to speak outside those and other dis-
ciplinary homes: after art history, aside from curation, outside the disciplinary
philosophy of art. Where is he when he speaks?
19. See Section 2 of the Seminars. The and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje-
participants discussed selections from the Cantz, 2009), and Contemporary Art and the
“Questionnaire on Visual Culture,” October 77 Museum: A Global Perspective, edited by Hans
(Summer 1996), especially 25, 27–36, 39–44, Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern:
52–62, 68–70. Hatje-Cantz, 2007); for the exhibition see www
20. The Global Art World: Audiences, .globalartmuseum.de/site/act_exhibition.
Markets and Museums, edited by Hans Belting
87 Bildwissenschaft
Joana Cunha Leal: I just want to note that there is another tradition in which semiotics
and phenomenology are not separate: the French tradition, with Louis Marin
and Hubert Damisch, and even Daniel Arasse.21
Inge Hinterwaldner: In the German-speaking area we could also mention Felix Thür-
lemann and Steffen Bogen from the University of Konstanz.22
Keith Moxey: Yes. It’s a binary opposition, which collapses.
Whitney Davis: Gustav, I thought you were absolutely right to draw attention to the
logic of substitution in Bild-Anthropologie. I think it also pops up in Bredekamp’s
book, because much of the typology of Bildakt revolves around there being some
pictorial acts that are substitutive. In David Summers’s Real Spaces, there is a long
chapter devoted to the meanings of masks and effigies, in terms of the shift from
a substitutive functionality to the immediate legibility of their self-referentiality.
It seems Belting’s concern is not unique, but that he is adopting a special
or nuanced position within a field that takes that problematic as a general one.
After all, Gombrich also begins there, with his ethological account of substitu-
tion. It may end up looking like a nineteenth-century epistemology, but it is
rooted in engagements that are broadly distributed, in several languages.
Lisa Cartwright: One more question about Belting. He says “recent debates in the
journal Imaging Science and elsewhere belatedly abandon . . . the belief that sci-
entific images are themselves mimetic in the same way in which we want and
need images. In fact, they are specifically organized to address our visual naïveté
and thus serve our bodies, as images have done forever.”23 I am skeptical of the
idea that mimesis is what gets transposed onto the technology; and it’s histori-
cally inaccurate that such an abandonment happened in that journal. I wonder
if some of us, perhaps you, Jim, who have done work on scientific images could
address that.
James Elkins: For me that sort of assertion is a meter stick, indicating the distance from
quantitative, scientifically engaged discourse and humanistic discourse. I just
take it as a sign of his distance, and so I don’t try to critique it directly except
21. Marin, Sublime Poussin, translated by Margaret Iversen, Anthony Vidler, John Good-
Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University man, Stephen Bann, and Brendan Prendeville);
Press, 1999), and On Representation, translated Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée
by Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford Univer- de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992); Arasse,
sity Press, 2001); Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: On n’y voit rien: Descriptions (Paris: Denoël,
Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford 2000).
University Press, 2002); Damisch, Fenêtre jaune 22. Thürlemann, Vom Bild zum Raum: Bei-
cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris: träge zu einer semiotischen Kunstwissenschaft
Seuil, 1984); Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cologne: DuMont, 1990); Bogen, “Zwischen
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Damisch, Bild und Diagramm: Eine Kunstgeschichte
The Judgment of Paris (Chicago: University of gezeichneter Maschinen” (Habilitation, Kons-
Chicago Press, 1996); see also Damisch, “Eight tanz, 2007).
Theses for (or Against?) a Semiology of Paint- 23. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body,” 313.
ing,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 257–67 The lacuna is an attempt to clear up the syntax
(this Oxford Art Journal number is entirely dedi- of the translation; the original is “recent debates
cated to Damisch’s work and gathers contribu- in the journal Imaging Science and elsewhere
tions from Stephen Melville, Yves-Alain Bois, belatedly abandon the illusion in the belief. . . .”
where it leads to theories that fail to connect to their scientific audiences—

theories that only make sense to readers in the humanities.
Gustav Frank: Lisa, I think you’re right about your concerns. The claims are disputable.
But I think we have to jump now, to the Bredekamp readings. Sorry! Perhaps
Bredekamp’s concerns will help elucidate your question, because he is more
deeply engaged with scientific imaging.
James Elkins: Bredekamp’s research project, Das technische Bild, is the most visible
example within Bildwissenschaft to engage with the technical specifics of non-
art production, which are significantly absent in Boehm’s and Belting’s writing.
I commissioned the essay we have read, because there was nothing in English.24
It is a good summary of their research, and it was done with his approval.
For us the question might be how this appears as a research position. The
introduction is very succinct: it goes quickly from form, defined in terms of
archaeology and morphology, to historicity. I would suggest that such an intro-
duction would not be sufficient, in an Anglo-American context, to justify the
particular technical account that follows.
Keith Moxey: I think the essay is an inadequate representation of what Bredekamp
thinks he’s up to. In a while we will be considering several of Bredekamp’s texts,
and that will give a better idea.
María Lumbreras Corujo: I especially like a book published in 2007 called Das Tech-
nische Bild: Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder.25 It con-
tains a varied ensemble of texts introducing the different facets of the project.
An editorial opens the book summarizing its conception, and you also have a
couple of texts that explain the theoretical and methodological concerns of the
group. But there are also case studies presenting the research of each member,
and a long interview with Horst Bredekamp in which he talks about his interest
in the description of images. Finally, there are shorter, more didactic texts defin-
ing key concepts, methods, and shared themes such as “comparison,” “visualiza-
tion,” or “objectivity and evidence.” The book is a collection of heterogeneous
materials, but I think that, precisely because of that, it gives a sense of the rich-
ness of the project. What is particularly interesting about it is its commitment to
reflecting on methodologies that allow a precise analysis of the visual.
Gustav Frank: Matthias Bruhn is the author of the second introduction to Bildwissen-
schaft, called Das Bild: Theorie, Geschichte, Praxis (2008); the first was Martin
Schulz’s Ordnungen der Bilder in 2005.26
James Elkins: And although it’s not our subject at the moment, I have to add that Gus-
tav’s book is the third introduction.27
24. Matthias Bruhn and Vera Dünkel, Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissen-
“The Image as Cultural Technology,” in Elkins, schaftlicher Bilder (Berlin: Akademie, 2008).
Visual Literacy, 169–78. 26. Bruhn, Das Bild; Schulz, Ordnungen der
25. Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, Bilder.
and Vera Dünkel, eds., Das Technische Bild: 27. Frank and Lange, Einführung in die
Bildwissenschaft.
89 Bildwissenschaft
Gustav Frank: Bruhn’s book was written in connection with Bredekamp, so I think it is
a good representation of the Berlin project.
James Elkins: I agree, and we assigned the essay because it is the only accurate account
of what the Berlin project was doing with technical images.
Gustav Frank: If we turn to Bredekamp himself, we could begin with the Galileo book,
or the small book Darwins Korallen.28
Keith Moxey: What interests me in Darwins Korallen is the methodology. I’ll just briefly
summarize it because we have only assigned one chapter. Bredekamp says Dar-
win found the visual metaphors for temporal change that were in use in his life-
time (more often than not an image of a tree) to be inadequate. In Bredekamp’s
narrative, Darwin was impressed by his discovery of different species of branch-
ing corals, where the branching goes in all directions, without a single trunk.
What strikes Bredekamp is that on the top of one page, Darwin has written,
“I think,” and below it, there is a doodle of a coral, which branches in all direc-
tions, unlike a family tree. It is clear that Darwin sees in this visual metaphor a
way of avoiding the family tree model of evolution. The coral dies as it grows,
and what survives supplants what dies. Bredekamp is especially interested in the
fact that Darwin seems to be thinking with or through the diagram: “I think
[diagram].” This isn’t the same as Boehm’s construction: it isn’t as if the picture
has meaning; it does have meaning, it is how Darwin thinks at that moment.
Whitney Davis: Keith, can you clarify what for you is interesting about Bredekamp’s
general approach, as opposed to the specific case? If the larger proposition is that
a mental image structured later image-making, that doesn’t seem at all to be a
new thesis.
James Elkins: May I add a question to that one? My interest in Bredekamp’s book is in
its reception. It’s a small book, literally. It’s a very concise example of an image as
a model, and there would be many other examples. But there is even an English-
language review, by Rachael DeLue, so the book is pretty clearly taken to be
exemplary and not just an example.29
Keith Moxey: What struck me about Bredekamp’s book, and also yours, Jim, Visual
Practices Across the University, was the idea of thinking with images.30 Trying to
find images that capture the invisible, that attempt to codify that which seems
to be beyond perception. Using images as if they were languages.
María Lumbreras Corujo: Bredekamp says at some point in the book, “the picture is
not a derivative or an illustration, but an active bearer [Träger] of the thinking
28. The seminar participants read Brede- image to communicate a complex constellation
kamp, “Das Modell der Koralle.” of ideas and hypotheses,” and she notes that
29. DeLue, review of Bredekamp, Darwins “Bredekamp is not the first to point out the
Korallen, and three other books, Art Bulletin instrumentality of images and image making
92, no. 4 (2010): 386–91. DeLue’s interest in within scientific thought.”
the issues we discuss in the seminar is only 30. Visual Practices Across the University
tangential. She says the book shows “just (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007). [—J.E.]
how much store Darwin put in the ability of an
process.”31 I guess he understands the doodle as a medium that guides thought,

as something that makes it possible to think in ways words alone can’t.
Whitney Davis: In Bredekamp’s example, the “I think” followed by the doodle is fol-
lowed by a very famous and important discursive, algorithmic, and numerical
statement by Darwin, which has been the subject of extensive commentary by
generations of Darwin scholars. What does Darwin mean by the A, B, C and the
1, 2, 3?—and other examples of explicit codification? So I am not even sure if this
is a good example of an image as a model, or image as thinking.
James Elkins: So, back to my interest in the reception: the book’s reception might be due
to a widespread interest in images as thought, as theory, as models. The idea is in
Tom Mitchell’s Picture Theory, and it’s already come up several times this week.
Keith Moxey: Whitney, I don’t think he is arguing the image replaces language. But the
image is embedded in whatever claims Darwin was making.
Whitney Davis: Okay, so the image is part of the linguistic argument. That is a very dif-
ferent claim than that the image is doing conceptual work tout court.
Michael Holly: Why can’t it be? Why can’t we talk about the thought of the visual model?
Whitney Davis: Kant says human thought requires images. It’s one of the deepest prop-
ositions of the Kantian system.32 It may be that we are seeing versions of this
brought into the twentieth century through Heideggerian revisions—
Michael Holly: But that’s human thought using images, that’s not images determining
or embodying or calling forth thought.
Gustav Frank: I’d like to make Bredekamp’s case against Whitney. I think Bredekamp
wants not only to show that science progresses with visual models, but to show
the moment when visualizations go beyond anything that was later articulated
in science textbooks. So Darwin goes beyond anything he later put forward in
his theory. It is the surplus that interests him.
But then I would also like to register a criticism against Bredekamp’s approach.
I suspect he ends his inquiry too early, as soon as he proves his assumption.
In his way of thinking, the scientist is a substitute for the artist. He presents Dar-
win and Galileo as artists: the books are implicitly about creativity and genius.
That is fine, but he should keep going, and ask questions that extract these visu-
alizations from their cultural isolation, which is not, for example, the splendid
isolation of a genius. In this case, he might note the tree is a progressive, Enlight-
enment model and the coral is a nineteenth-century historicist model, with all
its underlying dead branches. It entails skepticism about the historical process.
I think Darwins Korallen needn’t have been a small book, with a marginal pub-
lisher: it could have been a much bigger book.
31. Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen, 24. .org; and Davis, “Sein und Zeit im Raum: Perspec-
32. See Whitney Davis, “What Is Post- tive as Symbolic Form,” in Heidegger and the
Formalism (or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunst- Work of Art History, edited by Aron Vinegar and
geschichte),” Nonsite, no. 7 (2012), at nonsite Amanda Boetke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
91 Bildwissenschaft
Keith Moxey: I’d like to move on, and say something about Georges Didi-Huberman,
who we have also read in preparation for this seminar, even though he does not
write in German. For him, there is an unconscious dimension to the work of
art, which is something we have hardly touched on. He is often cited for his
idea of anachronism, which appears in the essay we read: “we cannot produce a
consistent notion of the image,” he writes, “without a thinking about time that
includes difference and repetition, symptom and anachronism.”33 We have here
an author very different from those we have encountered so far, in the sense that
time is the vehicle for the recognition of the presentation of the image. Those are
brief and inadequate words for a complicated essay.
James Elkins: Here’s a thought experiment about Didi-Huberman. Imagine that the
only theorist in visual studies was Tom Mitchell, so that we’d be taking all our
conceptual and methodological cues from him. I think the world of visual stud-
ies, if not Bildwissenschaft, would still be recognizable. Lots would be missing,
of course, but I don’t want to press that model. I just want to contrast it to what
visual studies, Bildwissenschaft, and art history would look like if Georges Didi-
Huberman’s books were the only ones on our library shelves. Our imaginations
would be thronged with images of passion, of violence, of resurgent examples of
the Pathosformel. Many of the things we have been talking about, such as popu-
lar imagery and advertising, would entirely vanish, and representation would be
in perpetual crisis. I’m not at all saying this as a way of criticizing him: I’m sug-
gesting that if art historians, in particular, really took him on board, instead of
citing him in contained contexts, many of the issues we have been talking about
up to now would have to appear fundamentally misguided, poorly formulated,
or uninteresting. There is a great distance between his interests and those that
can be assigned to disciplines, and perhaps—although now I’ll be sounding like
Žižek—perhaps that is why some disciplinary art history is so intensely and fit-
fully attracted to him.
Whitney Davis: I was surprised to see readings by Didi-Huberman in a list of visual
studies reading. And I agree, Jim, the consequences of taking Didi-Huberman
on board would be to eliminate vast swathes of what we have been reading as
possible projects. That doesn’t eliminate his work’s interest: it is philosophically
clear, but I have the sense that he really is an outlier for this particular set of
issues.
Michael Holly: Visual studies cannot possibly accommodate someone like Georges
Didi-Huberman unless we stretch our concepts beyond recognition. What fas-
cinates me about him, even in translation, is the completely different rhetoric,
or style of writing, which puts art history on a different register than it had been
before. In that, his work is akin to visual studies. It shocks us into being some-
where else.
33. The participants read Didi-Huberman,

“History and Image: Has the ‘Epistemological
Transformation’ Taken Place?,” 135.
Elisabeth Friedman: Didi-Huberman’s concept of art as symptom might be a shock

to both art history and visual studies because the symptom resists historicity and
language, which are central concerns of these fields.
Joana Cunha Leal: Didi-Huberman directed, along with Bernd Stiegler, Trivium’s first
number precisely on the “Iconic Turn.”34 He presents himself there as feeling
“si peu Français en France, si French (donc misunderstood) aux USA et si ‘conti-
nental’ dans une Allemagne intellectuelle beaucoup plus en travail et en dialogue
que partout ailleurs” (not very French in France, too much French [therefore
misunderstood] in the USA, and too “continental” in an intellectual Germany
working and dialoging as nowhere else).
Whitney Davis: Just a footnote. If there is no serious theorist of the visual, visuality,
or the image who cannot be included in visual studies, then it seems to me visual
studies is in serious trouble. If there aren’t the Didi-Hubermans about whom we
could say, “This is discernibly different from what we are doing,” then—
James Elkins: What about John Onians?
Whitney Davis: There is a group of such people, and I would be willing to include Didi-
Huberman in that group.
Keith Moxey: I guess I disagree with you, Whitney, about the marginality of Didi-
Huberman’s project.
Whitney Davis: I’m not suggesting it is marginal at all. It’s just a different kind of proj-
ect from what we’re considering.
Paul Frosh: I’m not an art historian, so I don’t understand your comment, Jim. Why is
he so out there, so different?
James Elkins: To use Michael’s word, he is a shock to the system of art history in many
ways. If the doctrine of anachronism were to be programmatically installed,
it would upset many art history departments. Our interest would be drawn
to incandescent moments of failed representation, trauma, and subterranean
motifs. Like Whitney, I’m not criticizing his work. I have read a lot of it, from
Phasmes to L’image survivante.35 But visual studies might well receive his work as
a different kind of shock than art history, and I think we all hope visual studies
is still interested in what Michael has called the exciting early days, when all sorts
of new theories rubbed up against old art.
Michael Holly: I liken the shock Didi-Huberman has given all of us to the effect of
Warburg, a hundred years before; and Warburg is, of course, his own intellectual
hero.
34. Trivium is a French-German online 35. Didi-Huberman, Phasmes: Essais

journal committed to the translation of French sur l’apparition (Paris: Minuit, 1998); Didi-
authors into German and vice versa. See trivium Huberman, L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art
.revues.org/223. et temps de fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris:
Minuit / Paradoxe, 2002).
93 Bildwissenschaft
Anna Sigrídur Arnar: He does bring up a number of German and Austrian names;
that’s how I saw the connection. There’s a kind of nostalgia for art history as it
was before the Second World War—maybe not nostalgia, but he does look back
to those sources and ask, as we did in Gustav’s earlier session, “What would art
history have become if these people’s work hadn’t been brutally interrupted?”
He invites us to think about that which could have been, an alternate trajectory
of art history had history taken a different course.
Keith Moxey: I think that’s right, and I think he is central to our interests. He poses
a direct challenge to certain well-worn paths into which art history has fallen.
Whitney, I still don’t see why Didi-Huberman would eliminate “vast swathes”
of art history.
Whitney Davis: No. He would eliminate a number of the projects we have been discuss-
ing in visual studies: Nick Mirzoeff’s work; the Journal of Visual Culture; some
parts of what is unfolding in Bildwissenschaft. I think his work has a good deal
of compatibility with other topics we have discussed, for example the commit-
ment on the part of some art historians to the psychodynamics of the artwork.
Michael Holly: Neither visual studies, as it is constituted now, nor even the history of
art, can welcome Didi-Huberman into their clubs. Their loss. His book on Fra
Angelico, if anything, goes deeply into the visual, as no other study before it had
done.36 He goes exhaustively into all the theological meanings that are packed
into the San Marco frescoes, but then he says: Wait. There is still something left
over, so many veils of meaning that no iconographic manual will be able to rend.
Where to now?
Flora Lysen: I would say that visual studies should be preeminently equipped to accom-
modate Didi-Huberman. We need the concept of anachronism as a way to
explain the rubbing of new theories or questions against objects from various
time periods. Didi-Huberman shows how no one ever bothered to look at Fra
Angelico’s red splashes of paint in Madonna of the Shadow.37 He shows how our
ways of looking and theorizing are “obscuring” parts of the image. He seems
to blame Panofsky for clouding our perception of artworks, especially of for-
mal elements such as paint and color, with an iconographical smoke screen.
Regardless of who to blame for our blindness in front of certain images, Didi-
Huberman’s thoughts about our presentist looking at images from the past are
absolutely central to visual studies, I would say.
James Elkins: We are running a bit short on time, and I wanted to be sure to include
your own essay, Keith, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn.” It is the only one in
English—and, I think, the only one in any language—that tries to make parallels
36. Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissem- 37. Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image,
blance and Figuration, translated by Jane Marie Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,”
Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and
1995). out of History, edited by Robert Zwijnenberg and
Claire Farago (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2003), 31–44.
and contrasts between Bildwissenschaft and visual studies.38 One of your central
terms there is presence and the idea of the encounter with the work—its place,
the places between the seer and the seen—and I wonder if we might begin to
take stock of our observations today by considering those concepts. Certainly all
the talk of the “meaning” of images in these pages will have sounded very strange
to Anglo-American readers in visual studies, as if it doesn’t even belong in this
book. We have left identity, gender, and social meanings far behind.
Gustav: This place in between: how is it constituted? Is it simply there? Is it constituted
in virtue of the object?
Keith Moxey: We would have to go back to Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. But as
you know, it’s about the experience of the world, and not the knowledge of the
world. Knowledge is built on the subject-object distinction.
James Elkins: Heidegger has an apposite concept, which I think would only deepen
your skepticism, Gustav: the Zwischen, the place where being is constituted
between beings, between things.
Michael Holly: This is all so funny, because when I met you, Keith, all those decades
ago, you were a dyed-in-the-wool social historian. Any of this talk would have
been heresy, not to mention fluff. I can just hear your voice, objecting and dis-
missing. What happened? Have you had a conversion experience?
[Laughter.]
Keith Moxey: I think I grew up.
[Louder laughter.]
Inge Hinterwaldner: Perhaps we can think of the in-between not so much as a space
as as an interaction. In the aesthetics of perception, for example, the idea is that
the recipient or beholder is always already foreseen within the artifact. That can
be made explicit by several “strategies” like repoussoir figures that direct the
viewer’s eyes. Taking this act of examination seriously, Boehm says a Bild can be
conceived as an event or a process which enfolds gradually with the beholder’s
engagement.
Gustav Frank: But then you are back with the same problem: how do you conceptualize
what you understand as the interaction?
Inge Hinterwaldner: We should of course think about what conceptualization of the
beholder we imply. But I would characterize the interaction as a reflected process:
visually analyzing the picture or image; registering where it leads the gaze; analyz-
ing which elements play a role and what follows from them. If we can’t adequately
express some impressions at first glance, this is normal and does not at all mean
that there is something mystical or even mysterious. The reasons might lie in the
fact that we have to develop adequate concepts to grasp the given configuration
38. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic

Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2005):
131–46.
95 Bildwissenschaft
resulting from the image producer’s decisions, which have consequences for the
reception process. Please note, I am not saying we should try to reconstruct what
the image producer might have intended. It seems more promising to extract
the operating iconic logic, the way the image functions or show. (And I mean
“showing” as the iconic mode of communicating.)39 Seeing this showing has to
be learned and can be taught. In short, the interaction on the most elementary
level can be seen as the informed and articulated dialogue between the specific
showing of the single image and the tackling of this offer by the beholder.
Gustav Frank: Sure, that’s what I was trained in as the classical and also the formalisti-
cally sophisticated interpretation and reception theory of the artwork, whether
it’s fine arts, literature, art house film, or photography. Inge, I could just parrot
Jim’s remark that this will sound bewildering to Anglo-American ears in visual
studies—bewildering because of its obvious lack of critical awareness regarding
the fact that all the entities you take for granted are loaded with a lot of well-
known theoretical or ideological assumptions. The beholder, the producer, and
the image are neither natural nor empirical or neutral entities; they don’t interact
in a natural, neutral way. Thus the beholder probably loses sight of the material-
ity and objecthood that the picture can put on display. On the other side of the
spectrum, even the space where the encounter takes place—the marketplace,
church, gallery, or museum—is produced by a visible and invisible net of social
rules and discourses.40 In this respect one could call Didi-Huberman’s preferred
situations of reception a historicist elitism, selecting the socially privileged or
affectively most intense positions devant l’image.41
Can we then solve the paradox that haunted Benjamin by seeing the short-
comings of both the vitalists’ adoration of presence and the historicists’ mantra
of historicization? Can’t we come to see that they share their core desires and
obsessions?
Sunil Manghani: Inge, the point you make from Boehm, that we might conceive the
image, or Bild, as an event that gradually enfolds and unfolds with the beholder’s
engagement makes me think of Panofsky’s lovely vignette of being greeted by
an acquaintance across the street—whereby we gradually come to “read” the
“scene” in ever more detail. Tom Mitchell of course makes great play of this in
Picture Theory. In fact he describes it as the “primal scene” of iconology.42
James Elkins: As long as you’ve mentioned Tom, I should say that he has appropriated
the word Bildwissenschaft. He presented a paper in 2005 at a conference I held
in Ireland, on the “Four Fundamental Principles of Bildwissenschaft,” but when
he gave us the text for the book, that was changed to “Image Science.”43 I think
39. Boehm, Egenhofer, and Spies, Zeigen. Hanser, 2000), which replaces the definite by
40. Keith’s Seminar 7 on politics elaborates the indefinite article, even more telling.
on that tension. 42. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays
41. Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image: Ques- on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
tions posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art University of Chicago Press, 1994), 25–34.
(Paris: Minuit, 1990). In terms of characterizing 43. The essay was originally titled “Four Fun-
connoisseurship that omits historical time, damental Principles of Bildwissenschaft”; the
I find the German title Vor einem Bild (Munich: English was then changed to “Four Fundamental
he was wanting to respond to Horst Bredekamp’s essay, which he had published

two years earlier in Critical Inquiry.44 Tom’s use of Bildwissenschaft is completely
adventitious.
María Lumbreras Corujo: Actually, he did publish an essay keeping the German word,
in 2008.45
Merja Salo: I accept this theory of image as presence, but what are the methods, the
analytic tools, that it opens for us?
Inge Hinterwaldner: For me, the word “presence” is markedly different from “repre-
sentation.” In German we can use the word Darstellung to emphasize the specifi-
cally designed “presentation” rather than the reference.46 This can suggest a focus
on how things are depicted. We can apply a variety of established methodologi-
cal tools to analyze the mode of depiction.47 I personally prefer to examine the
formal aspects and composition of images or pictures closely, and then to pro-
ceed to integrate a wider context and theoretical framework.
Merja Salo: It was 1994 when the pictorial turn happened; it’s been fifteen years, so its
effects should be visible by now. We should have wonderful results based on the
theory of image as presence. As far as I know, in Finland, the projects inspired
by the pictorial turn are incomplete.
Keith Moxey: Well, there is the mass of publications that Gustav and Jim have been
discussing: thirty books to be published by Eikones.
James Elkins: Two ancillary points, Merja, that bear on the dissemination of this par-
ticular concept of presence. Was ist Ein Bild?, the book that has Boehm’s essay
proposing the iconic turn, appeared in 1994, but the essay had been scheduled
for another publication in 1991, and he says it was written in the late 1980s. Tom
Mitchell’s expression “pictorial turn” first appeared in 1994. And then, regard-
ing Eikones: each year, on the site visit, I proposed setting aside some of their
considerable funds to produce a book a year in Chinese, Spanish, English, and
French. As of this moment, they have one book scheduled to appear in English.
It’s a real pity, and it has hugely delayed the reception of Boehm’s ideas. Belting’s
work has been translated into Chinese, English, French, and Spanish, but Bre-
dekamp is virtually unknown. Not a single one of his books has even appeared
in English.
Michael Holly: This ontological turn, as I would call it, is maybe fifteen years old, but
it seems to be garnering greater attention. It is growing from within visual stud-
ies, challenging it from the inside. As a reaction to the challenge, we turn around
Concepts of Image Science,” and it was com- edited by Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart
bined with another text and published as (New York: Routledge, 2008), 55–67.
“Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy?,” in Elkins, 46. Was heißt “Darstellen”?, edited by Chris-
Visual Literacy. tian L. Hart Nibbrig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1994).
44. Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition?” 47. See, for example, Max Imdahl, Giotto:
45. Mitchell, “Image Science,” in Science Arenafresken. Ikonographie—Ikonologie—Ikonik
Images and Popular Images of the Sciences, (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1980).
97 Bildwissenschaft
and try to fit it into this recently established category of visual studies when we’re
talking now about something new, something different. Let’s celebrate it and see
how far it takes us.
Gustav Frank: In the run-up to this event, I had a look at the major history of Ger-
man art, which is now eight volumes long.48 I wondered: after fifteen years of
the pictorial and iconic turn, how much visual studies, Bildwissenschaft, new
art history, and social history of art have made their way into the heart of the
discipline, as it is exemplified by this publication?
Whitney Davis: Including Barbara Lange—
Gustav Frank: Yes, she was my coauthor for our book Einführung in die Bildwissen-
schaft, and she’s the author of the final volume, on the twentieth century. I was
astonished to find hardly any imprint of the newer work. In Barbara’s volume
there is gender, identity, class issues, and the subject of the GDR, media but
without any visual studies or bildwissenschaftliche imprint. Volumes 6 and 7,
which I frequently use, aren’t even really affected by the social history of art.
Is this the same in other countries, as Merja says of Finland?
Keith Moxey: Well, if we’re talking about collections that function as handbooks of art
history—
James Elkins: Like Oxford Art Online—
Keith Moxey: Then you can count on them to have deep reservations about expanding
art history beyond the canon.
Michael Holly: This is also where visual studies has failed, as I keep arguing.49 Visual
studies might not have ossified if it had paid more attention to the premodern
practices that art history continues to study.
Whitney Davis: Why would it take less than fifteen or twenty years for these concerns
to be expressed? Consider Chris Wood and Alexander Nagel’s project to think of
an “anachronic Renaissance.”50 I’m not claiming that they are literate in Boehm
and Bredekamp at all, but you can see in their project the persistence of pictorial
imaging practices through the retemporalization of the Renaissance, that they
are taking on board something like echoes of some of the work we are consider-
ing. I think it’s pretty exciting: no matter how incomplete its theorizations might
be, it does suggest that these models can potentially be put into operation in
conventional, empirical terms, by art historians who perceive themselves to be
archival, archaeological, and forensic.
Joana Cunha Leal: In Portuguese scholarship, the problem of applying visual studies is
not the subjects that visual studies considers, but the issue of methodology and
theory. I mean, there is a considerable devotion to the study of artifacts without
48. Geschichte der Kunst in Deutschland, 49. See Section 4 of the Seminars.
vol. 8, Vom Expressionismus bis Heute, edited 50. Wood and Nagel, Anachronic Renais-
by Barbara Lange (Munich: Prestel, 2006). sance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
“major art” status (ceramics, furniture, goldsmith’s work, or ordinary building

typologies), but they are unaware of a theoretical framework, or any problematic
recognizable as visual studies.
María Lumbreras Corujo: In Spain, the works of Bredekamp and Boehm haven’t
had much diffusion because of the language barrier. Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie,
which was translated in 2007, has been widely read, but I don’t think that the
ideas he develops in this book have had a great impact on the Spanish scholar-
ship so far. Interestingly, though, in the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the graduate program includes
a seminar on Bildwissenschaft taught by Linda Báez Rubí, who was a postdoc-
toral fellow in the Graduirtenkolleg Bild–Medium–Körper at the Hochschüle
für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. I know that some graduate students in Mexico
have been discussing these theoretical models and are trying to integrate them
in their own work. Many of them, by the way, work with premodern objects
such as early modern religious images, and Linda herself is a specialist in late
medieval and early modern visual rhetoric and mnemonics. Also, the Centro
Argentino de Investigadores de Arte in Buenos Aires invited Hans Belting to
teach a seminar on image anthropology a couple of years ago. I don’t know about
other places in Latin America, but it seems that Bildwissenschaft is disseminat-
ing through some Spanish-speaking countries.
James Elkins: Keith, it’s interesting that your essay comparing visual studies and Bild-
wissenschaft appeared in 2005, so even though it is still unique, it belongs in the
second decade of visual studies, which was our subject in Seminar 3. It was an
untimely contribution, and as far as I know it has not been discussed in print
until now. In this way we contribute, incrementally, to the accumulation of
visual studies’ and Bildwissenschaft’s awareness of their links.
6. I M A G E , M E A N I N G , A N D P O W E R
Despite the diversity of Bildwissenschaft, the program called Eikones in Basel plays
an immense role in Bildwissenschaft. The conversation transcribed here begins with
the role and the major focus of that research group and its degree program. The discus-
sion then turns to the generative terms of that program, including image, meaning,
and power, and the ways they are construed in other scholarship.
James Elkins: We don’t have a predetermined order for exploring these materials, so I
thought I might begin with Gottfried Boehm. Aside from the usual confer-
ences and so forth, my own engagement with Bildwissenschaft is that for the last
five years, since its inception, I have been on the site-review panel for a large
image-research institute in Basel, directed by Boehm.1 It is called Eikones, and
it is funded by the Swiss government; one of our Fellows, Inge Hinterwaldner,
has been involved since the beginning. It is now entering its second phase, and
Boehm will be retiring. The Boehm years, if I can call them that, have been
especially interesting to me, because Eikones presented him with an opportu-
nity or a forum, on an unprecedented scale, to develop his interests. I’ve been
specially concerned to see how his phenomenological and ontological interests
work when he needs to respond to technical and scientific research projects of
the sort that first-generation phenomenology excluded.
Eikones is promising about thirty books in three different series—you’ve
read the tables of contents of some, and we’ve brought along some others,
including Inge’s—and so in a few years, even if the new director, Ralph Ubl,
changes the institute’s direction, they will be among the principal publishers in
Bildwissenschaft and German-language art history, philosophy, and criticism.2
I have the site-review documents here, and I’d like to quote from a few pas-
sages that have to do with Eikones’s conceptual foundations.3 Again, this is a
drastic compression of a massive project, and all I want to do it telegraph some
points that can orient our discussion. These are official documents, and they are
produced in English—that’s a requirement of the Swiss National Science Foun-
dation, which funds Eikones—so they are carefully crafted and representative.4
1. The panel included people who figure in 4. A footnote about language: the site review
our readings and in the discussion of disci- panel is accompanied by NFS members, who
plines: Hans Belting, Bernhard Waldenfels, supervise the review; they are always scientists
Lorraine Daston, Oskar Bätschmann, and Sybille because Eikones is one of just a few of the NFS
Krämer. projects that are not science. The first year,
2. In addition to all the sources listed at the 2007, we began with a private meeting of the ten
beginning of this section, see the publishing of us on the panel and the NFS scientists, and
notices on the Wilhelm Fink website: www.fink we began in English, because that’s the rule of
.de/katalog/reihe/eikones.html. the NFS. Then one of the panelists said, in Ger-
3. The documents cited here are unpub- man, “I don’t see why I have to speak English
lished and partly proprietary to Eikones. here,” and from then on, for the next five years,
First I want to note the title of the enterprise is itself multiple. Eikones is
not the only title they use, even on site. There are three other options, which
are on the title pages of their documents: they also call themselves NFS Bildkri-
tik (“Swiss National Science Foundation Image Criticism”); “Iconic Criticism,”
in English; and that English title has a subtitle, also in English, “The Power and
Meaning of Images.” The multiple titles are pertinent because they attach to
Boehm’s philosophic claims.
In the first annual report, 2007, the first paragraph says the purpose of
Eikones is to investigate “the power and meaning of images.”5 That phrase,
“power of images,” was in English even in discussions, although the resonance of
the English-language phrase wasn’t opened for discussion—for example, David
Freedberg’s expression wasn’t usually cited.
Whitney Davis: When it was translated back into German, what word was used?
James Elkins: Macht—
María Lumbreras Corujo: That word has been linked to Bildwissenschaft from the
beginning. One of the best-known anthologies in the field is Iconic Turn: Die neue
Macht der Bilder.6 It also appears in Bredekamp’s writings and in Boehm’s Wie Bil-
der Sinn erzeugen.
James Elkins: The expression “power and meaning of images” is divided into three
parts. The first is called “iconic theology,” which includes the study of icono-
clasm, iconophilia, and iconophobia; the second is “ornamentation and iconic
power”; and the third is “image politics.”
The second was dissolved after a time; during the first few years there was a
project to fundamentally redefine ornament. Eikones had several of these spe-
cial groups dedicated to intensive conceptualization. They were sometimes ham-
pered by our site visits, because our panel did not always agree that the theoriza-
tions were helpful or well-defined; but there were also inherent limitations posed
by Eikones’s size. In 2007, Eikones has thirty-four researchers and a graduate
college with thirteen scholars. Its modules, clusters, and groups changed over
time, but in 2007 there were six modules: “The power of images / image poli-
tics”; “Image, architecture, and word”; “The image and time”; “The image and
everything was in German, except for these index to the degree to which Gottfried wanted
documents. This is pertinent because there was to nourish initiatives that were closer to his own
an assumption that German was an adequate interests; the diversity of Eikones’s researchers
international language; the decision had a far- and their topics always made coherence difficult
reaching impact on their translation policy and to attain or measure. A third purpose is also
their points of reference. mentioned on the first page of the 2007 docu-
5. In the second paragraph, the purpose ment. Here it is “to render iconic critical judg-
is given again, differently, as “developing a ments plausible wherever they are required.”
common vocabulary,” and there was initially a This is a disciplinary goal, and Eikones contin-
project to develop a Bildlexikon, a vocabulary ues to incorporate a strong outreach and public
Eikones was going to develop to augment exist- education component.
ing critical vocabularies. When the Bildlexi- 6. Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder,
kon was dropped, that goal was restated as edited by Christa Maar and Hubert Burda
“developing a common vocabulary.” That was (Cologne: DuMont, 2004).
of interest to me because it would have been an
writing”; “Literary text as iconic criticism”; and “The epistemic image,” which
was visualization in science and technology. Because thirty-four people had to
be distributed across six modules, there wasn’t much opportunity to cover the
entirety of any given subject, or to consistently work to apply new concepts.
Eikones had an enormous ambition to speak about images in a fundamental
way, but it wasn’t always possible given the number of researchers and the fact
that the students had to continue to produce dissertations that would be viable
for their future careers. The situation was analogous to the situation of some
graduate students in visual studies programs, who need to make sure they’re
employable.
Michael Holly: Were these visiting scholars, or permanent staff?
Inge Hinterwaldner: Eikones has four-year cycles: research topics—Jim mentioned

the ones of the first period—are defined for this time span. The scholars (pre-
docs and postdocs) apply with their research projects and are given four years at
Eikones; the graduate college scholars are given three years. We had also some
visiting Fellows (usually postdocs and professors); they resided at Eikones for a
few weeks or months at a time.
Keith Moxey: Did they accept applications from international scholars?
James Elkins: Yes. One of our briefs on the panel was to monitor the “advancement
of women” and issues of diversity. As a North American, I often found myself
having to say that race and ethnicity should also be considered, along with the
“advancement of women”; and when it came to diversity, the conversation tended
to center on the disproportionate representation of German scholars as opposed
to Swiss or Austrian scholars. But I don’t want to give the wrong impression:
they did try to be as international as possible; it just wasn’t as diverse as some
other institutions, especially in North America or the UK, and that is significant
for the overall coherence of the program and its affiliation with Bildwissenschaft.
Well, there is a tremendous amount more that could, and should, be said
about Eikones, and I hope that sometime a history will be written that will con-
tinue this kind of discussion. I just want to make one more point, related to the
third component of “the meaning and power of images,” called “image politics.”
I also ended up representing Anglo-American visual studies when I had to com-
ment on the relatively few dissertations, modules, clusters, and other units that
had to do with the social dimensions of images. Here is how the social life of
images is described in the 2008 document: “this cluster turns to an area that could
not be sufficiently addressed at the beginning of our project. We will focus on
how the image functions in, and participates in, the social field, with an emphasis
on ‘practice.’ ” (There was a connection to the local Hochschule für Gestaltung
und Kunst, and a couple of people interested in production, especially in visual
communications and design.) “Interestingly, as images are immediately legible in
their self-reference, they seem sufficient unto themselves, even as their use and
function are embedded in a wide range of practice, including science, technol-

ogy, art, and economy.” I think this sentence begins in a way familiar to Anglo-
American readers, but swerves toward the kind of technical analysis of reception
that is closer to other strands of Bildwissenschaft, such as Horst Bredekamp’s.
The following sentence mentions “diagrams, circuits, and photographs.” In the
five years I’ve been visiting Eikones, issues like gender, identity, politics, and soci-
ety have never made more than intermittent and bracketed appearances.
Perhaps we could turn to some of Gottfried Boehm’s texts now, to see some
of his principal conceptualizations. I’d like to open that discussion by quoting
some lines from a text that Gustav and I did not assign, but Gottfried himself
assigned when he was here, at the 2008 Stone Art Theory Seminar called What
Is an Image? I’m not sure if this has been published, either in English or Ger-
man; I’m going to quote from the text he provided. It’s called “Indeterminacy:
On the Logic of the Image.”7 It has some of the clearest formulations of his
thoughts about the nature of images, and it is significant that he proposes logic,
from the beginning, as a category. He writes: “By ‘the logic of images’ we mean
a manner of generating meaning that is particular to the images themselves, and
can be derived only from them. We are working from the premise that images
add something important to our language, our concepts, and our knowledge,
that can only be communicated through images.” There are two qualifications.
He says he is interested in the “oscillation” or “indeterminacy” of the visual and
the linguistic, and he remarks that “this contrast, or oscillation can be described
as iconic difference, whereby it is also stated that the initially only visual rela-
tionship can be treated ‘as’ one that is full of meaning, and thus attains logical
status.” It is a very unusual claim, and contains the qualification that iconic dif-
ference can be treated “as” a relation that has meaning.8 The claim here is that
there is a resemblance to meaning, an analogue to meaning. If it were meaning,
pictures would be folded back into language. This is what’s meant by “meaning”
in the expression “power and meaning of images.” It is very far from Anglo-
American formulations. These expressions—iconic difference, iconic logic—are
parts of a technical lexicon of about a half dozen terms; they are crucial for
whatever sense can be made of his project.
Inge Hinterwaldner: From the passages you quoted (and from the rest of Boehm’s
texts I am familiar with), I do not see the necessity to speak of “as if meaning” in
confrontation with images. To relate meaning (and also content, logic, or inter-
pretation) solely to language or semiotics: wouldn’t that already be a strong
7. German original: Gottfried Boehm, hinzufügen, das nur auf diesem Weg zu erfahren
“Unbestimmtheit: Zur Logik des Bildes,” ist” (208) and “Der Kontrast lässt sich als
in Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des eine ikonische Differenz beschreiben, womit
Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), auch gesagt ist, dass die zunächst nur visuelle
199–212. The original passages read, “Unter Beziehung, dann ‘als’ eine bedeutungsvolle
der ‘Logik der Bilder’ verstehen wir eine ihnen behandelt werden kann, [d]ie etwas zeigt, das
eigentümliche, nur ihnen selbst abzulesende heisst einen logischen Status gewinnt” (209).
Weise, Sinn zu erzeugen. Wir arbeiten also [—I.H.]
mit der Prämisse, dass Bilder unserer Spra- 8. Quotation marks in the original, which
che, den Begriffen und dem Wissen Wichtiges was prepared by Boehm ca. 2008.
statement presupposing certain premises? The philosophical hermeneutics tradi-

tion (Heidegger, Gadamer) shows other options. Therefore, Boehm emphasizes
the compatibility of Gadamer’s and Plessner’s accounts with the study of images
or “nonlinguistic expressions.”9
Keith Moxey: I think this is a serious attempt to do something about the significance
of images, other than a semiotic analysis, apart from what Göran Sonesson did,
and the French Canadian semiotician—
James Elkins: Fernande Saint-Martin.10
Keith Moxey: Boehm’s project is an attempt to get around what were seen to be failed
attempts. Nelson Goodman was the architect of the idea that images are not like
words, that they come at us all at once, that they are not a linear system, not a
time-based system. Goodman called this quality of images, which prevents their
being taken apart into systems of signs, density. Boehm’s work seems to me to
be an alternative. How might images make meaning, or suggest meaning? Jim
chose his words very carefully, because even if you claim that images make mean-
ing, you treat the image as if it were full of meaning.
James Elkins: I wonder if it might be useful to distinguish between different rejections
of semiotics. The rejection on Gottfried Boehm’s part is consistent, and has a
nameable set of texts against which it poses itself. But then there’s the rejection
of semiotics in Anglo-American visual studies, which is structured around the
distinctions that have been constructed between Peirce and Saussure. Peircean
signs, which are taken to be dynamic and contextual, are preferred to Saussure’s
systematic structures, despite the fact that his concepts served Lacan and others
and informed much of poststructuralism. And then—a third rejection—there is
Göran Sonesson’s appearance in Tom Mitchell’s Picture Theory. As I remember
that, he thinks of Sonesson as an example of a sort of semiotics that creates a
metalanguage that overlays its object at a minimal distance, and is more a for-
malization than a fruitful interpretation.11 There is more here, because art his-
tory has had at least three revivals and abandonments of semiotics. Especially in
regard to Bildwissenschaft, it might be useful to distinguish reasons why people
don’t want to subscribe to different semiotics.
Juliet Bellow: I wanted to talk about the role of the body. All three of the theorists we
read for this seminar use the body, and the earlier writers in visuelle Kultur that
Gustav assigned also propose their theories of film in relation to the body, specif-
ically in relation to dance.12 My worry is that they essentialize the body—finding
9. Helmuth Plessner, “Zur Hermeneutik du Québec, 1987), translated as Semiotics of

nichtsprachlichen Ausdrucks,” in Das Problem Visual Language (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
der Sprache, edited by Hans-Georg Gadamer, sity Press, 1990).
Deutscher Kongreß für Philosophie 8 (Munich: 11. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays
Wilhelm Fink, 1967), 555–66. Cf. also Michael on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 86.
Peter Smith, 1966). 12. See Section 1 of the Seminars.
10. Saint-Martin, Sémiologie du langage
visuel (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université
in it a convenient metaphor for, or way of describing, phenomena that seem to

be outside of language and culture. I’m not sure that is what Boehm is doing,
but that’s what I fear when I discover a theory like his. Given that historically the
body is so often coded female or associated with “feminine” states and experi-
ences, I see this as a potential problem.
Gustav Frank: So you would say the semiotics you have in mind deals with the body,
and Boehm is not taking it into consideration? Boehm would put it the other
way around: he would say semiotics is very abstract, and far from any corporeal
reality. The Bildwissenschaft he elaborates is very interested in how the body is
affected by images. It’s very corporeal. In this respect Boehm is close to Georges
Didi-Huberman.
Juliet Bellow: Semiotics, in my understanding, is agnostic about corporeal reality;
it’s concerned with the body’s role in particular practices of signification, rather
than some underlying, universal substrate. I am glad to see any theory try to
grapple with the question of how bodies participate in the processes of making
and receiving images, but I am also wary of theories that hinge upon the body
rather than a body or bodies, plural. While I would acknowledge potential prob-
lems with semiotic interpretation, to me, semiotics does a better job at making
us aware of how bodies produce and internalize meaning at specific moments
and in specific contexts than Bildwissenschaft, at least what I know of it so far.
Keith Moxey: Boehm talks a lot about gesture, but not in terms of signs. For him, ges-
tures do not make meaning so much as ask us to make meaning before them.
Their capacity to be meaningful has to be understood metaphorically.
James Elkins: It’s possible that we may be dealing here with different implementa-
tions of phenomenology, or different strains of phenomenology. As Keith says,
Boehm’s project is metaphorical, because some of his conceptual categories, such
as gesture, emerge from phenomenological readings of the body’s encounter
with images. That is also the case with Bernhard Waldenfels and other followers
of Merleau-Ponty. But phenomenology inhabits visual studies differently. It is
taken as a starting place for any description of experience, but as soon as you’ve
started, there you are—
Gustav Frank: And it’s no longer a problem.
I want to add something about meaning. In Benjamin, meaning and the self
are completely different from what he’s interested in—the image, language, and
bodies. Gottfried Boehm is very concerned with having meaning on board, even
if he has to put it in italics or quotation marks. Why is he so concerned? I see
similar tendencies in Bredekamp, because he is trying to get theory on board.
His recent book is a theory of Bildakt, which could be translated as “picture act”
or “image act.”13 It is explicitly an analogue of the speech act. Just as the speech
act has a person at its origin, so the picture act has an image.
13. Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin:

Suhrkamp, 2010).
Joana Cunha Leal: It is analogous to Saussure’s basic distinction between parole and
langue.
Gustav Frank: Yes. So why are Boehm and Bredekamp maneuvering back to meaning,
using locutions such as “as if”—as if semiotics, as if meaning? Why is that so impor-
tant? I would skip this, and say let the meaning go. The level at which pictures are
interesting is the level of affect or anything else not necessarily based on meaning.
James Elkins: Gustav, how closely would you align your critique here with Tom Mitch-
ell’s project? Does his project help inform you at this point?
Gustav Frank: I think it is crucial for all projects of visual studies and Bildwissenschaft
to be able to say something about affect and the body; those subjects operate
beyond anything that can be described by semiotics. I sympathize with Tom’s
way of saying, let’s play with alternative models of how images work in societies;
let’s pretend we take the metaphorical animism literally. But alongside animism
I would prefer also to bring in strong theories in the sense Paul suggested or,
Whitney would insist, from social and natural sciences. That’s not an exclusion,
because ethnology, anthropology, and the neurosciences’ concepts of vision can
inform the study of the everyday, the contingent, and the serial imagery that you
have mentioned as among the central lacunae of visual studies. I do not want
to combine “serious” stuff with “serious” theory in order to legitimize the field’s
existence. I would agree with Boehm and Bredekamp that there is something,
as you said, Jim, “that is particular to the images themselves, and can be derived
only from them.” I doubt that this will amount to great art or big science, but
I’ll never cease asking Bildwissenschaft what that particular is.
Michael Holly: Boehm even says, in his letter to Tom Mitchell, “the aesthetic realm,
which the image had largely been thought to inhabit, was over time”—Panofsky
and so on—“broadened to encompass the discursive and the cognitive,” and
then he asks the very legitimate question, “Was this not a betrayal of art?” So to
fight the betrayal, you don’t go to the logic that instigated the betrayal in the first
place.14 I’m confused about that.
Gustav Frank: Me too.
Flora Lysen: I wonder if it would help if we brought in a line from the first page of the
exchange, where Boehm writes, “For the ‘image’ is not simply some new topic,
but much more relates to a different mode of thinking, one that has shown itself
capable of clarifying and availing itself of the long-neglected cognitive possibili-
ties that lie in non-verbal representations.” Here he doesn’t talk about meaning,
but modes of thinking.
María Lumbreras Corujo: Yes, and I think this is crucial. Both Boehm and Bredekamp
understand images in that way: as nonverbal modes of thinking, as a means
14. Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell, letters are extensively discussed in James Elkins
“Pictorial Versus Iconic Turn,” March 2006, and Maja Naef, eds., What Is an Image?, Stone
unpublished in English. (See the bibliographic Art Theory Institutes 2 (University Park: Pennsyl-
note at the beginning of this section.) These vania State University Press, 2011).
to produce knowledge differently: visually, or pictorially.15 The difficulty lies in

describing how that happens. That’s the moment when metaphors such as ges-
ture or meaning come into play. As I see it, it is also a methodological problem,
one that especially worries Horst Bredekamp. He really wants to get into the
picture and explain how its epistemic potential is put to work. That’s why he’s so
concerned with the description of images.
James Elkins: Meaning itself is vexed in an interesting way. In the Eikones literature,
the concept is everywhere. I remember at one point saying, if you had proposed
this in North America, as a research project, you couldn’t just say you were inter-
ested in meaning. The cognitive is one extreme point of the stretched or stressed
concept as it is used in Eikones.
Flora Lysen: If we are interested in getting at meaning, we have to look at what kind
of “modes of thinking” images are propagating according to thinkers in Bildwis-
senschaft. What kind of knowledge is acquired from these modes of thinking?
Boehm speaks, for example, about the way in which certain images (for example
models of the world or of heaven) are “heuristic.” In these images knowing and
doing are closely interacting.16
Gustav Frank: I would have preferred that the project went on to describe what the new
sort of knowledge might be. That’s what I’m so keen on hearing from Bildwis-
senschaft. I’ve been waiting for it for decades now! Keith, you say it’s metaphori-
cal. Okay, it’s metaphorical, but exactly what kind of metaphor is it?
Inge Hinterwaldner: If we agree that images communicate in specific ways and have
their own logic of functioning, isn’t it obvious that they provide their own paths
of knowledge production? If you ask scientists who deal with enormous amounts
of collected or generated data, they all say visualization is indispensable. Nobody
looks at lists with billions of numbers, because you can hardly get any evidence
out of them. It seems to be comparably difficult to gain knowledge when con-
fronted with the empirical phenomena under study: we need to do “paperwork”
and to transform rats into inscriptions, as Bruno Latour puts it.17 If we think of
15. Georges Didi-Huberman recently under- die Tradition der Naturgeschichte (Berlin: Wagen-
scored this aspect—the interest in the question bach, 2005); Bredekamp, Galilei der Künstler:
of the “constitutive role [of images] in the produc- Der Mond, die Sonne, die Hand (Berlin: Akade-
tion of knowledge”—as being characteristic mie, 2007); Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider,
of the work of a whole generation of German and Vera Dünkel, eds., Das Technische Bild:
scholars, notably including Bredekamp and Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissen-
Boehm. Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the schaftlicher Bilder (Berlin: Akademie, 2008).
World on One’s Back? (Madrid: Museo Nacio- 16. Boehm, “Iconic Knowledge: The Image
nal de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010), 132; see also as Model,” unpublished MS, ca. 2008. Boehm
Boehm, “Zwischen Auge und Hand: Bilder als remarks that in disciplines like art history,
Instrumente der Erkenntnis,” in Mit dem Augen concepts such as “visual thought” and the older
denken: Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in parler peinture aren’t questioned, that concepts
Wissenschaften und virtuellen Welten, edited by with images can always “come to the rescue.”
Bettina Heinz and Jörg Huber (Zurich: Voldermeer, He continues: “to really understand this dis-
2001), 43–53; Bredekamp, Antikensehnsucht und cursivity of the pictoral and thus to explain it or
Maschinenglauben die Geschichte der Kunstkam- make it known through scientific means is one
mer und der Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte, 3rd ed. of the biggest challenges before us” (3–4).
(Berlin: Wagenbach, 2007); Bredekamp, Darwins 17. Latour, “Visualization and Cognition:
Korallen: Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and
flight simulators that show the pilots-in-training completely synthetical sensu-

ous worlds, it would be fatal if they were not able to gain a kind of practical
knowledge in these settings. However, if your phrase “new sort of knowledge” is
pointing to an alternative epistemology, then it’s not surprising that we are just
at the beginning.
María Lumbreras Corujo: Boehm uses the word Sinn instead of Bedeutung, for example
in the title of his recent book Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen.18
Gustav Frank: I worry about this also, because it means both “meaning” and “sense”:
“how images create meaning,” and “how images create sense.” The two words
have very different philosophical uses.
María Lumbreras Corujo: Yes, it’s not Bedeutung, which would be the usual word for
“meaning”—so the title is not Wie Bilder Bedeutung erzeugen. If you think of
Sinn as “sense,” it better conveys the idea of the phenomenological encounter.
It seems to me that Sinn contributes to empathizing the way in which pictures
relate to their viewers and produce something new—what they “add” in a spe-
cific bildlich way, as Boehm would have it.
This makes me think about the passage from “Indeterminacy” you quoted,
Jim, and the fact that Boehm is invested with what counts as the particularities of
images, their Eigenschaften.19 By talking about “oscillation,” “opacity,” or “inde-
terminacy,” he wants to address the special quality that make images images
and not something else. “Logic” also serves that purpose. In a different text,
he defines it as “the consistent production of meaning [Sinn] through genuinely
pictorial means.”20 Now, the question for me would not only be why Boehm’s
main concern is the production of “meaning,” but also what does he understand
by “genuinely pictorial means”? Of course, both questions are related because his
alternative to semiotics is linked to his engagement with the ontology of images.
But where does the Bildlichkeit of Bilder lie for him? I tend to think—and this
is something that Keith mentions in his article21—that, in the end, he somehow
identifies it with the formal aspects of the picture. Forms, colors, materiality:
they are the conditions of possibility for any Sinn to arise.22
Whitney Davis: I’d like to go back to Keith’s introduction of Goodman into the discus-
sion. Here is a conjecture about Boehm’s ontology: wouldn’t it be possible to
say Boehm has constructed an account which, in Goodman’s terms, would be a
dense deictics? The different could be that Boehm is interested in the possibility
Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past 21. “[Boehm’s] intransigent assertion of
and Presence 6 (1986): 1–40. the autonomy of the visual is accompanied
18. Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. by a radical perceptual formalism that tends
19. Boehm, “Unbestimmtheit: Zur Logik des to eschew considerations of content.” Moxey,
Bildes,” in Bild und Einbildungskraft (Munich: “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of
Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 243–53. Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2008): 137.
20. “Unter Logik verstehen wir: die konsis- 22. He writes, for instance, “Auch Bilder
tente Erzeugung von Sinn aus genuin bildneri- präsentieren ausschließlich Vorderseiten. Wie
schen Mitteln.” Boehm, “Jenseits der Sprache? immer sie aussehen mögen, wir blicken auf
Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder,” in Maar and Farben und Formen, die uns zeigen, die etwas
Burda, Iconic Turn, 28. bedeuten.” Boehm, “Unbestimmtheit,” 252.
of maximally dense and replete deictics, while Goodman is interested in articu-

lated extensions of natural language.
James Elkins: Possibly, except for the different status accorded to semiotics itself. In the
2008 event, What Is an Image?, this topic came up, with Gottfried Boehm and
Tom Mitchell at the table. Boehm is, of course, committed to an ontology, and
Tom is committed to not being committed to an ontology. But Whitney, a simi-
lar thought occurred to me, and I asked Tom if Goodman might not function in
some cases as an ontological ground for his sense of images, because Goodman
appears in his writing in places where something crucial about images needs to
be succinctly conjured. Needless to say, he rejected that notion. Boehm’s rejec-
tion was just as sure and quick, but it was a rejection of the epistemology of
semiotics, not its ontology.23 The problem, in both cases, would be how to put
the analogy to semiotics in such a way that it could appear potentially meaning-
ful or useful.
Lisa Cartwright: I wonder how Boehm would place his work in the context of gesture
studies, because there has been a lot of work on that subject, from Birdwhistell’s
Kinesics and Context (1970) and Adam Kendon’s classic work to that of art histo-
rian Moshe Barash and the visual studies scholar Esther Gabara.
Gustav Frank: I don’t think he places himself in that context at all. That is the difference
between his work and our project here: we would like to find connections, but
that isn’t what he does.
Lisa Cartwright: And what tradition of phenomenology is he coming out of? Because
gesture studies draw on a strong tradition of phenomenology.
Gustav Frank: Just Merleau-Ponty; nothing significant after him.
James Elkins: Did you notice the moment in the letters in which Tom Mitchell notes
how Gottfried says he worked alone in developing his theories? For Tom, that
relative isolation was an issue. The project of looking for links, just to see how
they might connect theories, is differently valued in the two traditions we are
considering. Lisa, in our group, I think you’re the best example of someone for
whom communities of scholars have precedence over some other considerations;
Gottfried would in some respects be quite different.
23. James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What Press, 2011). Boehm’s answer was not included
Is an Image?, Stone Art Theory Institutes 2 in the transcript, but Tom’s response is recorded
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University in Section 4 of the Seminars.
7. A G E N E R A L T H E O R Y O F V I S UA L C U LT U R E
This seminar was led by Whitney Davis; he assigned portions of his book A General
Theory of Visual Culture.1 That book proposes a highly conceptualized, abstract
account of the ways a study of the visual can be distinguished from, and related to,
a study of visuality. Implicitly, the book proposes a deep criticism of visual studies.
Davis says that in visual studies, “visuality is simply a cultural interpretation of what
is seen,” and scholars fail to consider “relevant . . . analogies” to the practices they
study; in addition, visual studies assumes “a cultural succession has a social matrix,”
that visuality can be “simply a sociology of culture that happens to be visible,” and
that viewers are “cultural servomechanisms” who “automatically adjust visually to
visible worlds.”2 The book is principally aimed at disciplinary art history, but in
the extracts transcribed here, Davis fields some questions on his project in relation to
visual studies.
Whitney Davis: Rather than rehearse the substantive claims of the readings I’ve assigned,
I would like to say something about the parameters that surround those read-
ings, from an autobiographical point of view, but also in terms of some of the
disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and professional and cultural-political things we
have been discussing in the seminar up to this point.
So, as a reminder: the main claim of the final chapter, which the book leads
up to, is encapsulated in a slogan that the entire book tries to warrant: ontol-
ogy recapitulates analogy. The echo here is Haeckel’s biogenetic law, ontology
recapitulates phylogeny, and that is partly intended, and so my motto is in some
sense an implicit critique of the biogenetic law. But aside from that, my claim
is that the ontology of pictures recapitulates their analogies, and another way to
claim that would be that visuality emerges in a network of likenesses (analogies),
which are consolidated in a historical form of life, or forms of likeness. The echo
of Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of life” is also intended, and my expression
“forms of likeness” is also intended as an elaboration and critique of the Witt-
gensteinian expression.
The argument has some peculiar or counterintuitive results from the point
of view of visual culture studies. For example, one of my strongest claims comes
down to the notion that what is most important about a visuality is invisible,
1. Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture Kunstgeschichte,” in Metzler Lexikon Kunst-
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), wissenschaft, 2nd ed., edited by Ulrich Pfisterer
chaps. 1, 2, and 9. Davis also assigned an (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2011), 500–504.
essay, “The Archaeology of Radical Pictoriality,” 2. Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture,
in Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science, 280, 316, 337, 8, 339. These passages are
and the Arts, edited by Richard Heinrich, Elisa- extracted from my review of the book, on the
beth Nemeth, Wolfram Pichler, and David Wag- College Art Association book reviews website
ner, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Heusenstamm: Ontos, 2011), (password protected), June 2011. [—J.E.]
191–218. See also Whitney Davis, “Zukunft der
and does not concern visible phenomena. You will have seen my consistent effort
to displace questions of visuality and visual culture from questions of the look of
visible things, to invisible likenesses they might have. Because they are invisible
doesn’t mean they aren’t pertinent: they are pertinent precisely in virtue of being
para-visible.
The basic theme of this project, as with everything else I have written in
the area of art history and visual studies, is the radical openness of vision to
the closures—the conditions, constraints, and correlations—that must be intro-
duced in order for us to recognize any world, and anything in it. I believe this
theme has a rather distinctive politics, and I will come back to that at the very
end, because sometimes people have difficulty making a connection between
abstract analytical argumentation about seeing and a moral or political perspec-
tive that might be entailed or presumed.
The art-historical genealogy that begins this project is quoted at the begin-
ning: it is Wölfflin’s phrase “Das Sehen an sich hat seine Geschichte.” It is trans-
lated in different ways, depending on what edition you consult, but the transla-
tion is usually something like “vision itself has a history,” “vision has its own
history,” or “vision has a history of its own.” This claims warrants a great deal of
art-historical research, and I think it stands behind a great deal of visual culture
research in the later part of the twentieth century. But I want to quote the sec-
ond part of Wölfflin’s famous sentence, because it is what motivated my work:
he continues, in one of the early English translations: “and the exposure of these
‘optical strata’ [optische Schichten] must be the elementary activity of art history
[Kunstgeschichte].”
The basic claim here is a fascinating one, and you can take many differ-
ent species of art history and see how they deploy, map, or track it. For me,
it had immense impact. I had come into art history with an archaeological back-
ground, and a term like “stratum” immediately resonated, both methodologi-
cally and substantively: it is something that is materially laid down over a previ-
ously existing sediment, and this happens in a forward-looking direction. It is
also the object of a retrospective uncovering or exposing. So the possibility that
there is a literal archaeology of perception that can be worked out struck me as
immensely interesting.
I had another predisciplinary reason to be attracted to Wölfflin’s metaphor.
In college I was deeply attracted to psychoanalysis—I won’t go into all the
reasons—and its procedures, protocols, methods, and traditions. There, too, the
metaphor of strata that have been laid down in some kind of historical sequence,
and that involve retrodictively, or in reverse order, a historical analysis and recon-
struction, is at the heart of psychoanalytic procedure, although it is important to
remember that Freud thought of his psychodynamic archaeology as something
literary archaeology couldn’t do.
Now that I have finished this work, I can see that some of these interests
have carried through, and are still present for me.
111 A General Theory of Visual Culture
James Elkins: Since you are offering an autobiographical and disciplinary framework,
I wonder about the persistence of psychoanalysis beyond your first book, Rep-
lications: Art History, Archaeology, Psychoanalysis, and outside of specifically psy-
choanalytic studies such as the one on Freud’s wolf man.3 I am assuming there
would be a use value other than a psychobiographical one for bringing your
interest in psychoanalysis into this discussion, and it occurs to me that virtu-
ally every temporally inflected point of analysis in the General Theory of Visual
Culture could be read in psychoanalytic terms. So I wonder if the General Theory
could be read as a critique of psychoanalysis, because everything that would be
inaccessible, temporarily or permanently, is rendered analytically accessible.
Whitney Davis: That is a very helpful remark; I am not sure if I can respond in any
complete way. It is certainly the case that psychoanalysis’s metapsychological
notions—of the thermodynamics of nervous energy, and the role of the contact
barrier in processing proprioception into images and recognitions—that meta-
psychology continues to be so second nature to my thinking that it continues to
be impossible for me to articulate anything that makes anthropological, socio-
logical, or archaeological claims of any sort without having that resonate for me.
So I am quite sure that you could read A General Theory of Visual Culture as a
transcription of some psychological theories into this domain.
James Elkins: I think you could read the General Theory as a freestanding allegorical or
abstract critique of psychoanalysis.
Lisa Cartwright: If you’re interested in providing a model of visuality that could get
past the difference problem, then the empirical psychoanalytic work on children
done during the first year could provide interesting information.4 But it’s not
taken up in contemporary scholarship.
Whitney Davis: I agree a hundred percent in the relevance of that in the second half
of the twentieth century. Major figures for me, in thinking through my own
relation to psychoanalysis and the possibility that it might be reused in terms of
a biocultural account of the ontogenetic emergence of culture in the subject at
the level of sensuous knowing, are Melanie Klein and, more recently, the group
that crystallized around Nelson Goodman at Project Zero at Harvard, such as
Ellen Winner.
Gustav Frank: Over lunch, I had a disagreement with Tom Mitchell over his non-
methodology, his anarchical approach, as he says. I suggested anarchy could be
reconstructed as a method, which he didn’t like. I wonder if what you are doing
could be reconstructed as a method. At one point you mentioned “counterintu-
itivity,” and I wonder if that could be a robust method of image critique. Also,
3. Davis, Replications: Art History, Archaeol- 4. René Spitz, The First Year of Life: A Psycho-
ogy, Psychoanalysis (University Park: Pennsylva- analytic Study of Normal and Deviant Develop-
nia State University Press, 1996); Davis, Drawing ment of Object Relations (New York: Interna-
The Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, tional Universities Press, 1965).
Interpretation, and Freud’s “Wolf Man” (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
I wonder if that could bear on what we have been calling the presentism in visual
culture. Could our dislikes about presentism be due to our skepticism about the
intuitive moments in it—what you have described as visual studies’ quick and
close reaction to current affairs, visual studies’ interest in photography, film, and
the Internet, presumably because they are so close?
Whitney Davis: We belong to the aspective horizons of those visualities, because other-
wise they would not even be recognizable to us in their pictorial functions.
Gustav Frank: That might be close to my problems with Klaus Sachs-Hombach’s work
on objects close to our perceptions; he takes intuition as a leading principle.
So could counterintuitivity be among the robust methods of your approach?
May I give an example? Although we have not taken photography as a topic
of our seminars this week, we have had photographs on the table from the begin-
ning. Here is one of Kittler’s arguments about photography. He says: I would be
less interested in the year 1839; I would be more interested in the year 1836. Why?
Because in that year the brothers Weber developed an algorithm about human
movement. They figured out how to extract paradigms from movement, and
that work had more impact on society and the future and current affairs than
the invention of photography.5 I think that argument is also counterintuitive,
because algorithms are counterintuitive.
In another piece I’ve written recently, I make the claim that one of art his-
tory’s and visual culture studies’ robust methods should be the counterfactual,
and maybe that’s a related way of saying the same thing. Situations of perceptible
life experience that are so distant from our own as to be unimaginable are the
most important to take on board if the purpose is to frame a critique of those
that are imaged or imaginable for us. If we didn’t have that relation, we couldn’t
have the condition of critique in the first place.
It’s not that the counterfactual needs to be impossibly distant from us in
time and space—as in the usual interest, in visual culture studies and art his-
tory, in taking on cultural and historical distance. That is trivially true, but it is
analytically true that the distance registered by the counterintuitivity of percep-
tual imaging is on no way dependent on a temporal or spatial distance between
our own life and the one we study. But how this is actualized as a method is a
tricky and interesting question. I am not sure about the counterintuitive, but
the counterfactual is one of the most robust and productive methods in ana-
lytic philosophy. So the method of counterintuitivity has something to do with
my wish to bring in artifacts that are maximally divorced from the sensuous
manifold that we inhabit, from which their so-called presence to us could be the
object of recognition and critique. I want to be able to escape that presentism,
as I would use that term, denoting the presence to intuition of the perceptual
5. Weber and Weber, Die Mechanik der 1992); Kittler, “Schrift und Zahl: Die Geschichte
menschlichen Gehwerkzeuge: Eine anatomisch- des errechneten Bildes,” in Iconic Turn: Die neue
physiologische Untersuchung (Göttingen: Macht der Bilder, edited by Christa Maar
Dieterich, 1836), translated as Mechanics of and Hubert Burda (Cologne: DuMont, 2004),
the Human Walking Apparatus, translated by 186–203.
P. Maquet and R. Furlong (Berlin: Springer,
manifold delivering the object, before any possible further analysis. I find that
implausible, for Kantian reasons.
James Elkins: I don’t want to lose sight of the potential pertinence of this to readers
of the book we’ll be producing. Your book General Theory of Visual Culture has
several passages that contain trenchant critiques of visual studies, but they are
set as asides in an argument that might seem, to visual studies scholars, largely
abstract. The radical openness of the visual, and the crucial importance, for you,
of nonvisual elements in the visual, are conceptualizations that are strongly at
odds with business as usual in visual studies: but the challenge, in our context,
would be to flesh out those implications for existing modes of visual studies.
I wonder if the force of your critique might partly be brought out in context of
this discussion about counterintuitivity.
Whitney Davis: I agree that the what you’re calling the “force of my critique”—for
example, my stress on the radical openness of vision—might not be taken up
immediately and readily in visual-cultural studies, as it’s often practiced as what
I call a “sociology of culture that happens to be visible.” And I’m well aware
that the “politics” of my theoretical model—a model that puts certain basic
operations of vision, visibility, and visuality into fundamental opposition to the
historical and essentially political process of the totalization of vision as “visual
culture”—is developed in a very different register than the politics (especially
the “party politics”) of a visual-cultural studies that proceeds as overt critique of
culture that happens to be visible, and with which the writer (the analyst of the
visual representations and practices in question) disagrees politically and wants
socially to resist by rendering their social determinations maximally transparent
to analysis. My point is simply that that analysis seems to require a conceptual-
ization of vision as “radically open”—for example in virtue of “radical pictorial-
ity”—that requires theorization. I conceptualize “succession,” “recursion,” and
“resistance” as historical processes inherent in natural vision in the social world,
that is, as intrinsically “political.” But I do not trace (because I cannot empiri-
cally find) a ready path from this constitutive fact to the contingent facts of
particular visual cultures that have been totalized in history, and for which a par-
ticularized political sociology—such as a “social history of art”—must be devel-
oped. In turn this makes me somewhat skeptical of the form of critique of visual
culture that visual-cultural studies sometimes takes—skeptical of its depth and
bite. I’m hoping to take up these matters more explicitly—and with fuller atten-
tion to the procedures of existing visual-cultural studies in the context of inter-
disciplinary visual studies from vision science to digital art-making—in future
writing. In fact, Sunil and I have a plan to organize an exchange between us that
might get at some of them from his and my own different—but I don’t think
ultimately opposed—points of view.
Inge Hinterwaldner: I wonder if you find any use for what Gottfried Boehm calls
schema or medium.6
Whitney Davis: One of the claims of neuroaesthetics that we’ve all been taught to love
to hate, or hate to love, is that the brain through which the world becomes
visible to us as a world of recognizable forms and processes has its own intrinsic
rules and programs. In Gombrich-land, those are the schemas, or in other texts,
the scripts or frames or protocols. Usually such concepts are bolted to an ethol-
ogy coming from Lorenz, Tinbergen, and others, of wired-in templates through
which the world becomes schematically available. What interests me is that if
there are rules and programs for artifacts, they could have a partly disjunct rela-
tionship to the rules and programs of the schemata. Gombrich himself would
have to admit that, because he admits some images—pictures—escape recogni-
tion, precisely because of their resemblance to the world, as in trompe l’oeil.
I think Gombrich is quite mistaken, but about the ways schemata are imprinted,
and about which images have greater or less schematicity, but he is on the track
to the right problem when he inquires into the nature of schemata that are gen-
erated randomly or accidentally, and when he asks what elements are wired in.
I don’t know enough about Gottfried Boehm’s use of the term “schema,”
so I am responding indirectly. Gombrich’s teacher Emanuel Löwy introduced
the term to the historical tradition by way of Ernst Brücke’s psychophysiology
and the attempt, in that period, to calibrate intuition with concept, to hold on
to the Neo-Kantian program that intuition, or the presence of the immediately
visible, is one stem of the two stems of the mind—the other bring transcenden-
tal aesthetic. Without both together, you’d be talking about animal perception,
and not human perception.
Inge Hinterwaldner: Boehm’s notion of schema is built upon the Kantian concept.
However, he adapts it to image-related rules. These rules underlie the artifacts
without determining them fully. They are fleshed out with whatever the image
producer wanted to show. In my opinion, one of Boehm’s main concerns is to
trace these organizing principles in a procedure that we could call a kind of
reverse engineering. The paradigmatic and most prominent example of such a
set of rules is linear perspective. In analogy to linear perspective, which organizes
space, I tried to show that the most general formative level of computer simula-
tions can be described by a systems perspective that organizes time.7 But there
are lots of other schemata.
Keith Moxey: Whitney, I am worried about the generality of your theory, in the sense
that it seems to be distant from the disciplines it means to address, art history
and visual studies. The parts that intrigue me, and seem to have real promise for
6. Boehm, “Iconic Knowledge: The Image as Medium zum Bild,” in Bild—Medium—Kunst,

a Model,” unpublished MS, ca. 2008. German edited by Yvonne Spielmann and Gundolf Winter
original: Boehm, “Ikonisches Wissen: Das Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999), 165–78.
als Modell,” in Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: 7. Hinterwaldner, Das systemische Bild: Iko-
Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin Univer- nizität im Rahmen computerbasierter Echtzeitsi-
sity Press, 2007), 114–40. Also Boehm, “Vom mulationen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010).
both disciplines, are the passages on visuality and pictoriality, namely the ways in
which visuality changes through time—its historicization—and the lack of cor-
respondence between what can be visualized and what is visible. But I continue
to worry about the level of abstraction, and whether it can intersect with art
history, which is interested in cultural and national differences, and with visual
studies, which is concerned with differences of other kinds, such as gender and
class. I think that the strength of the view from outside may itself work against
your project’s use for the very disciplines you have in mind. Your dislike of
presentism is also a potential problem, because it is so central to visual studies.
Whitney Davis: Okay. When you speak about applicability, you mean the General
Theory should be applicable to—
Keith Moxey: The way in which we think about visual studies or the history of art.
Whitney Davis: Who is the “we” there?
Keith Moxey: Practicing visual studies scholars, practicing art historians.
Whitney Davis: Well, lots of practicing scholars are interested in the longue durée,
because they are professionally responsible for artifacts that are from remote
historical horizons, or cultures that are remote from our present—even though
the objects may be contemporary with us, their present is different. Such objects
might be sitting right here: after all, how many presents are we in? We have
different perceptual horizons in this present environment. I would take it to be
helpful to have a vocabulary in which that could be conceptually parsed out.
As far as application, if we are talking about an art historian who wants an
interpretation of the metapictorial interreflexive self-reference of this complex
Poussin painting, then I will be pretty agnostic about whether my project speaks
to such an interest. I hope that some of the discussion of pictoriality and visual-
ity, for example, might speak to that. (My example in A General Theory of Visual
Culture is a Dürer engraving.) But I wouldn’t be too disappointed if much of
this way of writing, these concepts, doesn’t pertain to someone working on the
visual, cultural, or iconological horizons of a work of art that is within our pres-
ent. Why? Because if it is within our present then there are lots of other meth-
ods, including pictorial analysis and informed iconology, that can aid those proj-
ects. It would be interesting when the methods of visual culture studies could
deliver a description of something like metapictoriality or cultural difference in
horizons that are otherwise inaccessible through these other methods, whether
they are iconological or visual-cultural. I am not sure how that would pan out,
so I leave the door open to it.
As for abstraction: it’s hard to know. What is abstract for some readers will
be doggedly descriptive to other readers. Some of my peers in philosophical
aesthetics may think this book is not abstract enough: it is too involved with
particular sociological, anthropological, critical issues, and they press on the
argument, preventing it from achieving the conceptual clarity and generality

they value. Some of the writing in the game-theoretical community is, to me,
extremely abstract. It’s like going through a college course in mathematics all
over again to go through some of the very sophisticated writing that is done on
questions of algorithms and code. So there is an entire community of readers for
whom this book will seem like the work of a plodding art historian, who doesn’t
achieve even the beginnings of genuine abstraction. Too abstract or not enough?
James Elkins: I am interested in how the book brackets art. As one of the relatively
few people who has tried to write a book on images by bracketing out art—
The Domain of Images—I am aware of the problems of trying to keep art to one
side of the argument. The gesture can have unintended consequences. I’d be
interested in strategies you use to bracket out art. The most obvious strategy
would be to exclude consideration of aesthetics; if you do that, you omit the
nonconceptual, and so forth. But as soon as that is done, you also exclude ele-
ments of historical understanding, structures of historiography, and so forth.
My book ended up excising much of history in the name, I thought, of simply
not paying attention, for a while, to the category of art. If you look at certain
artworks as exemplars en route to other sorts of claims, the aesthetic starts leak-
ing back in.
Whitney Davis: It is possible to bracket objects considered in the histories of European
aesthetics as artworks. The bracketing, downplaying, or deprivileging of those
objects is not impossible; and it then becomes possible to consider images like
the ones that interest me—Egyptian images, or prehistoric images. Then it may
turn out that enables the identification of other visualities, which have equal
claim to be considered as valid and interesting objects vis-à-vis objects nomi-
nated as art in the visual cultures of the West. This is something that interests
a lot of people in global art studies, as you know. There are definitely images in
other cultures, made under other visualities, that have been somewhat invisible
to us because our sense of art is not just a visuality of art tout court, but of our
art. So the bracketing of art is to me a bracketing of an art.
James Elkins: Well, for what it’s worth, I am not sure it is possible to keep those levees
from leaking: at least for me, admitting the odd art example also admits aes-
thetic viruses, which can work in ways we can hardly detect. The generality that
a project like my own book hoped for is tarnished by pervasive aesthetics that I
wasn’t aware of at the time, for example an interest in formalisms that I now rec-
ognize comes from late modernism, or even more specifically from some 1980s
academic discourse.
Joana Cunha Leal: I think you have a very clear definition of your understanding of art
history. It presents art history as “historical investigation of the interrelations of
configuration, style, and depiction in artifacts, regardless of their origin or status
as art in the modern Western sense.”8 For me this is a very important definition,
because a huge part of art history recognizes itself in this definition.
But I wonder about the status of the image in your project; I find it inter-
esting but problematic. I imagine your project as expanding the Wölfflinian
undertaking of an art history without names, but I also see you as developing an
art history without objects.
Whitney Davis: When I started graduate school in the mid-1980s, the “new art history”
that we have discussed was prominent. The big subject, as far as art historians
were concerned, was the status of the object. The worry was that the new art
history was letting go of the art object, and also of the object as a physical thing
in our grasp. Somehow the new art history, with its interest in social relations,
meant that objects were constructed through cultural differences, and those
problematics would occupy more and more of historians’ attention relative to
the attention they used to pay to objects. That was a big discussion, and still is—
James Elkins: It was one of the common claims made against visual studies in the 1990s
and 2000s9—
Whitney Davis: These kinds of interests, mine and others’, would lead to an art his-
tory without the object, that is, the object accessible through looking, through
formalist attention to its visual appearance. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other
ways in which objects, in the plural, are discussed. There are ecologies and pop-
ulations of images—those are ideas Sunil and Tom Mitchell have developed.
In my case, art history without names, and where the object is in communi-
cation with other, nonvisible objects, including things that might not ever be
visible and that cannot be viewed, appears as a good position.
8. Davis, General Theory of Visual Culture, 6. “myths” 3, 5, and especially 8: “Visual culture is
9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Cri- fundamentally about the social construction of
tique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture the visual field.”
1, no. 2 (2002): 165–81, especially 169–70,
8. T H E P O L I T I C A L
This section of the transcript condenses several conversations over the week-long event.
Some of what follows took place in a seminar led by Keith Moxey, for which the
participants read two essays on the subject of the politics of apparently unpolitical
scholarship.1 In particular, an essay by Alexander Nemerov on Auden and Bruegel’s
Fall of Icarus is presupposed in what follows.2 The participants also drew on several
readings with political agendas, such as Mieke Bal’s essays from the 2000s and Nicho-
las Mirzoeff’s essay “The Right to Look,” which preceded the book of that name.3
James Elkins: I’d like to keep our conversations on this subject open, not only to articu-
lable positions in relation to politics, but also, even more broadly, between (1) the
position that politics is front and center in visual studies, woven into it from the
beginning, explicitly present as a possible purpose, and (2) the implicit position
that politics might be bracketed in certain circumstances, and for certain pur-
poses. Whitney, if I can take your seminar as an example, without proposing to
generalize it: you said at the beginning that you’d prefer to start by bracketing
politics. That very gesture would be considered inadvisable or unworkable from
the point of view of visual studies texts that are committed differently to politics.
On the other hand, much of that literature is inexplicit about its politics: it is
taken for granted that politics inheres in every critical gesture, so that political
positions might themselves be suspect.
This issue is on my list of visual studies’ lacunae.4 There is an untheorized
contrast between the historical implication of visual studies in politics—its ori-
gin in Marxist cultural studies, for example—and the more or less complete
absence of explicit or articulated political positions in other writing. That is a
gap that conceptually precedes any difficulties we might have in deciding visual
studies’ optimal positions in relation to existing political discourses.
Keith Moxey: I hope that one of our ways into the issue of politics is through the
assigned readings. Let me begin with some questions. Where does the politics
of cultural analysis lie? Does it lie in ideological criticism, and the exposure of
political, racist, classist, and other agendas? In part, yes; but we can then ask
what is the value of such criticism. One answer might be Tolstoy’s—that no
matter how eloquent, committed, and forceful cultural political writing is, the
1. Readings included Lorraine Daston and 3. Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object
Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Repre- of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2,
sentations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128. no. 1 (2003): 5–32; Bal, “The Commitment to
2. Nemerov, “The Flight of Form: Auden, Look,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005):
Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 145–62; Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical
1940s,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 473–96.
780–810. 4. See Section 4 of the Seminars, and the
First Introduction.
engines of war roll on, and roll over such writing. This is a sweeping generaliza-
tion, and we can take issue with it, but it questions the hope that some forms of
visual studies might have that in pointing out the injustice of a system of values,
generations of students might be made aware of the shortcomings of the politi-
cal circumstances they inhabit.
Must the work of cultural criticism always be explicitly directed at the sub-
ject matter, the themes, of the work in question? Is the work of the cultural
critic always confined to representation? Isn’t the identity of the artist or author
implicitly legible in the writing itself? The moment in which it seemed to be nec-
essary for authors to articulate their identities is perhaps over. Might the writer’s
identity and position not be implicit in the writing?
This possibility coincides with an important Marxist alternative to ideology
critique. Theodor Adorno argued that the very creation of the work of art in a
capitalist society can escape or counter the values of the culture in which it is
located. It may not directly address the issues of the day, but the work of the
artist might in itself be a way of responding to the social situation in which the
work is made. Walter Benjamin’s “Author as Producer” is a model here, with
its argument that the author’s commitment affects the form of the argument,
as well as its content.5
Here are two different views of the political position and purpose of the
artist, author, or scholar. It is in the second, that in which the author’s politics
remain implicit rather than explicit, that I would locate the interest of the piece
by Alexander Nemerov that you read.6 The essay asks, on the first page, “What
do artists and poets and critics do in the face of catastrophe? How do they regis-
ter it in their work, or should they even try to do so?” Nemerov points out that
even if Auden refused to infuse his poetry with the leftist politics he subscribed
to in the years leading up to the Second World War, his poem “Musée des Beaux
Arts” offers us what might be described as an apolitical political position. Writing
about Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting “The Fall of Icarus” in the Brussels
museum, Auden exploits the “dissonance” in the work’s facture, the occlusion of
its narrative subject, so as to make the poem a political allegory. Just as Icarus’s
fall goes unnoticed by the other figures in the picture, so the injustices of war,
man’s inhumanity to man (which Auden had experienced at first-hand during
the Japanese invasion of China), go unpunished. A parallel to such a reading of
Auden’s poem is offered by Mieke Bal’s essay on Doris Salcedo. Here furniture—
wooden objects—rather than explicit references to torture plays a decisive role.
Like Walid Ra’ad’s work on the civil war in Lebanon, which depends on the
creation of a fictive urban landscape in which imagined bombings are claimed
to have taken place, Bal’s argument insists Salcedo’s works, which refer obliquely
to the violence of the civil strife in Colombia, are effective political art because
they make their statements by indirection.7 This formal dissonance, this political
5. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA:
Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Harvard University Press), 768–82.
Paris, April 27, 1934,” in Selected Writings, 6. Nemerov, “Flight of Form.”
vol. 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, 7. Bal, “Commitment to Look.”
121 The Political
obliqueness, constitutes a political statement that differs radically from straight-

forward ideology critique.
James Elkins: Just a note about Bal’s positions, since Keith mentioned them, and then
we can get back to Nemerov and the problematic of indirect political content.
I read her use of Salcedo differently, but I think her position is compli-
cated, and ambiguous, enough so that’s easily done. For me, her two essays
“Visual Essentialism” and “Commitment to Look” propose different positions.
The earlier one, “Visual Essentialism” (2003), has some direct statements regard-
ing political action, such as “visual culture studies must critically analyze the
junctures and articulations of visual culture and undermine their naturalized
persistence.”8 The later essay, published in 2005, which mentions Salcedo, is a
meditation on Adorno’s argument about poetry after the Holocaust. Bal says
visual studies “too often pays lip-service to politics,” and she ponders what kind
of relation to politics is optimal. She writes: “To summarize my view of the
place of politics in visual studies succinctly: art as ‘scream,’ as expression, is both
legitimate and, as Adorno says, necessary. This expressionist aesthetic serves a
political purpose . . . but not by definition an artistic one.” Her example is Doris
Salcedo, but I think she means that such work might need to serve political, not
necessarily artistic, ends. On the other hand, the study of such artistic practices
has an unclear status, aside from its “commitment to theory.”9
Keith Moxey: I don’t think Bal wants to draw a distinction between art and the political,
for in her opinion Salcedo’s work succeeds as both.
Michael Holly: It’s not for nothing that Alexander Nemerov is the son of the poet
Howard Nemerov. The writing here is so luxurious, so—in an old-fashioned
way—aesthetically pleasing, so graceful, so resonant, that it raises other observa-
tions, such as how writing about some visual matters solicits a certain poetry not
available to others.
Keith Moxey: I think that is quite clearly something he cares about. He is Auden, in a
way: he is obliquely reading the great poet’s work, reminding us that his appar-
ently apolitical writing, a poem on a painting by Bruegel, has its politics.
James Elkins: This is a great opportunity to discuss writing in visual studies, and more
generally in art history and beyond. We have Benjamin’s “Author as Producer”
on the table, and so writing is a pertinent question in relation to politics. But
Michael, I am sorry, I have to disagree. For me there is an enormous difference
between Nemerov’s writing and the Auden he quotes, and it works to his detri-
ment throughout. I would agree with the words you use to describe Nemerov’s
writing, but to me they are all pejorative: it’s continuous, flowing, seductive,
8. Bal, “Visual Essentialism,” 21. However the object. . . . But because seeing is an act of
there are also more ambiguous formulations, interpreting, interpretation can influence ways
such as “In order to make a difference in the of seeing, hence, of imagining possibilities of
world studied, a political tone is less instrumen- change” (20).
tal than analyses that expose politics within 9. Bal, “Commitment to Look,” 146.
belletristic—all the things that someone like Martin Amis, or Nabokov, or even
George Saunders or Lydia Davis or William Vollmann, would run from.
Michael Holly: Alex’s writing is a continuation of the work he is talking about.
James Elkins: Well, the fact that we can see this so differently shows how much visual
studies and art history need to begin talking about writing. I have not spent time
with the Bruegel painting, but for me it is entirely different, even in its imputed
oblique politics, from Nemerov’s prose. Bruegel is awkward, wayward, surpris-
ing, static, and “dissonant.” Nemerov is placid, warm, weakly beautiful, flowing,
never sharp, always mildly hypnotic, unpleasantly tranquil. If authors are pro-
ducers in Benjamin’s sense, and if their writing produces a politics, as Keith is
suggesting, then this is just the kind of escapism that you described as the state
of affairs in the old art history.
Paul Frosh: I’d like to develop Keith’s theme using the notion of an engaged witnessing.
Images can be testimony. Much of photography, for example, is politically and
morally engaged in that way. There are all sorts of problems with this, of course,
modern equivalents of the farmer in Bruegel’s painting. We’ll see images and say,
Isn’t that terrible? and do nothing, or even derive a certain sensuous pleasure
from the scene: these different responses are analyzed variously as “compassion
fatigue,” “the narcotizing dysfunction,” or the “aestheticization of suffering.”10
But the ideal of course is that images, understood as a form of witnessing, will
ultimately promote action.
Bridget Cooks: I am intrigued by the conjunction of violence and aesthetics in Nem-
erov’s essay . . . but I’d like to talk about the shift that happens in the end of the
essay, when he turns to painting in the 1930s and 1940s. I think of Nemerov’s
work as an attempt to bring abstraction and politics together, but I felt that the
end of the paper kind of fell apart. At the end, I felt it was becoming reductive.
There was a fixing of abstraction into narrative that I found reductive.
Keith Moxey: There is something a little facile about reading Motherwell and Pollock
as echoing the formal properties of the Bruegel. That is one of the dangers of
formalism: like is not always like.
Anna Sigrídur Arnar: There is no clear road map in Nemerov’s text like we’ve seen in
some of the other texts we read this week. I share Bridget’s surprise at the shift
at the end of the essay to violence. I asked myself, How did the essay get to that
point? As Michael noted, the essay is beautifully written, and I would add that
one is almost seduced by the writing to follow the author down this subtle and
10. See Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectator- Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death
ship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006); Luc (London: Routledge, 1999). The “narcotizing
Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media dysfunction” is discussed by Paul Lazarsfeld
and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University and Robert Merton in “Mass Communication,
Press, 1991); Arthur Kleinman and Joan Klein- Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action,”
man, “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of in The Process and Effects of Mass Communica-
Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in tion, edited by Wilbur Schramm and Donald F.
Our Times,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23; Roberts, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois
Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Press, 1971), 459–80.
123 The Political
unpredictable path. If the essay were written by Mirzoeff, we would not have
had that element of surprise or seduction. I wonder how Nemerov’s essay would
have worked if it had been poorly written. I very much enjoyed the reading
experience of this essay, but I can’t help but ask how I would use it (if at all)
in teaching.
Michael Holly: Keith, there is also an easeful fall back into iconography and the detect-
ing of hidden clues—that body in the background, for example, which makes it
seem as if the mystery of the painting has been solved. That sleuthing gives the
lie to the force of the essay as a whole.
James Elkins: I wonder if we could also talk about the place of this essay in the present.
It was written by someone roughly speaking in our generation, with a certain
literature in mind, and a certain politics in the background. But he doesn’t talk
about that: he talks about the Northern Renaissance and the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. So there are two questions: What do we want to do with it, perhaps as a
model for an “oblique” political engagement for visual studies? But also: Why
was it written, in the way it was written, excluding what it excludes? It has a very
strong implicit politics, but it declines to mention its plausible adversary.
Keith Moxey: It was written at Yale, one of the main centers for disciplinary art history,
so we might ask about that context.
James Elkins: We could pursue that, but it might take us out of our way.11 I would be
more interested in how this particular oblique politics might appear to younger
scholars of visual studies, who are engaged with de Certeau, Bourriaud, Ran-
cière, and others: I imagine it might appear quite coy and patrician, in relation
to those mainly French authors who might appear just as detached—and pos-
sibly just as pessimistic as Tolstoy about the efficacy of visual studies—but not
at all coy.
Jeanette Roan: Our discussion would be very different if we had read Mirzoeff’s Watch-
ing Babylon and Derrida (as an early version of the schedule has it) rather than
Nemerov.12 Perhaps we could think about how these readings stage a politics of
visual studies?
James Elkins: This may be a moment to read two passages in one of Nick Mirzoeff’s
essays, one Keith and I originally thought to set for this seminar. It is a stark
contrast with what we’ve been considering. This is from the introduction to
the second edition of the Visual Culture Reader: “I continue to think that visual
culture—rather than visual studies . . . is the right phrase,” because culture
reminds us “of the political stakes inherent in what we do. For otherwise it
can, and has, been argued that there is no particular need for visual culture as
11. There are other art historians at Yale 12. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon:
at the moment who have experimented with The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture
“oblique” politics—for example, Chris Woods’s (London: Routledge, 2005); no specific readings
anonymous piece for the Art Bulletin, about the from Derrida were listed.
politics of the discipline.
an academic subfield.” And then from two pages before that: “visual culture is
a tactic for those who do not control the dominant means of visual production
to negotiate the hypervisuality of everyday life in a digitalized, global culture.”13
The Nemerov is the unusual intervention in visual culture. This would be
closer to the normative formulation. In Keith’s opening classification, Mirzoeff’s
activism comes before Tolstoy’s disillusionment, and certainly before Nemerov’s
scholarly practice.
Flora Lysen: Somewhere Mirzoeff says this more explicitly: that he always carries with
him an account of countervisuality.14 His activism, I would say, is his insistence
on the way visuality and countervisuality generate one another. Nemerov’s pol-
itics is indeed less explicit; he says “each transformation—Auden’s, Sargent’s,
and Nash’s—modernized the idea of the winged genius.”15 Nemerov’s ordering
of events becomes the argument, the rhetoric of the text. But I can’t find his
ideology.
Keith Moxey: Nemerov’s essay permits him to be more nuanced. It allows us to think
about the different roles an author might play. Is it to be at the barricades,
or is it to retire from the fray, as it were, and produce something that does not
address the political situation directly? I think there are two models here: Mir-
zoeff thinks there should be direct engagement; Nemerov explores the possibili-
ties that might lie beyond that.
James Elkins: Another way to put that is that the contrast between political activism
and reflection is paralleled by another contrast, between the distinctness of the
positions that Mirzoeff occupies and the indistinctness of the positions Nemerov
implies.
Juliet Bellow: Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s theorization of the parafictional comes to mind
here.16 Parafictional work, as she defines it, mediates between imagination and
reality, art and activism, gaining strength from its simultaneous occupation of
both spheres. This could potentially constitute a productive model for visual
culture’s relationship to disciplinary boundaries.
Sunil Manghani: I quite like Mirzoeff on the subject of digital culture, by the way:
I just can’t understand why he keeps bringing back visuality, which hasn’t been
well defined, and does a lot of work in his writing, especially in “The Right to
Look.” And I’m not sure if that’s what he is really writing about.
James Elkins: I don’t understand: given that visuality is so often an undefined term, how
does it stand in the way of Mirzoeff’s account more than some other account?
13. Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture,” on, there’s nothing to see here. . . . It is the
in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., edited by performative claim of a right to look where none
Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 6, technically exists that puts a countervisuality
4 respectively. into play.” Mirzoeff, “Right to Look,” 477–78.
14. The title concept of Mirzoeff’s “Right to 15. Nemerov, “Flight of Form,” 792.
Look” is defined as “the claim to a subjectivity 16. Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafic-
that has the autonomy to arrange the relations tion and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer
of the visible and the sayable. The right to 2009): 51–84.
look confronts the police who say to us, ‘move
125 The Political
Sunil Manghani: Just because he pitches everything around visual culture, and so it’s
very clear that is what his writing is meant to be about. But when you get into
the details, it seems that some of the really interesting things aren’t about the
visual.
James Elkins: What, for example?
Sunil Manghani: For instance, his observations about the flow of information, and
how the military deals with the flow of computerized information.
James Elkins: For me, the most interesting moments in Nick Mirzoeff’s texts are the
ones where the text’s political purpose comes up against what I think of as an
aesthetics of complexity: he’s drawn to the most intricate, imbricated moments
of self-reference and self-referentiality in surveillance, for example, and I think
of those as a formal or aesthetic interest.17
Keith Moxey: I think the readings do dramatize the question of whether visual studies
has to have a politics, and that raises the question of the role of theory. So we
deconstruct ideologies—of gender, of class, of militarism. Bal, on the other
hand, seems to be fed up with ideology critique, and she intends to propose
something else. But what? There is a politics of theorization, and the notion
that theory itself is a sort of politics. Can theoretical innovation then replace
ideological criticism as the fuel on which visual studies runs? The introduction
of Bildwissenschaft into these discussions suggests that there are many more ways
to conceive the study of the visual than merely politics.
Sunil Manghani: One example of that might be the ways Mirzoeff and Rogoff write:
they enjoy working with theories, structures of meaning, and so forth. One
problem with moving away from ideology critique is that you end up with writ-
ing like that. I think Bal tries to define a “method” in this kind of writing when
she suggests “objects are active participants in the performance of analysis.”18 The
idea here is that the collision of objects and writing enables reflection and specu-
lation, apparently leading to “a theoretical object with philosophical relevance.”
In the later article we read, she appears to peg this idea to a “commitment to
look”—which would seem to be even more vague.19
Gustav Frank: I am worried about this whole discussion because it is channeled at once
into the traditional patterns of arguments in aesthetics and, as Bal’s ambiguity
shows, easily trapped in these patterns. Such patterns also organize the differ-
ence between most Bildwissenschaft publications and visual studies in the US
and the UK. While Anglo-American visual studies is interested in the subversive
17. For example, the beginning of “The Sub- now watching Serbian television watching them
ject of Visual Culture,” in which he ponders watching.” Mirzoeff, “Subject of Visual Culture,”
watching a CNN report of the bombing of 3. For me, the aesthetics of this—the paradox,
Belgrade in 1999 and noticing a logo indicat- the complexity—is much stronger than the claim
ing CNN was getting its feed from a Belgrade that it is an example of a war of images that
television station. When the people in Belgrade somehow parallels the war over the land.
realized their feed was being taken by CNN, 18. Bal, “Visual Essentialism.”
they switched to carrying the American images 19. Bal, “Commitment to Look.”
with the CNN logo. “Thus CNN viewers were
force of or in art, German-language writing is devoted to the single artwork

as outside or beyond political commitments. For English-language scholarship,
non-art imagery has to undergo the ideology critique of the capitalist society of
mass consumption, or else it risks being completely neglected. If visual studies
ends up being centered either around the concept of subversive art or around
isolated Art with a capital “A,” then farewell! Neither in-depth connoisseurship
nor direct political intervention needs visual studies, as Tom’s book Cloning Ter-
ror proves.
Visuality is political because of the many social and cultural spaces and intri-
cate practices it organizes. All tools, especially of the formalist, iconographical,
and iconological tradition, can discover and analyze the variety and the inter-
connectedness of these spaces and practices.
Subversion then probably becomes visible on an epistemological level, where
our perception and modes of communicating perceptions are organized––and
that subversion may be neither leftist and engaged nor conservative and refined.
There’s a lot of optimism in this claim that research and intellectual discourse
can do any good.
Li Xi: I think if visual studies follows political and social dimensions, it actually might
not reach its original goal, that is, to restore a sense of justice and rationality,
which has been blurred and overwhelmed by capitalism, back to the public eye.
For example, visual studies has not actually criticized the negative impact of logo
culture, a culture that reveals the alienation and materialization of human life
and the whole of society: rather, visual culture has emphasized the importance
of logo culture.
Elisabeth Friedman: I wonder, in relation to Mirzoeff, if we might consider the things
that artists make, such as those Nemerov mentions, as forms of countervisuality.
Perhaps the visual objects themselves suggest new ways of seeing the world.
Flora Lysen: Both in the Mirzoeff essay and the paper by Anders Michelsen there are
departures from the idea that to see is to differentiate, to put a name on some-
thing, to classify.20 Mirzoeff is explicit that this sort of definition of visuality—
as the Foucauldian “nomination of the visible”—is his political conceptual point
of departure.21 Such a differentiating conception of visuality is something I think
Whitney is trying to counter with his account of radical pictoriality, in which
visuality is characterized by recognizing analogies between different elements,
but this differentiation is never the end of the process, but continues indefinitely
and is thus endlessly open to change.
20. Mirzoeff describes the “complex of visu- “Nothing Has Meaning Outside of Discourse?
ality” as practices of classifying, separating, and On the Creative Dimension of Visuality,” in “Art
aestheticizing form. Mirzoeff, “Right to Look,” in the Age of Visual Culture and the Image,” spe-
476. Michelsen explains the practice of visual cial issue, Leitmotiv 5 (2005–6): 90. (Leitmotiv is
culture, of looking as discoursive action upon an e-journal; see ledonline.it/leitmotiv.)
such systems, using imagery, visual mediation, 21. Mirzoef quotes Michel Foucault,
and technique. “Visual culture is thus a structur- The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
ing/structured relation.” Anders Michelsen, Human Sciences (London, 1970), 132.
127 The Political
James Elkins: In the “Right to Look” essay, the line I think is most characteristic is
this. At the end of the essay he defines countervisuality this way: “If counterin-
surgency uses neovisuality as a strategy, can we construct a countervisuality to
counterinsurgency?”22 In other words, the visuality is nameable, has a direction,
and an opposite.
María Lumbreras Corujo: I like Mirzoeff’s idea of countervisuality, its political force
compelling us to react against visuality. But the first thing I thought after read-
ing the article is that Mirzoeff doesn’t gives us a clue as to how to put counter-
visuality into practice. This goes back to Jeanette’s comment. I’m not sure about
what could be counted as forms of countervisuality. Mirzoeff talks about a “new
mobility” that should “reclaim, rediscover, and theorize the practices of everyday
life,” but then he asks, “What is this new everyday?”23 and leaves the question
unanswered.
Gustav Frank: If we take the four names, Adorno, Benjamin, Mirzoeff, and Nem-
erov, then I think they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Adorno’s theories entail
the impossibility of art in a monopolist, capitalist society. Benjamin’s theory in
“The Author as Producer” imagines people who move in the apparatus: they are
no longer artists, in the traditional sense. The two contemporary readings fit
quite well, because the art historian, Nemerov, takes up the historical interval
from the emergence of art to the moments it fades out in the twentieth century;
and Mirzoeff jumps in and says, I’ll take care of the rest, after art. Each author
has his position.
Keith Moxey: That’s clear in a general sense, but I would take issue with the details.
That is, I’m not sure that Adorno claims that art is impossible under capitalism.
Rather, I take him to mean that it offers the sole refuge in an otherwise totalizing
system.
James Elkins: Let’s put a few more texts on the table. Last night Tom Mitchell sent me
an e‑mail with his latest essay on visual studies, called “New Rules for Visual Cul-
ture.”24 The sixth one is appropriate to us here. It’s very entertaining to me that
two of the seven “rules” are things that we need to tell him, because he’s confused
about them. The sixth “new rule” might be a good way to open a conversation on
his politics. It reads: “Someone has to explain to me what the purpose of visual
studies is. What are we trying to accomplish? Are we amassing a new knowledge
project? Exposing and intervening in false consciousness? Producing an archae-
ology of power? Reading the strata of the seeable and sayable? Or is visual culture
more like a genealogy, a counter-discourse, and the recovery of what has been
silenced by history, and left unseen, unremarked, or unremarkable? Is visual cul-
ture a kind of therapy for a certain kind of blindness? What kind?”
22. Mirzoeff, “Right to Look,” 474 and 495.

23. Mirzoeff, “Right to Look,” 496.
24. Mitchell, “New Rules for Visual Culture,”
read at the College Art Association meeting,
February 2011.
Jeanette Roan: What has become apparent to me in the course of our discussions
this week is that there are many different practices of visual studies in existence
today. What would explaining the purpose of visual studies look like given the
multiple genealogies of visual studies? Mitchell may be, as he says, a “patriarchal
elder” of a particular strand of visual studies, but there are also traditions of
visual studies in which he is not central.
James Elkins: Yes, definitely. I also want to read a brief passage from Cloning Terror,
Tom’s most recent book.25 It is about what he sees as the most important widely
disseminated, political significant images of the period since 9/11. The book’s
claim is that images and ideas of cloning and terrorism form a hybrid concept.
A lot of the conceptual analysis comes out of an interview with Derrida, which
turns on the notion that terrorism is an auto-immune dysfunction. Here he is,
near the beginning of the book: “It is never enough to simply point out the error
in a metaphor, or the lack of reality in an image. It is equally important to trace
the process by which the metaphoric becomes literal, and the image becomes
actual. This means a renunciation of the most facile and overused weapon in
the iconologist’s arsenal, the tactic of ‘critical iconoclasm,’ which wins easy vic-
tories by exposing the unreal or metaphoric character of an icon. . . . We need
instead a method that recognizes and embraces both the unreality of images
and their operational reality.”26 And just to sample the kinds of conclusions he
draws, here is a passage at the end of the book about the Hooded Man photo-
graph from Abu Ghraib prison: “The Hooded Man heightens the contradictions
embedded in the theme of state by staging it as an icon that does not remain
securely on the positive side of the sacred-secular confusion . . . , but forces an
enjambment of good and evil, God and the devil, Islam and the Judeo-Christian
alliance.”27 In other words, it’s a move to make the images complex, and resist
simple meanings.
Whitney Davis: What is the principal political or moral critique about an animate, sen-
tient, quasi-human entity? Is there a difference between a critique of a picture or
a thing, an artifact, and a critique of a human agent, however opposed to his or
her politics one might be? Is there a different ethics of critique at that level that
forces a change in the nature of critique?
Keith Moxey: If images are dead, they simply reflect the interests of those who make and
use them. If images are alive, they have the potential to do what their makers and
original recipients never imagined.
Whitney Davis: Isn’t there a risk that this quasi-animism, ontologized in these things,
is a cover or an excuse for opting out of critique of the actual intentionalities and
agencies that stand behind them?
25. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of

Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011).
26. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, xviii.
27. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 158.
129 The Political
James Elkins: Whitney, I’d share that concern, except that in my reading, this book does
not end up depending on what Tom calls “animism.” It’s a discussion of the dis-
semination of images. You could say that posing it this way, through animism,
allows him to concentrate on other issues.
For me, the problem of Cloning Terror isn’t animism, or his position in rela-
tion to “critical ideology”: it’s that it’s not clear that this is a book about images.
Tom is a good dyed-in-the-wool deconstructionist; he comes out of word-image
studies in the 1970s, and he’s well aware of the necessity of implicating images
in words and vice versa. I think that all of those ideas are so much things of the
past, so decathected, so out of his realm of interest, that he allows his political
concerns to carry along, as if in a flood, whatever interests him—and some of
what floats in the floodwater is images. They feel arbitrary in the sense that they
need not have been images.
Whitney Davis: So if the material were jurisprudential texts, one would get the same
text?
James Elkins: Yes. And Mirzoeff’s book Watching Babylon is not that different: it is about
images, but it does very little with them, and there are few images in the book.
Paul Frosh: Sunil’s book Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall is very different.28
It is definitely about images. So is Hariman and Lucaites’s book No Caption
Needed, which is precisely about those images at particular historical junctures
that seem to invite and concentrate public debate.29 There is work out there deal-
ing with the problem of the role of images in the public sphere.
James Elkins: Yes, and Cloning Terror does that, but intermittently, and almost, as it
were, without caring or noticing when its claims need to be about images, when
they are incidentally about images, when they’re about the idea of images, and
when they’re about other claims, with images somewhere in the background.
I think Tom’s politics—his genuine desire to say something about the world—
has floated free of his concern with visual culture.
Gustav Frank: I would mark the difference here very clearly between the historians who
discover their canon of images in the collective memory of the twentieth century
and a project like Sunil’s Image Critique.30
Lisa Cartwright: I think that at some level, the work Keith is doing on Bruegel is more
political, at this particular historical moment, than the kind of work that is being
advocated when we’re talking about the ways to do visual studies, or discussing
28. [Sunil Manghani, Image Critique and the travelogues, and literary and biographical
Fall of the Berlin Wall (Bristol: Intellect, 2008). accounts.—S.M.]
Rather than offer a straight analysis of visual 29. Robert Hariman and John Lucaites,
representations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public
book claims to enact a “double procedure” to Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: Uni-
both critique images and use images as a means versity of Chicago Press, 2007). The book has a
to engage with contemporary mediated culture. website: www.nocaptionneeded.com, accessed
In doing so, the book’s sources range from August 11, 2011.
artworks, photography, and archival materials 30. For a typology of images of collec-
to news clippings, ephemera, advertisements, tive memory including “supericons” that
whether we should look at these images rather than those images.31 At bottom,
there is a serious methodological issue, which is partly at stake in what Whitney
is doing by distinguishing visual studies from visual culture studies. Few people
are doing visual studies in the sense of doing analytics—looking at what goes
into the period eye, for example—and I think that is sorely missing from what
passes as visual culture studies, when we look yet again at the way the Abu
Ghraib images were fused with iPod ads. There are these aspects of formalism
that we just haven’t even scratched, and I imagine art historians going home, and
wondering how to proceed, and coming up short after reading these conversa-
tions. So I wonder if the kind of work Keith is modeling might move us further
at this particular moment.
Paul Frosh: I think what Mirzoeff is doing is tactical. It’s not strategic. He is looking at
the immediate problem, and trying to firefight.
Lisa Cartwright: I totally agree. I like Nick, and I’m not criticizing him.
Paul Frosh: Neither am I: I think tactics can be a very necessary thing.
Lisa Cartwright: But when you put up a slide of surveillance and say, This is the
military-industrial complex, and you have a room full of people who are old
Marxists, you really don’t need to do that anymore.
Whitney Davis: You’re preaching to the choir.
Lisa Cartwright: Yes, and beyond that, we need a visual studies that will tell you what
goes on in that image. It’s not about the Panopticon anymore. We need an ana-
lytics that tell us what is going on in those images at a very fine level of grain.
María Lumbreras Corujo: I think that is exactly what Bredekamp and Bruhn were try-
ing to accomplish with the project Das Technische Bild. What is absent in it is a
strong politics like the one you encounter in Mirzoeff’s work. I wonder whether
these two concerns are completely at odds, or whether they can be reconciled
somehow.
Paul Frosh: What I’m getting at here is the idea of the intellectual as seeming to with-
draw from the immediate barricade. I understand what Nick is doing, which is
something else. He is someone who is saying, I need to respond publicly, and
the urgency of the situation means that I need to respond now. Leaving aside
whether or not he does it well, it’s a different kind of politics to what I think Lisa
is describing, which is developing an analytics that has time to think, meditate,
reconsider, apply, and reapply itself, and to develop a coherent theoretical and
methodological kernel which will have long-term impact on others’ work.
communicate in various cultures, generations, 31. This is a reference to Moxey’s unpub-

strata, etc., see Das Jahrhundert der Bilder, lished book; he had given a chapter on Bruegel
edited by Gerhard Paul, 2 vols. (Göttingen: in a public lecture (not recorded in this book).
Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2009), especially
1:29–32.
131 The Political
James Elkins: The essay of Nick’s we read, “Right to Look,” was published in Critical
Inquiry. Tom Mitchell would be the one who has ultimate say over what goes
into the journal. It is a product of this year, the same as Cloning Terror. After 9/11,
Tom felt some of the same urgency, and he wrote a piece even though, as he said
at the time, he didn’t have much of an idea what to say. Tom’s politics—which I
think is separable, now, from his visual studies and his theorizing on images—
is tactical in the sense you’re ascribing to Nick.
Paul Frosh: And there is a value to that, so long as you say it as clearly as you can at the
moment. But there is also a value in withdrawal. There is a deep, mystical value
in spending time with images, and that is a different kind of politics. It’s the kind
that lets us make sense of the possibility that Whitney’s General Theory of Visual
Culture might find its readers in fifty or a hundred years.
Lisa Cartwright: I don’t agree. I see the two kinds of work as interrelated and crucially
connected, at this point in history. You can’t do the kind of work you demand
from those images if you do it too quickly. The images aren’t obvious. If we work
tactically, we’ll just say the same things about them next week that we say today.
It takes time to understand images, and so the strategic and the tactical need to
be connected.
Paul Frosh: Ideally, I’d obviously agree with you. And the slow accretion of a strategic,
analytical politics over time should mean that what is being said today about
images is different to what it was possible to say twenty, fifty, or a hundred years
ago. Sometimes, however, the same things need to be said about images because
it is politically urgent that they be reiterated now, and what may appear to some
people to be a mere repetition is to others—a new generation—a viewpoint they
are hearing for the first time.
Juliet Bellow: I see this problem as connected with the Case of the Calvin Klein
Suit.32 I was thinking of this in relation to Bal’s claim in the “Visual Essential-
ism” essay that the museum is “a privileged object for analysis in visual culture
studies” because it has the potential to “disturb the conventional notion of the
transparency of the visible” through variations in installation technique and the
foregrounding of curatorial choices.33 I teach a class called “Museums and Soci-
ety,” and I do the kind of ideology critique that we have been considering. After-
ward, the veil is lifted, and the students see how the museum is constructed . . .
but then comes the problem: What is next?
Keith Moxey: One possible answer might be to note that the museum isn’t just a prison
house for escaped works of art, but to notice exactly what kinds of architecture
are involved, what interiors, what discourses. For the Calvin Klein suit, you can
notice the details: the stitching, the fabric. What sort of manipulation of the
imagination does this suit consist of? How is elegance being designed?
32. This is described in the first introduction

to this book, under “Absences,” no. 7.
33. Bal, “Visual Essentialism,” 14–15.
James Elkins: Or you can pay attention to the ways you are not using the visual. What
in the images, or the museum, is not part of your critique? What visual ele-
ments are not necessary for your critique? To what extent are the points in your
classroom nonvisual? This is the issue I raised in relation to John Pike’s project.34
Gustav Frank: In systems theory, the idea would be to reenter the situation.35 Have a
class observe your class, and see what you are doing, and then let them be the
object of study. In that way you recreate the entire situation in a dialectic.
Juliet Bellow: I think I may have parodied my own class, because I actually have my
students do or consider several of those things.
James Elkins: I think we are about out of time. It’s interesting how heated, how imme-
diate, this conversation has become, even though it is about two widely different
possibilities for politics in visual studies. I just wonder what the graduate stu-
dents who are working on the reader Theorizing Visual Studies will make of this:
their political temperature is very low, nearly at absolute zero. For some of them,
at least, the political is distributed so thinly that it wouldn’t be possible to even
be as engaged as the disengaged Alexander Nemerov.
34. This is described in the first introduction Eva Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
to this book, under “Absences,” no. 2. 2000).
35. For this sort of procedure see Niklas
Luhmann, Art as a Social System, translated by
9. S C I E N C E S T U D I E S
The place of non-art images—from science, engineering, statistics, and other fields—
came up several times during the week. This transcript excerpts several discussions:
the first one on Whitney Davis’s essay “Neurovisuality,” which surveys possible con-
nections between brain and vision science and art history;1 and a second conversation
led by Lisa Cartwright, for which the participants read three texts on film and science
studies, including an essay by Giuliana Bruno on Hugo Münsterberg’s laboratory at
Harvard; Münsterberg pioneered the quantitative measurement of people’s reactions
to motion pictures.2
Whitney Davis: The topic here is what might be called the neuroaesthetic turn. My essay
is one way into this, and we could also talk about John Onians’s text.
James Elkins: The community of people who study the science of vision and visual pro-
cessing from positions more or less in art history is extremely diverse—so much
that it’s almost incoherent. There’s Ladislav Kesner, for example, and Barbara
Stafford, and David Freedberg, in addition to Onians, and some barely talk to
one another. So in general I think your essay is extremely valuable as a first step
toward some more consolidated discussion.
Whitney Davis: Do you think that group is diverse because there is no stable theory of
vision that people could feel confident about? A theory that appears sufficiently
coordinated or stable so that people could use it, even if they don’t necessarily
hold to its major claims?
James Elkins: From my point of view, it’s that the encounters are not yet between some
art history and some specialty such as cognitive psychology or the neurology of
vision. Reading is selective and opportunistic, and so is interpretation.
Whitney Davis: When I started graduate school, David Marr’s book Vision had just
been published.3 I thought that book would be immediately processed into art
history and other fields, and be used as a textbook in the humanities. That didn’t
happen, for all sorts of reasons, and there is a history of that in itself.4 I made use
1. Whitney Davis, “Neurovisuality,” nonsite, 3. Marr, Vision: A Computational Investi-

no. 2 (2011), at nonsite.org. gation into the Human Representation and
2. For this the participants read Cartwright, Processing of Visual Information (New York:
“The Hands of the Projectionist,” Science in Freeman, 1982).
Context 24, no. 3 (2011): 443–64; Giuliana 4. A useful review and contextualization of
Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Mün- Marr’s theoretical models, including a stringent
sterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images,” Grey critique, can be found in Yehouda Harpaz, “Cri-
Room 36 (2009): 88–113; and Mary Ann Doane, tique of Vision by Marr,” at www.human-brain
“The Indexical and the Concept of Medium .org/vision.html.
Specificity,” in Differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 128–52.
of the book in my own work, and then I found that one reason the work wasn’t
communicating well was on account of this predicated vision science that was
not particularly interesting to other scientists of vision, or had been discredited
by them.
Anna Sigrídur Arnar: I have two questions: first, I wonder about the relation between
your earlier work, such as Replications, and this new work.5 I gathered from your
introductory and autobiographical remarks that in a sense you had been exam-
ining similar problems but that you had framed them differently for the later
work because you felt that certain questions had not been adequately answered.
In that sense, you felt the need to approach the problem from a different per-
spective. To fully understand the project in A General Theory of Visual Culture,
I wonder if one needs to be conversant with your earlier books? Second, I ask
that since you bring so many disciplines to the table—archaeology, philosophy,
psychoanalysis, art history, and theories of vision—do you feel the necessity to
bracket some disciplines out, and highlight others? Perhaps that explains some
of the reframing of your scholarly projects?
Gustav Frank: Let me add a question, which also concerns the methodological level of
your work. Could this work on the “neuroaesthetic turn” be done as a kind of
monographic Whitney Davis project? To what degree does this kind of research
require collaboration?
Whitney Davis: Bracketing disciplines, works of art, and approaches to objects are stra-
tegic moves that ensure communicability, generality, and applicability of results
that might otherwise get ghettoized, as it were. Readers might conclude that the
books are written only by an art historian, writing within art history, and for art
historians.
I have a very different view of the question of method than, say, Tim Clark.
For him the test of an art-historical interpretation would be that no one else
could write it but this one person who did. That is the sine qua non. Explication
has to rise to that minimal degree of inimitability before we’re even on the page
of rich and significant description. I pretty much see that matter the other way
around. The inimitability of the ekphrasis is richly productive of a certain kind
of interpretation, but it is a kind that has been done so much, by so many tal-
ented writers, who are such great stylists, that I don’t have any claim to be even
wanting to reproduce that. And on a methodological level, I have a bit of a moral
problem with it. I have an issue with constituting the inimitability of an analysis,
in pedagogical terms, in terms of the possibility of collaboration, and in terms of
the spirit—not of science, because that sounds risky, but—
Gustav Frank: There is an institutional expectation that the humanities should do big
science.
5. Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art His-

tory, Psychoanalysis (University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 1996).
135 Science Studies
Whitney Davis: Yes. There is a risk in saying that you should develop a general model
that has an imitability, so that everyone can deploy it.
So I am well aware of the risks of going too far down that road. One pos-
sible outcome for visual studies is that forms of intellectual collaboration and
collective evaluation at the level of method, protocol, and research design could
shift away from the inimitable spirit of the author in relation to the inimitable
specificity of the object. But I’m not sure what the alternative is.
James Elkins: This is a serious issue, and I’m glad it’s being raised, because I think it is
utterly invisible from within art history and visual studies. I have tried writing
about combined art and science issues in such a way that technical detail does
not give way to metaphoric description too quickly, or unnecessarily.6 That way
the imitability, in the terms you’re using, will be prolonged, but the inimitability
of the result is still high. It’s a scaled strategy, so maybe it’s a way to begin talking
about this issue.
Keith Moxey: Whitney, there is something quite radical about your description of Tim
Clark’s criterion for good interpretation.
Whitney Davis: Well, but if it didn’t have an inimitability, it wouldn’t have achieved
sufficient particularity in its engagement with the object.
Keith Moxey: But couldn’t you say that interpretation in the humanities depends on
that? Isn’t the individual’s response the most wonderful contribution that any-
one working in the humanities can experience? Isn’t work in the humanities
centrally about difference? The world is shown filtered through individuals, and
somehow an insight occurs in that process, and that’s what matters. Art his-
tory and visual studies actually depend on responses to objects whose individual
characteristics are what count.
Whitney Davis: I would turn the tables slightly on that set of characterizations. Tim
Clark’s book on Poussin is two hundred and fifty pages on one painting.7 If all of
us were to do our two hundred and fifty pages, meditating from our particular
points of view, it would become increasingly more difficult to get at the very axes
of difference, commonality, or lack of commonality that might structure our
individual and collective version of the painting. Partly that is the sheer quantity
of the ekphrasis.
Keith Moxey: We might not produce texts as interesting as Clark’s. Someone might come
up with a text that all of us would recognize is more interesting than the rest.
Whitney Davis: I don’t think that would ever occur. Clark’s interpretation is considered
interesting because there is an entire social and institutional history behind his
6. This is the project of Elkins, Six Stories 7. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment
from the End of Representation: Images in in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press,
Painting, Photography, Microscopy, Astronomy, 2006).
Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics,
1985–2000 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2008).
writing. I love the book: it taught me a lot about the painting, and about Clark.
But I would be very cautious about supposing that that’s what we should all be
striving for, partly in virtue of the necessary exclusions that his sort of looking
would require.
James Elkins: This is an extremely unusual kind of conversation we’re having. The
furthest interpretation of Clark’s writing gets within art history is acknowledg-
ment and praise, even though most of us know we can’t, or shouldn’t, or won’t,
emulate it.8 But our context here is even rarer: we’re talking about how visual
studies or art history might build bridges to science, and especially the study of
vision, by flattening and generalizing its style. I think this is exactly the kind of
fundamental issue that needs to be explored before much genuinely collabora-
tive work can be done.
Lisa Cartwright: Whitney, if you could teach a research program in which you could
pursue these subjects, what would it look like, and what would your students do?
Whitney Davis: It would look less like a traditional art-historical program, in which
students look at screens, object, or books, and try to find ways to describe, and
more like a graphic project. Students would go out into the world to observe
uses of visual things by people who could be interviewed, recorded, or observed.
It might involve a little more use of the protocols of social scientific investiga-
tion that tend not to have any status in the humanistic inquiries: questionnaires,
interviews, statistics, text aggregate data.
Jeanette Roan: That sounds a lot like what happens in design classes at my institution—
students often go out into the world to do fieldwork and conduct ethnographies.
But their purpose is quite contrary to what I understand yours to be. They’re usu-
ally trying to gather information that will help them design products that people
will want to buy, or to find better ways of marketing products that already exist.
On the other hand, you’re interested in gathering data about human vision at a
general level, right?
Whitney Davis: The “ethnography of new media” is, as Jeanette says, a major topic—
or perhaps better, a procedure—in the intersection between vision science, visual
studies, media studies, computer science, and so on. While I’m not against it
(in principle it can be deployed under adequate conceptualization and constraint
as an element of an investigation of the historicity of vision and visuality in
the sense I’d advocate), I’m wary of the kind of uses that you describe: helping
tech companies, software writers, app developers, and so on to tailor interfaces
and platforms to certain kinds of experience, consumption, and dissemination,
and essentially to massage—if not actually to produce—visuality in the theo-
retical sense, and in relation to the intrinsic resistance (the “radical openness” or
8. A conference co-organized with Pablo Hel- Noppeney. This was, as far as I know, the only
guera at the Museum of Modern Art, May 20–21, attempt to understand the relation of his speak-
2011, included an analysis of Clark’s speaking ing style to his claims. See www.moma.org/visit
and writing style by Ellen Levy and a Power- /calendar/events/11844.
Point paraphrase of that style done by Claus
137 Science Studies
“radical pictoriality”) of vision making worlds visible. To get at this as a social

process in our time and place, we’d have to be doing, I suppose, some kind of
critical-historical ethnography of that “ethnography of new media” that func-
tions essentially as part of the design process and as market research. Many schol-
ars of new media, especially those coming at the present-day explosion of small
powerful digital devices from the vantage points of political critique and human-
istic historicization, take this to be what they’re doing, and rightly so. But I have
the impression that the sciences that are entering into visual studies and art his-
tory will probably have the biggest impact on this level. The classroom unit may
begin to involve itself with computational issues and the ethnography of media.
The art history classroom will begin to look a lot different. Universities across
the U.S. are starting projects with names like “humanities lab”; Stanford has one.
One can be cautious and skeptical, but students are voting with their feet.
James Elkins: I don’t doubt that, although I would imagine it happening more in art
history than visual studies. But there are two things about our conversation, and
about the various attempts by Onians and others to read vision science, that
bear saying. First, it is definitely significant that none of us here have wanted
to pursue specific claims made by Semir Zeki, David Marr, or others you cite.
We don’t seem to be interested in what the vision scientists actually claim, and I
think that is symptomatic and entirely typical. And second, I notice your essay
has only a few references to more recent scientific material, such as Kulvicki’s
On Images, and no references to primary sources in scientific journals.9 There
is a disparity, still, between the specialized sources we cite when we review our
own literature (such as Clark’s very complex and decidedly unpopularized book)
and the slightly older, popularized or summarized literature that writers includ-
ing Kesner, Freedberg, and others cite when they look to the sciences. That is
another disparity we would need to work on if we’re to take science seriously.
Whitney Davis: I take your point. But I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate and fair in every
respect. Many scholars in visual studies (though maybe not in this room) are
indeed deeply interested in what “vision scientists actually claim,” whether they
are in turn concerned to historicize those claims (there are a number of excellent
histories of research in perceptual science and philosophy of perception, not to
speak of the history and critique of the domain of visualization—the “practices
of looking”—in generating scientific knowledge, our topic today) or interested
in finding ways to put them to use analytically in their own investigations of
visual culture (as someone like Onians has tried to do, for example, not so much
in his “neuroarthistory,” which is a substantially historiographical project, as in
his “neuroarchaeology,” which is substantive neurohistorical explanation of a
particular case study). Moreover, I’m not sure whether you mean to draw atten-
tion to the “disparity” between how we cite our own literature (say art-historical,
sociological, or philosophical) and how we do (or can) approach “recent scientific
9. Kulvicki, On Images: Their Structure and

Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
material” (especially the “primary sources in scientific journals”) as a negative or

a positive thing. As you imply, there’s clearly an issue here about our training,
about disciplinary collaborations and divisions of labor; about the availability of
transdisciplinary frameworks within which we can not only “keep up to date”
with ongoing scientific research but also “update” scientists about our inter-
ests and conclusions as historians, anthropologists, artists, and so on. I have no
solution to this beyond a vague hope that seminars like this might nudge such
conversations into being where they could be happening but aren’t yet, and
awareness that they are already going on in all kinds of venues (for example,
in the frames of some of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany). I’m not espe-
cially troubled by your observation about a time lag between the generation of
“primary” science (such as published in advanced specialized scientific journals)
and the use of “popularized” and late-coming syntheses, whether written by sci-
entists themselves or generated within interdisciplinary visual studies. I’ve been
reading and rereading a lot of Gombrich lately and have been struck by the way
in which two waves of primary scientific conceptualization—the rise of ethol-
ogy in the work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and others in the thirties,
and the consolidation of a protocognitive perceptual psychology in the work
of Jerome Bruner and others in the fifties—washed through his work a decade
or more later, and in the form of the most synthetic and general publications
emerging from laboratories, and how they continued to vitalize his own theo-
retical investigations long after “primary” science had generated new technical
results and adopted different models. I don’t think we have to be up to the min-
ute with every technical publication to be able to learn from “primary science”
and indeed to participate and intervene in it at a primary level. For one thing,
it’s not obvious that primary science sheds its skin—or better, rearticulates its
philosophical architecture—so quickly that people engaging in visual studies in
nonscientific frames and discourses can’t keep up. “Keeping up” isn’t perhaps the
right issue.
Flora Lysen: Current work that is being done in neuroarthistory or neuraesthetics, such
as Onians’s Neuroarthistory or Barbara Stafford’s Echo Objects, doesn’t seem to
employ any of the research methods of the social or natural sciences, as Whitney
suggests should be done. Instead, they use concepts from neuroscience research
such as neural plasticity or pattern recognition in order to cast a critical look at
artworks or art practices and give them a kind of neuro-reconsideration. It seems
they can never keep up with the controversies and debates in the natural sciences
about these concepts. What they (art historians or visual culture theorists) can
do, I think, it to try to see in what way thinking about images—and perhaps
artworks in particular—can help us to reconsider the way neuroscientists con-
ceptualize image-making and visuality.10
10. Onians, Neuroarthistory from Aristotle tricky, for example, is the way in which the
and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven: discovery of mirror neurons (the firing of motor
Yale University Press, 2007); Stafford, Echo neurons when perceiving movement) is received
Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: by such authors as a way to explain the effect of
University of Chicago Press, 2007). Especially certain artworks on our bodily feelings; see, for
139 Science Studies
Lisa Cartwright: I’d like to introduce a different set of concerns. My work began
in film studies and art practice. My first book was a history of structural film,
coming out of structural sculpture. I was interested in the work being done
around neurology and physiology, so I moved from there sideways into science
and technology studies. I’ve also been involved in American studies, studying as
a graduate student with Alan Trachtenberg and David Rodowick, a Deleuzian
scholar, although I didn’t follow him into the Deleuzian turn—which was, after
Michael Holly left Rochester, a major turn in visual culture studies.11 In Roch-
ester, my own work on affect studies was organized around André Green, who
was a student of Lacan; Green’s work was involved with object-relations theory
and affect, which were problematic concerns in the view of scholars invested in
the Lacanian turn.
I offer that as background. I have the somewhat strange task here of intro-
ducing science studies, media studies, and other fields; they might be seen as
subfields in relation to visual studies, but the readings I have set are parts of an
attempt to disorganize that sense.
Keith Moxey: Lisa, I was fascinated by the Giuliana Bruno reading, because it tied in to
so many things we have been talking about: the role of affect in visual studies,
the ways in which Münsterberg’s laboratory at Harvard set out to measure—
using weird and intricate mechanisms—people’s response to film.12 This reminds
me of “What Do Pictures Really Want?” or the idea, in Bildwissenschaft, that
images think. These are all attempts to break down the distinction between the
observer and what is being observed.
Inge Hinterwaldner: I guess you do not mean a complete collapse between observer
and the observed. Are you referring to ideas like the human being as “host of
images” (“Ort der Bilder” as opposed to “Herr der Bilder,” as Hans Belting says)
or as “iconophor” (as Boehm says)?13
Keith Moxey: That’s right, the collapse of subject and object is only a useful heuristic
tool if it is used metaphorically rather than intended literally.
Lisa Cartwright: So Keith, the analogy, the pattern you’re seeing is—
Keith Moxey: The distance between images and ourselves is something we built. We’re
not entirely sure what the distance between visual objects and our subjectivities
might be. These texts and projects are all models, as Gustav would say, of the
distance.
example, David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: Univer-
“Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Aesthetic sity of Minnesota Press, 1995).
Experience,” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 11, 12. Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science.”
no. 5 (2007): 197–203. 13. Gottfried Boehm, “It Reveals Itself:
11. Alan Trachterberg, Reading American Gesture—Deixis—Image,” unpublished MS,
Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady ca. 2008; Hans Belting, “Der Ort der Bilder,”
to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, in Das Erbe der Bilder: Kunst und moderne
1990); David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Medien in den Kulturen der Welt, edited by Hans
Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, Belting and Lydia Haustein (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1997); Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing 1998), 34–53.
Lisa Cartwright: For Bruno, part of the interest was in using the archive to go into the
lab itself, rather than trying to find the images that Münsterberg produced there.
She wanted, I think, to find the mechanisms by which the images were used to
study people; her interest shifts away from the image and toward—
Keith Moxey: Toward the subject who is watching. In other words, the image becomes
fused with the reaction. Let’s say I am watching a horror film. I’d be a splendid sub-
ject for an experiment: I would be clutching the arms of my chair. My palms would
be sweating. I’d be a classic subject. I would somehow have managed to internalize
the image, to embed it in myself. I vaguely know, in the back of my mind, that it’s
a creation of the filmmaker, but to me it is intensely real and disconcerting.
Lisa Cartwright: But Bruno is not looking at that. That’s not in the lab. The laboratory
doesn’t suggest to us what spectators felt; it gives us data about a practice that
was oriented toward finding out what spectators felt.
Keith Moxey: That’s what I’m trying to get at: the Münsterberg lab was trying to under-
stand our responses to film.
Keith Moxey: Well, that’s fine . . . but the lab shows that the image is as much subjective
as objective.
Bill Stamets: The lab also generated hundreds of pages of research, in English, that were
of no interest to Bruno. You can download them, if you want to see the studies
they actually did there.14
Lisa Cartwright: But within the history of film studies, there is a reason why Giuliana
Bruno is not writing about what Münsterberg said about spectators. She is writ-
ing about his lab. Those papers have been studied, and spectatorship has been
discussed for many years.15 She is looking at the instruments and practices of film
studies, the apparatus. Although there was a lot of interest in the apparatus and
the production of film in the 1980s, there has been relatively little work on the
history and practice of the actual uses of film, particularly in contexts like the
experimental psychology laboratory.
Bill Stamets: But those studies involve other psychophysiological stimuli far, far less
sophisticated than moving images.
Juliet Bellow: To use an art-historical parallel, Bruno’s essay is like a study of the paint-
er’s studio without the painter or the painting there. It’s about the space, the
paintbrushes and tubes of paint: the technology, the apparatuses, the things that
tend to be invisible to us. Art history and visual studies began with the object;
in visual studies we are thinking more about the spectator and reception theory;
and now this is a third thing, the rest of the context that we tend to leave out.
14. See ia600204.us.archive.org/20/items 2nd ed., edited by Anneke Smelik, Pam Cook,

/harvardpsycholog16266gut/16266-h/16266-h and Mieke Bernink (London: British Film Insti-
.htm, accessed December 1, 2011. tute, 1999), 353–65.
15. For a review of the work on film theory
and spectatorship, see The Cinema Book,
141 Science Studies
Lisa Cartwright: Yes, exactly.
Whitney Davis: To what degree, in an essay like Bruno’s, is the laboratory a metaphor
for a wider social field? For example, in Foucault’s sense, you could say San Fran-
cisco is the “laboratory” of sexuality. In the formula, x is the laboratory of y,
whatever y is in some sense made visible by treating the laboratory as a sample,
a stratum, or a focalization, but what is at stake is not a bricks-and-mortar labo-
ratory. Her project is a way of reaching toward some wider, deeper, socio-psychic
polity that the laboratory stands for . . . I am not quite sure how to express the
relationship, but I have a feeling that is what Bruno is getting at.
Lisa Cartwright: I think that is absolutely accurate. The laboratory is a social practice
organized around a space that we can analyze using the terms of visual culture.
Giuliana is trained as a film scholar, and her work is on architecture and cities;
so she is interested in the organization of social space. In laboratory and science
studies, there would be a tendency to say that laboratories are certain sorts of
social spaces, distinct from other spaces.
Whitney Davis: And how do analogies to other spaces—studios, museums—get sorted
out disciplinarily? Is it a source of interesting refertilization? Does it bifurcate the
scholarly communities?
Lisa Cartwright: The distribution of methodologies in laboratory studies would be
interesting for anyone looking at contemporary practices in visual studies. If you
look at the scale of the hand and the pencil and their interaction with your agen-
tial machine, you might choose to use an ethnomethodological approach, which
would come from Harold Garfinkel, and you might then move through Michael
Lynch.16 He is an ethnomethodologist who has worked for twenty-five years on
images, insisting that we look at the practice, move our focus from the images
themselves to a much more intricate field of practice.
James Elkins: I think our conversations here on science studies, the science of vision,
and related subjects have been very representative. Non-art images are one of my
own interests, and I find they are decisively marginalized in visual studies—even
more so than in art history. There is, I think, an enormous distance between
Whitney’s interest in reading image science along with art history, and Lisa’s
interest in the current state and future prospects of science and media studies.
One way to think about this might be to think about the different
approaches to the value and interest of the technical, as opposed to the affec-
tive. In my reading of your work, Lisa, and of the Bruno essay, affectivity is
absolutely central. When affective experience drives the work, what appears as
technical—and therefore marginal—is the mechanical, the quantitative, the
mathematical. I don’t think a researcher like Bruno would be well advised to
16. See, for example, Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch, “The Production of Scientific
Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston, “The Work of Images: Vision and Re-vision in the History,
a Discovering Science Construed with Materials Philosophy, and Sociology of Science,” Com-
from the Optically Discovered Pulsar,” Philoso- munication and Cognition 31 (1998): 213–28.
phy of the Social Sciences 1 (1981): 131–58; and
read Münsterberg’s texts or activate and use the instruments he used—as you

said, Lisa, she is embarked on a different kind of work—but there is affective
value in first-person, professional-level interaction with texts and instruments.
That affective content does not appear until those texts are studied or the instru-
ments are used. In my own work, for example, I have found it immensely useful
to actually learn how to use things like spectrographs and interference micro-
scopes, and I try whenever I can to read contemporary, unpopularized, primary
scientific research.17
In my experience, people give three reasons for resisting that sort of learn-
ing: (1) as you’ve said, there is a feeling that previous science studies have already
covered that ground; (2) there’s also the entrenched agnosticism within visual
studies and the humanities about what science currently thinks about vision;
and (3) there is concern that actual science writing is not a humanistic sub-
ject, that our interest should be the conditions of its production and reception.
I think a deeper reason we avoid the details and reality claims of science is that
we would have to produce different kinds of texts. In a formula: we—visual
studies scholars, in this case—don’t want to write texts that have equations.
I think that is exactly what has to be risked in order to speak across the bridge
from the humanities to the sciences, and across the equally wide gulf between
scholars who want to read and incorporate actual vision science and those who
want to pursue laboratory studies, science studies in general, media studies, the
sociology, ethnography, or even the philosophy of science.
17. The justification for this, and examples,

are in Elkins, Six Stories from the End of
Representation.
10. T H E P L A C E O F T H E I M A G E
This section and the next are transcribed from the closing roundtable, which ended
the week. Here the question was about images in the texts and teaching of visual stud-
ies. If the expressions “pictorial turn” or “iconic turn” have purchase, and if, in late
capitalist culture, people tend to experience the world through or as images, then
visual studies might be well positioned to analyze the new visuality. Yet it is an open
question whether visual objects work differently in the texts of visual studies than they
do, for example, in art history.
James Elkins: We haven’t yet discussed a subject that I think is central to visual stud-
ies’ self-description: the place of images in our texts. Visual studies continues,
in various ways, to make a promise: that the visual and visuality will have a dif-
ferent status than in art history and other humanities. In particular, there’s the
promise that the visual will have the capacity to guide or move arguments, that
we argue and think with or through the visual rather than alongside it or over it,
that the visual has a certain power or even a desire that can be taken on board,
that images propose or embody or instantiate theories rather than just illustrat-
ing or exemplifying theories.
In any of these ways, visual studies would probably not be interested in hav-
ing images function as mnemonics or reminders of absent originals. In much
of art history, images function as necessarily inadequate reminders of originals
or as placeholders for the observer’s own encounter with the work. Visual stud-
ies would also not be interested in taking images as examples of ideas, theo-
ries, or arguments made in the text. In art history, so this argument might run,
images follow along, illustrate, exemplify, or otherwise ornament claims made in
the texts.
The promise of visual studies has been that images are more active, that they
work to theorize, direct, drive, produce, or orient argument. I want to signal
four salient texts.
Barthes’s essay “The Photographic Message” has the well-known line “The
image no longer illustrates the words: it is the words which are structurally par-
asitic on the image.” From a contemporary vantage point, I think we might
want to distinguish texts that feed on images or are nourished by them—using
Barthes’s metaphor—and the rarer and more challenging case of texts that per-
mit themselves to be fundamentally altered by images. Barthes himself wrote
such a text, I think, in Camera Lucida, but it is a far from common occurrence.
A second example, from the German-language tradition, is Horst Brede-

kamp’s Darwins Korallen (Darwin’s corals), a little book on a moment in Dar-
win’s work that was, in Bredekamp’s account, propelled by a sketch of branching
coral.1 For a moment, Bredekamp argues, Darwin thought with or through that
image. The image directed the argument.
Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe is my third example,
because she has said, both in the book and in an interview, that it was driven by
images, that it began as a collection of images and that they suggested its argu-
ment.2 I don’t doubt that, but as it stands, the book has a series of arguments that
control the meanings of the images.
And a fourth example is Tom Mitchell’s book Picture Theory and the claim
of its title, that images produce theory.3 Yet in Picture Theory, the pictures are
mainly illustrations of arguments that are carried on in the text. In my reading,
there is no moment in the book in which an image arrests my reading and makes
me reconsider what the text is saying.
I mention these three, in telegraphic fashion, just to open the conversation.
My feeling is that visual studies has not yet made good on its promise to take
images as something other than illustrations, examples, exemplars, mnemonics,
ornaments, placeholders, or other accompaniments to the arguments that run
around and past them in our texts. There are counterexamples, especially in
art history—I think, for example, of how Tim Clark lets images interrupt his
thinking—but they are rare.4
Sunil Manghani: I’ve heard Susan Buck-Morss talk about bringing together the text
and images of her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe. It was interesting listening
to how difficult it was in terms of production. She sat down with the designers
at MIT Press and worked out layout with them. That was, she suggested, and
I think still is, an unusual thing to do.5 I know, certainly, when I did my Image
Critique book, it was shock horror for the publisher that I didn’t want captions
to any of my images. I said, “It’s fine; there will be a list of images, but I don’t
want captions next to the images.” From their point of view, that was a problem,
because they had to code up pages and make sure they went to the printer in
the correct order. It’s strange, because if we think back historically, there is a rich
tradition of playing with the book format, and even though we’ve gotten more
and more means, including virtual means, that hasn’t exploded into new kinds
of printing.
1. Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen: Die frühen in This Book,” in James Elkins, Kristi McGuire,
Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuen-
Naturgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Wagenbach, nen, eds., Theorizing Visual Studies: Thinking
2006). Through the Discipline (New York: Routledge,
2. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastro- 2012).
phe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and 5. These remarks relate to comments during
West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). the question-and-answer session following a
3. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal paper presentation given by Susan Buck-Morss
and Visual Representation (Chicago: University at the Radical Philosophy conference at Birbeck
of Chicago Press, 1994). College, London, November 7, 2001.
4. The argument here is expanded in
“An Introduction to the Visual Studies That Is Not
145 The Place of the Image
I think this subject is very much to do with risk taking. We may be overly
concerned with having the correct argument all the time. I don’t know whether
it’s sometimes useful to fail, to understand things through failure.6
James Elkins: Images would then fail in a different way than texts.
Sunil Manghani: Yes, perhaps. When we were talking with Tom Mitchell about the
metapicture, it occurred to me that metapictures open things up, rather than
closing them down. It can be a struggle to deal with that.7
Keith Moxey: I think it might be useful to rehearse the history of visual studies; at least
in the English-language tradition, it came out of cultural studies and has been
haunted by the word. Images have usually been treated as representations, rather
than presentations. The image as, say, a configuration, a presence, a set of formal
proposals has infrequently been the subject of visual studies, which has mainly
been about content: What is the work of images? What do they do? How do
they try to persuade us? What are the ideologies they represent?
We live in a moment where there is a massive turn from that model to some-
thing else. No one, however, is entirely sure what that something else might be.
There are some very interesting theories. There is Boehm’s idea that the figure-
ground principle might be the means by which something called visual logic
might become apparent, and that even if images cannot be taken apart into
semiotic units, they nevertheless have the capacity to make some sort of mean-
ing in a metaphorical sense. There is Bredekamp’s notion that the use of visual
images in the sciences is actually a form of thinking, that it is an alternative to
6. Elkins alludes to various dilemmas acknowledges the book’s fragmentary style, and
regarding the place of the visual in Susan proceeds simply to state “it does not, therefore,
Buck-Morss’s work, which can certainly be cohere.” What appears unacceptable is the fact
understood in terms of risk taking and failure. that Buck-Morss actually wants to incorporate
For example, in commenting on the visual the unreliability of images. It is true that in
sequences in her book Dialectics of Seeing Dreamworlds and Catastrophe she deliberately
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), he notes “the “entertains” the possible nostalgic meaning of
weakness of any series of images largely unsup- the very images she uses as a means to com-
ported by text: it can be read in so many differ- ment upon the comparative role of modernist
ent ways that it tends not to attract discussion.” utopian narratives. As such, Buck-Morss allows
Similarly, regarding Dreamworld and Catastro- her critique to run in different directions before
phe, he argues the images, whilst inserted into coming to “completion” as fashioned by her par-
an extensive text, “are still susceptible to being ticular engagement with the materials. This she
read as signs of nostalgia for failed modern- describes (elsewhere in the interview) as the art
ist utopias,” and so can be read as if “printed of a “living methodology,” very much inspired
in a photography magazine.” Elkins, Visual by the writings of Walter Benjamin. See Susan
Studies: A Skeptical Introduction [New York: Buck-Morss, “Globalization, Cosmopolitan-
Routledge, 2003), 100–101. These problems ism, Politics, and the Citizen,” Journal of Visual
reveal themselves in a review of Dreamworlds Culture 1, no. 3 (2002): 325–40. Buck-Morss
and Catastrophe, where Buck-Morss’s argument provides one clear example of visual studies
is lauded for the attempt to “salvage the revolu- that is markedly different from many of the key
tionary critique of capitalism,” but nonetheless texts discussed throughout the week. (Note,
criticized for being ambiguous and “not quite these remarks derive from a commentary given
sustained.” Nick Stone, “Hail to the Revolution- in Manghani, Image Critique and the Fall of the
ary Critique!,” Radical Philosophy 107 (2001): Berlin Wall [Bristol: Intellect, 2008], a book
48–50. Interestingly, at no point in the review that adopts a similar approach—and indeed
is there any comment on the book’s analytical expresses its indebtedness to Buck-Morss’s
use of images (and this despite being explicitly ideas and concerns for visual studies.)
referred to in the book’s introduction as part 7. See Section 4 of the Seminars.
of its philosophical method). The reviewer
using language in that context. There is Hans Belting’s proposal that images have
always been with us, that there is an anthropology of images, that we can’t live
without them, that every culture has them. And finally, the most animistic of
these approaches is Tom Mitchell’s, who argues that images have a life of their
own, that they are secondary agents in the lives of humans.
These theories are fascinating. But the idea that images on their own, such
as those in the book Dreamworld and Catastrophe, can amount to anything,
can make meaning, is problematic. Sometimes combinations of texts and
images work very well: I recall Douglas Crimp’s book On the Museum’s Ruins.
He worked with Louise Lawler, who produced a photo-essay.8 That worked very
well, because images and text had nothing to do with one another, and yet they
complemented each other very well. If such project is going to work—if you’re
going to line up images, one after another—then there is going to have to be a
principle that animates the sequence. I think Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas,
which proposes analogies on the level of form, worked; but it is difficult to line
up images in such a way that they actually speak to one another.
James Elkins: Or, in the most fundamental instance, it’s difficult to let a single image,
in an actual visual studies or art history text, “speak” in the sense that it can
disrupt, delay, derail, criticize, undermine, or otherwise alter what the text
proposes. I think moments like those are very few and far between, and what
actually happens is images follow along and illustrate, exemplify, and—as you
say—represent.
Whitney Davis: It seems there’s a tension between an interest in argumentation or theo-
rization being rooted exclusively or in large part through images understood as
configurations that are visible to us, and what seems to be a consistent philo-
sophic interest of a good deal of contemporary visual culture studies, namely that
images are somehow ontologically outside being true or false. We have heard that
claim in various forms, but it is worth remembering that in earlier theories of
visuality there was a strong sense that images are, ontologically, the sorts of things
that can be corrected. For example, there is Gombrich’s theory of the schema,
which involves a claim, internal to it, that the schemas of human vision, which
are then replicated in the schematic construction or constitution of a given pic-
ture, are ontologically the sorts of things that are susceptible to being made more
naturalistic or realistic: they can be corrected and transformed in light of a con-
frontation between the visual projection of the human brain and something else.
There has also been a long-standing interest in the possibility that images can
be enhanced: they can be made more intersubjectively intelligible; they can be
transformed in light of political critique, or moral challenge. There, too, there
has to be some criterion by which the image can be interestingly adjusted.
I think one of the issues for contemporary visual studies is to resolve its
views on this problem. In visual culture studies, of the sort we are familiar with
8. Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cam-

bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
in the cultural sociology of imaging, there seems to be a claim that the object
of visual studies is the critique of images, such that a transformation or correc-
tion of visualities can be attained, on some principled basis. (Perhaps a political
basis, or some other: but a principled basis.) Yet there persists the opposite claim,
that there is no method by which the image can be adjusted in that sort of way.
It seems to me we are being called to a foundational question.
James Elkins: Whitney, I think you’re absolutely right to point to the need to decide
how, and whether, images can be corrected. In practice, the claims and prac-
tices run the other way: Tom Mitchell, Horst Bredekamp, the Barthes of that
essay, and Susan Buck-Morss all propose ways that images can “correct”—alter
or transform—text.
Whitney Davis: It may be premature to try to resolve it philosophically or analytically;
this may be a problem in Bildwissenschaft. I have been interested to hear, in Lisa’s
seminar and elsewhere, just how much we are learning about this problem from
a very fine-tuned investigation of imaging practices, and for claims about the
informational richness of images.9
Lisa Cartwright: Whitney, can you provide some examples of practices that provide
corrective, interpretive adjustments of the image? And some examples of the
other position—
Whitney Davis: The one in which it’s taken for granted there couldn’t be a principled
adjustment, that any adjustment would be arbitrary and constitute just another
visual object?
Lisa Cartwright: Yes.
Whitney Davis: Well, there seems to be, in some approaches to new media, the view
that the greater distribution of a particular image, and the response to that image
coming in from users, lead in some interesting sense to an image that has greater
intersubjective value, for other purposes, such as community building, or socio-
subjective psycho-sexual-social exchange, democratization, reconstruction of
public culture on the global stage regarding matters of citizenship and polity.
That view is predicated on the assumption that the image is being enhanced
by the ways it is distributed. But at the same time, there may be a philosophi-
cal tendency in visual studies to suppose that such an enhancement of value is
constitutively impossible, in the very nature of imaging, and that these kinds of
hopes are utopian, and will never be realized ontologically.
James Elkins: One of the most fundamental issues we have encountered this week is
one we have been assigning to the German-language and Anglo-American tra-
ditions. The texts we’ve been reading from the German-language tradition are
committed to a sense of the image in which it functions as if it had meaning—

Whitney Davis: That phrase is a cipher for the contrast I am drawing attention to. The
“as if ” allows you to say, It has no meaning, and yet it has meaning.
James Elkins: Yes. I’d like to point to a dis-symmetry in the availability of ways to
articulate the two positions. In our 2008 event, What Is an Image?, we encoun-
tered an interesting impasse.10 For most of a day, we were mulling over whether
or not an image can contradict another image. This is a tremendously difficult
puzzle if you subscribe to a certain version of Bildwissenschaft; it is easier if you
come at it from the vantage of, say, Leo Steinberg, for whom the answer would
be, Yes, of course. (I am thinking of his Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, where
copies of Leonardo’s painting are taken to be wholly capable of contradicting
one another.)11
Whitney Davis: In visual culture studies there seems to be a strong view that the very
aim of cultural studies in its moment of visual critique is to provide foundations
for the constitution of new images that will indeed successfully critique previous
images and visualities.
Keith Moxey: Whitney, I hate to disagree with you again, but I suppose it is one of the
good consequences of having different philosophical positions on the same panel.
The idea that visual studies depends on setting images right just staggers the
imagination. What visual studies has done is to look at the activities that images
perform in the service of capitalism, patriarchy, or racial inequality. Not in the
hope of setting the images straight: these images are obnoxious and deplorable,
but they might not be commented on if it weren’t for the work of visual stud-
ies. Really what we’re talking about here is ideology criticism. The people who
are critical of images have a position. They aren’t setting images right; they fully
acknowledge that there is no right or wrong. It is a contest of positions, of voices.
Whitney Davis: Yes, that may be a fundamental difference between your view and my
view. And it may be a correct characterization of some trends in visual studies.
But I wouldn’t want visual studies to be merely a contest of opinion. I have an
instinctive reaction against that view.
Sunil Manghani: I would want to agree with both Keith and Whitney here. In Image
Critique, I consider ideology explicitly by focusing on the fall of the Berlin
Wall—and all that that event sums up. However, I purposely didn’t want to
simply overturn the dominant readings of the event, particularly, for example,
what I refer to as a theme of celebration and its connection to a so-called end of
history. For me, one of the key moments in the book is a reference to Margaret
Thatcher’s response to the news media footage of the event. As the British prime
minister at the time, she steps out of Downing Street the morning after and
simply urges we watch our televisions. I describe her as having a certain visual
10. James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What 11. Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last
Is an Image?, Stone Art Theory Institutes 2 Supper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Stein-
(University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer- berg’s claims about images in that book are
sity Press, 2011), especially Section 2 of the analyzed in the Second Introduction to Elkins
Seminars. et al., Theorizing Visual Studies.
shrewdness in this, in letting the images speak for themselves. She says herself,
she doesn’t need to say anything, but rather just let people “see what freedom
means.” The problem in the book, then, is how can other ideologies, which were
equally part of the situation, be seen to exist? In the face of the joyous scenes of
the fall of the Wall, it wasn’t good enough to simply explain other ideologies.
The question is, how can they be articulated with equal force and emotion—
in this case visually? In Barthes’ terms, the point is not to simply rely on the
work of the mythmaker (e.g., the journalist) or the mythologist (the critic or
scholar), but to actually “entertain” what goes on in the reading of the myth.
In its moment and its modality. It is the point I try to make in the piece I gave
us to read this week on making metapictures political. In the case of the Berlin
Wall, there are a few films I have found interesting, though only as offering the
very beginnings of a response.12
Gustav Frank: I think there is a vicious circle of picture theory, at least in the sense of
picturing theory. An analysis of this notion can lead us to a better understanding
of the concepts that inform our theorizations and even our depictions of visual
and nonvisual, of sight and other senses.
There are various possibilities regarding the relation of picture and theory.
Whitney, you mentioned schemata. Jim, you mentioned the idea of images
leading or affecting argument in visual studies (I would call that a metaphoric
relation). Keith, you mentioned the idea of reducing images to merely show-
ing. I think a reflection on the concepts we use to picture picture theory, often
unconsciously, would be a productive theme for visual studies. Shouldn’t we
talk about our different concepts, and see how they overlap, and whether they
contradict one another?
James Elkins: I entirely agree, a conversation on picturing picture theory, if we want to
put it that way, is crucial. For my part, I wouldn’t think of my examples as meta-
phoric. For me, the general problem is: How seriously can visual studies take the
visual? Can we permit the visual to guide, distract, slow, and even undermine
our theories and explanations? Probably not, because we’re scholars! Even con-
temporary fiction writers who incorporate images seldom let those images do
anything more than illustrate or distract: I’m thinking of Jonathan Safran Foer,
Susan Howe, Tan Lin, Orhan Pamuk, Paula Fox, Anne Carson, and most prom-
inently W. G. Sebald. So I think my picturing of the problem might be, in the
end, psychological or psychoanalytic: What anxieties prevent us from letting
images ruin our texts? That would be an extreme, “postdisciplinary” way of put-
ting it. More domestically, with some faithfulness to the discipline, the question
would be, What desires prompt us to keep images under control in our writing?
Michael Holly: Gustav, I would put what you are saying in even plainer language. Jim
said that the 2008 Stone Art Theory Seminar discussed whether even images
12. Manghani, “Making Metapictures Politi-

cal: Public Screenings of the Fall of the Berlin
Wall,” Northern Lights 7, no. 1 (2009): 113–31.
could contradict one another. I would push it to another register, and ask, Can
intellectual progenitors contradict one another? But of course. Visual studies
was born from two parents, who had been warring about how to raise the chil-
dren: British cultural studies and Anglo-American art history. One of them, art
history, was fairly certain about its truth claims; and the other challenged the
idea that one could even locate truth. What pushed art history into becoming
visual studies, in the 1980s and 1990s, was that most of us began to be aware
of differing interpretations and methodologies, and, moreover, we began to be
aware that images were also teaching us how to see. So we began to ask: How do
images make us think? Philosophers of art history such as Hubert Damisch were
claiming, “The picture thinks.” All of this has evolved into a profound awareness
that images might also be active agents, secondary agents, with which to argue.
They pose structures, arguments, compositions, and ideologies with which to
quarrel. We rub against one another, even in the world of traditional art history.
At least in my corner of visual studies, that’s where the going gets interesting.
Sunil Manghani: I agree; I don’t necessarily see the idea that images operate outside
truth and falsity. We can think about more than one thing at once, so it’s not
necessarily a matter of true or false, but of a complexity of things.
When we start talking about how to put images together, one method comes
from artists. Artists seem to get on with asserting things with images quite hap-
pily on their own.
James Elkins: It’s a pity, I think, that the conceptualization of the making of art still
hasn’t made many inroads in visual studies or art history. There, among many
other things, we’d find models of the sorts of active images that interest me:
images that contradict, assert, and argue, images that carelessly undermine what-
ever sense their maker (read: their scholar) hoped to make of them; images that
are misguided; images that are stupid.
Whitney Davis: I’d be interested in hearing an account of what devolves from the prop-
osition that a viciously racist stereotype of another human being is not, in an
important sense, false.
[Pause, then laughter.]
Keith Moxey: Well, if there’s a ping, there has to be a pong. The pong would go some-
thing like this: it’s not that the racist image is false; it’s all too persuasive, and
consonant with the attitudes of many parts of the population. It’s that it needs
to be contested by another opinion. The other opinion, the one that would call
the racist image into question, would call the image false, just as the racist would
call people who disagree with him false, or misguided. Truth and falsity become
significant rhetorical games. What we have here is a conflict of opinions, not
truth and falsity.
Whitney Davis: So ontologically, in that thesis, there is an interesting philosophy of

the image as possessing “truthiness.” Remember the objection to George Bush’s
representations? These claims to the truth of visualizations, both discursive and
pictorial, are “truthy” by nature. If that’s true, then they must have some “falsi-
ness,” a territory over which we can have interesting discussions.
Keith Moxey: We can agree on that level, yes.
[Laughter.]
Lisa Cartwright: In teaching racist images, my biggest problem is not saying that an
image is true or false. The real job for us is to show the multiplicity of uses to
which images are put in any given historical or synchronic setting. The work for
me is to bring that to the sociologically old-fashioned idea of the truth or falsity
of images. I need to work also with my faculty, who are very focused on ideas of
truth—especially sociologists, and those who work on legal questions.
We have done a lot of work in visual culture studies, queer studies, and
feminist studies on the question of the subject. We’re beyond the point where we
think of the subject as unitary or even binary. So we might want to investigate
why we ascribe to the image some kind of singularity of subjectivity when we
give it agency. If we think of images having agency that aspires to subjectivity,
then what is that subjectivity? There is a queerness to it, a multiplicity to it. That
has huge implications for visual studies.
James Elkins: Tom Mitchell would like that, I bet. That problematic passage in the essay
“What Do Pictures Want?” that ends with the notion that pictures might not
want much of anything is certainly pluralist in a compatible way.13
I think it is entirely logically appropriate that the initial question about the
place of images, and whether visual studies can make good on its promise to
show images working, thinking, theorizing, and arguing, has come down to the
question of the truth or falsity of images. It is logically appropriate, but I really
wonder if it will find an audience in visual studies. In my experience, visual stud-
ies is so deeply agnostic and culturally relativist regarding truth that it cannot
have a position on this issue. I even wonder if the sheer distance between Lisa
and Whitney, for example, will even be visible.
I hope, in a future iteration of visual studies, we will let images be free to
ruin our hard-won disciplinary authority.

11. E N V O I
These last few pages are also transcribed from the closing roundtable, in which the
participants pondered what the week had accomplished, and talked about ideas that
had, for one reason or another, been omitted. The portions transcribed here are about
people who hadn’t been mentioned during the week, and whether they might be
usefully described as visual studies scholars; and, at the end, about the institutional
limits to the growth of visual studies.
Lisa Cartwright: A number of names have been predominant in the course of our
conversations this week that aren’t the names I would choose. One name that
has come up a lot, in mostly negative statements, is Nick Mirzoeff. His work
has been strongly identified with a particular characterization of the political.1
So I wanted to signal this, because if what we’ve been doing is presented as a
history of the field, there are many, many absences. Just off the top of my head,
there is Amelia Jones, whose work in feminism and visual studies was not about
making feminism a niche area of visual studies, but about acknowledging the
fact that feminism has been foundational to visual studies in Europe and the
United States.2 So I think we have to be careful about thinking this week would
be adequate as a history of visual studies.
James Elkins: Just speaking for myself, I certainly don’t think what we’ve done is ade-
quate. I just mean that our conversations, especially Gustav’s contributions,
point to a different sense of what might be done with the historical record. We’ve
been looking back in a different way.
Whitney Davis: Lisa, I wanted to ask if your sense of the pedagogical horizon. Has your
work in visual studies directed pedagogic initiatives in a new way for you?
Lisa Cartwright: It’s not so much a matter of pedagogic initiatives, as that it’s been
foundational to my sense of pedagogy, as someone who came out of a visual
studies tradition. A few times, when we talked about politics, it’s been a question
of whether or not we should be at the barricades, or whether what we say here
has no immediate effect in the outside world. I think the classroom is the space
where things one says can have an immediate effect. I think about what I want
to teach them, and how it informs my scholarly research.
Paul Frosh: I think the question of the alternate histories of visual studies is very
important for the future development of the field, especially considering the

2. Jones’s Feminism and Visual Culture
Reader (London: Routledge, 2003) is mentioned
in passing in Section 3 of the Seminars.
International Association for Visual Culture Studies. One of the things I wrote
in my passionate and slightly whiny letter of application was that I could not
understand a visual studies that had very little to say about what is probably
the dominant postwar audiovisual medium, television. I was thinking narrowly
about what visual studies might be, and coming here I’ve realized there’s a whole
list of people I’d want to put in visual studies: Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel—
Lisa Cartwright: Yes.
Paul Frosh: William Uricchio, John Ellis, Daniel Dayan, a whole list of people I think
are important. My research includes them, and my syllabi. The question is
whether they would want to be included.
Lisa Cartwright: Anna McCarthy is literally in a visual studies program!
Paul Frosh: Right, but some of the others might well not want to be put into visual
studies. John Caldwell: maybe, maybe not. It’s not an unequivocal yes for these
people. So the question is: what kinds of conversations could we have that could
bring people like these in? That’s why the International Association for Visual
Culture Studies is very important. On one hand, it’s great to be inclusive; on the
other hand, if everyone then groups around their subspecialties, as happens for
example in communication studies (where health communication, political
communication, and language and social interaction people seldom talk to one
another), then it’s not clear if there is a coherent conversation.
James Elkins: I’d note, in this regard, Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell’s new collabora-
tion, The Handbook of Visual Culture, which includes television, film, architecture,
and a wide range of contributors, including writers as different as Lisa and John
Onians.3 It will be arguably the most heterogeneous compilation under the name
of visual culture. My project, Theorizing Visual Studies, will be just as diverse, but
in different ways. Perhaps that’s a future of the field: ambiguous inclusiveness.
Whitney Davis: Paul, just to add to that, I don’t know if there could be a case in which
all borders are open. If some are open, others will be closed. In relation to tele-
vision, which hasn’t seen the kind of representation you might have expected:
if the focus in visual studies is to expand toward the present day, or modern
media, even further than it already has (because some would say that the privi-
leging of modern media, from photography forward, is one of the difficulties
of visual studies), then one effect might be to drive people with other interests
elsewhere—interests such as premodern cultures, archaeology, and others, which
are, for obvious reasons, underrepresented in contemporary media.
Keith Moxey: We may be in a transition to other forms of critique. The kinds of cri-
tique that informed people in the first generation of visual studies were ethnicity,
3. Heywood and Sandywell, Handbook

of Visual Culture (London: Berg, 2012); their
previous collaboration was Interpreting Visual
Culture: Exploration in the Hermeneutics of the
Visual (New York: Routledge, 1999).
155 Envoi
gender, and class; but as the field develops, we see new axes of interpretation,
including global warming and globalization. The things that give our time an
apocalyptic flavor might become the focus of visual studies.
Whitney Davis: For the first time, you and I agree, Keith.
[Laughter.]
Keith Moxey: I’m glad that’s on the record!
James Elkins: Keith, it’s worth noting that Nick Mirzoeff’s introduction to the second
edition of his Visual Culture Reader makes a similar point; he quotes Kobena
Mercer saying that the triad “race, gender, and class” is a “mantra,” and he says
it needs “revision.” But it’s interesting that his choices of new subjects—at the
time, it was the decoding of the new habit of invoking race and gender in dis-
ingenuous and knowing ways, and more recently, it’s empowered looking in the
face of counterinsurgency and other institutionalized forms of visuality—aren’t
your choices.4
Gustav Frank: Paul, to your question regarding conferences and specialties. Do you
think we should change our institutional configurations? We have talked a lot
this week about methods and theories, but not much of institutions. As Benja-
min says, the book is no longer the proper form. So perhaps research that is no
longer focusing on monographs or peer-reviewed papers might be in order.
Paul Frosh: There are remedies. We put one in place in my own department . . . it’s a
difficult problem, because you’re dealing with people who are on career paths,
who want to publish in particular places, who have tenure pressures.
Whitney Davis: I am deeply attracted to collaborative practices in science and social sci-
ence communities; I’d love to have students do collaborative PhDs; I admire the
lab model, although I’m well aware of the critical work that has been done on
laboratory practice. I’m attracted to the idea of teaching that way, in that model;
but I am concerned that there may be features of visual studies, as opposed to
other cultural studies, that may disable those kinds of collaborations. There may,
for example, be a contradiction between the categorical insistence on the primal
phenomenology of the presence of the image for a beholder, on the one hand,
and an emphasis on intersubjective communicability of experience, and debate
about it, on the other. That’s more a feeling I have than an argument, in the same
way as I have a worry about traditional art history, that its emphasis on the close
looking at the art object was, for all its importance, exclusionary, because it was
so inimitable and hard to communicate.
Michael Holly: That is a place where real politics is yet to be accomplished. University
departments belong to the prehistory of the old “new art history.” Little has
changed, at least in America, and, I gather, in Europe, now that it is modeling
4. Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture,”

in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., edited by
Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 9.
itself on the American system, regarding the kinds of collectivities called depart-
ments. You are still judged, if you’re in art history, by a kind of scheme that was
laid down, in this country, in the 1950s, or maybe even the 1940s. There is room
for political action there, I think. I have been associated for some time with an
association called RIHA (Research Institutes in Art History) in Europe, and they
are very activist-minded because of certain decrees coming down from different
cultural ministries about how to evaluate scholars, and how to get funding for
waning humanities departments. There is room for politicking there, because if
these systems do not change, I don’t think visual studies will have much hope to
be ecumenical in its possibilities.
James Elkins: For me the most important institutional issue is the relation of visual
studies to the making of art. The relation between art history and studio art
teaching remains, I think, the single most important unresolved issue in the
institutional politics and even the self-understanding of art history. There are a
few institutions where art historians and studio art instructors collaborate, but
there are many more where the two are more or less amicably separate. There are
no interesting theorizations of the intersection, as far as I am concerned.
The subject continues to be largely unremarked in visual studies. In my own
program, here at the School of the Art Institute, we have an MA program in
visual studies that involves art practice, and a proposal for a PhD that would be
one of the first that encourages, if not requires, students to have a practice; but
even in our program, we have been unable to conceptualize the intersection.
This subject seems to me to be a really fascinating, undertheorized horizon for
visual studies, and it is particularly pertinent since we’ve been spending a lot of
time this week with Bildwissenschaft, where the phenomenological encounter—
and this is to your point about laboratories, Whitney—has no internal logic that
prevents it from engaging the making of visual objects.
Sunil Manghani: Also, it can be a different kind of making, different to what we might
associate with a practice-based degree. When I teach, in a media studies pro-
gram, I’m working with students with very little, if any, background in making.
I ask them to create their own contemporary version of Richard Hamilton’s well-
known piece Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing?
(1956). In part it is an exercise to get students to using some of the fundamental
tools in Photoshop, but also it is presented to them as an intellectual puzzle
about the notion of visual culture. Crucially, I’m not looking for complete, pol-
ished end results. In fact, given the need to cover in class both theoretical and
practical aspects, there simply isn’t the time for this over the duration of just a
semester. Underneath the making is a visual “reading” and critique. It’s an open
dialogue. I try to get my students to make something, but I’m not focused on
the thing itself, rather the hope that they become more conversant between and
with thinking and making.
157 Envoi
James Elkins: There are any number of reasons why it might not seem advisable, perti-
nent, or helpful to practice the making of visual objects, but I find that they are
often contingent. What is internal, and unexamined, is the reason why a plural-
ity of practices do not explore making.
Lisa Cartwright: Jim, do you think that the engagement with making might be more
widespread? In my department there is a visual studies course for our nine hun-
dred majors.
James Elkins: But do your nine hundred majors make art?
Lisa Cartwright: No, I’m not talking about the practice-based PhDs, I’m talking about
visual culture programs that are near practice programs, and there are more in
the UK—
James Elkins: Yes, I follow this subject, and I agree there are examples of intersections,
or encounters, of practice and scholarship. What’s missing is the theorization.
It happens in an increasingly constrained educational literature, which is focused
on refining and developing ideas of knowledge and research in university-wide
contexts.5 It seems to me a different kind of theorization is needed to make sense
of what happens when a visual studies writing practice, for example, encounters
a visual practice. When the scholars make art, for example. Or when artists pres-
ent their work as visual studies scholarship. But that’s for the future.
5. See, for example, Michael Biggs and coedited with Frances Whitehead, Stone Art
Henrik Karlsson, eds., Routledge Companion to Theory Institutes 3 (University Park: Pennsyl-
Research in the Arts (London: Routledge, 2011); vania State University Press, 2012), addresses
a volume in this series, What Do Artists Know?, this.
ASSESSMENTS
P R E FA C E
Sunil Manghani
As with other volumes in this series, it is difficult for a brief introduction such as
this to do justice to the many and varied voices, ideas, and critiques that come
through in the collection of Assessments that follows. The purpose here is cer-
tainly not to assess the Assessments, but simply to offer some guidance; to aid the
reader in navigating the entries by highlighting running themes and to identify
links or tensions between individual commentaries. As I suggest in my introduc-
tion to this book, visual culture/studies can be said to have properly coalesced as
a field of study in the mid-1990s, in gaining traction as a keyword for publishers.
Yet frequently the field is characterized by its own self-analysis, with the ripples
of the October questionnaire being felt a good decade (and more) after its publi-
cation. Farewell to Visual Studies did not seek to reawaken these debates as such,
but to assess how far we’d progressed. Framed this way, the Assessments collected
here are every bit as revealing as the Seminar sessions.
Akin to the heated debates around the emergence of a term such as “post-
modern” and the institutionalization of the interdisciplinary field of cultural
studies, visual culture and visual studies has had to put up with perpetual ques-
tioning, being asked just what it is and how it differs from other subjects and
approaches. As Christensen describes in the opening Assessment, the Seminars
are “captured” by a discursive field, made up of the headings “Visual Studies,”
“Visual Culture Studies,” “Bildwissenschaft,” and “Art History,” all of which
brings about a “high degree of self-awareness in the domain.” Reflexivity is a
recurring motif, and the outlier of a persistent tension. Respondents each have
to grapple with the problem that to say farewell to something requires knowl-
edge of what it is that you’re sending off. Yet giving shape to visual studies fre-
quently means to focus on a certain “vitality” that Alloa suggests is drawn from
“its transdisciplinary, anti-institutional momentum”; the very same momentum
that Tom Mitchell suggests (at the close of Seminar 6) we might do well to hold
onto for as long as possible.
The idea of trans- and interdisciplinarity is a vexed one. As a symptom of the
problem, the Assessments are almost all written out from an explicit disciplin-
ary position. Andrew’s reflections, however, on signing up to graduate study at
University of Chicago in the mid-1990s recall the “thrill of visual studies [that]
came less from the antagonism of inserting new objects into traditional dis-
ciplines than from the new conversations this allowed.” This optimistic view
chimes with Nicholas Mirzoeff’s writings at the time, which characterized visual
culture more as a tactic than an academic discipline. As an “interactive” model of
visual culture studies, Mirzoeff’s account drew upon concepts of intertextuality

and interdisciplinarity (with direct reference to Barthes’ seminal article “From
Work to Text”). Paraphrasing Barthes, Mirzoeff defined interdisciplinary study
as creating a “new object,” which belonged to no one single discipline. Arguably,
it is this conception of visual culture (as greater than the sum of its parts) that
is the “supplement”—the give and the take—that pervades the Seminars and is
reflected again in the Assessments.
Similarly, Tom Mitchell’s delight in framing visual culture studies as an
“indiscipline” is another way of describing a tactic; a means to purposefully
foreground and challenge the “turbulence” or “incoherence” that surrounds the
boundaries of disciplines. Indiscipline—to remain difficult—is to prevent fall-
ing into the halfway, in-betweenness of the “inter-” of interdisciplinarity. Yet,
we might say, the true difficulty of interdisciplinary work is whether or not we
want to come out of our discipline, and if so, we need to ask for how long and
whether we plan a return. In this sense, it is perhaps less important to define what
interdisciplinarity is than to consider its processes and temporality. Barthes’s for-
mulation in “From Work to Text” is easily misread due it its spatial reference.
He writes of “that space where no language has a hold over any other . . . that
social space which leaves no language safe . . . nor any subject of the enuncia-
tion in position as judge.” Visual studies has been defiant in wishing to leave no
language safe, yet, as these Assessments show, it is not easy to get away from sites
of exchange. As Berger puts it in his Assessment, “ ‘[e]xplaining’ visual studies
necessarily entails privileging certain origin narratives over others and declaring
a winner amongst the many competing approaches currently in circulation.”
The problem of privilege raised by Berger is brought into sharp focus by
Zarzycka when she suggests that “[t]he names and references missing [in the
Seminars] spoke as loudly about the field as those that were frequently quoted
and cited.” It is a problem that echoes through a number of the Assessments.
Zarzycka herself seeks to advocate “an expansion of the visual that engages
broader issues in sensory perception,” while similarly, Gracyk urges a more
nuanced understanding of the “aesthetic object,” whereupon we “might be ready
to examine aesthetic response as reflecting social and biological imperatives.” The
identifying of omissions or the need for greater nuance is understandably often
the central focus of the Assessments. Orell argues broadly that if “visual studies
is to be taken seriously as a challenge to and beyond the discipline of art history,
then the inclusion of even more voices from other disciplinary backgrounds,
also from outside film and media studies, may have proven productive.” Orell
suggests, for example, that science historians, anthropologists, and area studies
specialists would have been helpful to extend the frames of reference. Kılınç and
Linder, in their respective Assessments, both suggest that architecture has been
left out of the discussions; Emmer bemoans the lack of attention to science stud-
ies and specifically mathematics; while Holert suggests that conflation is made of
“visuality” and “images.” In prising these apart, he suggests that “visual studies”
163 Assessments
might even be named “visibility studies.” Weissman argues that “digital humani-
ties or some such as of yet unnamed method or space or program” is necessary
for genuine transdisciplinary research, suggesting that more attention be given
to the contemporary context of new technologies and data. “[S]tudents and
scholars are increasingly asked to produce not only texts,” writes Weissman, “but
also images, data structures, maps, charts, and other information-based visu-
alizations.” While he couches it in a very different narrative, Drucker appears
to envisage a future similar to that of Weissman. In marking out a comparison
between the “theory-divided departments” that led to the “demise” of traditional
art history and the “farewell” to visual studies tracked by the Seminars, Drucker
suggests that “[v]isual studies is ahead of us, not behind, but it will be formu-
lated from different sources and with other aspirations than the field whose
demise [the Seminars] detailed.”
Yet a deeper underlying concern is perhaps the handling and/or the omis-
sion of history. Schwartz is sympathetic to a “near chorus of pleas,” seemingly
voiced in a “void,” that raised “concern about the presentism of the field.” Her
concern is that the history of visual studies, “summoned and simultaneously dis-
missed,” is in the end “too incoherent and arbitrary to reject or admit.” On a spe-
cific note relating to how the theories of the Frankfurt school entered the canon
of visual culture studies, Stiegler refers to a certain orthodoxy whereby “there are
very few texts quoted continually and others missing. Benjamin is the classical
example for the repetitive canon, Kracauer for the quite astonishing missing
reception.” Nonetheless, the opening seminar, led by Gustav Frank, touched a
chord with those attending the Seminars precisely because of its nuanced han-
dling of history. It set a precedent for the remaining sessions, seeking out both
greater breadth and depth in our understanding of the scope, nature, and his-
tories of visual studies (and/or visuelle Kultur). Zahler, Günzel, Dotzler, Van der
Meulen, and Haxthausen each pick up and develop threads from this opening
session.
Grønstad notes that despite the near-synchronicity of the Farewell Semi-
nars and the launch of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies
(in 2010), there is quite a distance in tenor and understanding, particularly in
articulating the relationship of the visual and the political (Vågnes develops the
point in her account of reading the seminar transcript while also attending the
second Association conference, Now! Visual Culture, in 2012). A common thread
in a number of the Assessments relates directly to how visual studies is framed by
the political, and vice versa. Reinhardt picks up on two different tensions: “The
contradictory pull between rapid and (in the seminar’s idiom) ‘tactical’ engage-
ment with the pressing issues of the moment, on the one hand, and slower, less
instrumental, more open-ended and reflective enquiries on the other.” He makes
the point that the two are too easily and erroneously “aligned with the difference
between research that is motivated by or significantly concerned with politics
and research that is, or takes itself to be, apolitical.” Reinhardt reaches towards
a more fluid understanding. In a similar vein, Klonk draws attention to the
debates raised around the Eikones project in Basel and Bildwissenschaft more
broadly. While preferring to render the term as “visual history” (Bildgeschichte),
Klonk notes how the “prefix Bild does not refer to a two-dimensional picture
but rather to anything shaped by the human hand (gebildet), thus freeing us to
investigate any artefact from any period.” Her formulation leads her to range
over various histories, and to argue that “political commitment and attention
to the specifics of the images and their bearers are not, in principle, mutually
exclusive.”
The need to understand and develop visual studies within a global context
is also an important theme. The Seminars brought together a wide range of
scholars of different fields, working in different geographical contexts, including
the UK, the United States, northern, central, and southern Europe, the Middle
East, and Asia. Yet inevitably this cannot be said to be fully representative, and,
regardless of the range of voices assembled at any one event, there is always
an ongoing need to think and speak from multiple perspectives. The Assess-
ments offer some further elaborations in terms of placing visual studies. Escande
offers useful insights into the development of visual studies in the Chinese con-
text, pointing out the value of adopting Western models of theoretical enquiry,
yet equally noting the need for methods to “evolve and take into account the
Chinese theoretical and practical tradition too.” Similarly, in focusing on visual
studies in the context of Latin America, Rubí argues how plurality and diver-
sity are necessary for “new ways of thinking and rediscovering visual studies
and Bildwissenschaft which depend on their responsiveness towards the visual
and historical heritage of other cultural worlds.” Along these lines, Hernández-
Navarro offers a point of view specific to Spain, but equally urges us to think
globally. He evokes the image of the Möbius strip, which has a single surface
(no inside or outside), as a means to think about “different traditions, histories
and versions in a world . . . in which spaces and times cross, overlap, and clash.”
Interestingly, a break in this suggested single surface might be said to occur in
France. Schwartz, for example, notes the porosity of French thinkers evoked
during the Seminars (“despite the fact Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lacan
dominated much of the first wave of American university formation of the field
in the 1980s”). Decobecq writes specifically of the need for “an account of visual
studies that would teach the French audience a thing or two about this multifari-
ous endeavor.” Part of the problem, she suggests, is a difficulty in translating the
word “politics.” As she puts it, “the English word is not only densely textured but
also elastic, stretchable to a point that no French equivalent can accommodate.
‘Politics,’ or even worse, ‘cultural politics,’ has no perfect match nor satisfactory
equivalent in [French].”
Taking account of all these different points of view—the clashes, the com-
parisons, the hopes, the disappointments, the new avenues, and the multiple
histories—there remains perhaps one simple fact: we just can’t seem to let go of
165 Assessments
visual studies. Not necessarily because we are duty bound to what it purport-
edly studies, but because we can never truly take the visual out of studying.
As Latimer puts it, “Our incapacity to adequately translate the visual into words
is both what gives visuality such power and what lends our best efforts to ana-
lyze visual events a kind of precarious grace. Farewell to visual studies? I don’t
think so.” Buoyed, then, by visual studies’ apparent “grace,” we might choose to
follow Notaro’s advice: “Rather than agonizing further on issues of definition
and genealogy, contemporary visual studies would do better to focus on the
‘making of images’ and ‘on the activities that images perform.’ ” With this in
mind, Notaro takes up the understanding of “farewell” as “fare well,” which, she
suggests, revealed early on in the Seminars “that behind the discussion always
already existed an aspiration towards affirmation rather than loss.”
CAPTURED BY THE DISCOURSE
Hans Dam Christensen
Under the headings “Visual Studies,” “Visual Culture Studies,” “Bildwissenschaft,”

and “Art History,” a discursive field is framed in the conversations in the Farewell
to Visual Studies Seminars. As is well known, a discourse mirrors a social order
at the same time that it marks or produces one. The ways, objects, phenomena,
thoughts, and feelings are made discursive objects; they do not exist in them-
selves, but relate to existing ways of producing meaning. Correspondingly, the
field of visual studies does not exist in itself, but is reproduced and rearranged
through the discourse. As a social arena, the conversations thus provide each par-
ticipant with a spectacular opportunity to demarcate the field through rivalries
and alliances with other participants.
As it is, the field circumscribed by the four headings is marked by a pro-
ductive culture of discursive conflicts. The abundance of readers, introductory
books, journals, national and international associations, conferences and study
programs as well as other demarcations which reflect on visual studies is a symp-
tom of this culture. In one way or another, these publications and institutional
settings pose a paradox for this field that frequently claims to be either interdis-
ciplinary, postdisciplinary, indisciplinary, or transdisciplinary. The conversations
add another piece to this disciplinary confusion.
Even if the curriculum and structure do just as much to frame the field as
the readers and introductory books, however, the design of the Seminars is dif-
ferent. The typical genres, in particular the peer-reviewed article, which are so
important in academia today are supplemented by a transcribed symposium,
which is no longer a drinking party but has become a discussion forum between
committed and proficient scholars.
From this perspective, it is tempting to look into the blind spots and dilem-
mas of the discourse, the disciplinary axioms and imperatives—borrowing con-
cepts that point in different philosophical directions, but nevertheless circle
about the same action: revealing the (more or less) unsaid. One might argue that
“critique of ideology” is a related term, but that would not be forward-looking.
Several times during the conversations, it appears that the time to question the
“critique of ideology” has come. These recurring negative mentions clearly indi-
cate that this sort of critique does not belong to the avant-garde of visual studies
(and being a social historian is clearly something one grows away from, it also
appears).
Do other dilemmas, blind spots, beliefs, presumptions, or even displace-
ments surface in the conversations? Certainly, the “farewell” of the title mirrors
167 Assessments
the high degree of self-awareness in the domain. One can expect the future
emergence of concepts such as “postvisual studies” and “new visual culture stud-
ies,” if they have not shown up already. This is a positive thing, because as long
as battles over the meaning of “visual studies” are going on, no one has gained
control of the terms yet—or the terms have not yet become so lifeless that no
one cares anymore.
The above-mentioned aspects are of course of minor significance in com-
parison with some of the epistemological paradoxes of the conversations. I can
see at least four partly overlapping dilemmas that are touched upon, but are dif-
ficult to put into words because they are so embedded in the discourses of the
field. They have been addressed several times before, but they seem to flee into
other layers of the discourse or be overshadowed by following links of associa-
tions almost every time they appear. Space is limited, but briefly, the dilemmas
go like this:
Foremost, the relation between artworks and all the images that are not art
poses a vital epistemological dilemma. In the conversations James Elkins men-
tions that [d]ull images, repetitive images, images without much desire, uninven-
tive images, unexceptional images, average images, unintellectual images—those
are the things we ignore.”1 He has stated this point before,2 and even though
science images, more or less, are treated as an independent domain of images,
and even though some of the participants in the conversations have published
important works on non-art images, this research is nevertheless an exception in
comparison with the abundance of research on artworks and images that echo
the features of artworks (uniqueness, complexity, etc.).
Next, this dilemma is aggravated by the fact that many artworks do not
appeal primarily to “visuality” or “vision.” Thus, it is most likely due to intellec-
tual idleness and institutional habits that a very large part of the contemporary
works of art and art production is still part of the discourses of visual stud-
ies. The art-historical discourses are saturated with the notion of an apparently
very tight relation between the picture and the artist’s perception. For example,
Wölfflin’s Sehformen and optische Schichten couple together picture and percep-
tion so closely that it indicates a particular visiocentrism in the discourses of
art history, which have been inherited by visual studies. This visiocentrism is
almost a mirror image of Saussure’s phonocentrism, which intrinsically made
sounds and speech superior to written language, according to Derrida’s notori-
ous reading.3 For example, Saussure compared the representation of speech by
written language with the photographic portrait of a person.4 The speech and
sounds guaranteed authenticity and presence, whereas the representation con-
noted artificiality and absence. In the same way, vision and perception guarantee
1. Section 4 of the Seminars. 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguis-

2. For example, James Elkins, The Domain tique générale (1916), edited by Charles Bailly
of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, and Albert Séchehaye (Paris: Grande Bibliothè-
1999), 4. que Payot, 1995), 45.
3. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie
(Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1967), 23.
authenticity and presence, whereas the representation connotes absence. The

longer the distance from the artist’s perception, the lesser the pictorial value.
Of course, plenty of analyses and interpretations in visual studies do not
refer to this tight relation between picture and perception. Nevertheless, it rules
the hierarchy of images. Fascinating images, unique images, desirable images,
inventive images, exceptional images, intellectual images—those that we pri-
marily study—originate in this close tie between perception and picture. These
are considered closer to the notion of the pure “image” than informative, sym-
bolic, or nonperceptual pictures, which ultimately hint at the written alphabetic
signs. This constitutes the third dilemma: if the picture is extricated from the
ties of visual perception and put on a continuum with the notions of the “pure”
written letter and the “pure” picture at the extremities, then the dichotomies and
binaries of word and image, verbality and visuality, saying and showing, reading
and seeing, and so on are destabilized.
This destabilization has also been addressed before.5 However, if pictures
in general do not embrace an independent domain, but are merged with, for
example, nonaudible and nonmoving signs, then what about the notions of
“visual knowledge,” “visual knowledge production,” and/or ““visual meaning”?
This is the fourth dilemma. Often the fear of “verbal knowledge” is close at
hand, but in practice this concept is just as meaningless as “visual knowledge.”
Knowledge is knowledge. Sometimes it is dominated by verbality, other times
by visuality or something quite different, but the one or the other never stands
alone. Even in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which as a post-
humous publication became a cornerstone in the development of linguistics,
semiotics, and structuralism and thus contributed to the linguistic imperialism
of the twentieth century, a wealth of pictorial signs appears. They were termed,
for example, figure schématique, schema, tableau, figure, symbole, figure visuel,
signaux, séme visual, and diagrammes.6 Saussure’s diagram of the dual structure of
the sign is famous, but what about the human profile with Greek and Latin let-
ters positioned in the pharynx indicating “l’appareil vocal,” the twofold dissec-
tion of a stem visualizing the difference between the synchronic and diachronic
approach to linguistics, the three handwritten letter T’s illustrating graphical
variations of the same letter, the abstract figures signifying the dynamic evolu-
tion of language and the relationship between thought and speech, and so on?7
Basically, Cours de linguistique générale is a transcript of students’ notes, so it
appears that the professor, not unsurprisingly, communicated by way of verbal
sounds, written words, and drawn figures on the chalkboard as well as by way of
his visual appearance, gesticulations, accentuations, and so on.8
5. For example, Elkins, Domain of Images, 7. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale,

83–84. 67, 125, 156, 165, and 273.
6. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 8. Hans Dam Christensen, “ ‘Plus de figu-
66, 70, 72, and 99, as well as Saussure, Ecrits de res!’—Den saussureanske ord/billedstrid,”
linguistique générale, edited by Simon Bouqet Periskop 15 (2012): 79–97.
and Rudolf Engler (Paris: Éditions Gallimard,
2002), 103, 110, 112, and 131.
169 Assessments
The categories of “picture,” “visuality,” “linguistic,” “word,” and so on are,

inescapably, ways of producing discursive orders. The practices of communi-
cation and transformation and production of meaning are, however, far more
complex than the power of our discursive orders and institutional settings allows
us to see.
V I S UA L S T U D I E S : A S U R R E A L I S T M O M E N T
Emmanuel Alloa
Concerning visual studies, it appears as if a curious inversion of perspectives

is suddenly taking place. While some are still busy sketching curricula for the
implementation of visual studies within academia, others already practicing this
strange discipline, which, before really having started, has already “grown old,”
to speak like Hegel. However, this need not be a contradiction. Saying farewell
implies being able to name that which one departs from, to take it as something
identifiable, stable, and closed. The same goes for the inauguration of new cur-
ricula in visual studies, as is currently planned in some German and French uni-
versities. It is highly unlikely that this institutionalization will revivify a debate
which drew its vitality from its transdisciplinary, anti-institutional momentum.
Still, this crystallization of the debate yields at least one promise: just as with
Hegel’s owl of Minerva, which can only take her flight at dusk, when the shad-
ows are longest and the colors have gone pale, looking back on visual studies
allows to see the contours of its premises and the morphology of its promises
with all the more clarity. In other terms, visual studies needs to be addressed in
terms of what a nascent discipline necessarily had to remain blind to: in terms of
its own historicity. Today, so it seems—and as the purpose of the Stone Summer
Seminar confirms—visual studies survives as the object of a necessary archaeol-
ogy, as one cannot but agree that “visual studies has not developed a discourse
about its own history, its historiography.”1 Such a retrospective gaze is not simply
of “antiquarian” interest, as Nietzsche dubbed the embalming attitude of the
positivist historian in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. It can become
“critical” when it accepts its necessary zigzagging mode, that is, that any light
shed on the past is shed from the perspective of the present and that thus the
light will reflect back on the current situation too.
The feeling about the necessity of an archaeology of visual studies as well
as of concepts of the visual was the starting point of an editorial project car-
ried out with my two philosopher colleagues Kathrin Busch and Iris Därmann.2
While such an overall archaeology is only just starting—the current book being
an example—one cannot avoid noticing that the first diggings concentrated on
certain areas, leaving others mostly untouched. A lot has been done in these past
years to unearth a certain German tradition of art history which, by enlarging
the scope of the image beyond that of the artistic image, could be considered
a forerunner of the visual studies predominant in the late twentieth century.
Some, like Horst Bredekamp, argue that the premises of what is now known as
1. See Section 4 of the Seminars. (Munich: Fink, 2011); Bildtheorien aus Frank-
2. Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: Eine reich: Ein Handbuch, edited by Kathrin Busch
Anthologie, edited by Emmanuel Alloa, Eikones and Iris Därmann, Eikones (Munich: Fink, 2011).
171 Assessments
Bildwissenschaft were, thanks to the impetus given by authors like Fiedler, Wölff-
lin, Warburg, and Riegl, already instituted “around 1900 and continued to be
developed until 1933.”3 Hans Belting prefers, for his part, to speak of “interrupted
paths” towards a science of the image.4 In many accounts, the sudden disruption
of this German tradition by the advent of Nazism is acknowledged, crediting
the exile of German or Austrian Jewish scholars such as Erwin Panofsky to the
United States or Ernst H. Gombrich to London as a foundational moment in
the constitution of visual studies. On the other hand, film studies and the study
of optical media would be unthinkable without two other figures whose biogra-
phies are also linked to the seizure of power by the Nazi regime: Béla Balázs and
Walter Benjamin, who were both forced into exile. While the reconstruction of
those filiations is indispensable today, this purely Germanic genealogy and the
narrative of the “interrupted tradition” is somewhat distorting. Let me provide—
given the constraints of this assessment format—just one prominent example.
Walter Benjamin’s definition of the dialectical image is among the favorite
quotations in visual studies. An image, says Benjamin with an evocative for-
mula, “is that in which what has been comes together in a flash with the now
to form a constellation” (Bild ist dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt
blitzhaft zu einer Konstellation zusammentritt),5 comprising the famous “dia-
lectics at a standstill.”6 While a great deal of effort is currently being expended
on replacing Benjamin in the context of the German Kulturwissenschaft devel-
oped between 1880 and 1933 and related to names such as Georg Simmel, Max
Weber, and Adolf Bastian,7 and also of course Aby Warburg,8 it is worth recall-
ing that Benjamin’s thinking did not come to an end in 1933, but that the exile
in Paris initiated perhaps the most intense period of this work. The theory of
the dialectical image cannot in any way be reduced to an purportedly “German
tradition,” as it is clearly inspired by the encounter with Surrealism. In 1934,
Theodor W. Adorno drew Benjamin’s attention to André Breton, whose text
Les vases communicants (The communicating vessels) “is so closely related to your
own thematic concerns that it will probably necessitate a fairly radical revision,”
a revision “comparable perhaps—what a parallel!—to the significance of Saxl
and Panofsky for your book on the Baroque!”9 Indeed, when Benjamin defines
the dialectical image as the flash-like conjunction of what is radically apart, one
cannot but hear the immediate echo of the famous Surrealist principle of the
chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.
3. Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? 7. Christian J. Emden, Walter Benjamins

Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry Archäologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft
29, no. 3 (2003): 418. um 1930 (Munich: Fink, 2006).
4. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: 8. Cornelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in
Picture, Medium, Body, translated by Thomas Bildern: Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby
Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Warburgs Mnemosyne-Atlas und Walter Benja-
2011), 12 et seq. mins Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Akademie, 2004).
5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 9. Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin,
translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh- Oxford, November 6, 1934, in Theodor Adorno
lin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer- and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Corre-
sity Press, 1999), 463. spondence, 1928–1940, edited by Henri Lonitz,
6. Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1933,” translated by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Pol-
in Arcades Project, 10. ity, 1999): 54.
In the First Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton takes up this suggestive image by
Lautréamont and generalizes it: “It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposi-
tion of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image,
to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the
beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference
of potential between the two conductors.”10 The direct link which runs from
Surrealism to the theory of the dialectical image is so obvious that Benjamin
himself worked on obliterating it. As he wrote to Gershom Scholem in a letter,
Benjamin considered that the “all too ostentatious proximity to the surrealist
movement could become fatal” to him.11
Critical visual studies, with Walter Benjamin as one of its main inspirational
figures, thus certainly has more than just one genealogy, and even the assumed
interrupted German tradition is definitely more multifaceted and porous than it
seems. French thinking has its fair share of responsibility for allowing the image
to be addressed as a major issue in the late twentieth century, and in particular
its “Surrealist moment,” that is, the idea that images pervade every aspect of life,
just as the photos contaminate, interrupt, and modify the text narrative of André
Breton’s novel Nadja. And the Surrealists were certainly also among the first to
organize the debate about an enlarged concept of the visual. In this perspective,
the famous visual studies questionnaire published by October in 1996 can be
seen as a belated echo of André Breton’s questionnaire on magical art published
in 1957. Through the questions posed to seventy-five scholars (philosophers,
anthropologists, psychologists, poets), including Blanchot, Bataille, Caillois,
Klossowski, Lévi-Strauss, Magritte, and Paz,12 Breton asked what it would mean
to widen the strictly Western and modern gaze on images, broadening the scope
far beyond classical art history. To allege a general denigration of the visual in
twentieth-century French tradition, as Martin Jay did with his still influential
Downcast Eyes,13 appears increasingly problematic today, when it becomes retro-
spectively evident how much contemporary visual studies is indebted to con-
cepts, methods, and approaches developed in the French context. In our two-
volume attempt at a first archaeological survey, some suggestions are made on
how the field could possibly be mapped,14 suggestions that cannot be adequately
summarized here. Fortuitously, other archaeological teams have started similar
enterprises at roughly the same time,15 so that one may be optimistic that this
will provide new grounds for debate in the near future.
10. André Breton, “Manifeste du surréalisme,” 12. André Breton, L’art magique (Paris: Club
in Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, français du livre, 1957).
1985), 49, and in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 13. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Deni-
translated by Richard Seaver and and Helen R. gration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Lane (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperback, 1972), 37. Thought (Berkeley: University of California
11. Walter Benjamin to Gerschom Scholem, Press, 1993).
Berlin, October 30, 1928, in Walter Benjamin, 14. Emmanuel Alloa, “Der Aufstand der
The Correspondence, 1910–1940, edited by Bilder,” in Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: Eine
Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, Anthologie, edited by Emmanuel Alloa (Munich:
translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Fink, 2011), 9–42.
Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 15. Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford, eds.,
1994), 342. Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader
173 Assessments
However, the point cannot simply be to reverse Jay’s thesis about the French
intellectuals and claim for their general and unconditional iconophilia. Address-
ing the powers of images often goes hand in hand with a certain iconoclastic
thrust; what needs to be understood is how a thinker like Gilles Deleuze could
simultaneously claim that a true thought would only be possible once “liberated
from the image”16 and outline, in his two cinema books, one of the most ambi-
tious theories of the moving image. Deleuze’s cinema books are emblematic of
what is possibly another specificity of the French tradition (if that’s what one
wants to call it): the direct engagement with the artworks and the proximity
with the creators.
If the image has been a constant preoccupation for so many thinkers, from
Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Barthes up to Lyotard or Nancy, that might
well be linked to the fact that French thinking was so often haunted from its
poetical margins. Not only have philosophers often been in charge of exhibiting
images, from Ravaisson (who not only shaped a philosophy of habit, but was
also in charge of the Louvre collections) to the exhibitions curated by Lyotard,
Derrida, and Kristeva in the eighties and nineties; their thinking itself is often
inextricably tied to certain images. What would Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind
be without Paul Cézanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire? Lacan’s “object (little) a”
without Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors? Foucault’s Order of Things without Diego
Velázquez’s Las Meninas? And Deleuze’s intensity of the flesh without Francis
Bacon’s paintings? Still, this does not turn them into iconodules without further
ado. But the task today could be to trace that occult trafficking of the image
inside philosophy, locate the involuntary effects of images inside the discursive
order, which quite often is but a response to their provocative force. Probably
no one has better summarized this ambivalence than Paul Valéry: “Philosophers
have a great appetite for images: there is no trade that requires more of them,
although philosophers often hide them under dull-gray words.”17
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
2010); Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French translated by Paul Patton (London: Continuum,
Theory, vol. 1, Narrative Figuration (New Haven: 2004): 168.
Yale University Press, 2010). For the sake of com- 17. Paul Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,”
pleteness, the following—problematic—book in The Collected Works: Aesthetics, translated by
shall also be mentioned: Temenuga Trifonova, Robert Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University
The Image in French Philosophy (Amsterdam: Press, 1971), 201 (modified translation).
Rodopi, 2007).
“A C U LT U R E M E D I U M ”
Nell Andrew
I applied to graduate programs in the history of art in the fall of 1996, on the
heels of October’s “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” I was requesting admittance
to art history from a background in comparative literature and dance, and I
recall littering my applications with references to visual culture, most of which
would surely make me blanch today. But in that year and the years of my gradu-
ate study at the University of Chicago, visual culture promised the possibility
of new intellectual terrain through which I could access the correspondences
among the ideas that most interested me in literature, dance, and the fine arts.
As Michael Ann Holly put it, visual studies “names a problematic. It shakes
up complacency. No objects are excluded.” Here was “an attitude in relation to
visual things, rather than a department.”1 Well, I wanted in, and I wanted in
through the door of art history.
At Chicago, the conversation was grounded around W. J. T. Mitchell’s
course in visual culture, which primed us in theories of vision and perception
from philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, optics, and art criticism. But it was
the art-historical commitment to close looking that ultimately led me to dis-
cover and to investigate what Whitney Davis refers to in Section 7 of the Semi-
nars as the “radical openness” of vision to the nonvisual. Although references to
a corporeal turn have more recently emerged,2 it was quickly apparent that along
with the visual turn came a revived investigation of embodied perception and
the fullness of nonvisual meaning that is carried by the visual. I relied on visual
culture studies to develop ways to think across dance, film, and painting of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This said, I seldom use visual culture to categorize my work now. Section 2
of the transcript recounts many of the reasons for my defection, from the weight
of visual studies’ focus on contemporary art and culture rather than the his-
torical past—even a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist past—
to its gradual forfeiture of the invitation to work interdisciplinarily. Aware of my
own inner emigration away from the movement that brought me to art history,
I find that in all but the most specialized cases, I advise my art history students
away from visual studies programs in favor of more traditional art history PhDs,
believing that their chances of landing a position in a university are stronger and
1. See Section 2 of the Seminars. Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Rout-

2. I’d point to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s ledge, 2011), and art history, Simon Shaw-Miller,
collection of essays, The Corporeal Turn: Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from
An Interdisciplinary Reader (Charlottesville: Wagner to Cage (New Haven: Yale University
University of Virginia Press, 2009), but also Press, 2002) and Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel
to recent corporeal and multisensory studies Koureas, eds., Art, History and the Senses: 1830
of the visual, including, from dance studies, to the Present (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy:
175 Assessments
their overall preparedness for teaching more solid with the apparatus of a tradi-
tional disciplinary program behind them.
The announcement of the Stone Summer Theory Institute’s 2011 theme,
Farewell to Visual Studies, gave me both a sense of confirmation and deep disap-
pointment. Visual culture studies has been a most vital arena in which art his-
tory’s boundaries, objects, and methods have been challenged and redefined; and
positioning the kind of art history I wish to do in relation to visual studies and
visual culture has been among the among the generative forces of my research.
Yet, to my delight, the transcripts of the Seminars show the debate still lives
vigorously and creatively, and I am gratified that we can be virtually present at
those tables.
As the transcripts regularly remind us, the thrill of visual studies came less
from the antagonism of inserting new objects into traditional disciplines than
from the new conversations this allowed. That we have seen historical periods
left behind in recent decades, however, tells us that visual studies has evolved as
a new discipline to account for newer and newer media rather than an arena to
gather accounts across media that brought it into action. Keith Moxey’s point
about theoretical historicity speaks to this shift in conversation: “There aren’t
any eternal answers, only arguments of greater and lesser conviction, which serve
a purpose and which are then replaced by others.”3 What is curious is that art
history now seems the more inclusive designation; hasn’t the definition of “art”
sustained debate over millennia? Visual culture studies pried open the doors of
art history to new media and methods, but entry is still limited to our defini-
tions of the visual. Calls for image studies are no better, disembodying both the
object and the viewer. Despite its inclusive intentions, the notion of visual cul-
ture re-encodes the modernist primacy of the optical and formal, when so many
of us who are drawn to visual studies showed up because we see visual culture as
a meeting place of somatic, cerebral, and socio-cultural information.
In the final seminar or “Envoi,” Davis brings attention to “a contradiction
between the categorical insistence on the primal phenomenology of the presence
of the image for a beholder, on the one hand, and an emphasis on intersubjective
communicability of experience, and debate about it, on the other.”4 In the wake
of visual studies, how does art history sustain its archival, raisonné-building, and
historiographical mandates alongside studies that begin with phenomenology,
imagination, and sensation, and explain these through theory? To my mind,
the visual denotes a medium; it’s the intervening stuff between phenomena and
communicable experience. The visual might in fact be better compared to a “cul-
ture medium”—if I can borrow a term from bacteriology—that is, a substance
that encourages the cultivation of new organisms. As a term and as a meta-
phor, it fits what visual studies ought to do for us. The visual culture medium
would be a dynamic and elastic ether that fuels the growth of associations and
correspondences.

4. Section 11 of the Seminars.
In her seminar, Holly reminds us that, for art historians, visual studies ini-
tially meant we could read anyone we wanted and argue for virtually any kind of
visual object. It helped us to get beyond what Norman Bryson called art history’s
“stagnant peace” and to get at what objects do, their work, activity, and after-
lives.5 Art history’s objects became catalysts for contemporary thought, rather
than historical relics of the past. This is the legacy and potential future of visual
studies: through the juxtapositions of thinkers with objects, we allow objects to
continue to generate new meanings and relevancy in the present, establishing
with each combination a potential culture medium.
5. This conversation appears in Section 2 of

the Seminars.
D O N ’ T E X P L A I N V I S UA L S T U D I E S
Martin A. Berger
In Section 8 on “The Political,” James Elkins introduces a series of related ques-

tions posed in Tom Mitchell’s “New Rules for Visual Culture.” Mitchell writes,
“Someone has to explain to me what the purpose of visual studies is. What are
we trying to accomplish? Are we amassing a new knowledge project? Expos-
ing and intervening in false consciousness? Producing an archaeology of power?
Reading the strata of the seeable and sayable? Or is visual culture more like a
genealogy, a counter-discourse, and the recovery of what has been silenced by
history, and left unseen, unremarked, or unremarkable? Is visual culture a kind
of therapy for a certain kind of blindness? What kind?”
The simplest, if somewhat irreverent, answer is “yes.” Because visual studies
remains under construction, all of the elements listed in Mitchell’s list can be
found in one or more of its strains today. Mitchell is less interested, of course,
in having the purported “answer” provided to him than in trying to shape visual
studies along particular lines. It is not that “visual studies” eludes Mitchell’s
understanding, but that he hopes to winnow down into coherence what is at
present a startlingly broad discursive field.
When Jeanette Roan followed up in Section 8 by asking, “What would
explaining the purpose of visual studies look like given [its] multiple genealo-
gies,” she put her finger on a tension that undergirds many of the seminar con-
versations. “Explaining” visual studies necessarily entails privileging certain ori-
gin narratives over others and declaring a winner amongst the many competing
approaches currently in circulation. Roan appreciates that there are intellectual
and institutional stakes in offering such an explanation.
History suggests that the debate will eventually be settled by the emergence
of an explanation that better supports the status quo. At best, visual studies will
lose its radical possibilities, and at worst, it will be subsumed under a preexisting
discipline, such as the history of art. My concern is not that overtly progressive
inquiries into economic or racial inequality, for example, will find themselves
outside of visual studies’ discursive borders, though this too is possible. I worry
instead that the narrowing of visual studies, which is a necessity of efforts to
define it, will result in a more constrained intellectual field in which to work.
The dangers here are twofold: that the process of definition will normalize visual
studies, leaving it recognizable in relation to established fields and modes of
inquiry; and that any resulting definition will allow scholars less leeway, and
fewer tools, to construct new radical critiques. A messy and incoherent visual
studies offers more raw material out of which new modes of inquiry and objects
of study are likely to arise.
Leaving visual studies undefined does not mean that the work of individual
scholars will lack either an object of study or a working method. The at-times
withering attacks leveled against visual studies for its lack of a center tend to
overlook that most studies exhibit internal coherence, even if the field as a whole
does not. While this lack of overarching coherence can devolve into insular and
presentist work, as the seminar participants note in Section 2, the relative coher-
ence of the history of art has hardly offered protection against these failings. The
pressure to explain visual studies threatens the existence of a vital intellectual
(and, increasingly, institutional) space in which work that reimagines the pos-
sibilities of academic inquiry can take place.
V I S UA L S T U D I E S : M O V I N G B E Y O N D “ V I S UA L”
Marta Zarzycka
What I have read is a very thorough and important mapping of the history and
ontology of visual studies. I could not help thinking that the reading list for the
Seminars has produced a de facto canon of topics and texts.
The names and references missing here, however, spoke as loudly about the
field as those that were frequently quoted and cited. What I would like to advo-
cate for, in particular, is an expansion of the visual that engages broader issues
in sensory perception. Visual studies have been referred to here as an “attitude,”
a disciplinary field, an expertise, a paradigm, a methodology, a social commit-
ment, even a set of skills. But the discussion has not openly tackled questions
of perception and sensoriality. The “visual turn” seems to have happened in the
absence of an idea that the visual studies could go beyond the matter of looking.
Moving beyond vision-oriented hermeneutics opens the possibility of other
sorts of engagements. By investigating digital photography, painting, video,
film, and multimedia art, we can find a variety of transgressive practices that
significantly reconfigure the relationship between vision and other senses, and
that disrupt and potentially transform the scopic regime.1 Many artworks and
cultural artifacts today challenge the traditionally inscribed “hierarchy of the
senses,” in which vision is dominant, which has prevailed in Western thought.
These range from Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (an installation using
humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air), through war documentaries on the
Web incorporating still photographs, music, and voiceover, to the Disney World
attraction It’s Tough to Be a Bug, which releases an unpleasant odor to match the
species an audience is watching on screen. At the same time, the field of neurol-
ogy has been giving much emphasis to cross-modal perception, including stud-
ies on synaesthesia (a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sen-
sory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic experiences in a second pathway),
stressing various forms of overlap between what were once thought to be clearly
demarcated sensory stimuli. Following the cognitive and affective dynamics that
emerge in the engagement with images, smells, textures, shapes, and sounds can
offer a chance to reformulate some of the paradigms pertaining to the field of the
visual studies.
This shift demands a greater focus on the figure of the embodied beholder.
In my view, the conceptualization of the beholder implied by the Seminars, read-
ings, and discussions is purely scopic—the gaze seems to be the only function
1. Film studies scholars have done important and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: Univer-
work in that direction: see Vivian Sobchack, Car- sity of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Jennifer
nal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, Experience (Berkeley: University of California
2004); Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory Press, 2010).
the body performs. The body is discussed very briefly in Section 5 on Bildwis-
senschaft; yet it remains a fixed object rather than a “process-in-practice.” Conse-
quently, I miss deeper engagement with the problem of embodied, multisensory
awareness, where the viewer is no longer only a viewer, but rather the subject of
an encounter involving spatial situating of the body, proprioception, tempera-
ture, skin contact, level of comfort, and aural and olfactory impressions. This
encounter comes into focus through the lens of interdisciplinary and intersec-
tional approaches considering how various categories of embodied difference
such as gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, (dis)ability, geopolitical location, and
(non)humanity determine our perception. Feminist scholars and theorists of
affect have done important work in this direction,2 yet it is rarely acknowledged
in the field of the visual studies.
Admittedly, there have been postulations for a sensory turn in the field:
W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that visual culture compels attention to the tactile,
the auditory, the haptic; Irit Rogoff has contended that images, sounds, and spa-
tial delineations should be read onto and through one another; Ella Shohat and
Robert Stam have stressed that the visual is simply one point of entry into inter-
textual dialogism. However, these ideas remain unaddressed here or in the large
number of anthologies and readers in visual studies. I believe these research con-
cerns can open up fresh perspectives on artistic and cultural practices and chal-
lenge aesthetic apprehension, which has often been reduced to the visual only.
Attention to the question of multisensory witnessing of today’s image culture
contributes to efforts to revise an important terrain of inquiry: namely, which
paradigms determine the relationship between images and their audiences?
2. While the consideration of alternative per- a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana

ceptual modalities is a topic that has only quite University Press, 1994).
recently stirred the larger debate, the body has On affect see Teresa Brennan, The Transmis-
been a key focus in feminist theory and activism sion of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
since the 1970s. The theme of the embodied 2004); Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn, eds.,
encounter has been explored by, among others, “Affect,” special issue, Body, and Society 16,
Rosemary Betterton, Intimate Distance: Women, no. 1 (2010): 7–28, Patricia T. Clough and Jean
Artists, and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996); Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007);
Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: Uni- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect,
versity of California Press, 1993); Moira Gatens, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke Uni-
Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996); versity Press, 2003); Clare Hemmings, “Invoking
and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological
Turn,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 548–67.
AESTHETIC OBJECTS, RECONSIDERED
Theodore Gracyk
Discussing loss of meaning in Section 4, Clemena Antonova articulates a com-

mon position concerning the aesthetic dimension of visual culture. When cul-
tural relocation “turn[s] a ritual object into an aesthetic object,” the change
“destroy[s] the original meaning of the image and impose[s] another one.”
Antonova is contributing to a discussion of W. J. T. Mitchell’s “What Do Pic-
tures Really Want?,” in which Mitchell aligns “aesthetic object” with the “ ‘work
of art’ proper.”1 In Section 5, Keith Moxey reaffirms roughly the same equation
while apologizing that he recognizes he is being overly reductive. Finally, in Sec-
tion 7, James Elkins explains that to undertake the study of visual culture with-
out focusing on Western fine art, the “most obvious strategy would be to exclude
consideration of aesthetics.”
As Elkins has said elsewhere, we are operating in the wake of Immanuel
Kant and subsequent Romantic philosophies of art. This tradition taught us
that the aesthetic response is independent of propositional thought. Non-art
images are nonaesthetic, Elkins remarks, “in the original Kantian sense,” because
they are utilitarian.2 So long as they are used as intended, as functional artifacts
that are not subject to judgments of taste, images fall outside the boundaries that
divide art from non-art. However, we can impose art status on objects by aes-
theticizing them. The passage of time tends to do this for us. But we can speed
the process by wrenching artifacts from their time and place of origin and repo-
sitioning them within physical and cultural institutions that direct us to regard
them aesthetically, as Albert Barnes did when he displayed pieces of wrought
iron alongside paintings by Cezanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh—an arrangement
preserved today in the Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia. Similarly,
Antonova’s example of the transformation of a ritual object into an aesthetic
object is the physical transfer of a Russian icon from a monastery to an art gal-
lery. Antonova finds it noteworthy that some visitors to the gallery pray before
the icon, refusing to aestheticize it. One corollary of the above is that artistic
postmodernism breaks from this tradition by repudiating beauty and the aes-
thetic realm.
In keeping with the theme that visual studies is now mature enough to
reflect on its own history, I offer a caution against the tendency to think in this
way about the aesthetic dimensions of visual culture. Aesthetics has a long intel-
lectual history, and the Kantian-Romantic position is merely one voice in that
1. Mitchell, “What Do Pictures Really Want?,” See also Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty:
October 77 (Summer 1996): 79. Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, The Paul Carus
2. James Elkins, The Domain of Images Lectures 21 (Chicago: Open Court, 2003).
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 53.
history. In recent years, academic aestheticians have frequently examined that

history, and four significant themes have emerged.
First, there is general recognition that the fine arts are a cultural invention
of a particular place and time.3 The key ingredients did not come together to
generate a unified category of “les beaux-arts” until the early eighteenth cen-
tury. As Thomas Adajian observes, many historically informed aestheticians have
concluded that there is no essence of art, because this history proves that “there
simply is no stable definiendum for a definition of art to capture.”4 Despite the
“beaux” of “les beaux-arts,” artworks have never been aesthetic objects except by
contingent social construction. Aware of this fact, many aestheticians support
nonaesthetic, historical definitions of art, according to which art status requires
some degree of historical reflexivity. A visual image is a work of art when it non-
accidentally reflects historical precedents within an existing art system. Lacking
the proper history, an identical image is not art.5 Aesthetics only matters in those
cases where it matters historically.
Second, many aestheticians support contextualism concerning most aes-
thetic properties.6 While it is certainly true that we aestheticize visual images
by repositioning them socially and culturally, it is not true that this entrance
into the realm of “art” succeeds aesthetically by distancing images from their
social and cultural origins. In Section 4, Tom Mitchell observes, “Ninety-eight
percent of the art produced gets no attention whatsoever.” That paints far too
rosy a picture—and I do note the aesthetic metaphor I’ve just employed. Of the
art that does qualify as getting attention, most gets almost no attention. The
most optimistic data that I can locate says that museum visitors spend an aver-
age of thirty seconds looking at a work of visual art. However, most studies
say that the average length of visual engagement is less than ten seconds. Since
aesthetic engagement normally prolongs interaction, this data implies that most
people get little or no aesthetic reward from most art. Cultural decontextualiza-
tion retards, rather than encourages, aesthetic response. Many visual aesthetic
properties are accessible only to viewers who grasp the art-historical context in
which an image was created, by seeing, for themselves, stylistic continuities and
discontinuities with other artifacts.7 Unless you regard boredom as an aesthetic
response, gallery display does not transform images into aesthetic objects any
more than Caligula’s appointment of his horse to the Roman senate transformed
the horse into a politician.
3. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthet- University Press, 1981); and Jerrold Levinson,
ics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): “Defining Art Historically,” British Journal of
496–527; and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Aesthetics 19 (1979): 232–50.
Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of 6. Theodore Gracyk, “Ontological Contex-
Chicago Press, 2001). tualism,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd
4. Thomas Adajian, “The Definition of Art,” ed., edited by David Cooper, Stephen Davies,
in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, and Robert
edited by Edward N. Zalta, plato.stanford.edu Stecker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 449–53.
/archives/fall2008/entries/art-definition/, 7. Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” Philo-
accessed August 20, 2012. sophical Review 79 (1970): 334–67.
5. See, for example, Arthur C. Danto,
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace:
183 Assessments
Third, appreciation of the previous two points has generated increased inter-
est in everyday aesthetics, which recognizes that artworks are a minuscule sub-
class of aesthetic objects.8 Since as far back as Socrates and Plato, beauty has
served as the paradigm example of an aesthetic property and a central focus for
aesthetic theory. Some philosophers argue that it should continue to serve as the
paradigm case for understanding all positive aesthetic phenomena.9 However,
it has been some time now since J. L. Austin inspired many philosophers with
his advice that aesthetics would be better understood “if only we could forget for
a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.”10
When we take Austin’s advice and attend to the wide range of aesthetic concepts
that we employ in daily discourse, it is clear that aesthetic objects, as objects
judged aesthetically, are visible always and everywhere in everyday life. Visual
images are but a small subclass of the aesthetic objects found in visual culture.
Toasters, file cabinets, and street lamps invite aesthetic evaluation, as do the
complex visual environments to which they contribute, and this ongoing evalu-
ation is informed by education in a visual culture.
Fourth, a narrow equation of “aesthetic object” and Kantian-Romantic
accounts of aesthetic judgment has directed attention away from functional
beauty, shortchanging the more empirical tradition that stems from David
Hume and Edmund Burke.11 The gallery visitor who prays before the Russian
icon, approaching it functionally, is not necessarily indifferent to its beauty.
On the contrary: this visitor who understands the artifact’s function is generally
better prepared to appreciate its aesthetic dimension than is the visitor who sees
an example of “folk art” and who then turns to look at another image after ten
seconds.
These four points invite us to rework Mitchell’s provocative claim that
“[v]isual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social
construction of vision. The question of visual nature is therefore a central and
unavoidable issue.”12 It can be supplemented as “visual culture is the visual con-
struction of the aesthetic, not just the aesthetic construction of vision.” As we
move beyond the inherited stereotype of aesthetic objects as objects viewed dis-
interestedly, for their beauty, and we grant that visual aesthetic properties are
both ubiquitous and culturally emergent, we might be ready to examine aes-
thetic response as reflecting social and biological imperatives. Aesthetics compli-
cates visual studies, but in a good way.
8. See Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, 10. J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philo-
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (New York: sophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University
Columbia University Press, 2005); and Yuriko Press, 1961), 131.
Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (New York: Oxford 11. See Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson,
University Press, 2007). Functional Beauty (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
9. Nick Zangwill, “Beauty,” in The Oxford 2008), 6–24.
Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold 12. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Cri-
Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, tique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture
2003), 325–43. 1, no. 2 (2002): 170.
FROM IMAGE TO VISIBILITY
Tom Holert
What struck me in the session on politics was how “visuality” tends to become
reduced to “images.” Any presumed lack of images or any direct reference to
specific images in works such as Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look or Mitchell’s Clon-
ing Terror is considered by the majority of the discussants as evidence of a lack of
disciplinary rigor, methodological coherence, and true commitment to the cause
of visual studies, if there should be any such thing left. As much as I advocate
close attention to the necessary substrate of every reflection on visuality, I doubt
that direct reference to (and engagement with) specific images alone guarantees
a more sustainable mode of visual studies. The study of the individual visual
item, the picture (still or moving, single or multiple) should actually be linked
to analysis of socio-technological infrastructures and networks of image distri-
bution, replication, repression, transformation, and so on. This way, visibility,
conceived as “a matter of a positive, material, anonymous body of practice”
(John Rajchman on Deleuze on Foucault), would emerge as the both complex
and vexed subject of a field of research that might continue to be called “visual
studies” or could be renamed “visibility studies.”
V I S UA L S T U D I E S A N D / A S A R T H I S T O R Y
Julia Orell
Farewell to what exactly? When I first received the invitation to comment on the
discussion of the Seminars, I was excited and curious—yet curiosity soon gave
way to confusion and ultimately to an uncomfortable disappointment. Most
promising for this discussion—and long overdue—seemed to me the inclu-
sion of a historiographical angle and the attempt to bring Anglo-American and
German-language approaches into a dialogue (my interest in the latter relates to
my own academic biography, with an MA in art history in Germany followed by
a PhD in the U.S. and my current position in Switzerland).
Confusion set in, because of the heterogeneous definitions and historio-
graphical trajectories associated with visual studies, visuelle Kultur, and Bildwis-
senschaft, further complemented by the discussion of a number of more recent
approaches taken by, mostly, well-established art historians. While this hetero-
geneity of voices present in the discussion and readings offers many insights and
potentially fruitful points of departure, no sustained common ground seemed
to emerge. My disappointment grew, because the Seminars appeared to be not
so much about visual studies as about art history’s self-questioning, navel-gazing
in search of relevance and innovation. Art historians and those who can relate
to art-historical concerns clearly dominate the discussion, and a strong sense of
nostalgia permeates large parts; a nostalgia that has less to do with visual studies
than with the “new art history” of the eighties and nineties. This is surprising,
because the participants present a much more diverse group. It is telling, for
instance, that Paul Frosh repeatedly feels the need to point out that he is not an
art historian and tries to steer the discussion, unsuccessfully, into a transdisci-
plinary direction.1
If visual studies is to be taken seriously as a challenge to and beyond the
discipline of art history, then the inclusion of even more voices from other disci-
plinary backgrounds, as well as from outside film and media studies, might have
proven productive. For instance, a perspective from the history and philosophy
of science, where many scholars are working on pictures and imaging technolo-
gies, could have added to the debate in Section 9 and many other instances where
art-historical approaches to scientific pictures are addressed. The voice of a visual
anthropologist in addition to an art historian’s Bild-Anthropologie (Section 5) and
in response to the October questionnaire (Section 2) would have been of inter-
est. What about the large number of historians who have turned toward the
study of visual and material primary sources in addition and as an alternative to
texts? And finally, despite the breadth of nationalities and cultural backgrounds
1. See his contributions in Section 2, Sec-

tion 4, and Section 5.
present at the Seminars, there was a distinct lack of voices addressing visuality,
both as a cultural concept and as object of study, outside the Western hemi-
sphere. To a historian of Chinese art (and visual culture), it is frustrating when
global and transcultural issues are hyped yet at the same time neglected when it
comes to theoretical debates about the historiography and current direction of a
field.
I would like to end with two (rather art-historical) remarks on the parts of
the Seminars that resonated most with me. As mentioned above, I was extremely
interested in the discussion of Bildwissenschaft (Sections 5 and 6), though it ulti-
mately reveals how little Bildwissenschaft has in common with Anglo-American
visual studies. This results in many instances of talking past instead of with each
other (e.g., in the discussion of the term Sinn [meaning] in Section 5). I see a
danger of conflating different agendas under the header of a German Bildwissen-
schaft; the approaches taken by Gottfried Boehm and Horst Bredekamp, who
figure most prominently in this discussion, are quite distinct. Both tendencies sit
rather comfortably within (German) art-historical traditions, one more indebted
to philosophical aesthetics—mostly hermeneutics and phenomenology—and
the other attempting to renew art-historical projects in the tradition of Warburg
and Panofsky. Thus, while the critique of Bildwissenschaft’s apparent failure to
address gender, race, or politics (both in its institutional framework and its intel-
lectual impetus) is justified to a certain degree, these issues have simply not been
part of these two distinct projects. That does not mean that they are absent from
German-language art history in general.
My final point concerns Michael Ann Holly’s and James Elkins’s repeated
critique of visual studies’ failure to address historical, pre-twentieth-century
materials. I fully agree with this point, and it is probably the main reason why
I often choose to keep a distance from many debates that come with the label
“visual studies” attached to them. At the same time, the generation of art histo-
rians and historians currently in the early stages of their careers produces schol-
arship in premodern and especially in non-Western art history that does not
necessarily consider itself “visual studies” but is indebted to it and practices it
in terms of the breadth of visual materials studied and by carefully (and often
quietly) “rubbing” new theories against ancient objects.
S H O U L D W E H AV E K N O W N O U R P L A C E A F T E R A L L ?
Kıvanç Kılınç
I will be responding here to Section 2 of the Seminars, “Histories: Anglo-

American Visual Studies, 1989–1999.” As an architectural historian specializing
in the non-West, whose research interest lies in the buildings left on the margins
but still within the parameters of the architectural canon, I am fascinated by
the conversation about the ongoing dialogues between art history and visual
(culture) studies. Perhaps that makes me an outsider to the conversation I will
be responding to, but I believe that at the same time it puts me, and anyone else
with such interest, at the very center of it. I am not talking about extending the
discussion of whether visual culture studies are a “cure” for art history, impelling
it to rethink its foundations, or a threat to its basic existence. But if the larger
question is to reimagine the canon to be more inclusive (culturally, geographi-
cally, and historically) while making it impossible to grow once more into a thick
wall, as it still is today in many ways, the possible answers lie in this dialogue
more than anywhere else.
Since art can attach to the beginning and end of virtually everything, from
“digital art” to “art of the everyday,” I find the debate less urgent if art history
as the gatekeeper of the canon can survive under the cannon fire of visual stud-
ies. No doubt, by forcing art history to overcome its elitism and go beyond a
lengthy catalogue of selected works, visual studies has seriously shaken the art-
historical canon. It “encompasses the entire visual spectrum of, well, life,” as one
student remarked on College Confidential, describing the difference between art
history and visual studies majors.1 Also, as Jennifer Lauwrens argues in her doc-
toral dissertation, “art is unquestionably affected by visuality, since, by means of
technology, art moves seamlessly through visual culture, thereby challenging the
ontological foundations of the concept of ‘art.’ ”2
Art and architectural history have been under continuous attack from
within as much as from without for the last couple of decades, but have also
been quite adaptable to new environments. And I do not mean in a negative
way. I can speak largely of architecture, although what happened there is not
detached from similar developments in art. Remember El-Lissitzky’s Prouns,
for instance, which emancipated the audience from fixed point of views and
produced “riddles” rather than “finished” compositions with “no ground plan,
no elevation, no top and no bottom,”3 and most importantly, no happy place in
1. loveduke22, College Confidential (Duke 2. Jennifer Lauwrens, “The Contested Rela-

University), talk.collegeconfidential.com/duke tionship Between Art History and Visual Culture
-university/722689-art-art-history-visual-studies Studies: A South African Perspective” (PhD
-program-question.html, accessed August 19, diss., University of Pretoria, 2005), 54.
2012. 3. Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical
Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (1988):
any established tradition. The canon was able to absorb the shockwaves caused
by the historical avant-gardes only when the heat of the revolution faded away
and then was ruthlessly consumed by authoritarian regimes. By remaining
within the geographical limits of modernism, however, neither the historical
avant-gardes nor the postmodernist experiments that followed necessarily ques-
tioned their own privileged position. This task was taken up by postcolonial
criticism of architecture and urbanism, revealing the steady Eurocentric core in
mainstream scholarship. Buildings and artworks hitherto considered insignifi-
cant (“traditional,” “vernacular,” “non-Western”) have been more widely studied,
pushing architectural historians to contest the legitimacy of the canon.4
But then, how can we draw lessons from criticism from within and without?
In “Should Art Historians Know Their Place?,” John Tagg wrote, “no: if it means
being marginalized within academic definitions of the discipline; if it means
being accommodated in a decently diversified syllabus and peacefully coexist-
ing as an alternative specialism, a more or less tolerated sideline: structuralist
art history alongside post-structuralist art history, social art history, feminist art
history, psychoanalytical art history and, on another level, Scottish art history
alongside Chinese art history, ancient art history alongside modern art history,
all of them coexisting without contradicting, yet somehow eclectically recon-
ciled in the larger discipline.”5 Art and architectural historians, therefore, need
to forge a dialogue without avoiding inconsistency, disagreement, and revision.
Each “specialism” needs to challenge the “repressive pluralism”6 embedded in
such conformism rather than simply being glued to a body of knowledge or a
list of great objects, regardless of the scope and size of such list. All parallel or
counternarratives could then be explored as sites of encounter where art objects,
architectural products, and “vernacular” forms of knowledge pass around the
world from one place to another.
It is the only way in which what we teach in art and architectural history
could be imagined as a web of interconnected stories, simultaneously emerging
but not necessarily developing a fondness for one another. I believe this is where
art and architectural historians could learn from visual culture studies: “Art his-
tory has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it is always going somewhere,”
172; Mart Stam, “El Lissitzky’s Conception of Nigel Thrift (London: Sage, 2003), 381–97;
Architecture” (1966), in El Lissitzky: Life, Let- Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Archi-
ters, Texts, edited by Sophie Lissitzky Kuppers, tecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in
translated by Helene Aldwinckle, introduction Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2000); Jyoti
by Herbert Read (London: Thames and Hudson, Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiat-
1968), 390. ing Architecture, Urbanism, and Colonialism in
4. See, for instance, Zeynep Çelik, “Colo- Delhi (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Andre
nialism, Orientalism and the Canon,” in Inter- Raymond, “Islamic City, Arab City: Oriental
sections: Architectural Histories and Critical Myths and Recent Views,” British Journal of
Theories, edited by Iain Borden and Jane Middle Eastern Studies 21 (1994): 3–18.
Rendell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 161–69; 5. John Tagg, “Should Art Historians Know
Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Their Place?,” in Grounds of Dispute, Art History,
Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (New York: Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (Min-
Routledge, 2004); Anthony D. King, “Cultures neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992),
and Spaces of Postcolonial Knowledges,” 53.
in Handbook of Cultural Geography, edited by 6. Tagg, “Should Art Historians Know Their
Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Place?,” 53.
189 Assessments
as Keith Moxey has remarked in an interview,7 whereas visual studies has always
been contemporary.8 But then, shouldn’t “visual culture practitioners” also more
willingly “engage in historical eras or canonical texts about the pictorial” instead
of almost completely shunning them?9 Apparently more “border crossings” are
necessary.10
7. “What Does Visual Studies Do?,” interview to overcome. Mostly with the help received from
with Keith Moxey, CVS / Center for Visual Stud- the postcolonial turn briefly mentioned above,
ies, www.visual-studies.com/interviews/moxey the idea that modernity is a multisited, simulta-
.html, accessed August 19, 2012. neous experience gained terrain among art and
8. This “contemporaneity” has mind-opening architectural historians.
potential since it categorically rules out the idea 9. Kristine Nielsen’s question to Michael
of the West / Europe as a singular, central and Holly—I do not think this question was directly
homogenous cultural milieu, a hundred years addressed by any of the participants of the
advanced from the rest of the world—a way of conversation.
understanding history with which art and archi- 10. “What Does Visual Studies Do?”
tectural historians had to struggle for decades
D I D S O M E O N E S AY A R C H I T E C T U R E ?
O R , TA K E M Y D I S C I P L I N E , P L E A S E !
Mark Linder
It is no surprise, when two dozen people talk with one another in the same room
for a week and the expressed aim of the gathering is to consider the sources,
strains, and vitality of a shared intellectual enterprise, that the resulting con-
versation is intensive and rarely strays from established problems and concerns.
It should also be no surprise that these insiders offer intriguing and conten-
tious reflections on the varieties and legacies of visual studies and are eager to
probe the field’s idiosyncrasies and inadequacies, past and present. Occasion-
ally branching off into questions of political efficacy or cultural relevance, the
primary tone is that of a group striving for self-definition. Who are we visual
studies folk, how did we get here, what could be different, how must we change,
what is our relationship to art history and cultural studies, and what are our
differences that need articulation, historicization, and debate? If the primary
purpose of the gathering was to define an inclusive “us” (and there are some pro-
vocative moments when individuals such as Georges Didi-Huberman are named
as outsiders), the symposium was a productive, intriguing, and important event.
But then what? While there was much optimism about the future and potential
of visual studies, speculative trajectories were rarely sustained and hardly a pre-
occupation of the participants. Despite numerous denials and several dissenters,
the overall group affect betrays a desire for discipline: if there is indeed a farewell
implicit in, or perhaps symptomatic of, the discussions, it is that visual studies is
a field of research that can no longer easily refuse or defer disciplinary identity.
The question of visual studies’ disciplinarity is engaged persistently in the
transcript’s earlier “histories” sessions, beginning with Michael Holly’s recollec-
tion that “ten years ago” she would tell undergraduates that visual studies “isn’t
a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic [and] an attitude in rela-
tion to visual things.”1 Keith Moxey later suggests that “dissensus”2 has been a
positive characteristic of visual studies in the past (though Jacques Rancière goes
almost unmentioned in the transcript). Yet “making expertise and nomadism
compatible,”3 as Kristine Nielsen puts it, is difficult, and the possibility that
visual studies could embrace “hospitable disputation” is complicated, Paul Frosh
argues, by visual studies’ “founding” antagonistic relationship with art history,
the discipline that visual studies “models itself upon and defines itself against.”4
The particulars and effects of that family argument make it hard for “anyone
coming in from the outside” to launch and sustain “an independent project.”5

191 Assessments
Clearly, even a group with a territory as extensive and unsettled as visual studies
struggles with boundaries and proprieties.
A key exchange occurs in the first session when María Lumbreras Corujo
seizes on Gustav Frank’s claim that because “there was something immanent
in visuelle Kultur that was highly problematic,” the intellectual formation of
visual studies has been flawed from the start. She suggests that others (Didi-
Huberman among them) see any such failings not as “endemic” but as a mat-
ter of unexplored investigations and unrealized potential. Yet Frank insists that
faults remain “in the makeup of current studies and in the references they fre-
quently use as authorities,”6 and as a result “there are many ecosystems of visual-
ity and vision that are not yet properly researched and deserve our attention.”
Quite simply, he remarks in a later session, “visual culture and Bildwissenschaft
just fail to address problems in the right way.”7
But even if the discourse should and could be repaired and reconstructed, the
question of the form or model of disciplinarity for visual studies would remain.
Jim Elkins offers a list of several alternative disciplinary models that have been
embraced by visual studies—interdisciplinarity, postdisciplinarity, indisciplinar-
ity, subdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity8—but explicit attempts to grapple
with questions of discipline fade from the discussions after Tom Mitchell’s auda-
cious assertion at the end of his session that the “only reliable method is to be
very, very intelligent. So I want to prolong the indisciplinary moment of visual
studies as long as possible.”9 Expressed or not, differing disciplinary doubts and
desires underlie the positions of the participants and span a broad spectrum of
attitudes toward disciplinarity in general and how visual studies should relate to
other fields. On the side of a more malleable and permeable discipline are the
distinct positions of Whitney Davis, who argues for integrating multiple strong
disciplines with visual studies, from philosophy to science, and Tom Mitchell,
who would encourage creative, even wild, assemblages of discourses. On the side
of a more organized, if complex, discipline are Frank, with his call for critical
reconstruction, and Lisa Cartwright, who imagines a rigorous discipline that can
pursue “new cross-cultural combinations,” especially with “knowledge produc-
tion, ontology, epistemology, [and] other issues in science.”10
The sources and constitution of academic status are at stake in each of these
positions. While Davis and Cartwright both see advantages in engaging sci-
ence, Davis is willing to risk the status of visual studies by endorsing approaches
that adopt the “protocols of social scientific investigation that tend not to have
any status in the humanistic inquiries,”11 while Cartwright seeks to enhance the
status of visual studies by researching the visual culture and cultural implica-
tions of science. However different their strategies, it is clear that a relationship
with science offers benefits to the status of visual studies. Ironically, though it
is perhaps less obvious, similar collaboration across the humanities may be less
attractive because of the astonishingly diminished status that images and visual
literacy have in the humanities. Perhaps, as Elkins suggests near the end of the
transcript, even visual studies needs to treat images differently: “I hope, in a
future iteration of visual studies, we will let images be free to ruin our hard-won
disciplinary authority.”12
I tend to believe that not only are refusal, deferral, complication, and dif-
ficulty required for the project of visual studies to continue, but so are projects
that engage even broader audiences, topics, and problems. One strategy would
strive to increase interest in the work of visual studies among other fields, and
another would call for a more adventurous application of visual studies to areas
of investigation that exploit its versatility. In the first case, the opportunity is
for the insights and approaches of visual studies to become useful and intrigu-
ing and even necessary to other disciplines and fields that need to expand their
understanding of their own image culture and visual habits. The second case is
an opportunity for visual studies to test and disturb its insights and approaches
by applying them to challenging subjects with rich visual practices and histories.
As an architecture theorist and an outsider to visual studies, I am familiar
with those strategies. For the past decade, architecture theory has turned from
the critical assessment of its own history, methods, and ideologies that char-
acterized the work of the last quarter of the twentieth century to speculation
on potential applications, projects, and transdisciplinary sites of operation or
collaboration that would expand our field of operation and engage new con-
stituencies. Architecture is constantly caught between its own disciplinary and
professional concerns and an obligation to be understood by a broader audi-
ence. Scrutiny of its representational techniques, its uses of digital media, and its
reception as image would potentially reconfigure architectural practice and the
reception of its products. This is the sort of project that Elkins seems to desire
to counter his observation that it is “glaringly obvious that visual studies isn’t
interested in questions of making.”13 Or, even if architectural design, representa-
tion, and visualization are avoided, there is still the entire designed environment,
produced by architecture and other design practices, which could be addressed
in visual studies. It is unfortunate that neither architecture’s visual practices nor
the visuality of the built environment is discussed in the transcript as a potential
area of investigation, and that architects seem not to be viewed as an audience
that would or should become sophisticated readers and users of visual studies
work. The transcript mentions architecture or cities just six times, and only in
the most general way. In one instance, when Jim Elkins proposes an analogy
between the taxonomy of metapictures and Chicago’s urban morphology, Tom
Mitchell makes light of it, remarking, “if you lived in L.A., there’d be no way
to make those divisions!”14 But any architect or urbanist would immediately see
an opportunity in the formal difference between Los Angeles and Chicago to

193 Assessments
extend the analogy and launch a discussion of alternate metapicture taxonomies.

To me, that is precisely the sort of thinking that I imagine visual studies could
do much differently than architects do themselves. In any case, there are many
studies, most famous among them Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, Denise
Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, Bea-
triz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity, and Sylvia Lavin’s Kissing Architecture, that
should be standards for visual studies.15 Conversely, architecture would be radi-
cally transformed if more of its theorists, historians, and practitioners began to
understand its practice as the production of images. So visual studies, take my
discipline, please.
15. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City MA: MIT Press, 1977); Beatriz Colomina, Privacy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960); Denise Scott and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass
Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour, Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Sylvia
Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbol- Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton: Princeton
ism of Architectural Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge, University Press, 2011).
M AT H E M AT I C S A N D T H E V I S UA L
Michele Emmer
I am a mathematician, a filmmaker, a producer of books based on images. In par-

ticular, I have edited two books titled The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, the
first in 1993 and the second in 2004. I have created eighteen films in my series
Art and Mathematics. My latest books are Bolle di sapone: Tra arte e matematica
(Soap bubbles: between art and mathematics), which includes three hundred
images, and Numeri immaginari: Cinema e matematica (Imaginary numbers:
cinema and mathematics).1 So I was attracted by the chance to respond to the
Farewell to Visual Studies discussions.
First of all, I should note that I was perplexed that in the total of 215 pages I
received, only 15 were explicitly dedicated to science studies, to the “place of non-
art images—from science, engineering, statistics, and other fields,” although it
is also said that it “came up several times during the week.”2 In any case, the
word “mathematics” is mentioned only once and “mathematical” once.3 Also,
the word “algorithm” appears four times.4
What is visual studies? Michael Holly quotes a flow chart once given to
her by a student: “Aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology, architectural history,
art criticism, art history, black studies, cultural studies, deconstruction, design
history, feminism, film studies / theory, heritage studies, linguistics, literary
criticism, Marxism, media studies, phenomenology, philosophy, photographic
studies, political economy, postcolonial studies, poststructuralism, proxemics,
psychoanalysis, psychology of perception, queer theory, Russian formalism,
semiotics, social history, sociology,” and “structuralism.”5
So no place for mathematicians! But Holly also says that visual studies “isn’t
a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic. It shakes up complacency.
No objects are excluded. Visual studies names an attitude to visual things, rather
than a department.”6 James Elkins adds that visual studies’ “freedom to engage
new theorists . . . goes to the point of the interdisciplinarity that was a crucial
part of visual studies’ self-definition in 1990s,”7 while Gustav Frank says that
1. Michele Emmer, ed., The Visual Mind: 2010) (Viareggio Award, best Italian essay
Art and Mathematics (Cambridge, MA: MIT 2010); Emmer, Numeri immaginari: Cinema e
Press, 1993); Emmer, ed., The Visual Mind II matematica (Turin: Bollati, 2011).
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Emmer, 2. Introduction to Section 9 of the Seminars.
Art and Mathematics, 18 films and DVD, 25 3. Sections 7 and 9 of the Seminars,
m. each, Italian State Television and Michele respectively.
Emmer, 1980–95; Emmer, ed., Mathematics 4. Section 5 of the Seminars (“algorithmic”);
and Culture, series, Springer Verlag, Italian and Section 7 (“algorithm,” “algorithms”).
English, 1998–; Emmer, ed., Imagine Math, 5. Section 2 of the Seminars.
series, Springer Verlag, 2012–; Emmer, Bolle di 6. Section 2 of the Seminars.
sapone: Tra arte e matematica (Turin: Bollati, 7. Section 2 of the Seminars.
195 Assessments
“the emergence of visual studies is not centered on art” and that “visual studies
depends on developments in the experimental sciences.”8
So my idea is to talk about the role of images in modern mathematics and to
discuss a few examples. The first problem is that mathematics is abstract. “As for
abstraction,” says Whitney Davis,
it’s hard to know. What is abstract for some readers will be doggedly
descriptive to other readers. Some of my peers in philosophical aesthetics
may think this book is not abstract enough: it is too involved with par-
ticular sociological, anthropological, critical issues, and they press on the
argument, preventing it from achieving the conceptual clarity and gen-
erality they value. Some of the writing in the game-theoretical commu-
nity is, to me, extremely abstract. It’s like going through a college course in
mathematics all over again to go through some of the very sophisticated
writing that is done on questions of algorithms and code. So there is an
entire community of readers for whom this book will seem like the work
of a plodding art historian, who doesn’t achieve even the beginnings of
genuine abstraction. Too abstract or not enough?9 (Emphasis mine)
The second problem is, what kind of role do images have in math? According
to James Elkins, “[w]hat is at stake for visual studies is the capacity to take images
as models and not examples or illustrations”;10 and Keith Moxey says that “[w]hat
struck me about Bredekamp’s book, and also [Elkins’s] Visual Practices Across the
University, was the idea of thinking with images. Trying to find images that capture
the invisible, that attempt to codify that which seems to be beyond perception.
Using images as if they were languages.”11 Gustav Frank says, “I think Bredekamp
wants not only to show that science progresses with visual models, but to show
the moment when visualizations go beyond anything that was later articulated in
science textbooks.”12 Inge Hinterwaldner suggests, “If we agree that images com-
municate in specific ways and have their own logic of functioning, isn’t it obvious
that they provide their own paths of knowledge production? If you ask scientists
who deal with enormous amounts of collected or generated data, they all say visu-
alization is indispensable. Nobody looks at lists with billions of numbers, because
you can hardly get any evidence out of them. It seems to be comparably difficult
to gain knowledge when confronted with the empirical phenomena under study.”13
I hope that my examples will go in the direction described by Elkins: “We’re
talking about how visual studies or art history might build bridges to science”;14
and by Lisa Cartwright: “If you could teach a research program in which you could
pursue these subjects, what would it look like, and what would your students do?”15
For the last eight years I have taught a unique course in the university cur-
riculum in Italy on “Space and Form” for second-year graduate students in
8. Section 1 of the Seminars. 12. Section 4 of the Seminars.

11. Section 4 of the Seminars. 15. Section 9 of the Seminars
mathematics, architecture, and design (in the European system, second-year

Laurea Magistrale students). The course is almost completely visual, using films,
computer graphics, images that go from art to architecture, mathematics, and
biology. Though sometimes I do use equations.
James Elkins noted at the end of the session on science studies that “visual
studies scholars . . . don’t want to write texts that have equations. I think that
is exactly what has to be risked in order to speak across the bridge from the
humanities to the sciences, and across the equally wide gulf between scholars
who want to read and incorporate actual vision science and those who want to
pursue laboratory studies, science studies in general, media studies, the sociol-
ogy, ethnography, or even the philosophy of science.”16
The Role of Images in Modern Math: A Few Examples

I start by quoting Keith Moxey: “There is Bredekamp’s notion that the use of
visual images in the sciences is actually a form of thinking, that it is an alterna-
tive to using language in that context.”17 Many changes have occurred in the field
of mathematical visualization in the past several years. In May 1988 a conference
took place at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. The theme was Differential Geometry, Calculus of
Variation, and Computer Graphics. A large portion of the conference was devoted
to images, in particular those obtained by computer graphics techniques, which
have made a number of interesting new results possible in mathematics. The year
before, the Geometry Supercomputer Project (known as the Geometry Center)
started its activity at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In 1992 a
new workshop was organized at the MSRI in Berkeley. The theme was explic-
itly Visualization of Geometric Structures. The same week, by chance, a special
issue of Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences
and Technology, dedicated to visual mathematics was published.18 The five hun-
dredth anniversary of the death of Piero della Francesca was October 12 of the
same year. None of the speakers at the 1992 workshop used merely blackboard
and chalk. All presentations were made using computer graphics, showing in real
time the various softwares produced to investigate new geometrical problems.
The use of visual computers presents new challenges for mathematicians: not
just to find more accurate visualizations of known phenomena but to discover
new forms, new shapes, to investigate completely new surfaces. A sort of experi-
mental mathematics. When I was a student in the sixties, only pure mathematics
was considered of any interest (see, for example, G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s
Apology), but at the end of the nineties the difference between pure and applied
math began to disappear, and I can say that today there is no distinction at all.
At the end of the sixties, Benoit B. Mandelbrot, while studying certain kinds
of algorithms, discovered fractals. According to his own informal definition, “[f ]
16. Section 9 of the Seminars. 18. Michele Emmer, ed., “Visual Mathemat-

17. Section 10 of the Seminars. ics,” special issue, Leonardo 25, nos. 3–4
(1992).
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ractals are geometric shapes that are equally complex in their details as in their
overall form. That is, if a piece of a fractal is suitably magnified to become of
the same size as the whole, it should look like the whole, either exactly, or per-
haps only after a slight limited deformation.”19 In fractal geometry, images are
essential, not just illustrations of a phenomenon. The property of self-similarity
of fractals makes it possible to have an enormous quantity of information con-
tained in an image, and this is one of the main reasons that computer graphics
animation in films uses fractals to create fascinating special effects.
In 1976, Thomas Banchoff and Charles Strauss produced the first anima-
tion in color of a four-dimensional cube, the hypercube. Ten years later Ban-
choff and collaborators produced the first animated film of the hypersphere.
It was possible to see the movement of a four-dimensional object (of course in
its three-dimensional projection) and discover shapes that were almost impos-
sible to visualize and realize without the animated images. It was really a shock
for the scientific community. In 1986, in the section on Space at the Biennale
Internazionale d’arte in Venice, the film was on show like an artwork. While
four-dimensional polytopes were known even if nobody had seen them mov-
ing in space, by 1986 it was possible to find the solution to an open problem in
mathematics using the images produced on a computer screen.
In 1982 the Brazilian mathematician Celso Costa published an example of a
surface that was minimal in relation to certain topological properties. David A.
Hoffman and William H. Meeks III, by considering the equations obtained by
Costa and with the help of the computer graphics expert James T. Hoffman, were
able to see the new surface on their computer and to discover the properties of the
surface using the images. It was the first real cooperation in mathematics of formal
proof and visual images of the unknown solution. David Hoffman said, “This col-
laboration of art and science produced something significant to both fields.”20
Many artists have realized sculptures of minimal surfaces of these kinds.
In the last years in contemporary architecture, in which the importance of math-
ematical and topological images is becoming more and more important, the
building that housed the new Olympic swimming pool in Beijing in 2008 was
constructed using a virtual model of a nonphysical minimal structure. Only in
November 2011 was it possible to construct a physical model of the structure,
based on a conjecture of Lord Kelvin which dated back to 1887.
A new visual mathematics uses images, many created through computer
graphics and algorithms, not merely as illustrations or to provide an example,
but as an essential element of demonstration and proof of research and analysis.
This new field could certainly be of interest to scholars working in visual stud-
ies. I would like to conclude by quoting Tom Mitchell: “I want to prolong the
interdisciplinary moment of visual studies as long as possible.”21
19. Benoit Mandelbrot, in Emmer, Visual

Mind, 12.
20. [ ]
R E S P O N S E , FA R E W E L L T O V I S U A L S T U D I E S
Terri Weissman
In Section 9, “Science Studies,” there is a very brief discussion concerning col-

laboration between scholars in the humanities and those in the social sciences
(and other fields). There is also a quick mention of projects with names like
“humanities lab” that work in a transdisciplinary or postdisciplinary manner—
such as the Stanford Humanities Lab, which seeks to bring together scholars in
the sciences, design, archaeology, history, and so on in order to create interactive
digital spaces and foster a new kind of research paradigm in which humanists
learn from the project management model used in the sciences. About these sorts
of undertakings Whitney Davis says, “One can be cautious and skeptical, but
students are voting with their feet.” In what is a mostly dismissive conversation,
this is the most positive thing said. But this indifference (or scorn?) strikes me
as a mistake—a big mistake, especially for scholars interested in visual studies.
Certainly there are worrisome aspects of the humanities lab model, and of the
related “digital humanities.” As someone interested in these spaces, for instance,
I worry about the uncritical euphoria and what can feel at times like the blind
embrace of all things connected to interactive digital media. I worry too about
an emerging, and I think deeply disturbing, connection between business and
art that seeks to instrumentalize humanistic research and artistic practice. And
finally, perhaps most simply, I worry that humanities labs and similar projects
provide a way for digital media enthusiasts to claim academic credibility without
the presence of any kind of rigorous intellectual review process. That research
will be reduced to bullet points. That style will trump substance.
Yet for all that, I still believe that digital humanities or some such as of yet
unnamed method or space or program that creates opportunities for transdis-
ciplinary research provides the most compelling case for the continuation of
(not the farewell to!) visual studies. In part this is for the simple reason that
“Big Data” no longer belongs to the field of supercomputing alone. That is,
the proliferation of digital artifacts has made the amassing of large collections
and the creation of new archives available to any curious browser or hoarder.
And while recent approaches to and scholarship on documentaries have in some
way grappled with this changed image landscape (I am thinking of artists like
Walid Raad or Ursula Biemann, or scholars such as Ariella Azoulay or Robert
Hariman and John Lucaites, or even Jacques Rancière), there still needs to be a
more fully articulated analysis that offers ways to interpret how the increasingly
complex interface between human and machine has changed what and the way
we see. We know that technological systems facilitate different kinds of visibility
199 Assessments
through the application of frames, filters, and algorithmic ordering. But where
is the vanguard of methodology in the study of technology and vision by art-
ists and art historians today? And how can scholars and artists make the values
embedded in the complex technological systems we use—and often, simultane-
ously, seek to critique—visible?1
These are the types of questions that visual studies scholars should be most
apt to address. These are the kinds of questions that, for me, make visual stud-
ies more important than ever. The kind of excitement that Michael Ann Holly
talked about as existing around the formation of visual studies in its early days—
the sense that stakes are high—also exists here, around this emerging field that
locates itself at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), visual
studies, and artistic production. To be clear, this is not a field or movement
restricted to scholars of contemporary art. Networks of transportation, methods
of mapping, systems of building and manufacture, representations of science,
and so on—these are not areas of study confined to the modern era or contem-
porary moment, yet the study of each is affected by new technologies of vision.
Thus, as students and scholars are increasingly asked to produce not only texts,
but also images, data structures, maps, charts, and other information-based visu-
alizations, the need to investigate the function and politics of vision in techno-
logical systems would seem to demand the reinvention of visual studies, not its
abandonment nor its farewell.
1. Much of what I say here was developed scholars at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
in conversation with Kevin Hamilton and forms Champaign, for a new graduate concentration in
the basis of a proposal put forth by a group of technology and visual studies.
RESPONSES
Johanna Drucker
The “visual studies” described in these transcripts was a particular intervention

in art history that began in the mid-1980s, but it is not the only version of the
history or identity of the field. Art history was woefully undertheorized in that
era. French philosophy, British cultural studies, and German critical theory had
resulted in vigorous and virulent debate in literature and film in their encounters
with semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanaly-
sis, Marxist and feminist theory, as well as the varied philosophies that accom-
panied them (queer theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and other critical
engagements followed soon after). Art history had remained remote from these
influences, and the defense against theory came from many different positions.
Scholars who saw the supremacy of the object, connoisseurship, and formal
analysis threatened were joined by others who felt the legitimacy conferred by
their training and credentials under threat from expertise in fields to which they
had little access except through difficult and obscure-seeming texts.
Battles over theory divided departments, made and ruined careers, and
transformed the discipline of art history. Many visual studies–affiliated art his-
torians turned away from visual analysis to the study of institutional practices.
Some managed a synthesis of the formal qualities of works and their social pro-
duction. Some expanded their discussions to dialogue with anthropology, fash-
ion, media, history, literature, history of science, or other disciplines in which
visual representations are produced or circulate. But even now, the entrenched
resistance to the study of mass media and broader domains of visual imagery and
production is part of the backlash against visual studies in art history (perhaps,
more properly, Art History), or, at least, a continuation of the impulse that
resisted its influence. The carcass of traditional art history has been pretty well
picked dry, even if it continues to be preserved and venerated in some of the
citadels and cloisters. But the “visual studies” outlined here is equally exhausted,
at the self-confessed “end” outlined in your volume, bidding itself farewell.
Why? Remember, the challenge was not just to reread the canonical works
through new lenses, but to bring new objects of study and analysis into view
while developing a unique methodological approach. Two things happened
along the way. The quest for a methodology specific to visuality failed to materi-
alize from this confluence of theoretical contributions, and the commitment to
aesthetics as a specialized mode of knowledge and arena of cultural production
evaporated. Exceptions can be cited in individual works, of course, but in broad
terms the intellectual inquiry into the historicity of vision, interest in visual
201 Assessments
epistemology, attention to the specificity of visual means and methods, concern

for embodied cognition and systems approaches to the social complex of visual
culture, all of which have developed considerably over the last three or four
decades, were simply ignored by “visual studies” as conceived here. Meanwhile,
the world was changing.
Methodological transformation came at the price of blindness, a peculiar
avoidance of attention to visual specificity, as if in compensatory response to the
old tenets of a retrogressive-seeming formalism, with its attachment to notions
of inherent, essential, and even self-evident value. The method of visual studies,
by its own admission throughout this tract, was often practiced at the expense of
visuality. Belief in the distinct capacity of images to produce both sense (coher-
ence and legibility) and meaning (referential and replete expression) on terms
that are distinct from those of language was sacrificed in favor of ideological cri-
tique. In other quarters, discussions of visual epistemology, design, media, and
information studies, cognition and vision, and new materialisms were surging
into view. These realms were fed in part by systems theory, by cybernetics and
digital media studies, but also by the long-standing examination of the specific-
ity of vision. These discourses are not constrained by either attention to or reac-
tion against art history, that tiny hothouse object in the larger culture of visual
forms, but are vigorous aspects of many multidisciplinary fields.
Nineteenth-century mass production changed the game in visual arts, with
commercial and entertainment images overwhelming those of the fine art arena
(giving fine art a newly defined identity). But since the invention of networked
digital media, we negotiate most of our daily business through the graphical
formats of interface. Visuality plays a dramatically different role in contem-
porary life than at any other point in human history, organizing knowledge,
information, communication, and the exchanges of power, money, and units
of cultural value in unprecedented ways, with unparalleled speed, volume, and
effect. The critical tools needed to understand these environments have to come
from fields of cognitive studies, design, and interface studies. Their history is
not encompassed in the esoteric knowledge domains of poststructuralist theory,
however useful it is as an accessory or adjunct. The point is not to jettison what
is valuable, but to lift our heads up from the narrow view into which attention
has been funneled by academic silos and disciplinary constraints, and revisit the
long and rich history of studies of vision, visuality, and epistemology as they
have intersected with design.
This version of visual studies is deeply humanistic, highly articulate and
self-conscious, with its roots in architecture, graphical forms of knowledge pro-
duction, printing and the book, page layout and composition, the history and
cultural valence of typography, visualization of information and knowledge in
graphical and diagrammatic forms, cartography from an array of interpretative
and thematic traditions, illustration, fashion, urban planning, industrial design,
user interface, artificial vision, and digital design—in short, all of the domains
in which visuality is an essential means of production. Design was fine art’s

dialogue with utopia, certainly in the visions of the late nineteenth-century
Arts and Crafts, Secessionist, and then twentieth-century Constructivist and
related movements and their legacies. That tradition of visual studies is far from
exhausted, and it is the domain in which my work has developed over the same
thirty years that I watched the rise and now self-confessed exhaustion of the
visual studies within the orbit of art history.
In the mid-1980s, pursuing an interdisciplinary degree that combined film
studies, the visual arts, environment design, and the history of writing, I had
only a distant sense of the art-historical community’s interest in theory, limited
to what I gleaned from the work of Norman Bryson and Victor Burgin. I sent
out feelers on the Berkeley campus to see if a full-fledged visual studies program
might take root. I visited the remains of György Kepes’s experimental foothold
at MIT, went to the Carpenter Center at Harvard to learn from what was left
of their Bauhaus legacy, sought out all the then-dying embers of the legacy of
Constructivist, De Stijl, and the other design movements whose precepts had
been codified in design curricula as well as professional practices. The vision-
ary work of László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Herbert Bayer, Alexander
Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Anni and Josef Albers, and others was shaped
by utopian visions of transformation and change. Those aspirations, like all of
the socialist agenda, met their tempered fate in various ways, but the crucible
of intellectual and creative thought gave rise to a full-fledged engagement with
visuality in systematic methodological and practical ways. As a method, this
tradition of visual studies has a long history stretching into antiquity, into the
use of visual means to produce pattern, idea, form, tools, decoration, commu-
nication, and expression. That discourse has never found a place in the “visual
studies” that is now declaring itself at an end. Why?
Humanistic as well as scientific and technical fields depend on visual knowl-
edge and its transmission in ways that are newly urgent even if they go back to
classical times, such as the creation and display of information in graphical form.
Certain disciplines, like architecture, rely on visual methods as the core instru-
ments of their existence—handwriting does not exist except in examples, and
the great copybooks and manuals of penmanship and lettering are testimony
to the nuances of class, station, and function to which these models were put.
The rhetorical structure of argument is outlined in diagrammatic form that is
explicitly graphic. The “laws of form” central to formal logic and its ambitious
dreams of a totalizing capacity to encode knowledge, the imaginative designs of
philosophical languages, the “real” character of John Wilkins, the diagrammatic
virtuosity of Robert Fludd—these strains of visual thinking and expression can
only be understood using a critical vocabulary informed by reference to specific
properties of visual forms. Humbert de Superville, Charles Blanc, John Ruskin,
Otto Neurath, Owen Jones, the Gestalt psychologists, theorists of Constructiv-
ist production of knowledge (visual and other), Humberto Maturana, Francisco
203 Assessments
Varela, Stephen Kosslyn—the list could go on an on, establishing a rich histori-

cal and theoretical foundation for visual studies from a broad array of contem-
porary fields highly relevant to pressing concerns in the present. Rarely codified
into a curriculum, such a foundation would be useful and practical across many
realms of applied and theoretical knowledge and research. Visual studies is ahead
of us, not behind, but it will be formulated from different sources and with other
aspirations than the field whose demise you have detailed.
FA R E W E L L T O A H I S T O R Y W I T H O U T T H E PA S T
Vanessa R. Schwartz
Reading the transcript of a seminar I did not attend, about readings I did not
read, is a form of curious intellectual eavesdropping that I hope has not fallen
on my own deaf ears. It is a relief that the Stone Seminar Farewell to Visual Stud-
ies harbors no delusion of being a singular intellectual origin or trajectory. This
would be especially dubious in an interdisciplinary field, which generally devel-
ops as an intellectual voluntary association. The Seminars represent a cluster of
important approaches: German, Anglo-American, Swiss academics, but very few
French thinkers, despite the fact that Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lacan
dominated much of the first wave of American university formation of the field
in the 1980s. Ocularcentrism and its decline in France is also the subject of one
of the foundational intellectual histories in the field, Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes.1
But aside from the Gallic exclusion, my greatest concern is that the Seminars’
organization mimics the field’s strangest attribute: its increasing lack of histori-
cal depth and an insistent chronological insensitivity. There are five “Histories”
sections, including the oxymoronic “Present Decade”; two refer to no particular
moment, and there are great gaps from the prewar German period to 1989, fol-
lowed by decadism, with no key moments or texts defining the transition from
one period to another except a calendar. Wouldn’t a study such as T. J. Clark’s
The Painting of Modern Life, which, despite itself, gave enormous impetus to the
field on its 1985 publication and which preceded the translation of Walter Ben-
jamin’s The Arcades Project into French, and Susan Buck-Morss’s The Dialectics
of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989), need to find a place
in such a discussion?2 In the transcript the genealogy derives from two sets of
German-language writers: those such as Wölfflin, Warburg, and Riegl, fathers
of academic art history (when it was visual studies before the fact, as Bildwis-
senschaft), and those such as Kracauer and Benjamin, who developed “media
studies” before the fact. Yet, as the coeditor of a volume, The Nineteenth-Century
Visual Culture Reader, that attempted to present a historically driven account of
both the field and its objects, I was also struck by the lack of reference to such
thinkers as Baudelaire, Marx, Simmel, and Freud, who shed indispensable light
on the categories of “modernity” as a historical formation which in itself can be
considered to have produced a culture so saturated in images that it has pushed
scholarship into a near frenzy of trying to describe and explain it—despite the
1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIX siècle:
of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought Le livre des passages, translated by Jean
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Lacoste (Paris: Cerf, 1989); Susan Buck-Morss,
2. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and
Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); 1989)
205 Assessments
fact that image production is an ancient practice and has always been about
much more than what we in the Western world have come to define as art.3
If image production and reception is the major vein of the field, vision and
visuality comprise its other fundamental domain of consideration, thus linking
visual studies to the philosophy, theory, and history of perception and the senses.
Finally, visual studies can be defined as engaging with new practices of scholarly
inscription in images and through visual narration brought to the fore by the
digital revolution. I am skeptical of the conflation of artistic practice with visual
studies, however. Our work is to offer investigation and analysis in the form of
critical discourse, and we are no more artists because we use images than we are
poets because we use words.
I was struck by the near chorus of pleas by Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey,
and to a lesser extent Lisa Cartwright (who was astute enough to mention Jona-
than Crary, another poor soul who made his career trapped in working on a cen-
tury past),4 who seemed to be speaking into a void, since the subject they raised
was never taken up in any sustained way in the Seminars. They voiced concern
about the presentism of the field as well as among seminar participants. Symp-
tomatic of this amnesia in the discussion is the attention to Nick Mirzoeff. While
everyone mentioned his recent politically motivated work on 9/11 and his Visual
Culture Reader, no one, for example, recalled his first, excellent book, Silent Poetry,
which looked at the long genealogy of thought concerning deafness as a condition
of potential excessive visuality and in which he mined a rich visual archive of the
history of sign language and deaf artists in nineteenth-century France. Even that
research has been forgotten—and the book was published in 1997.5
Holly and Moxey invoked the importance of work that treated the distant
past and its images, its institutions, and remote cultures’ organization of visual-
ity. The science of vision has a history too that might serve to temper all the fad-
dishness about neuroscience today. To be fair, all intellectual inquiry that is not
antiquarian can be regarded as presentist in the sense that present perspectives
and frameworks guide scholars. That, however, is quite different from the field’s
current condition of being mired in “now-ism,” as Richard Meyer has described
it. Increasingly, visual studies has become shorthand for the study of contempo-
rary visual culture. That is a regrettable condition. In the graduate certificate we
built in visual studies at USC, our orientation is resolutely historical; we have
active participants with expertise in all periods, from antiquity to the present,
who work alongside anthropologists, sociologists, and communications and film
scholars. Any sense of the past that exists in the scholarship in the field is here
telescoped—as if something that happened ten years ago is “in the past.” Some-
thing that happened ten seconds ago is also past, but for scholarly purposes,
a real dedication to experience long past has been the special value of the deep
3. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. 1990); Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Atten-
Przybliski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Cul- tion, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge,
ture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004). MA: MIT Press, 2000).
4. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the 5. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Silent Poetry: Deaf-
Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the ness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
and careful knowledge to which humanities scholars have been dedicated, leav-
ing the present to the social scientists and, I suppose, the future to the scientists,
if we need to divide knowledge that way.
Lynn Hunt and I guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture
to offer work that exemplifies the value of such inquiry. The issue considered the
relation of images to temporality and contextualization, from cave paintings to
film and photography.6 We did not aspire to cover all history but rather many
periods in history to remind the journal’s readers of the importance of contextu-
alization and the real differences that temporally and spatially different cultures
produced in regards to the visual. Visual technologies themselves, such as the
instant camera, have also fundamentally altered the expectations and experience
of time itself; Elizabeth Edwards concerns herself with such issues in The Camera
as Historian.7 The late Anne Friedberg practiced a sort of media archaeology in
her books Window Shopping and The Virtual Window.8 The intersection of science
and art has brought the latter’s questions about objectivity and epistemology to
bear specifically in the visual realm. Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire, which
looks at the eighteenth-century Spanish botanical expeditions, is an exemplary
study among the many dedicated to the nexus of visual culture and the history
of science.9 Additionally, there is an important historical literature that considers
the problem of visual discernment as central to the process of social democrati-
zation in the West in the nineteenth century. More than thirty years ago, Neil
Harris identified the operational aesthetic in his study about P. T. Barnum, and
more recently Michael Leja has extended that paradigm to later in nineteenth-
century America, moving from the realm of popular culture back to such artists
as Eakins, Harnett, and Duchamp.10 In short, the history of visual studies is also
a history of the histories of visual culture already written as much as a set of intel-
lectual histories of methodologies, schools of thought, and movements.
The history of visual studies that is summoned and simultaneously dismissed
in the Seminars is too incoherent and arbitrary to reject or admit. We need to bid
farewell to an idea of history that is a mere web of connections with a shallow
and analytically poor chronology that measures time against the calendar rather
than in genuine intellectual developments. This results in a sense of history that
is more like the eternal present, one that ominously mirrors the worst aspects of
the depthlessness of the very modern visual culture that it seeks to interrogate.
6. Lynn Hunt and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University

“The History Issue,” special issue, Journal of of Chicago Press, 2012); Pamela H. Smith,
Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (December 2010). The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in
7. Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as His- the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of
torian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Chicago Press, 2004); and Claudia Swan, Art,
Imagination, 1885–1918 (Durham: Duke Univer- Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland:
sity Press, 2012). Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (New York:
8. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cin- Cambridge University Press, 2005), among oth-
ema and Postmodernism (Berkeley: University ers not already cited in the seminar discussion.
of California Press, 1994); Friedberg, The Virtual 10. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Bar-
Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, num (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
MA: MIT Press, 2006). 1981); and Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skep-
9. Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: ticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp
Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
A M B I VA L E N C E S
V I S U A L C U LT U R E S T U D I E S A N D
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
Bernd Stiegler
The theories of the Frankfurt school and especially of Walter Benjamin are part
of the canon of visual culture studies. Their impact has to do with the particular
theoretical setting of visual culture and its history emerging from cultural stud-
ies. But in fact the reception is in a way quite orthodox: there are a very few texts
quoted continually and others missing. Benjamin is the classical example for the
repetitive canon, Kracauer for the quite astonishing missing reception.
Benjamin and the Problem of Shifting Theories

Starting with the repetitive canon, we have to deal with a permanent reinvention
of Benjamin and a rewriting of his theories. Benjamin is really a shifting theoret-
ical subject and not a well-defined object. Or to put it in other terms, Benjamin
is the ideal author in order to establish a canon which is—deliberately or not—
structurally wide open and in permanent transition. If you want to see things
in a Marxist perspective, take Benjamin. If you want to switch to metaphysics,
take Benjamin. If you want to be close to deconstruction, take Benjamin as well.
Sometimes you have to choose other texts, sometimes you just have to change
your interpretative optics.
In the context of visual culture studies, Benjamin is a sort of background
theory. There are just a handful of canonical texts which can be found in more
or less every visual culture book. But there are others missing, and in a quite
astonishing way even those dealing with the visual are not part of the canon.
In fact, many of Benjamin’s texts work—metaphorically and practically—with
images, but only those which try to formulate broader historical issues are read
and discussed. Benjamin himself is a figure of permanent ambivalences. That is
what makes his ideas attractive and even exciting. To understand him precisely
you have to go to the core of his images, to the heart of his visual world. You
have to read his essays on children’s books, to go through his collection of post-
cards, to recollect the illustrated books of his critical reviews, just to name a few
examples (cf. Walter Benjamin’s Archive).
One more step: Visions of Benjamin could be the title of a book reconsider-
ing the history of visual culture. Benjamin’s works are a plurality of their own
and offer a huge and often contradictory variety of issues, concepts, ideas, and
so on. Their complex and shimmering readings, transformations, and reformu-
lations in the context of visual culture studies reveal a lot about visual culture
studies and less about Benjamin.
Kracauer, or the Missing Decades

Kracauer has a particular and very significant position in this context. He is
an outstanding example of the early practice of visual culture, especially in his
writings on films and his feuilletons collected in the new German edition of
his works.1 There are literally hundreds of journalistic texts dealing with visual
phenomena in an analytical sociological perspective—but only a dozen that are
quoted in the field of visual culture studies. In fact, only Das Ornament der
Masse, his essay on photography, and a few others collected in edited volumes
remain, together with From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. Several decades
are missing in and due to this choice.
For Kracauer, the visual world is a world that speaks in a particular way
and that has to be read in a different way. Throughout his very dense descrip-
tions and “social” readings, Kracauer develops his singular sociological phenom-
enology not as an explicit and well-defined theory but as a more implicit one.
Photography and film are means of social expression and have to be deciphered
as media of memory, social interactions, revelations, and even utopian dreams.
Most of the central visual culture ideas are to be found in Kracauer’s texts of the
1920s and early 1930s. None of them belong to the central or even broader visual
culture canon.
In fact, the Shoah marks a real gap in his conception and interpretation
of history and its philosophy, his perspective having been completely changed
by that caesura in history. The redemption in the subtitle of Theory of Film,
The Redemption of Physical Reality, is a redemption of the mere “physical” world
and not of the subject, which is, as the spectator of the films, neither an identical
reference nor a well-defined entity. This idea marks From Caligari to Hitler and
Theory of Film.
If you want to discover Kracauer as a theorist of early visual culture—and
he is one of the most brilliant examples—you have to go through this impressive
collection of short texts.
The Frankfurt School and Media History: Ambivalences of Criticism

It might be useful to practice a sort of rereading of Adorno, Horkheimer, and
other members of the Institute for Social Research from the perspective of their
specific use of images and their analysis of the visual. Generally speaking, the
institute seems to have been marked by a deep iconophobia. But this impres-
sion makes the issue even more attractive and interesting. And in fact Adorno’s
position is, in my opinion, much more ambivalent than it seems to be (see, for
example, Martin Seel’s book with essays on Adorno and film),2 and quite a lot
of research projects in the middle of the twentieth century dealt with the visual
1. Siegfried Kracauer, Werke, vol. 5, Essays, Schrifte von Film, edited by Inka Mülder-Bach
Feuilletons, Rezensionen, edited by Inka Mülder- with Mirjam Wenzel and Sabine Biebl (Frankfurt:
Bach with Sabine Biebl, Andrea Erwig, Vera Suhrkamp, 2004).
Bachmann, and Stephanie Manske (Frankfurt: 2. Martin Seel, Adornos Philosophie der
Suhrkamp, 2011); Kracauer, Werke, vol. 6, Kleine Kontemplation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004).
209 Assessments
world. Some of them are related to early empirical sociology (Lazarsfeld and
others), while others are extremely detailed analyses of the relationship between
mass medias, mass culture, and everyday life—and that’s the issue of visual cul-
ture studies as well.
The ambivalences of the Frankfurt school and those of visual culture studies
are corresponding. That is the lesson we have to take into consideration for our
from now on double reading of the classical texts.
E P I S O D E S O F FA I L U R E ? O R , S O M E R E M A R K S O N T H E
INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND ITS
R E L E VA N C E T O A G E N E A L O G Y O F V I S U E L L E K U LT U R
Lisa Zaher
I am responding to the genealogy of visuelle Kultur that Gustav Frank presents in

Section 1 of the transcript. I would like to better understand what he deems to be
the failure of the critical endeavor of theorists like Balász, Benjamin, and Mün-
sterberg, and the forty-year gap that ensued between roughly 1940 and 1980.
I take his point to be that a rereading of Balász, Benjamin, and Münsterberg
contributes to a history of visual culture, and not merely a history of film or
media studies, in making available a thicker history of attitudes about percep-
tion and the production and reception of images. I understand too that the gap
he indicates is specific to the institutional narrative within Germany. However,
I propose that it would be fruitful to undergo a similar, parallel reevaluation of
many of the canonical figures within the history of photography in the United
States.1 I contend that the structures and mechanisms within one institutional
narrative might illuminate the other, or, at minimum, provide a concurrent his-
tory of visual culture with a set of analogous, and at times overlapping, prec-
edents and terms.
Such a parallel study would first identify the emerging institutional frame-
work for the history of photography in the United States from the late 1910s
onward, as a time and place where many of the concerns of the above authors
were shared. We find echoes of Balász’s call for “interhuman spiritual exchanges”
within the writings of one of his contemporaries, and photography’s earliest
modernist theorists, Paul Strand.2 Writing in 1922 about the photographs of
Alfred Stieglitz, Strand declared, “In thus revealing the spirit of the individ-
ual he has documented the world of that individual, which is today.”3 Edward
Weston carried forth this tradition in his efforts to communicate the essence of
his photographic subjects.4 Ironically, when reviewing Weston’s exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, Clement Greenberg argued that in order
for photography to be a successful form of modern art, the photographer must
“rely more on his explicit subject and . . . express its identity or personality and
his feelings about it so much more directly.”5 Objecting to Weston’s cold formal-
ism as an overt conceptualism, Greenberg praised, instead, the work of Walker
1. On this note, it might make sense to treat 4. Weston’s sentiments appear throughout
Münsterberg as a marginal figure on the edge of his published Daybooks, which begin in 1922
both narratives. and continue through to his more canonical
2. Béla Balázs, The Theory of the Film: Char- essays, such as “Seeing Photographically,”
acter and Growth of a New Art (London: Denis published in 1943. See Weston, The Daybooks of
Dobson, 1952), 41. Edward Weston, edited by Nancy Newhall, vol. 1,
3. Paul Strand, “Photography and the New Mexico (Rochester: George Eastman House,
God,” Broom 3 (1922), reprinted in Classic 1961), and vol. 2, California (New York: Horizon
Essays in Photography, edited by Alan Trachten- Press, 1966).
berg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 5. Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass
149–50. Eye: Review of an Exhibition of Edward Weston”
211 Assessments
Evans, for offering a form of modern art photography based on an intuitive and
empathic engagement between photographer and subject.6
If, as Whitney Davis suggests, what Frank fears has become lost does “have
something to do with the doctrine of expression: the expressive gesture, the
transparency of the Innenwelt to visibility and the Umwelt, by way of nonver-
bal or extralinguistic expressivity” in the contemporary German framework of
Bildwissenschaft, is it significant to Frank’s genealogy that these were the terms
through which photographic media were deemed to possess aesthetic value?7 The
“organizing ideology, the vitalism” was an essential factor in judging photographs
as works of art.8 Not only did this “doctrine of expression,” to borrow a phrase,
serve to value the material objects as art, but integral to that valuation was the
idea that these objects were “alive.” Their aliveness made them modern art.
The institutional treatment of photographic media in the United States is per-
haps helpful for understanding a site for the continuation of the vitalist impulse
within the writings of Benjamin and Balász. However, it also generated its own
alternative reasonings for why its own contemporary moment may have lost or
disassociated itself from that impulse. We can locate one explanation in the impact
of Structuralist and Poststructuralist thought on the history of photography as it
became incorporated into the larger narrative of art history, which other speakers
allude to throughout these Seminars.9 Strand’s photographic theory provides an
explanation for the specific failure of his own theoretical project, as it accounts
for the impact of photography on visuality from within a modernist perspective.
Strand championed the modernist belief that what moves the tradition forward is
both knowledge of that tradition and the knowledge and conviction that what one
is doing is a contribution to it.10 He was aware, as Whitney Davis has written, that
“[v]isuality and pictoriality are reciprocally and recursively interdetermined and
interacting aspects of world-recognition.”11 After encouraging his followers to learn
the photographic tradition by looking through the pages of the journal Camera
Work, Strand advised them accordingly, “As a matter of fact, your photography is
a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by
(1946), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, 8. Section 1 of the Seminars. See Allan
vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, edited by Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic
John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Meaning,” in Thinking Photography, edited by
Press, 1986), 62. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan Education,
6. We find these claims echoed by the French 1982), 103.
film theorist André Bazin, especially in his 9. See Craig Owens, “The Allegorical
1943 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”
Image,” in What Is Cinema, vol. 1, translated by and “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Postmodernism, Part 2,” in Beyond Recognition:
Press, 1967). Similar ideas about expression can Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley:
be found in Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cin- University of California Press, 1992), 52–69 and
ematographer (the author’s memos, which date 70–87.
from 1950–74), which despite its title is more 10. Paul Strand, “The Art Motive in Pho-
than just an account of cinematography, but tography,” British Journal of Photography 70
rather a reflection on media, selfhood, and the (October 5, 1923): 612.
communicability of experience. Robert Bresson, 11. Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual
Notes on the Cinematographer (Copenhagen: Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
Green Integer Books, 1997). 2011), 233.
other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have
eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Niet[z]sche meant when he said,
‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidi-
ous other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of
profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision.”12
The reciprocal and recursive effects of pictoriality and visuality in Strand’s
photographic theory identified a problem within photographic modernism,
as achieving a new “style” photographically involved an act of looking analogous
to, and dependent upon, the act of learning the tradition. In 1972, the artist and
theorist Hollis Frampton declared that Strand had assigned a new role to the
artist, that of epistemologist.13 Frampton’s reading suggests that the conditions
necessary to sustain Strand’s photographic theory as a modernist project are pre-
cisely the conditions that warrant its treatment as a study of visual culture.
Another (too quick) conclusion on the failure of the critical endeavor of
such theorists as Benjamin and Balász would be that the institutionalization
of photographic media within the United States produced the conditions for
this failure. The argument would be that the gradual induction of photography
into museums not only suffocated their ideological objectives by turning a mass
cultural dynamic into a high art aesthetic, but also transformed the necessary
material conditions through the fetishization of the photographic print. How-
ever, the actual institutional treatment of photographic media, specifically at the
Museum of Modern Art at midcentury under the direction of Edward Steichen,
speaks to a contrary view. Steichen’s curatorial policy, enacted with such exhi-
bitions as Road to Victory (1942) and The Family of Man (1955), often involved
obtaining negatives from the photographers and printing the photographs by
himself in a range of formats that best met the needs of his exhibition layouts.
Christopher Phillips has argued that this method deemphasized the authenticity
of the single photographic print as well as its autonomy, placing the emphasis on
the image rather than the material object.14 The material form of each image did,
however, become a factor of Steichen’s exhibition design, crafted to impact its
spectators through the dynamics of the display, including large-scale reproduc-
tions and overlapping juxtapositions of images in three-dimensional space. Stei-
chen understood photography as a visual language, one communicated, shared,
and learned through its unique history of distribution and display.15 As he stated,
“Man’s first language was written in images on the walls of caves. Photography
simplifies and enlarges the scope of the image language.”16
12. Strand, “Art Motive in Photography,” 614. Family of Man.” Barthes’s criticism, however,
13. Hollis Frampton, “Meditations Around concerned not so much the claim for photog-
Paul Strand,” in On the Camera Arts and raphy as a universal language as the applica-
Consecutive Matters, edited by Bruce Jenkins tion of photographic media towards the myth
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 63. of a universalized human experience. Roland
14. Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mytholo-
of Photography,” October 22 (Autumn 1982): gies, translated by Annette Lavers (New York:
27–63. Hill and Wang, 1972), 100–102.
15. Roland Barthes famously lambasted 16. Edward Steichen, “My Life in Photogra-
Steichen’s The Great Family of Man show, as it phy,” Saturday Review, March 28, 1959, 18.
was presented in Paris, in his essay “The Great
213 Assessments
While I can foresee the objection that authors like Paul Strand and Edward
Steichen were advocating for a monomedial account rather than an account of
visual culture, I would argue that such an objection is based on a limited concep-
tion of what “photography” amounts to. Their absence from a larger history of
visual culture is a limitation not so much of their theory as of the disciplinary
applications of their thought.
FA R E W E L L T O V I S UA L S T U D I E S —
WELCOME TO PHENOMENOLOGY!
Stephan Günzel
My response to the discussion draws on a remark by Gustav Frank, who draws

our attention to the fact that image theory (Bildtheorie) has a strong non- or even
antisemiotic bias. Indeed, this was Gottfried Boehm’s intention in proclaiming
an “iconic turn,” which represented nothing less than a break with the domi-
nance of linguistic approaches, and in consequence with the “linguistic turn.”
Boehm even suggested rethinking language in terms of images—and pictures.
However, theory (and particularly philosophy) has long lacked a turning away
from the linguistic or semiotic paradigm. And as Frank also mentions, even when
nonsemiotic approaches are considered, they do not overcome the notion that
an image is (and has to be) a sign. Therefore—and this is what the future (at least
of Bildtheorie) holds—a “perceptual turn” has to take place. Lambert Wiesing,
who is also quoted by Frank, is one of the few theoreticians who have turned
away from semiotics. In this he has laid a new foundation for picture semiotics
within an image theory, by demonstrating in which ways an image or a picture
can be, without necessarily having to be, used as a sign. The recent translations
of his writings (especially Artificial Presence) are making his approach known to
the international community.1 This will not only stimulate the discussion but
provide stagnating image theory with a completely new paradigm. It should also
give visual studies the impetus to integrate those phenomenological insights.
1. Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Phil-

osophical Studies in Image Theory, translated
by Nils F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2010).
FA I L U R E ? FA R E W E L L ? D E S T R U C T I O N !
A SHORT REFLECTION ON VISUAL STUDIES,
OR VISUAL STUDIES CONTRA BILDWISSENSCHAFT
Bernhard J. Dotzler
Diese Aufgabe verstehen wir als die am Leitfaden der Seinsfrage sich vollziehende
Destruktion des überlieferten Bestandes der antiken Ontologie auf die ursprünglichen
Erfahrungen, in denen die ersten und fortan leitenden Bestimmungen des Seins
gewonnen wurden.
—Martin Heidegger
On the question of a “farewell to visual studies,” I would like to refer to an aspect

which I missed in the discussions among the summer school’s participants. It is
“acoustic space,” once promoted by Marshall McLuhan in opposition to “visual
space,” which emerged from print. Photography, illuminated advertising, film,
TV, and so on have mostly been interpreted as a dramatic increase of the visual,
or as an ongoing escalation of the visual culture we believe we live in. Accord-
ing to McLuhan, however, photography and film (photography from Talbot to
the decline of Kodak, i.e., not digital photography, not digital film, nor video)
are mechanical arts just as print is, whereas TV belongs to the electronic media
and is acoustic in its essence, that is to say, in its effects. A “farewell” to visual
studies, I would like to argue, is perhaps not enough. One should think about
“destruction” in the sense that Heidegger gave to the word when he wrote of the
task of a “Destruktion der Geschichte der Ontologie.” Derrida only embellished
the challenge by rephrasing the term into “deconstruction.” McLuhan instead
acknowledged that “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as tri-
umphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.”
(There is the laughter at “proxemics” in the list of disciplines or topics
involved in visual studies. Here, for a moment, acoustic space comes into play.
But the matter wasn’t followed up. Anyway.)
The distinction between visual space and acoustic space opens an interest-
ing perspective on the division of the history of visual studies into two phases,
as suggested in the first seminar. Although this is not the only way of think-
ing about the histories of visual studies, there are good reasons for identifying
a period from about 1900 to the 1940s and a new onset since the 1980s and
’90s. One then has to ask two questions (both of which are thoroughly reflected
by the summer school’s discussions). First, what is the difference between then
and now? Second, why did the previous investigations into visual culture fail?
Why did the first period come to an end? What was, or is, the rupture that
caused the recent efforts to establish a Bildwissenschaft to be a restart rather than
a continuation? Visual studies have never been a failure in the richness of what
they brought to light, of course. Cultural studies of whatever kind cannot fail.
They act as positioning agencies with positive results that (with the exception of
errors in detail, such as, for example, wrong age determinations of this or that
artefact) cannot be negated or falsified but only denied or ignored. However,
if “failure” also means “disruption” (or vice versa), then there was a failure worth
exploring.
With respect to the difference between the visual studies of, let’s say, the 1930
and ’40s and the new attention that has been paid to visual phenomena since the
1980s and ’90s, it can be easily named. Whether pictures were only read or actu-
ally seen (as Tom Mitchell put it in the discussion), their “being in the world,”
that is, their ontology, was undoubted when Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kra-
cauer, or Erwin Panofsky wrote on photography and film. Not only was what
they made visible considered to be true and real,1 but the pictures themselves
were simply material. In contrast, the epistemological status of images radically
changed with digital photography. As is generally known, pictures and images
have now become a doubted reality, an object of skepticism, misgivings, and
disbelief, or in German, Zweifel. Visual studies therefore has become, on the one
hand, more exigent than before. On the other hand, the “ontological turn” to
the image, as which at least Bildwissenschaft has to be seen, might be nothing
else than facing the challenge with an act of despair, or Akt der Verzweiflung, with
Verzweiflung understood in a Heideggerian sense as Ver-Zweiflung. Even when
dealing with technologically informed pictures (e.g., Das technische Bild), the
pictorial turn, whether that of Tom Mitchell or that of Bildwissenschaft, does
not encounter the extinction of (material) images that is the signum of today’s
visual realities. So, instead of continuing as it has, the task of visual studies may
be to learn to destroy what they have been, and to become aware—to learn
thinking—not only of the invisible,2 but of the nonvisual at the ground of all
visuality.3
What thereby has to be understood is, among other things, what happened
in between: what is the difference that makes a difference between the study
of visuelle Kultur in the 1920s and ’30s and today’s visual studies? The diversity
of visual realities then and now is only one aspect. Another one comes to the
fore with the question of “failure,” or “disruption.” The visuelle Kultur period
ended with the beginning, that is to say, the impact of TV. As one can observe,
for example, in the closing chapter of Rudolf Arnheim’s Radio (1936), television
since then has mostly been seen as an extension of broadcasting from the pure
auditorial level, by which radio is defined, to the visual level as well. TV seems
to be one of the optical media. If so, however, the study of visuelle Kultur should
have been able to go on as it did with photography and film. But it didn’t. Why?
1. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: 3. Cf. my closing statement in Bild/Kritik,

The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: edited by Bernhard J. Dotzler (Berlin: Kulturver-
Oxford University Press, 1965). lag Kosmos, 2010).
2. As Whitney Davis says in Section 7 of the
Seminars.
217 Assessments
Even radio was seen (!) as an “imagery [!] of the ear” by Arnheim (and others).
It was only McLuhan who suggested thinking it the other way round: TV does
not so much convert the radio world into a visual world as the visual world into
a radio world. In his famous Playboy interview (“A candid conversation with the
high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media,” 1969) he argues:
McLuhan: . . . It is television that is primarily responsible for ending the

visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology, although
each of the other electric media have played contributing roles.
Playboy: But isn’t television itself a primarily visual medium?
McLuhan: No, it’s quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is a
visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or photo-
graph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather
than of sight.
Thus, one might say, in a way, that to continue visual studies they should have
turned, or should turn now, into something like what once was called the study
of “soundscapes.”4 Or at least thinking along these lines seems to me to be worth
considering not only a “farewell to” but an “overcoming of ” visual studies.
4. Cf. R. Murray Schafer, The New Sound-

scape: A Handbook for the Modern Music
Teacher (New York: Berandol, 1969), and
The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977).
I M A G E -A B I L I T Y
ANOTHER READING OF BILDGESCHICHTE
Sjoukje van der Meulen
One thing that has always surprised me about Bildgeschichte is that this German
form of art history focuses primarily on the content of the image (its meaning, its
message, its composition; in short, its iconography) and seldom on the material
and technical (or technological) making or production of that very image. In these
Farewell to Visual Studies conversations, this omission is also observed by James
Elkins in regard to the closely related Anglo-American discipline of visual studies:
“It becomes, at least for me, glaringly obvious that visual studies isn’t interested in
questions of making. . . . That’s on my list of lacunae: visual studies remains disen-
gaged from the phenomenology and from the empirical data of making images.”1
This shared failure of visual studies and Bildgeschichte is particularly dis-
turbing for media studies, which takes for granted that media conditions and the
technology employed inform the image and are thus contributive to its meaning
and message. In this book on the fate of visual studies, including Bildgeschichte,
Gustav Frank holds that media studies is “a potential adversary” of Bildge-
schichte, and he singles out Friedrich Kittler in particular: “This [media studies
as ‘potential adversary’] is especially true of the media-hardware orientation of
Friedrich Kittler, who argues for a technical a priori that supersedes interest in
the contents of a text or image. . . . Kittler’s appearance in the 1980s was really
shocking, not just for people engaged in what became Bildwissenschaft, but for
people in the humanities generally. That’s why I would place media studies as an
adversary of Bildwissenschaft.”2 While Frank rightly observes that media studies
in Germany since the early 1980s, led by Kittler, has almost developed into a
kind of anti-Bildgeschichte, it is a question whether these opposed iconographic
and technological traditions necessarily exclude each other. In this commentary,
I propose an alternative reading of Bildgeschichte, based on another etymologi-
cal source of the underlying concept of Bild, which might help to transcend the
antagonism between these fields.
Many scholars have pointed out that the English term “image” and the Ger-
man word Bild are not the same: where the English language has two words to
denote representation—image and picture—in German both types of images fit
into the same category of Bild.3 Still, the basic concept of the image that under-
lies both visual studies and Bildgeschichte finds its common root in the Latin
term imago. This illuminates the iconographic orientation and interpretation
of Bildgeschichte and visual studies by leading scholars in both disciplines: the

3. Such as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp,
W. J. T. Mitchell, and Samuel Weber.
219 Assessments
term “iconography” comes from the Greek εἰκών (image) and γράφειν (to write),
and relates to the study of religious images or icons in the Byzantine and Ortho-
dox Christian tradition.
In his first study on Bildgeschichte, Bild und Kult (1990), Hans Belting,
for example, defines Bild as imago right in the preface: “Deshalb sei vorweg
gesagt, dass unter einem Bild im folgenden vornehmlich das personale Bildnis,
die imago, verstanden ist.”4 His reading is consistent with the Grimms’ Ger-
man dictionary, the standard etymological dictionary for the German language,
which lists the Latin source of imago as well as the anthropological concept
of Bild: “bild ist vorzugsweise menschenbild, ein gleichnis des menschen, was
seiner gestalt gleich kommt.”5 In Bild-Anthropologie (2001), Belting further
develops his ideas about the image in an anthropological sense.6 Belting explains
that the human source of Bild goes back to imago in its earliest anthropological
forms, such as representations of deceased people in death cults. The premise
that he infers from his multifaceted anthropological analysis is that the image
and the human body cannot be separated: our whole physiological and men-
tal “apparatus” has a role in the creation of the image. In this second book on
Bildgeschichte, which he now baptizes Bildwissenschaften, Belting clearly dis-
tinguishes this newly invented discipline from both art history and media stud-
ies. In “A Neglected Tradition: Art History as Bildgeschichte,” Horst Bredekamp
questions Belting’s recreation of Bildgeschichte and his ahistorical assessment of
media studies: Bildgeschichte, Bredekamp insists, not only has a history but also
includes “a long-established media-historical approach.”7 Nonetheless, Brede-
kamp’s historical excursion into the media-conscious fathers of Bildgeschichte,
such as Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, is based on the same understanding
of Bild as imago, with which he confirms the iconographic tradition of Bildge-
schichte. In Visual Studies, W. J. T. Mitchell similarly interprets the concept of
the image in terms of imago and explicitly references Panosky’s iconography,
even as he revises the art historian’s method into iconology. In Mitchell’s words,
“I call these ‘essays in iconology’ to restore something of the literal sense of this
word. This is truly a study of the ‘logos’ (the words, ideas, discourse, or ‘sci-
ence’) of ‘icons’ (images, pictures, or likenesses).”8 And he adds, “In a broader
sense, the critical study of the icon begins with the idea that human beings are
created ‘in the images and likeness’ of their creator.”9 The leading scholars in
4. “Therefore it has to be said in advance 8. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text,

that in the following an image is mainly under- Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
stood as the self-image, the imago.” Hans Belt- 1986), 1.
ing, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor 9. Mitchell, Iconology, 3. Mitchell does refer
dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1990), 9. to image making, not, however, in a material
5. “Bild is first of all human image, man’s and technical (or technological) sense but
likeness, that which equals his shape.” Grimms in terms of ideology and the manipulation of
Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Bild.” the image in areas such as advertising and
6. Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: propaganda. He focuses on ideology in various
Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: chapters of the book.
Wilhelm Fink, 2001).
7. Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition?
Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry
29, no. 3 (2003): 418–28.
Bildgeschichte and visual studies, in short, base their methods regarding the
image on the typical art-historical iconographic traditions of Warburg and Pan-
ofsky, complemented in visual studies by the semiological approach of Roland
Barthes.
According to media studies, this grounding of Bildgeschichte in icono-
graphic and semiological traditions is not just problematic but also insufficient
to understand the complexities of the technologically driven Bildkultur today.
Already in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibil-
ity”—without which Belting’s Bild und Kult would arguably not exist10—Walter
Benjamin insists that traditional and technical images are tremendously differ-
ent. The media theorist Vilém Flusser turns Benjamin’s insight into a thesis on
the ontological difference between these two types of images, which he uses as
his starting point for Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of
Photography, 1983) and Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Into the Universe of
Technical Images, 1985).11 Historicizing Jonathan Crary’s thesis that perception
is premised on technology, and thus also informs the observation and interpre-
tation of the technical image, Kittler writes a whole history of modern opti-
cal media, in which he substantiates his claim that the humanities, including
art history, are shaped by technological developments.12 It must be noted that
Bildwissenschäftler such as Belting and Bredekamp have since long opened up
to media studies, including the one established by Kittler in the 1980s: Belting
includes the concept of “medium” in his theoretical triad of terms of “image,
body, medium,” and describes medium and image as “two sides of the same
coin,” while Bredekamp has initiated a research group on Das Technische Bild.13
All of which just confirms the validity of this critical inquiry as to whether the
construction of media studies as anti-Bildgeschichte is still productive.
10. Even if Belting does not credit Walter Minnesota Press, 2011). For my analysis of the
Benjamin in his study, it is clear that his book is relation between Flusser’s and Benjamin’s work,
greatly indebted to Benjamin’s explanation of see Sjoukje van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin
the relation between Bild and Kult in “The Work and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory,”
of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” New German Critique 37, no. 2 (2010): 180–207.
Even more, Belting’s assumption that Bildg- Belting disagrees with Flusser on several major
eschichte will replace the old concepts of art points, as evident from the chapter “Die Trans-
and art history seems informed by Benjamin’s parenz des Mediums: Das fotografische Bild,”
insight that our concept of art will change in Bild-Anthropologie, 213–39.
through new reproduction technologies. Para- 12. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the
doxically, Benjamin made possible a new history Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
of the (technological) Bild for upcoming mass Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
culture, while Belting (then still a specialist in 1992); Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien:
medieval and early modern European art) went Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 1999),
back in time and wrote a history of the Bild translated as Optical Media: Berlin Lectures,
before the notion of art instead. 1999, translated by Anthony Enns (London: Pol-
11. Vilém Flusser, Für eine Philosophie der ity Press, 2010).
Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography, 13. Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body:
1983), translated as Towards a Philosophy of A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry
Photography, translated by Anthony Mathews 31, no. 2 (2005): 302–19; Horst Bredekamp,
(London: Reaktion, 2000); Flusser, Ins Uni- Birgit Schneider and Vera Dünkel, eds.,
versum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen: Das Technische Bild: Kompendium zu einer
European Photography, 1985); Flusser, Into Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder (Berlin:
the Universe of Technical Images, translated Akademie, 2008).
by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of
221 Assessments
To further resolve the conflict between the two disciplines, I propose another
possible reading of the concept of Bild. The Grimms’ German dictionary notes
that the earliest concept of Bild derives not from the Latin imago but from the
Germanic billen, a verb which interestingly refers to the making (Gestaltung)
of the image: “bild war anfänglich, was man sich immer unter billen zu den-
ken habe, ein plastisches kunstwerk, und erst nachher wurde der name auf die
flache, nicht vortretende zeichnung, auf das gemälde erstreckt.” The dictionary
continues: “in bild liegt die vorstellung eines unter der schaffenden, gestalten-
den, knetenden, stoszenden, schnitzenden, hauenden, gieszenden hand hervor-
gegangnen werks.”14 In this reading of Bild as billen, in other words, the image
is not so much a passive icon as an active question of giving form. This under-
standing of Bild—which lies at the core of Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism or
Nieuwe Beelding15—could be related to Benjamin’s insight into the altered status
of Bild due to technological reproduction techniques, and subsequently to Sam-
uel Weber’s reading of Benjamin’s work through what the author calls “Benja-
min’s -abilities.” Weber points out that Benjamin’s frequent use of active nouns,
expressed through the English suffix of “-ability” or the German -barkeit, marks
his entire oeuvre—the most famous of which, of course, is the term “reproduc-
ibility” or Reproduzierbarkeit.16 Now, if you apply Benjamin’s “-abilities” to the
notion of Bild, then you get the term Bildbarkeit, which the Grimms’ German
dictionary lists as an existing German noun that refers to the potential making of
that Bild; or, more precisely, to “Was gebildet werden kann.”17 Possibly this read-
ing of Bild as Bildbarkeit or imageability could contribute to a Bildgeschichte
that is nuanced in both an iconographic and a technological sense, which in
its turn might strengthen the dialogue between Bildgeschichte and the most
advanced image theories in media studies, such as Mark Hansen’s definition of
the digital image as “process” and “embodiment” in his New Philosophy for New
Media (2004).18
14. “Bild was initially what one should concept of Bild in modern Dutch painting, but
always think of as billen [old German word for his idea of Nieuwe Beelding is related to a
‘giving shape’], a plastic artwork, and only after- concept of the image that is based on the idea
wards was the term extended to encompass the of Gestaltung or Bildbarkeit.
flat, non-protruding drawing, and the painting”; 16. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities
and “Bild comprises the representation of a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
work that came forth from the crafting, shaping, 2008).
molding, jabbing, cutting, chiseling, pouring 17. “That which can be shaped.” Grimms
hand.” Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Bildbarkeit.”
“Bild.” 18. Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for
15. It is beyond the scope of this commentary New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
on Bildgeschichte to elaborate on Mondrian’s
T H O U G H T S O N V I S U E L L E K U LT U R
Charles W. Haxthausen
I am sympathetic to James Elkins’s remark (Section 10) that “visual studies has

not yet made good on its promise to take images as something other than illus-
trations, examples, exemplars, mnemonics, ornaments, placeholders, or other
accompaniments to the arguments that run around and past them in our texts.”
A few pages later he elaborates: “For me the general problem is: How seriously
can visual studies take the visual? Can we permit the visual to guide, distract,
slow, and even undermine our theories and explanations?” For all of the dis-
course about the agency of images, he seems to suggest, many of those who write
on them under the name of visual studies seem to resist that agency in their own
practice.
This problematic can already be found in what Gustav Frank, in Section 1,
calls the “initial phase” of visual studies, and he makes precisely that point. Bor-
rowing a phrase from the Austro-Hungarian film theorist and critic Béla Balázs,
he dubs that phase visuelle Kultur, and locates it in German-speaking Europe
of the interwar period. Frank wants to “reconstruct the problematic of this first
period of visual studies, because it appears that similar problematics have been
implemented in contemporary visual studies and Bildwissenschaft.” Later he
adds, “What strikes me about Bildwissenschaft and visuelle Kultur in the 1980s
and 1990s is that they have a semblance of the arguments of Balázs and [Walter]
Benjamin.” He does not get around to developing this point, but his remarks
have stimulated a few of my own thoughts on this issue.
I see the problem Elkins identifies exemplified in the fundamental dif-
ferences between the “arguments of Balázs and Benjamin.” To state it simply:
Balázs believed that the visual had agency independently of and beyond lan-
guage; for Benjamin the agency of the image was dependent on the word. This
view is already evident in his earliest writings, as well as in the very texts that
have made him such an influential figure in visual studies.1 In the final chapter of
The Origins of German Tragic Drama, in which he sought to rehabilitate allegory
from the bad press it had been receiving ever since Lessing, Benjamin asserts
that the object is “quite incapable of generating any meaning or significance on
its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist,” and allegory
he defines as “a form of writing.”2 We find the same idea in the “Little History
of Photography,” where, noting the “literarization of all the conditions of life,”
Benjamin insists on the necessity of captions for photographs, without which
1. I make this argument in my article 2. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German

“Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/ Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (Lon-
Carl Einstein,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 47–74 don: Verso, 1998), 184.
(see particularly 63–69).
223 Assessments
“all photographic construction must remain arrested in the approximate.”3 In his

notes for “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
he wrote that “[t]he technological reproducibility of the work of art leads to
its literarization.”4 What Benjamin called the “actualization” of the artwork is
its allegorization, its instrumentalization by means of the word. At bottom, for
all of his astute sensitivity to the radically altered media landscape, Benjamin
remained a logocentric thinker, and one could plausibly argue that he exempli-
fied the kind of approach to images that Elkins sees afflicting much of visual
studies today. It is noteworthy that the vast majority of readings for Frank’s
seminar (Section 1) were by Benjamin, and this reflects the fact that of the vari-
ous Weimar authors he associates with this first phase of visual studies—besides
Balázs, the others he mentions are Rudolf Arnheim and Siegfried Kracauer—
Benjamin has undoubtedly been the most influential.5
The gulf that separates Balázs from Benjamin is already evident in what Balázs
meant by visuelle Kultur. The phrase comes from his Visible Man (Der sichtbare
Mensch), the first book of film theory published in German.6 Balázs’s immedi-
ate focus may be the medium of silent film, but at bottom he is concerned with
visuality tout court, beyond cinematic images, and in this respect he anticipated
contemporary visual studies. Yet Balázs used the term visuelle Kultur not in the
sense that I understand Frank to be using it, that is, to designate an expanded
domain of visual artifacts to be studied, but to mark an epochal shift from a
verbal culture, dominated by conceptual, linguistic forms of cognition, commu-
nication, and experience, to a visual one—he called this a “neue Wendung zum
Visuellen,” a new turn to the visual.7 If the hegemony of verbal culture was a
consequence of the printing press, the re-emergence of a visual culture, so Balázs
argued, was effected by silent cinema, in which millions of viewers daily expe-
rienced “human destinies, characters, feelings, and moods of every kind with
their eyes, and without the need for words.”8 Silent cinema was in the process
of fundamentally changing human subjectivity and perception. The meaning of
the book’s title is that man has now become more fully visible to man, through
gesture and facial and bodily expression. “It is film that will have the ability to
raise up and make visible once more human beings who are buried under moun-
tains of words and concepts.”9
3. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 6. First published in 1924 and reprinted in
1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, trans- German by a Hungarian publisher in 1982 and by
lated by Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Suhrkamp in Germany in 2001, this historically
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, important book has only recently received its
1999), 527. He reiterated this point on the neces- first translation into English, along with Balázs’s
sity of captions in “The Author as Producer,” second book, Der Geist des Films (1930): Béla
in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 775. Balázs, Early Film Theory: “Visible Man” and
4. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 “The Spirit of Film,” edited by Erica Carter,
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 1039. translated by Rodney Livingstone (New York:
5. In Gustav Frank and Barbara Lange, Berghahn, 2010).
Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft (Darmstadt: 7. Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch (Frankfurt:
WBG, 2010), Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Carl Suhrkamp, 2001), 16; Balázs, Early Film Theory, 9.
Einstein, and El Lissitzky are added to this list 8. Balázs, Early Film Theory, 10.
(62). 9. Balázs, Early Film Theory, 11.
Balázs belongs to a long German intellectual tradition that privileged the

visual as a cognitive and experiential mode discrete from and beyond linguistic
signification. This notion reaches back at least to Schopenhauer and extends
forward through Konrad Fiedler, Carl Einstein, and Balázs to Horst Bredekamp
and Gottfried Boehm.10 Whatever their differences, these authors share a posi-
tion succinctly formulated by Boehm: “Beyond language there exist vast spaces
of meaning [Sinn], unimagined spaces of visuality, of sound, of gesture, of facial
expression, and of movement. They have no need of improvement or of addi-
tional justification by the word.”11 For them, visuality offers a version of the
world that is not circumscribed by language and concepts, that never merely
exemplifies what is articulated in language. Significantly, the crucial texts of
most of these authors have not been, or have only recently been, translated into
English.
At several points during these Seminars both Gustav Frank and James Elkins
speak of the urgent need for visual studies to investigate and reflect on its own
histories, to interrogate its own origins. Such an investigation would reveal that
the attitudes behind the “iconic turn” or “pictorial turn” are not new; they have
a long history, and what Balázs meant by visuelle Kultur is part of it.12 Visual
studies would do well to examine that history.
10. It is worth noting that in his twenties “meaning? And if the latter, why didn’t Boehm
Gottfried Boehm edited and wrote a long intro- use Bedeutung? Here I have settled on “mean-
duction to a new edition of Fiedler’s collected ing” because Boehm also uses Sinn to apply to
writings: Konrad Fiedler, Schriften zur Kunst, linguistic meaning. On p. 14 he asks, “Aber kann
2 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971). Fiedler’s es denn, jenseits der Sprache, überhaupt so
Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit etwas wie Sinn geben?” (But can there really be,
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1887), which has never been beyond language, something like meaning?).
translated into English, argues for the differ- 12. Keith Moxey offers an extremely useful
ences between the worlds constructed by verbal survey of the contemporary field in “Visual
and visual signification. Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual
11. Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn Culture 7, no. 2 (2008): 131–46. While he
erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin provides a lucid and sympathetic account of the
University Press, 2007), 52. Here I have trans- approaches of Boehm and Bredekamp, he does
lated Sinn as “meaning.” In Section 6 Gustav not address their intellectual ancestry within the
Frank and María Lumbreras Corujo worry over German tradition.
the translation of Sinn: should it be “sense” or
FA R E W E L L T O V I S U A L S T U D I E S — C O M M E N T
Asbjørn Grønstad
I would like to begin by thanking the editors for inviting me to contribute to

this project. Ever since the final Stone Summer Theory Institute, with its emi-
nently enticing title, was first announced, I have been curious to learn what this
self-consciously provocative farewell would entail. Therefore, I much appreciate
the opportunity to read the transcripts. While this particular framing of the sem-
inar seems designed to signal a turning point for the field—begging the question
why it would be necessary to abandon something that is still in its youth—
my initial reaction after having digested the manuscript was that the Farewell
to Visual Studies seminar in fact epitomizes a certain tendency that inarguably
has been present in the field as a whole since its inception and that has escalated
exponentially throughout the last decade. This tendency is of course visual stud-
ies’ almost insatiable appetite for disciplinary self-examination, for making the
theories, methods, and practices that define the field a primary object of study.
Not that there is anything dubious about this. I think relentless and continuous
meta- and transdisciplinary scholarship is vital for the health of any discipline,
and I have practiced and will continue to practice this kind of research myself.
What I would like to point out here is merely that not even a conference that at
least ostensibly seems eager to sever ties with the past is able to escape the domi-
nant discursive framework in which discussions about visual studies typically
take place. There is much that I find useful about the conversations in this book,
perhaps in particular in the section lead by Gustav Frank on visuelle Kultur,
yet I could not help feeling that much of this terrain has been covered before,
in articles and debates in journals, in conference talks, and in various visual cul-
ture histories and publications such as Routledge’s Critical Concepts.1 Despite the
many vigorous and stimulating conversations, then, there is a sense in which the
debate is going around in circles a little bit.
It is quite impossible to summarize a symposium with so many different
voices, and I realize, obviously, that such an endeavor also lies far beyond my
brief as a respondent here. What I will do is share a few observations that I find
pertinent, or at least noteworthy, in light of the topics and preoccupations of
the Farewell to Visual Studies seminar. As I am sure many scholars of visual stud-
ies noticed, the announcement of the Institute roughly coincided with the first
gathering of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies (IAVCS)
in London in May 2010. It might be emblematic of the inner turmoil of the
field that, within the span of little more than a year, where one major event
1. Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith, eds.,

Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and
Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2006).
would proclaim the field as just launched, another would proclaim it to be over.
One could perhaps object that these are two different constellations—visual
culture studies and visual studies—but they certainly belong within the same
disciplinary horizon, their histories and provenances overlap, and there seem to
be many scholars who use these designations in a less than consistent way. Not
to mention that the visual culture community at large seems to drift effortlessly
between these categories or groups. Whether seen as acts of consolidation or
acts of dissolution, it is difficult not to view these Seminars (London in 2010
and Chicago in 2011) as manifestations of the still precarious state of the field of
visual culture/studies, and possibly also of an ongoing struggle for disciplinary
hegemony. My own feeling is that visual culture should embrace its constitutive
diversity in the future and that it can ill afford to maintain internal disputes
regarding its own identity. That is, one ought to be wary of aggressively promot-
ing one account, or version, of visual culture/studies at the expense of compet-
ing accounts. One of the reasons for this is that too much fragmentation might
impair the continued presence and authority of the field on an institutional level.
From where I am standing, some of visual culture’s most immediate neighbors—
film studies and (new) media studies/digital culture—appear increasingly pow-
erful and self-sufficient, and if visual culture/studies fails to sustain its impetus
and cohesiveness, the already volatile purchase it has on research departments
and other scholarly environments might decline. As Sunil Manghani notes in
Section 4, art history as well as media and film studies departments in the UK at
least have begun to turn away from visual culture.
The second remark I would like to make concerns James Elkins’s mention
in Section 3 of Visual Culture 3, which he describes as “a less directly politically
inflected set of practices” that are “more engaged with social and digital media.”
Having attended the second biannual convention of the IAVCS, entitled Now!
Visual Culture, in New York in May–June 2012, I have to say that the notion of
a disengagement on part of visual culture from activist politics was not much
in evidence there. Few will be surprised to learn that chief organizer Nicholas
Mirzoeff had an “Occupy” sticker on his laptop; maybe slightly more unantici-
pated was the degree to which a sense of political urgency saturated the event
as a whole. I find this tendency commendable, granted that it does not engulf
the valuable pluralism—thematic, theoretical, and methodological—that is so
much a part of the potency of visual culture.
My third and final comment trails along from this very brief reference to the
political to consider, in passing, the subject of theory as it relates both to politics
and what one might call the rhetorical and epistemological efficacy of the image.
In Section 8, Keith Moxey raises the intriguing question “Can theoretical inno-
vation then replace ideological criticism as the fuel on which visual studies run?”
I doubt that the kind of ideology criticism of the 1970s and ’80s will return,
but that does not mean that contemporary visual culture—and here I intend to
refer both to its artistic practices and its academic pursuits—is not headed in the
227 Assessments
direction of an intensified engagement with social, political, and ethical matters.

Where the ideology critique of the past occasionally was too programmatic and
inflexible for its own good, the current rejuvenation of politically aware art and
scholarship has the great advantage of being more theoretically adventurous, less
dogmatic, and, last but not least, more accommodating of what one somewhat
portentously could call the irreducibility of the aesthetic. The ability to articulate
new theoretical perspectives will surely be key to the future prosperity of visual
culture studies, and the ways in which many contemporary practitioners on both
sides of the fence incorporate both theory and practice, text and image, artistic
ambition and political energies in their various projects should bode well for the
production of such reinvigorated theoretical work. The notion that images are
capable of generating their own kind of theory, that they themselves produce a
way of thinking, has become a widespread one in many quarters of visual culture
studies, maybe even to the extent that the idea is now taken for granted. Surely
this is a theoretical topic that is in no way exhausted. Yet, in concluding, I want
to suggest that the time may be ripe for extending also to language and verbal
discourse the same generosity shown toward the visual over the last couple of
decades. When Elkins contends in Section 10 that “visual studies has not yet
made good on its promise to take images as something other than illustrations,”
he seems to rehearse an all too familiar complaint vis-à-vis academic language
and its investments in the image. Our visual experiences, whether of aesthetic
or other objects, will inevitably seep into our writing in many different and
complex ways, and I think we should be careful not to diminish the still active
presence of the image within the text. We have had a linguistic turn, later a
visual turn; perhaps it is time to entertain the possibility that critical language
can interact with the image and the visual world in nonreductive and uncontrol-
ling ways. A formidable task, to be sure, but for us as visual culture scholars it is
nevertheless our task.
FA R E W E L L V E R S U S N O W
Øyvind Vågnes
In the first section of the transcript from the 2011 Stone Summer Theory Insti-
tute, art historian Bridget Cooks asks her fellow participants whether they can
address “the feeling of loss” that she’s getting from the ongoing conversation:
“I’m getting the sense that we’ve lost something, that something about visual
studies has failed.” This remark might have occurred several days into the week-
long seminar, or quite early; it’s hard to know as a reader who was not present,
since the transcript consists of bits and pieces of conversation that have been
moved around in the manuscript. Perhaps I was so struck by the remark in part
because of the context in which I found myself reading it. I was on a plane cross-
ing the Atlantic, on my way to the second conference organized by the Interna-
tional Association for Visual Culture, hosted by Nick Mirzoeff and New York
University, and I had brought the transcript along.
Now! Visual Culture, as the event was called, was nothing if not energetically
situated in the present moment, addressing what presenters thought of as the
pressing issues of the field. Returning to my hotel room after the sessions every
day, I found the transcript lying there on the table, and when I came back to
Norway a few days later I had finished it. I have to say that the experience of tak-
ing part in the discussions at the conference shaped my reading of the Farewell
document—and the other way around. The contrast, of course, is already sug-
gested in the gesture of self-description: Farewell vs. Now (exclamation mark).
Several of the reflections offered both in the transcript and in the seminar
rooms in New York spoke to each other in very interesting ways. Take Section
8 of the transcript, which kicks off with a discussion of an essay by Alexander
Nemerov; after a few pages it is contrasted with Mirzoeff’s work. Keith Moxey
suggests that the two represent two models: “Mirzoeff thinks there should be
direct engagement; Nemerov explores the possibilities that might lie beyond
that.” Scholars can be at the barricades, or they can keep from addressing the
political situation directly. Jim Elkins responds: “Another way to put that is that
the contrast between political activism and reflection is paralleled by another
contrast, between the distinctness of the positions that Mirzoeff occupies and
the indistinctness of the positions Nemerov implies.” Distinctness equals activ-
ism. Indistinctness equals reflection.
I came to Now! Visual Culture with two manuscripts in my bag—the Fare-
well transcript and my own brief talk for the opening session, a series of “light-
ning talks” where each presenter had five minutes to respond to the question
“What is visual culture now?” It’s safe to say that several of the presentations
229 Assessments
were marked by a form of “direct engagement.” But I’d like to think that they
also offered reflection.
My own talk consisted of some rather fresh thoughts on the mass killings
here in Norway on July 22, 2011, and how I’d felt inclined to think about their
aftermath as a scholar of visual culture. That afternoon a car bomb exploded
in the executive government quarter in Oslo, killing eight people and injuring
more than two hundred. Then, less than two hours later, at the summer camp
of the Worker’s Youth League held every year at Utøya Island, a gunman dressed
in a homemade police uniform killed sixty-nine of the participants there and
injured more than a hundred. As soon became evident, the same individual was
responsible for what happened in both Oslo and at Utøya.
A steering committee for the national July 22 memorials submitted its report
to the Norwegian government in the spring of 2012, arguing for two specific sites
of commemoration and describing the reasons for their selections. At every such
decision made, I sense a heightened critical awareness in my own response. Will
we end up being what Marita Sturken has called “tourists of history”? Certainly,
a national television award show proved without a doubt that Norway is not
beyond the kitschification of these events. Then there was the extensive circula-
tion of images of the mass murderer on the front pages of national newspapers,
leading people to turn them around at newsstands—a senseless proliferation of
his image and the ill-fated prohibition that followed. The media coverage of the
trial against the mass murderer was strictly regulated, and the media protested
the decision that most of it would not be broadcast—instead of live images
and audio we saw the massive distribution worldwide of the image of the mass
murderer saluting the world with his raised, clenched fists. The first visual art,
immediately controversial, was exhibited in April 2012. Numerous documentary
films are being made at the time of writing this. Commemoration books that
resemble coffee table books in design have already been published.
As I observed in my talk in New York, the attempt to develop a critical
vocabulary in the face of contemporary events, and allowing terminology to take
shape in response to what seems urgent in the now, are in my view testimony
to the intellectual vibrancy, not stagnancy, of visual culture studies. It is one of
the reasons I have come to hold W. J. T. Mitchell’s work in such high regard.
In his Skeptical Introduction, Elkins warned scholars of visual culture and of the
humanities more widely to be cautious that “writing about 9/11 has been a poor
decision for many scholars.”1 I have thought about that warning a few times over
the last few months. But these events have compelled me to describe and analyze
them to the best of my abilities, in spite of any warning that it might be a risky
decision. I hope I will be able to engage with them directly, distinctly, and yet be
able to offer worthwhile reflections.
1. Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Intro-

duction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 81.
“ I D O N ’ T K N O W W H Y Y O U S AY G O O D B Y E ,
I S AY H E L L O ” ( O N TA K I N G B O T H T H E V I S UA L
A N D T H E P O L I T I C A L S E R I O U S LY )
Mark Reinhardt
Before I began reading this book, the title unnerved me. Lacking even a soft-
ening question mark, it seemed to announce the end of a conversation I had
joined only recently and for which I still harbored considerable hopes. Why this
premature call? What could come of it? Goodbyes are often messy, of course,
and the one proposed here turns out to be rather complicated, if not a bit of a
tease. “We are saying farewell to a farewell,” Jim Elkins explains early on, “in the
sense that obliviousness to a certain history is something we wish to address.”1
Later, when Tom Mitchell forces the issue by asking who favors bidding “fare-
well to visual studies and getting on to something else,” no one signs on.2 Still,
while the chosen title has obvious marketing advantages—Farewell to Oblivious-
ness wouldn’t pack the same punch—it’s not simply a con: as the conversation
unfolds, contributors challenge or dismiss assorted facets, currents, habits, and
practitioners of visual studies scholarship.3 Even after the dismissals, however,
many visual studies projects survive, for the seminar’s participants survey a for-
midable range of histories and research programs, some of which they present as
continuing sources of vitality and promise.
That range is one of the book’s great strengths. I found the diversity of
inventories and assessments to be at times bewildering—there are six versions
of visual studies outlined in the opening paragraph of the first section alone,
and the models continue to proliferate as the conversation unfolds—but also
exciting and, ultimately, edifying. Among the things I have gained are a greatly
expanded and more detailed map of visual studies traditions and practices, and a
reading list of intimidating length. Readers closer than I am to the institutional
worlds of the seminar’s key participants (the majority of whom have ties to art
history) may end up with shorter lists, but it is hard to imagine not being both
pushed and pulled by this book. The orientation most consistently subverted by
the sometimes contentious, sometimes fragmentary conversation is the resentful
resistance that Michael Holly encountered first from art historians threatened
by the rise of visual studies in the U.S. and then among the more ahistorical of
contemporary visual culture scholars: “We don’t have to know that.”4 In saying
goodbye to know-nothing avoidance of theories, methods, media, objects, and
periods, the book really says hello to a host of new challenges, most promisingly
1. Section 1 of the Seminars. Section 4), to a sense of visual studies as noth-
2. Section 4 of the Seminars. ing more than “cultural studies with a visual
3. There are farewells, e.g., to a neuroaes- emphasis” (Mitchell, Section 4), and to studies
thetics disengaged from other forms of visual “centered either around the concept of subver-
study (Frank, Section 2 of the Seminars), to the sive art or around isolated Art with a capital ‘A’ ”
kind of enterprise represented by the Journal of (Frank, Section 8).
Visual Culture (Elkins, at least by implication, 4. Section 2 of the Seminars.
231 Assessments
but also most dauntingly, I think, the work of engaging seriously with current
scientific research on vision and perception.
Despite all that, I can’t completely shake the apprehension first prompted by
the title. The seminar is suffused by a feeling that I had suspected might fuel the
desire for a certain kind of farewell: an anxiety about politics circulates through
the discussion. The conversation tends to suggest that the more preoccupied
we are with politics, the less we will have to say about what is specifically visual
about a picture or practice: many participants seem to fear that political engage-
ment will lead to work that, as Elkins puts it, is “about images, but . . . does very
little with them.”5 Though not common to all participants and resisted by some
(most explicitly by Lisa Cartwright), that concern shapes the course and tone
of the whole seminar, cutting off some potentially fruitful lines of inquiry. The
fear is hardly baseless—plenty of work does fit Elkins’s description—but as it
unfolds here it tends to keep the conversation from being either precise or seri-
ous enough about politics. I will try to say a bit about how that happens and at
what cost, and to reflect on what follows for visual studies from taking politics
seriously.
There is a tendency in the discussion, most clearly in the section on politics
(Section 8), to conflate two different tensions. The contradictory pull between
rapid and (in the seminar’s idiom) “tactical” engagement with the pressing issues
of the moment, on the one hand, and slower, less instrumental, more open-
ended and reflective inquiries, on the other, is too often and too swiftly aligned
with the difference between research that is motivated by or significantly con-
cerned with politics and research that is, or takes itself to be, apolitical. Obvi-
ously, those who renounce political commitment are not likely to be interested
in work that takes the form of tactical interventions, but the two tensions are
hardly the same. Conflating them makes it easy to overlook how less instrumen-
tal or immediately engaged work might proceed in its investigations of political
matters—how, that is, a concern with politics might require or even enable one
to move more deeply into visual analysis and “do more” with images. When
Cartwright seeks to direct the conversation toward something like that possibil-
ity (one that Keith Moxey also seems to have hoped his session might pursue),
the invitation is not taken up.
I concede, even emphasize, that taking politics seriously opens lines of
research that do move beyond what some of the seminar participants portray as
properly visual analysis. As Paul Frosh notes, visual studies work on contempo-
rary images often stops just where social science starts, analyzing “distinct visual
objects, image-text ensembles or genres” at the expense of “the relations between
these objects and the people and systems that create and consume them.”6
Especially (though not only) because politics often involves large numbers and
5. Section 8 of the Seminars. He is describ-

ing Mirzoeff’s Watching Babylon, but the book
functions in the discussion as an instance of a
broader problem.
macroprocesses, some of the questions integral to robust investigations of the

politics of visual experience and the visual elements of political life cannot be
answered by even the most subtle and virtuosic interpretations of form, genre,
and medium, or the most ingenious speculations on reception; they instead (or at
least also) require ambitious analyses of social practices and institutional struc-
tures and detailed empirical investigations of how images are received and used.
But that is only half the story. Ambitious political inquiry doesn’t only lead
visual studies away from what is specifically visual. When politics involves mac-
rostructures and large aggregates, images and imaging technologies are, as James
Johnson argues, crucial to whether and how human agents come to see and
understand them.7 If a concern with politics points visual studies toward how
the meaning and use of images are affected by political structures and struggles,
it also requires us to examine how images and visual practices influence which
subjects and objects become politically intelligible and how the boundaries of
political life are demarcated. Unfortunately, the example of politicized scholar-
ship that looms largest in the seminar, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “The Right to Look,”
does not do much to model that kind of examination. Sunil Manghani and
others rightly criticize the murkiness of its accounts of visuality and countervi-
suality, but I think it equally important that the article is not only unclear about
where rights come from and how they operate, but also has very little to say
about how visual analysis might affect our understanding of those matters.8
Yet understanding them requires visual analysis. As Sharon Sliwinksi shows
in her recent work, the invention of human rights proceeded in no small part
through the making and circulation of images over several centuries, as a series
of visual skirmishes shaped and reshaped who could lay claim to the status of
human, on what terms, with what entailments.9 Work such as hers demonstrates
that taking politics seriously ultimately necessitates explorations of the mutu-
ally constitutive relationship between political life and the visual field. Perhaps
emphasizing such explorations would have changed the place and valence of
politics in the seminar, for such inquiries require, rather than impede, some of
the most compelling projects called for over the course of the conversation—
Cartwright’s examinations of “what goes into the period eye,” Elkins’s approach
to “images as models” rather than mere “examples or illustrations,” even Mox-
ey’s pursuit of “the image as . . . a configuration, a presence, a set of formal
proposals.”10
Too often, the Seminars take the political as given rather than a call for
inquiry, a topic that—like the visual—confronts us with perplexities and requires
reflection upon its variable and contested forms. Such inquiries are the stuff of
7. This argument is central to Johnson, the article or, still less, of Mirzoeff’s work as
“Aggregates Unseen: Imagining Post-Katrina a whole—work that has made significant con-
New Orleans,” Perspectives on Politics 10, ceptual contributions even as its more tactical
no. 3 (2012): 659–68; but see also Johnson, interventions have addressed urgent problems.
“ ‘The Arithmetic of Compassion’: Rethinking the 9. Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chi-
Politics of Photography,” British Journal of Politi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
cal Science 41, no. 3 (2011): 621–43. 10. Sections 4 (Elkins), 8 (Cartwright), and 10
8. Manghani, Section 8 of the Seminars. (Moxey) of the Seminars.
I do not intend this as a blanket indictment of
233 Assessments
my own field, political science. Regrettably, this does not make that field the
site of a more satisfying approach to politically engaged visual inquiry. Far from
it. American academic political science is, as a rule, remarkably uninterested
in visual phenomena: although the saturation of politics by visual technolo-
gies, media, and images has reached unprecedented levels, it scarcely registers
in the discipline’s mainstream or even in those areas most in conversation with
contemporary developments in the humanities.11 This seminar has both broad-
ened and deepened my sense of how much, and how desperately, students of
politics need to learn from diverse traditions and debates in the study of visual
artifacts and practices. But there may be modest scope for a two-way (if perhaps
still lopsided) exchange, one most likely to be fruitful if all parties avoid hasty
goodbyes.12
11. As the only political scientist to be 12. I hoped, but failed, to find room
taken up in the seminar discussions, Susan to develop at length one, perhaps eccen-
Buck-Morss is in this context the most obvious tric example of an opportunity for such an
exception. For a few other examples see David exchange: Gustav Frank asks in passing whether
Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial we should think of “Plato and Aristotle as
Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” practitioners of visual studies” (Section 1 of the
Review of International Studies 29 (2003): Seminars). We should, and the thought could
57–73; William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Think- have been pursued fruitfully in the Seminars.
ing, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of A work like the Republic, foundational to politi-
Minnesota Press, 2002); Michael Paul Rogin, cal theory, shows with particular force (and,
Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes of course, with lasting consequences) how it is
in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University that conceptions of the political and the visual
of California Press, 1988); Michael Shapiro, can be coimbricated, worked out simultaneously
The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in a relation of interdependence.
in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
R E S P O N S E : FA R E W E L L T O V I S U A L S T U D I E S
Charlotte Klonk
Farewell to Visual Studies waved goodbye to a preconceived worn-out notion of

visual studies and welcomed a whole new set of family members—not always
close relations—to the table. It was clearly a lively gathering. Yet can one really
compare, discuss, and evaluate the merits of different approaches and methods
without getting one’s teeth into the particular? Is not the proof of the pudding in
the eating? The discussion showed that, yes, it is not only possible but the fruits
are many. One being, for example, the chance it gave participants to reflect on
the history of a field still in its infancy and in which they themselves have been
active from the outset—Michael Ann Holly, for example, at Rochester, or Jim
Elkins, who reviewed the progress of the Eikones project in Basel. This allowed
for insight into motivations and discussions and helped to shape a sense of the
different interests at play in the field.
One would perhaps have liked for other voices to have joined the chorus
too: that of Martin Kemp, for instance, founder of the Centre for Visual Studies
in Oxford in 1999, who has a particular interest in the productive relationships
between art and science and who wholly sidesteps issues of ideology, politics,
etc.; or Horst Bredekamp, who, quite in contrast to Eikones founder Gott-
fried Boehm, began his career as a radical Marxist art historian with an interest
in iconoclasms from late antiquity to the early modern period. And how did
Georges Didi-Huberman find his unsettling and unique voice in France? I, for
one, would be very interested in hearing their takes. But what does self-reflection
of this type fulfill? Perhaps it allows us to see that the field is not monolithic and
that different agendas and opinions prevail. This will ultimately liberate us to go
our own ways. Farewell to Visual Studies sets this process in motion.
Bildgeschichte not Bildwissenschaft

The Institute of Art and Visual History in Berlin was given this title in 2007
when faculty members deliberately reacted to recent discussions and decided
against using the term Bildwissenschaft or “visual studies.” German renders
“visual history” as Bildgeschichte, where the first element, Bild, does not refer to
a two-dimensional picture but rather to anything shaped by the human hand
(gebildet), thus freeing us to investigate any artefact from any period. Thanks not
least to the in-house research project Das technische Bild, scientific images have
formed a particular focus of our study. In and of itself this is still more or less
aligned with certain interests of stateside visual studies. Where we perhaps depart
235 Assessments
from this and also from German Bildwissenschaft is in our radical insistence not
only that formed objects are to be studied against the foil of historical develop-
ments but also that the past itself is worthy of attention.1 This, more often than
not, involves fruitful alienation rather than incorporation, and is an attempt to
avoid the presentism that irritated several of the interlocutors in Chicago. At the
Institute we play host, for example, to projects dealing with late antiquity and
early modernity, as well as others concerning contemporary events. Moreover,
while it is true that some forms of Bildwissenschaft firmly evade political engage-
ment, this is not true of our research and teaching. We share Lisa Cartwright’s
opinion, nonetheless, that there is no use in preaching to a room full of old
Marxists. No longer is it “about the Panopticon,” but about “what goes on in the
image.”2 Today, in order to pull political punches, we must be patient enough to
trace cause and effect, to hold back on generalizations, and to avoid providing
the old familiar answers that lost their specific political purchase long ago. The
starting point is always a specific object.
What does this mean in practice? If we take as a given that the objects we
choose to engage with are “active participants in the performance of analysis,”3
an example is in order.
The Civil War in Syria: Images of Violence and Our Responsibility

The civil war in Syria has cost the lives of thousands, and there has been no
shortage of disturbing pictures testifying to this tragedy. On August 1, 2012,
a German state television station broadcast a video as part of its evening news
program in which everything seen to date was surpassed. We were told no more
than that the footage showed rebels executing members of a brutal pro-Assad
militia acting in Aleppo. No explanation was given as to who was behind the
camera, or how and why the film had been released.
A traditional methodological requirement in both art history and visual
studies / visual history would now be to investigate the circumstances of the
video’s making and release (author and provenience). In fact, since news corpo-
rations have taken to showing amateur films culled from the Internet, this has
become an imperative. In this respect, analysis would not differ from established
forms of research. Yet what followed in the news program poses new problems.
We were presented with shaky images of partly naked and bloodstained men
before a wall. Suddenly the camera panned away, coming to rest on a blind
spot; the sound, however, continued. A seemingly never-ending round of shots
followed cheers. This raises the question, what is it about images that makes
them more unbearable than sound and even more unbearable than words (the
reporter recounted the execution in great verbal detail)? Grasping the specific
and determining properties of different media has been at the heart of a project
1. See the discussion in relation to Whitney

Davis’s remarks in Section 7 of the Seminars.
2. Cartwright, Section 8 of the Seminars.
3. Mieke Bal, Section 8 of the Seminars.
initiated by the Berlin scholar Friedrich Kittler,4 and has also informed some
versions of Bildwissenschaft.
Surely, however, it is the broadcaster’s duty to release a film in its entirety
once the decision has been made to show it in the first place. Is this a cynical
game of hide-and-seek aimed solely at raising suspense and thus attention in the
highly competitive news market? Or do producers truly care about protecting
viewers’ sensibilities? Such questions are not new. Editors have been making
decisions about the showing of violent events since the emergence of illustrated
newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. When the Russian czar was killed in
a terrorist bomb attack in 1881, the Illustrated London News printed little more
than a rough sketch of the scene of the crime. The French L’Univers Illustré,
in contrast, printed a fictional recreation of the moment of the explosion. The
British Empire shuddered before thoughts of regicide, while the Republic was
far enough removed from such events to permit a full graphic representation.
The lesson is clear: then as now, the closer an event is to home (in every respect),
the less likely it is to appear illustrating that country’s news. To come to such
conclusions as this, to see continuities or, as the case may be, differences, requires
attentiveness to the history of particular phenomena. This is typical of visual
history as practiced in Berlin. In this we see ourselves as continuing, rather than
breaking with, the tradition of art history.
Refusing to Look
Since Susan Sontag’s 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others and maybe even since
her 1977 Essays on Photography, it has become standard to consider images of
violence from the point of view of the spectator. Yet, as the 2003 book shows, the
question of why one needs to see such images always meets with an ambiguous
answer. As she argues, they can be dangerous, make cruelty appear harmless, and
certainly never lead to political action. Yet they are also important as a reminder
of what people inflict on each other. If considering the viewer cannot deliver
either firm or useful answers as to the correctness of their showing, what can?
Well, I would suggest that we have lost sight of the need to consider the dignity
of the victims. While certain circumstances, such as court cases, exist where
images of torture and violence provide important evidence, making pictures of
torture available violates human dignity in general. And indeed, as the philoso-
pher Michael Rosen has recently argued, this dignity extends to images of those
who have also died as a result of torture or violence. It thus falls to us to refuse
to look at such images.
Worth remembering is that such images are not secondary to the crime.
Torture and killings are often staged solely for the camera and carried out with
an eye to their mass circulation—as was almost certainly the case with the afore-
mentioned execution in Syria. Asking the media—under pressure to sell or raise
ratings—to self-censor is pointless. Looking to governments is equally futile;

237 Assessments
sanctions from their side are never far from censorship, therefore highly prob-
lematic. Instead, it is our responsibility not to look (I consciously argue this
in opposition to Nicholas Mirzoeff`s assertion of an out-and-out right, if not
duty, to look.5) We, the viewers of the German news report, should have hit the
off button or switched the channel as soon as it became clear what we were to
be presented with. We would have been none the poorer; there were certainly
plenty of other news programs running without the video clip.
Where does this leave us? The moral duty not to look at certain images is
a conclusion committed to a form of political activism which itself seeks direct
results. A critique of the video broadcast, along the lines outlined here, was pub-
lished in a major German newspaper and provoked several controversial letters
to the editor, including a reaction from the broadcaster concerned.6 The case
study shows, I think, that political commitment and attention to the specifics of
the images and their bearers are not, in principle, mutually exclusive, but rather
able to be, as María Lumbreras Corujo remarked, “reconciled.”7

6. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 16,
2012.
C H I N E S E V I S UA L S T U D I E S
Yolaine Escande
This Assessment will first respond to and develop James Elkins’s comments about
Chinese visual studies in his classifications of five different types of visual studies
in the world. It will then reconsider the fruitfulness of visual studies applied to
Chinese images.
The meaning of “visual studies” has to be specified in the Chinese cultural
field. Visual studies has existed in recent years in the Chinese cultural area (the
end of the 1990s in Taiwan and South Korea, and after 2000 in China) under
the name of “cultural visual studies” (shejue wenhua xue or shejue wenhua yanjiu),
in extremely varied departments of universities and colleges (cultural studies,
religion, humanities, design, etc.).1 Visual studies in this cultural area are mainly
related to cinema, photography, and contemporary art studies, and under the
influence of Western methods (especially Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, and Der-
rida) and of postmodernism,2 and, when focused on Chinese objects, are most
often concerned with the relation between text and image and with modernity.3
While we understand Chinese visual studies as studies of Chinese images, then,
in the West the expression “visual studies” concerns mainly photography and
cinema, and it has recently attracted much attention.4
If the question of visual studies and visual culture in China and in the Chi-
nese art field was not posed as such before the twenty-first century, this does not
mean that what can be called a specific visual culture does not exist in China.
In the West, actually, the well-known part of Chinese visual culture is mainly
the literati forms of visual art, on the one hand (traditional painting and cal-
ligraphy, as seen in the great museum exhibitions), and the contemporary art
forms, on the other,5 both seemingly having only a formal link. Another part of
Chinese visual culture that draws a great deal of study is Chinese gardens and
related topics, such as rocks, curios, paintings, and gardening.6
1. This corresponds to Michael Holly’s 4. For instance, see Chris Berry, Xinyu Lu
statement on “What is visual studies?”: “It isn’t [Lü], and Lisa Rofel, eds., The New Chinese
a discipline; it isn’t a field. . . . Visual studies Documentary Film Movement: For the Public
names an attitude in relation to visual things, Record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
rather than a department.” 2010); Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds.,
2. 张春田 (Zhang Chuntian), 视觉文化与中国 Images in History: Pictures and Public Space in
经验 (Visual cultural studies and the Chinese Modern China (Berkeley: University of California,
experience), 中国图书评论 (China Book Review), Institute of East Asian Studies, 2012).
no. 6 (2011): 71. 5. The references on Chinese contemporary
3. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in art are too numerous to be listed here.
Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Move- 6. The studies on Chinese gardens started
ment, 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and long before the concept of “visual studies”
Littlefield, 2002); Pang, The Distorting Mirror: existed, with William Chambers’s (1723–1793)
Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University books. For visual studies on gardens, see Craig
of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming
Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).
239 Assessments
Additionally, a large part of Chinese visual culture remains much less

known. It concerns both literati and popular forms of artistic practices, such as
graphic design, fashion, architecture, interior design, lithography, and opera,7
but also visual culture not necessarily considered artistic, such as clothing, adver-
tisements, road signs and signposts, street signs and notice boards with written
characters, billboards, stamps, and so on.8 Thus, Chinese visual culture as com-
monly known concerns chiefly the ancient period, considered tantamount to
a bygone past, which means detached from the present time and accordingly
easier to scrutinize. But this kind of approach often misses the specificity of
Chinese visual culture, by detaching a form of art (like calligraphy or paint-
ing) from its living contemporary cultural dimension.9 In such circumstances,
the advantage of visual studies compared to art history is that it can cross the
chronological divisions inherent to art history to connect past to present and
study the actual practice of Chinese art practitioners.10 This point is fundamental
in Chinese visual studies; for instance, today calligraphy, whether traditional or
contemporary in its practice, is directly related to traditional theories and prac-
tices of the art.11 In this situation, art history is not sufficient, and visual studies
are particularly well adapted. In this respect, visual studies should be very useful
in forthcoming research.
The second issue discussed here is the legitimacy of “visual studies” in the
case of Chinese artistic images. Usually, when Chinese visual culture is men-
tioned in the West, it is from the viewpoint of art-historical studies,12 and mainly
as scrutinized by Western-trained scholars.13 In such a methodology, often based
on semiology or on a rhetorical approach to images, a large part of Chinese visual
culture is left aside or misinterpreted, if not misunderstood, as Li Xi explains in
her comments on politics and the importance to the relationship to the image,
when she says that “visual culture has emphasized the importance of logo cul-
ture.” In the case of Chinese artistic (and not necessarily aesthetic) images, this
relation cannot be considered one-sided, as it involves an interaction between
7. In Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: 10. This is a kind of answer to Paul Frosh’s
Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization, edited question “Do visual studies scholars ever con-
by Christopher Crouch (New York: Cambria duct research involving actual image-makers or
Press, 2010), landscape painting is examined in image viewers?”
a diachronic way, and graphic design, fashion, 11. See, for instance, Leo Ou-Fan Lee,
folk arts, prints, and architecture are studied. “Across Trans-Chinese Landscapes: Reflections
8. Laikwan Pang notably investigates lithog- on Contemporary Chinese Cultures”; Norman
raphy, opera, advertisements, etc. in The Dis- Bryson, “The Post-Ideological Avant-Garde,”
torting Mirror. in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, edited by Gao
9. For instance, the reader of Robert E. Minglu (Berkeley: University of California Press,
Harrist Jr.’s The Landscape of Words (Seattle: 1998), 41–49, 51–58.
University of Washington Press, 2008) would 12. For instance, Craig Clunas, Pictures and
expect a development of the link between cal- Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reak-
ligraphy on rocks and cliffs and Chinese living tion Books, 1997); Hung Wu and Katherine R.
landscape culture, but it never comes, as the Tsiang, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual
book is focused on a historical approach of a Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia
kind of Chinese calligraphy. I tried myself to Center, 2005).
show and to study this link in Montagnes et 13. As pointed out by Crouch, Contemporary
eaux: La culture du shanshui (Mountains and Chinese Visual Culture, 2–3.
waters: the Shanshui culture) (Paris: Hermann,
2005).
the image and the viewer, as well as between the viewer and the creator of the
image.14
The “rhetorical” approach to images leads to examining the image as a
visual object, bearing a language and self-sufficient in its meaning.15 Actually, the
“visual” issue is not the right one to be raised about Chinese visual culture, since
the most important question in Chinese art theory does not concern the visual
object, but the relationship between the viewer and the artist or creator. In other
words, Chinese aesthetic categories are mainly evaluative and focused on the link
between the creator and the receptor,16 compared to European categories, which
are descriptive and aimed at objectivity.17 Nevertheless, Chinese visual culture,
with its own theorization, is now recognized even in the field of neuroaesthet-
ics.18 In such a process, Chinese visual culture images, such as brushstrokes, are
effectively considered a visible link, a visual testimony of an emotion first felt by
the creator and transmitted to the viewers of the image, rather than studied as
objects.
Actually, this kind of empirical approach, as claimed by Gustav Frank,19
is established on a universal basis, which is human emotionality. Thus, the per-
ceived image does not work like a language; it is the embodiment (not the projec-
tion) of an emotion, which even a non-Chinese can feel.20 Through the Chinese
brushwork, a work of pictorial art can express emotions in a nonrepresentational
way, that is, in a non-“rhetorical” way.
In conclusion, visual studies are very useful and should develop in the
Chinese artistic and aesthetic field in order to understand the representational
background and functioning of Chinese images, whether traditional, modern,
or contemporary. But the methods applied to this domain should evolve and
take into account the Chinese theoretical and practical tradition too.
14. Zhu Qi criticizes the blindness of West- and sponsored by the French National Research
erners on this point in “Do Westerners Really Agency, based on the study of Chinese graphic
Understand Chinese Avant Garde Art?,” in Chi- arts (calligraphy and landscape painting) and
nese Art at the End of the Millenium: Chinese-art of its theoretical tradition, through Western
.com, 1998–1999, edited by John Clark (Hong experimental protocols from psychophysics and
Kong: New Art Media, 2000), 55–60. affective neuroscience applied to it.
15. “Rhetorical” in the sense used by 19. “In terms of empirical approaches
Georges Roque in his “Political Rhetoric in to image use and vision, neuroaesthetics
Visual Images,” in Dialogue and Rhetoric, edited also makes a strong claim.” Section 2 of the
by E. Weigand (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Seminars.
2008), 185–93; “Rhétorique visuelle et argu- 20. The first results of the Visual Art and
mentation visuelle,” Semen, no. 32 (2011): Emotion program confirm the emotionality of
91–106 (semen.revues.org/9370?lang=en). Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes. See Jérôme
16. “Aesthetic” is to be taken in the broad Pelletier, Yolaine Escande, Marine Taffou, Ken-
sense of appreciation of forms, and not in neth Knoblauch, Aure-Élise Duret-Lerebours,
the narrow sense of “study of beauty,” which and Stéphanie Dubal, “Brushstrokes with
would be nonsensical in the Chinese theoretical Emotion,” in Inter-culturality and Philosophic
context. Discourse, edited by Yolaine Escande, Vincent
17. See my book L’art en Chine: La résonance Shen, and Li Chenyang (Cambridge: Cambridge
intérieure (Paris: Hermann, 2001), 215–32. Scholars, 2013), 251–70.
18. There is an ongoing research program,
Visual Art and Emotion, established in 2010
T H E L AT I N A M E R I C A N D I V I D E
Linda Báez Rubí
James Elkins observes that there are more and other visual studies than the Anglo-
American and the German-language traditions. He mentions Latin American
visual studies as one of the five strains of visual studies,1 so I feel obliged to
address the line of ancestry of the practice in Mexico. I will begin by thanking
María Lumbreras Corujo for mentioning the seminars dealing with Bildwis-
senschaft and visual studies which began in Mexico at the Instituto de Investiga-
ciones Estéticas, UNAM a couple of years ago. I might add that the exploration
continues in the undergraduate and graduate art history department.
As a Latin American scholar graduated from the UNAM and trained in
medieval and early modern art history, first at the Warburg Institute and sub-
sequently as a member of Hans Belting’s research group Bild-Körper-Medium:
Eine anthropologische Perspektive, I realized the importance of establishing
a dialogue focused on analogous questions surrounding images from differ-
ing situations, namely belonging to European intellectual traditions and Latin
American ones. Bildwissenschaft and its debt to Aby Warburg proved to be a
fascinating way to explore and contrast them, because when confronted with
the circulation of images between two continents (Europe and America) and by
other scholars with similar concerns, I found Bildwissenschaft able to comprise
picture theory and images that are not necessarily understood as “art.”
Eager to find an opportunity for debate, I started working with several
Mexican and European colleagues from different disciplines and interested in
non-European images. In Germany, Martin Schulz and Beat Wyss shared my
concern with Latin American image understanding and worried about how to
ascertain and distinguish between that which is held as Mexican and Mexico.
At the UNAM, Deborah Dorotinsky, who comes from visual anthropology and
art history and currently edits a cybernetic review focused primarily on topics
related to visual anthropology, bodily representation, and gender as well as on
the circulation of photographic images in Latin American political and social
systems,2 proved to be an energetic interlocutor, as did Emilie Carreón, a scholar
interested in pre-Columbian art who trained in fine arts, art history, and anthro-
pology. Together they provided me with a broader and different view of how pre-
Columbian and indigenous American peoples conceived and interacted with
what Western culture calls “image.”
Together we arranged a first encounter between Mexican and young German
scholars, members of Belting’s group who traveled to Mexico to encounter their

2. The review can be consulted at revista-red
.pueg.unam.mx/.
Mexican counterparts. It proved to be very rewarding and culminated in a pub-

lication in 2010.3 As the book’s many contributions show, specific image theories
were not the central part of the debate that took place, although we discussed
many other topics once we started to realize how different our main concerns
regarding images were and consequently how the questions we set forth and the
ways we asked them differed. I must say that in this encounter I learned more
about what and how each of us was working on his or her own topic than about
picture theory. Most of all, the experience underlined the importance of lan-
guage and terminology when discussing texts written in German or English by
European and North American scholars in a third language, in this case Spanish.
It also made evident the fact that not enough Spanish translations of texts deal-
ing with image topics written by German scholars are available. As María notes,
Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie is one of the few widely read texts, and I might add
that he has presented conferences in Mexico City to interested circles of scholars
working on Mexican art, ancient to contemporary. Nevertheless, if we quantify
and compare this situation with the accessibility of German material translated
into English, and consider that in Mexico German Bildwissenschaft has been
siphoned through Anglo-American terminology, the fact that not even Gottfried
Boehm’s 1994 anthology Was ist ein Bild? has been translated is disappointing,
but not surprising.
Certainly the picture seems dismal, although important efforts made in
recent years by Spanish-speaking scholars like María Lumbreras Corujo, Fer-
nando R. de la Flor, and Fernando Zamora must be mentioned,4 because it is
through their writings that we can begin to have a certain, albeit limited, access
to the main postulates embraced by Bildwissenschaft.5 The advances by these
scholars bring to mind the question of what role the Spanish language should
play in this debate surrounding the image. By Spanish, I mean not only Iberian
Spanish, and I am referring to what it implies: an entirely different way of per-
ceiving, conceiving, and expressing the world which surrounds a specific culture,
such as the Spanish-speaking Latin American one.
In this sense, Latin American Spanish-speaking culture, with its heritage
of Indian languages, can contribute by enriching and adding new life to the
debate surrounding the image and visuality, for the simple reason that histori-
cally it is a culture that has dealt with how images function and how they exer-
cise power according to and depending on the different cultural contexts in
which they were applied—one could say put in service—when transforming
3. Los itinerarios de la imagen: Prácticas, Zamora, Filosofía de la imagen: Lenguaje,
usos y funciones / Itineraries of the Image: Prac- imagen y representación (Mexico City: UNAM,
tices, Uses, and Functions, edited by Linda Báez, 2008).
Emilie Carreón, and Deborah Dorotinsky (Mexico 5. Some strains of Bildwissenschaft are ana-
City: UNAM, 2010). lyzed in Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed., Bildtheo-
4. See María Lumbreras Corujo, “Magia, rien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundla-
acción, materia: La imagen en la Bildwissen- gen des Visualistic Turn (Frankfurt: Surhkamp,
schaft,” Anuario del Departamento de Historia 2009). For a Spanish version see my essay
y Teoría del Arte 22 (2010): 241–62; Fernando “Reflexiones en torno a las teorías de la imagen
R. de la Flor, Giro visual: Primacía de la imagen en Alemania: La contribución de Klaus Sachs-
y declive de la lecto-escritura en la cultura post- Hombach,” Anales del Instituto de Investigacio-
moderna (Salamanca: Delirio, 2009); Fernando nes Estéricas 97 (2010): 157–94.
243 Assessments
ways of thinking while imposing beliefs and devotions. The encounter with the
Muslim and Jewish world influenced the way of evaluating images in the Span-
ish peninsula, and other historical facts, such as the era of discoveries and the
conquest of the Indian cultures in the New World, were just as relevant. Recall
the iconic struggle that took place during the Counter-Reformation and the
historical consequences it had in the colonized territories: missionaries, theolo-
gians, painters, and sculptors followed political and religious aims dictated by
the Spanish Crown and consequently tried to define the roles of images when
creating new identities within indigenous cultures. This is one important reason
why continuing to ignore indigenous languages and their cultural and religious
practices toward images is impossible.
The fact becomes particularly evident in certain works presented by Serge
Gruzinski concerned with contact-period Amerindian images.6 While it is true
that they have served as precursors in this field of development, the inquiry must
not stop there. This is particularly so because it is also true that his works’ recep-
tion in the European world—mainly the French-speaking world—has over-
shadowed studies by scholars speaking and writing in Spanish,7 many of them
with a deep knowledge of Amerindian languages,8 who have contributed to the
understanding of image production, veneration, and use throughout the pre-
Columbian and colonial periods. Their work remains practically unknown to
scholars interested in visual studies and belonging to Bildwissenschaft. Would it
not be worth rescuing them? In order to do so, I believe that the first task would
be to formulate a historiographical exercise which evidences the ways images
have been thought of in the Latin American world.9 I anticipate that it would
make us recognize that, despite the efforts behind the study of pre-Columbian
art and of contemporary indigenous traditions, cultures, and image-making,
the traditionally applied methodologies—iconography, iconology,10 and semiot-
ics11—have come to a standstill and new questions must be developed as well as
answered from different perspectives,12 why not those belonging to Bildwissen-
schaft, with the aid of other disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnology, and
6. La colonisation de l’imaginaire, Sociétés 8. Miguel León Portilla, Toltecáyotl: Aspectos

indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique de la cultura náhuatl (Mexico City: Fondo de Cul-
espagnol, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, tura Económica, 1980); Alfredo López Austin,
1988). Cuerpo humano e ideología: Las concepciones
7. See, for example, the anthology of essays de los antiguos nahuas, 2 vols. (Mexico City:
written by Elena Isabel estrada de Gerlero, UNAM, 1984).
Muros, Sargas y Papeles: Imagen de lo sagrado 9. See, for example, Justino Fernández,
y lo profano en el arte novohispano del siglo “Coatlicue,” in Historia del Arte mexicano
XVI (Mexico City: UNAM, 2011); Pablo Escalante, (Mexico City: UNAM, 1972), 32–165; and George
Los códices mesoamericanos antes y después de Kubler, Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amer-
la conquista: Historia de un lenguaje pictográ- indian Art (New Haven: Yale University Press,
fico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991).
2010); Jaime Cuadriello, Zodíaco mariano: 10. Beatriz de la Fuente, Los hombres de Pie-
250 años de la declaración pontificia de María dra (Mexico City: UNAM, 1977).
de Guadalupe como patrona de México (Mexico 11. Dúrdica Ségota, Valores plásticos del arte
City: Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe, 2004); mexica (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995).
and Fernando R. De la Flor, Imago: La cultura 12. Points made in El arte de México:
visual y figurativa del Barroco (Madrid: Abada, Autores, temas y problemas, edited by Rita
2009). Eder (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
2002).
archeology, in order to surpass its limits and in order to generate new modes of
thinking about non-Western images in the fields of art and visual studies.13
Finally, as I mentioned, I wish to stress the importance of Aby Warburg
when talking about the history of Bildwissenschaft. I am aware of the complex-
ity of his intellectual heritage among his disciples who emigrated and initiated
different ways and methodologies of doing art history. Nevertheless, and despite
the revival of some of his ideas during the “Warburg boom” in the nineties, it is
still surprising how little we know about his legacy. The richness of his theo-
retical fragments remains in manuscript form in the archives of the Warburg
Institute in London, and I believe the fact they are written in German has hin-
dered their study to a certain degree. This situation must be remedied in order
to understand his interests and goals, especially when we are trying to introduce
this project to Mexico and seeking to establish how and when Bildwissenschaft
was founded and how it was developed by his disciples.
Trying to elucidate what image questions by different scholars stem from
Warburg and how they developed them in different ways for different propos-
als can help us establish a broader understanding of the variety of methods and
practices that make up the discipline. Warburgian input is like a vast number
of seeds whose potentiality can be cultivated in different ways depending on
the “cultural qualities” of the ground. To discover this potentiality is one of the
motors of Bildwissenschaft and, in my opinion, part of its future because we can
still glean unexplored characteristics of Warburgian thought, which is extremely
inspiring. In this sense, I would mention the work of the German art histo-
rian Gerhard Wolf, who is a scholar of Warburgian preoccupations interested in
Latin American art and culture in the age of discovery, conquest, and coloniza-
tion of the New World. He has been in touch with researchers from the Instituto
de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, and they have collaborated in projects and
expositions dealing with what I feel are canonical Warburgian topics: the way
images are transported (using a singular medium such as feathers) and their
circulation and transformation in different cultural and geographical milieus
(Europe and America).14 Gerhard’s research is a fine example of how variable and
dissimilar the Warburgian intellectual heritage can be, while at the same time
it fulfills one Warburgian expectation: it goes beyond the frontiers and crosses
the Latin American divide when dealing with other image cultures, Bildkultu-
ren. This exercise implies taking into consideration other modes and models of
thinking surrounding images and visuality, for example from the Australian and
13. On art, see Marie-Areti Hers, “El estudio e imaginarios sociales: Los indios yaqui en
del arte prehispánico y las ciencias auxiliares,” la revista Hoy en 1939,” Anales del Instituto
in De la antigua California al desierto de Ata- de Investigaciones Estéticas 94 (2009): 93–126.
cama, edited by Maria Teresa Uriarte (Mexico 14. A result of the mutual collaboration is
City: UNAM, 2010), 21–28; and Durdica Segota, the recent exposition Imágenes en vuelo at the
“El punto de partida para el estudio del arte Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico, 2011, and the
mexica,” in Uriarte, De la antigua California, book Colors Between Two Worlds: The Floren-
255–64. A result of such effort is the study tine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, edited
by Emilie Carreón Blaine, El olli en la plástica by Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (Florence:
mexica (Mexico City: UNAM, 2006). On visual Kunsthistorisches Institut, 2012).
studies, see Deborah Dorotinsky, “Imagen
245 Assessments
African world. Would it not be a task worth considering? Plurality and diversity
can in many ways fill the fissure which is causing the crisis we are discussing: new
ways of thinking and rediscovering visual studies and Bildwissenschaft which
depend on their responsiveness to the visual and historical heritage of other
cultural worlds. This will let us establish a forum of knowledge and reflections
about the power and meaning of iconic language in a more multidimensional
manner.
TOPOLOGICAL THOUGHT
ANACHRONISM AND DISCONTINUITY
IN VISUAL STUDIES
Miguel Á. Hernández-N avarro
This book presents a wide range of fundamental ideas that are absolutely per-
tinent in a moment such as ours, in which time, space, and positions are being
redefined. In this brief commentary, I will focus on a question that has been
present in different ways in many of the debates: the different versions and tradi-
tions related to visual studies and the need to historize and clearly set boundar-
ies for them both in time and in space. What I will quickly try to show is that
such boundary setting is problematic in a global world and that it should be
rethought using complex thought models, substituting the habitual static, lin-
ear, and structural thought models for other ways of thinking which are more
capable of evaluating discontinuity, anachronism, disagreement, and mixed
antagonism. My proposal will be to use the Möbius strip as a mental image to
substitute the map and grid.
During the seminar, at least five visual studies traditions were mentioned,1
and three versions especially linked to the Anglo-American tradition were fre-
quently alluded to.2 This division is undoubtedly useful in establishing reference
points, but it should be rendered more complex and put under the spotlight,
especially when we refer to a global context in which both spaces—traditions—
and times—the histories or states of the field—mix together, infect, and oppose
each other, giving rise to mixed versions of both traditions and temporalities.
In Spain, which is the context I know best, visual studies has appeared as a
kind of “bypass discipline” faced with the ossification and stagnation of art his-
tory, still anchored in an obsolete tradition. The Francoist years left the Spanish
humanities in a state of absolute desynchronization compared with the develop-
ment of the disciplines in other contexts. A process of opening and synchroni-
zation was only begun following the advent of democracy, from 1977 onwards.
That process, however, was never really complete, as if the delay was impos-
sible to eliminate, thus leaving no possibility of adjustment with international
traditions.
In such a context, visual studies is useful for bypassing the slow synchroni-
zation processes of traditional disciplines, introducing a new scenario—full of
problems, methods, and theories—that belongs to a different time-space than
that of the traditions that it has not been possible to update. Although it is true
that in the eighties in Spain there was already a kind of tradition of visual analy-
sis linked to the developments of Italian semiotics, the version of visual studies
that ended up being introduced at the turn of the century has much more to do

2. See Sections 2, 3, and 4 of the Seminars.
247 Assessments
with the Anglo-American tradition—even if, especially with regard to medieval-

ism, the German tradition is very present.3
The relevant thing here is that this introductory process is not well ordered
either temporally or spatially. What has happened in contexts like the Spanish
one—and I think it is possible to extrapolate this to other places—is that entry
was out of step, and this as a result produced a complex field that does not fully
adjust either to the traditions or to the versions mentioned during the seminar.
The construction of problems, theories, and methods in the field of Spanish
visual studies, then, is not continuous but anachronistic and conflictive.
By way of example, the translations of Martin Jay’s work are contempo-
raneous with those of Hans Belting, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Mieke Bal. These
are different traditions, different models, but also different times that, however,
end up bringing together a tremendously singular state of the field. We received
several “posterior” versions of visual studies before the “first” versions, and we
also received problems and methods from different contexts that on coming
together in the same place, however, gave birth to relationships that would be
unthinkable within the established traditions. What I would like to suggest here
is that those discontinuities and new out-of-step debates, far from being consid-
ered “illegitimate,” should be seen as opportunities for opening up the field and
proposing new and unthought-of relationships within it, bringing together—
sometimes conflictingly—problems, ideas, and methods that are, a priori, dis-
tant in time and space.
To a certain extent, this seminar proposes a static analysis both of problems as
well as of authors and concepts. Traditions—spaces—and then histories—times—
are talked of. I believe it is useful to introduce mobile thought models to better see
the evolution of both the spaces and the times. In this sense, we might allude to
Mieke Bal’s work on the movement and transformation of concepts between disci-
plines.4 A journey which occurs across space-time, between traditions, fields, prob-
lems, and historical preoccupations. This travel metaphor has always reminded me
of the magnetic shoes the artist Francis Alÿs wore round Havana during the 1994
biennale. Shoes that dragged reality around and that were modified during the
journey, whilst modifying their surroundings. Mieke Bal’s idea of traveling is also
related to this adherence. Concepts are transformed, modified, and modify their
field. And when we talk of a farewell to visual studies, I think reaching out to the
sense of movement, of travel (the old sense of “to fare”), is more than productive.
What I would like to do here is add a new image to the temporal metaphor
of the journey to think of visual studies in a global world, a thought model
3. The introductory process for the Anglo- all of these initiatives was the same figure: José
American version contains some key events: Luis Brea, who sadly passed away in 2010. He is
the series of international meetings on visual the editor of one of the first volumes published
studies which took place at ARCO Madrid in Spain to take seriously the issue of visual
from 2003 onwards; Estudios visuales (www studies: Estudios Visuales: La epistemología
.estudiosvisuales.net), the visual studies journal de la visualidad en la era de la globalización
published by CENDEAC; and Akal’s visual stud- (Madrid: Akal, 2005).
ies collection, which has translated the works 4. Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the
of Jay, Crary, Silverman, and Mitchell and is now Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University
translating Bredekamp, Bal, and Nagel. Behind of Toronto Press, 2002).
capable of evaluating anachronism and discontinuity. That image is the Möbius

strip, a nonorientable topological surface, with neither an inside nor an outside,
that brings into question the time-space proximity and imminence of Euclidean
models.
As is well known, topology was used by Jacques Lacan to describe psycholog-
ical spatiality and temporality: proximities, relationships, anachronisms, leaps,
and condensations that could not be represented topographically.5 A Möbian
space, without an inside or an outside, ruled by another series of correspon-
dences and proximities that are better adjusted to psychological space and time
than to the geographical and historical versions. The topological space is a con-
fused space-time where before, now, and after are mixed together and intercede,
a space where the outside configures the inside, a space that turns around a blind
spot, an absent, unresolved center, a discontinuity around which all of that topo-
logical space is organized.
A topological surface like the Möbius strip could help us to think about his-
tory and places: a continuous flow, other proximities, relationships between con-
cepts, as well as complex paths with no exit. I think that thought model would
be useful for thinking of a movable object, on the edges of existing disciplines
like visual studies. As an example, the idea of continuous flow brings into ques-
tion allusions to the origin and necessity of finding unique primordial scenes.
In this way, when we speak of Visual Studies 1, 2, or 3, we are referring to the
different twists, turns, and adherences on the Möbius strip. The same happens
when we refer to the way in which the discipline is shaped in contexts such as
the one I have mentioned, via different versions and traditions that drag along
concepts, problems, and methods.6
Throughout the seminar, Bredekamp’s little book on Darwin and the image
of coral as a thought trigger were sometimes alluded to.7 Perhaps something
similar happens with the Möbius strip in this text. It has at least been useful for
me as an image to think about the different traditions, histories, and versions
in a world such as ours, in which spaces and times cross, overlap, and clash.
Perhaps I sketched it unconsciously in the margin of the seminar notes I printed
out.
5. Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovan- RAM memory, concerned with process, than
evic, eds., Lacan: Topologically Speaking ROM memory, whose function is archival. See
(New York: Other Press, 2004). José Luis Brea, cultura_RAM (Barcelona: Gedisa,
6. If we think about it, what happens on that 2007)
surface is related more to the use value, with 7. Horst Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen:
practicality, than with the burden of tradition. Die frühen Evolutionsdiagramme und die Tradi-
To quote the ideas of José Luis Brea, the memory tion der Naturgeschichte (Berlin: Wagenbach,
operating on that surface would be more like 2005). See Sections 5 and 10 of the Seminars.
“ I D O N ’ T K N O W W H Y Y O U S AY
G O O D B Y E , I S AY H E L L O ”
Isabelle Decobecq
Writing this Assessment is both an exciting and a slightly daunting task. There
is some irony, too, in being asked to review reviewers of the field, thus mirror-
ing the very process of my own research. I was just beginning my doctoral work
when I came across the intriguing Farewell to Visual Studies slogan for the first
time, long before I was given the opportunity to read the transcripts of this semi-
nar or even heard about it: it was only the tongue-in-cheek title of a conference
by James Elkins back then. And while I never got a chance to attend it, its mild
provocation instantly worked its effect on me, all the more given my specific
subject position: as a semi-outsider to the field, a French student trained in
traditional art history whose dissertation relates to the history and epistemology
of visual studies . . . therefore thoroughly embracing, or at least aiming to say
(an admittedly belated) “hello” to, the field.
Since I am trying to come up with an account of visual studies that would
teach the French audience a thing or two about this multifarious endeavor (and,
hopefully, help accommodate a version of the field in our own scientific land-
scape), the prospect of waving an early farewell to it had no particular appeal—
except maybe to its many self-professed opponents, happily reveling in what
sounds like the expected acknowledgment of an all too predictable failure.
Indeed, despite repeated claims that visual studies has spread across the five
continents, French voices are notably missing from this boisterous polyphony.
The seminar is no exception, where continental thought is mostly identified
with German “image science” and its philosophical intricacies. But there is a
very good reason for that: up until now, our country has never really embraced
visual studies, outside of a few recent editorial and academic initiatives. My own
dissertation topic testifies to this growing awareness of something going on out-
side the borders of “traditional” art history (and indeed, most of our art history
remains deeply conservative) and in need of some explanation. For better or
worse, we are today, some twenty years later, rehearsing many of the debates and
misunderstandings that plagued the first inception/reception of visual studies in
the Anglo-American world.
So when reading the transcripts, I was also thinking of my fellow French
scholars, many of them unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of the quasi-field,
and I started to ask myself: what image does such an account give of visual stud-
ies? To what extent can it become central source material for people wanting to
engage in the field with some knowledge of its foundations? What can we learn
from the different experiences laid out in those pages?
Pardon My French
Overall, this was tremendously compelling and enlightening reading, though at
times quite confusing. Maybe my reading was tainted by my position as a tenta-
tive historiographer, twice removed from my object of study: because I’m not
doing visual studies per se, but trying to map and “explain” what it is, I’m always
keen on nailing down clearcut ideas and raw “facts.” And if the transcripts are
anything to go by, there is still a lot of blurriness going on with regard to the
limits, tenets, and overarching problematics of the field. The “who’s in, who’s
out” question is obviously not totally over, as the “ambiguous inclusiveness”
suggested by James Elkins in his Envoi attests, starkly contrasting, though, with
the apparent dismissal of Georges Didi-Huberman as a member of the club in
Section 5. Besides, what always strikes me whenever one speaks of visual studies,
including here, is the existence of a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the
general and the particular: either one speaks of visual studies in general—which
already sounds like a contradiction in terms—on a metadiscursive level, as some
abstract reality, without resorting to any particular example of an actual publica-
tion or specific teaching content; or else one picks a specific study, in which the
defining characteristics of the field are supposedly self-evident. But somehow
it always seems to me that the two visions don’t overlap that much, leading to
increasing difficulty in mapping out the field and in knowing exactly what we
are talking about.
The Do’s and Don’t’s

“Beginners” like us can learn a number of lessons from this account: to resist
the temptation to institutionalize; to lay bare the theoretical underpinnings of
our enterprise; to carve out our own niche and specificity, without importing a
ready-to-wear version of visual studies that would disregard our cultural, scien-
tific, and local specificities.
But I also found myself pondering the place of rhetorics and language games
at play in visual studies: most of the work done under the label is still written in
English, and to some extent one may wonder whether the same arguments that
pass as visual studies could be expressed in French, for instance, and still retain
their relevance. Words are no secondary matter: the translatability of the field
is indeed one of the major stakes that our editorial and academic field is facing
today.
Politics All the Way Down?

A case in point may be the pervasive yet contentious use of the word “politics”
both in the present debates and in visual studies at large. Indeed, the English
word is not only densely textured but also elastic, stretchable to a point that no
251 Assessments
French equivalent can accommodate. “Politics,” or even worse, “cultural poli-

tics,” has no perfect match nor satisfactory equivalent in our language. There is
a “fuzziness” and positive ambiguity in the English language that hits hard when
one tries to translate both linguistically and culturally the terms of the discus-
sion: the sliding from one scientific and cultural context to another may disclose
many potential conceptual cracks.
The gap could even be wider than we think, if, as the section devoted to
the political claims, the latter is the alpha and omega of the field—at least in its
original (read Anglo-American) version. At times, it sounds as if everything—
hence nothing—in the cultural world is, and has to be, about politics. But where
exactly is the political in politics? What are the real stakes here? Is this taken-for-
granted ideological saturation of the cultural field anything more than verbal
pyrotechnics?
Another question we should ask ourselves in the French context is whether
we can really welcome visual studies on board, considering we hardly ever let in
cultural studies in the first place. Multiculturalism retains a negative flavor in the
academy, the same way that gender issues are looked down upon with a good
dose of suspicion if not sheer hostility. The problem may be a die-hard fantasy
of universalism, that of the antique paideia, which still pervades a large part of
our teaching institutions, making the innate political nature of scholarship—
no matter how inexplicit the term may be—a point of contention with regard to
a hypothetical French reception.
One last word. With the risk of sounding overly partisan, I was indeed
surprised to read in Section 5 that “visual studies cannot possibly accommodate
someone like Georges Didi-Huberman unless we stretch our concepts beyond
recognition,” while there seems to be no agreed-upon definition or clear cir-
cumscription of the field. It remains unclear to me why exactly it should be so,
but maybe his most recent work and his last book in particular, Peuples exposés,
peuples figurants,1 would do something to challenge this appraisal. According to
the author, peoples, be they under- or overexposed in the so-called society of
the spectacle, are paradoxically exposed to disappear, caught as they are in the
irrepressible dialectics of visibility and invisibility. Hence the necessity to visually
document this invisible part of the social world, to expose the nameless, mak-
ing representation itself an inherently social and ethical stake. A good distance
away from his studies on anachronism and figurality, Peuples exposés clearly leans
towards Jacques Rancière’s reflection on the distribution of the sensible, thus
taking on a strong social and explicitly—dare I say it?—political flavor.
1. Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés, peuples

figurants, L’oeil de l’histoire 4 (Paris: Les Édi-
tions de Minuit, 2012).
FA R E W E L L T O V I S UA L S T U D I E S ?
Tirza True Latimer
The title Farewell to Visual Studies, haunted by T. J. Clark’s formulation, signals

pervasive themes of loss and disillusionment.1 Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Epi-
sodes from a History of Modernism concerns, on the one hand, the exhaustion of
modernism (and with it a set of formal operations devised to negate the bour-
geois values that produced it), and, on the other hand, the decline of Marxism
as a comprehensive explanatory paradigm. Farewell to Visual Studies reverber-
ates, similarly, with disappointment in the once radical discipline’s unfulfilled
promises—its “failures.”
Personally, I cannot reconcile myself with the idea of bidding farewell to
a vocation many of us fully intend to keep practicing. When W. J. T. Mitchell
polled the scholars and Fellows contributing to this volume—“All in favor of
saying farewell to visual studies, and getting on to something else, raise your
hands”—no one raised a hand.2 Granted, the title Farewell to Visual Studies has
the merit of stimulating thought about the state of the field, but it also frames
the conversation in ways I find preemptive. I have a problem, specifically, with
any move (however disingenuous) toward relegating visual studies to one of
those “post-” positions—along with, say, feminism—that implies the exhaustion
or superannuation of a concept whose work may have hardly begun. But I’d like
to bracket my objections to the premise in order to focus on the disappoint-
ments expressed by several of the field’s founders and most lively practitioners.
Without endorsing these scholars’ positions (or recapitulating them for the sake
of producing counterarguments), I would then like to consider what “failure”
might promise in relation to the practice of visual studies today.
James Elkins’s list of dissatisfactions with visual studies is the longest, pro-
portionate with his tenure in the field. He points to “the problem of making
visual images work in visual studies instead of using them as illustrations of
theories”; he believes “visual studies should look at the visual world outside of
modern and contemporary visualities”; he regrets that “visual studies has not
developed a discourse about its own history, its historiography”; “the lack or
absence in visual studies of non-art images, scientific images” disappoints him.3
Elkins also notes that the development of interdisciplinary exchanges between
those who write about art and those who make art has been uneven. “It seems
to me a different kind of theorization is needed to make sense of what happens
when a visual studies writing practice, for example, encounters a visual practice.
1. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes

from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999).
253 Assessments
When the scholars make art, for example. Or when artists present their work
as visual studies scholarship.”4 Michael Ann Holly, like Elkins, regrets that “the
visual past before 1980 completely dropped out of visual studies.”5 Keith Moxey
echoes a concern raised by Elkins and several others about the subordinate status
of images, even at the heart of visual studies. “Images have usually been treated
as representations, rather than presentations. The image as, say, a configuration,
a presence, a set of formal proposals, has infrequently been the subject of visual
studies, which has mainly been about content.”6 Paul Frosh expresses frustration
that visual studies has not managed to “let go of art history as its founding para-
digm, the thing it both models itself upon and defines itself against.”7 For Whit-
ney Davis, the field fails to offer “substantive accounts of vision” or engage with
notions and effects of invisibility.8 Davis also laments the structural obstacles
that continue to inhibit collaborative work in the field of visual studies.9 Gustav
Frank insists that we, the practitioners of visual studies, “are trying to continue a
project that has already failed, for endemic reasons.”10 (I take “endemic” to mean
so ubiquitous throughout the history of the field as to now be quasistructural.)
For María Lumbreras Corujo, “the very desire of reconstructing the history of
that failure entails a question about where our own limits, today in the present
visual studies project, might be.”11 Visual studies, it would seem, is bound to fail
because it is bounded by failure(s). The notion of failure, at the very least, uni-
fies this conversation, and by extension, some very different experiences of and
positions within the field.
Only one participant whose remarks are recorded here, Bridget Cooks, out-
right avowed the opinion that “visual studies is a success.”12 Cooks’s comment
offered an opportunity to subject the notion of “success”—with its connotations
of capitalist productivity—to critical scrutiny. But Cooks’s comment fell flat,
and no analysis of “success”—or, perhaps more importantly, “failure”—ensued.
What (and how) does failure mean here? Is failure (as in “the failure of visual
studies”) a device that performs critically to reveal areas of potential growth
and transformation? If so, failure should not pass untheorized, right? A number
of theorists (especially queer theorists) whose work has been useful to visual
critics—including Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Heather Love,
and Judith Halberstam—have acknowledged failure as a perverse form of suc-
cess.13 Failure, for one thing, has the capacity to expose default values (what
Foucault calls “codes of normalization”) that otherwise remain invisible.14 “What
3. See Section 4 of the Seminars. (New York: Picador, 2003); Judith Butler, Gender
4. See Section 10 of the Seminars. Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Iden-
5. See Section 2 of the Seminars. tity (New York: Routledge, 1990); José Esteban
6. See Section 10 of the Seminars. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color
7. See Section 2 of the Seminars. and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
8. See Section 4 of the Seminars. University of Minnesotta Press, 1999); Heather
9. See Section 10 of the Seminars. Love, Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of
10. See Section 1 of the Seminars. Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
11. See Section 1 of the Seminars. sity Press, 2009); Judith Halberstam, The Queer
12. See Section 1 of the Seminars. Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press,
13. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be 2011).
Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 14. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 38.
1975–1976, translated by David Macey
kinds of rewards can failure offer us?” Halberstam asks. “Perhaps most obvi-
ously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior
and manage human development.”15 Admittedly, failure bears with it an array of
negative affects (disappointment, disillusionment, depression, and despair). But
these can be used effectively as tools.
Dissatisfaction, rather than enclosing visual studies in a logic of futility, may
serve to (further) undiscipline the field. Elkins observes that, at this time, a string
of terms describes the vocation’s academic situation: “ ‘interdisciplinary,’ ‘postdis-
ciplinary,’ ‘indisciplinary,’ ‘subdisciplinary,’ and ‘transdisciplinary.’ ”16 To Elkins’s
list I would like to add (and advocate) “antidisciplinary.” What better time than
now—a time defined by the failure of universities, industries, infrastructures,
economic markets, the fourth estate, the public sector, nations, and political
regimes—to reexamine internalized models of success and failure? What better
time to use failure as a fulcrum for dismantling disciplinary barriers and leverag-
ing new forms of learning (and unlearning), new models of pedagogy?
“Ten years ago,” Michael Ann Holly recalls, “when I last taught undergradu-
ates, they would ask, ‘What is visual studies?’ and I would answer, ‘It isn’t a
discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic. It shakes up complacency.
No objects are excluded. Visual studies names an attitude in relation to visual
things, rather than a department.’ ”17 Have we lost, or tamed, our attitude? No.
I think these conversations demonstrate that visual studies remains messy, con-
tentious, indeterminate, unruly, and its many failures have proven exceptionally
generative.
Keith Moxey touched on the kinds of failures that have such potential for
visual scholars. “I love visual objects and practices because they are often—
by their nature—tremendously difficult to put into words, and so I would like
to hobble the interpretation of visuality, making it less smooth and confident.”18
Our incapacity (failure) to adequately translate the visual into words is both
what gives visuality such power and what lends our best efforts to analyze visual
events a kind of precarious grace. Farewell to visual studies? I don’t think so.
15. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 3.

“IF THERE’S A PING, THERE HAS TO BE A PONG”
Anna Notaro
I am writing this short response to Farewell to Visual Studies a few days after my
first visit to the documenta (13) art show in Kassel, Germany. This sequence of
events was not planned; it has more to do with serendipity and my tendency
to work close to deadlines. Hence there is a before and after documenta (13)
dimension to what follows.
Before: when I finished reading the transcript, prior to traveling to Kassel,
I felt rather overwhelmed by the erudition of the participants and the acumen
and vitality of the discussion, and, in spite of a sense of personal inadequacy,
I wished I was there! A transcript, in its vain effort to accurately replicate the
oral, often results in a dry read, deprived as it is of the subtle nuances of ver-
bal communication, and yet my reading experience was not impeded: so many
insightful and stimulating observations left me pondering, and some had a per-
sonal resonance, like the discussion regarding the ever-shifting disciplinary sta-
tus of visual studies and its multifaceted histories. Hal Foster’s description of
visual culture as “a passport that can lead to fairly touristic travel from discipline
to discipline,” evoked by Kristine Nielsen,1 was particularly poignant in that I
have used visual culture exactly in such a manner—except that, contrary to the
superficial and time-limited experience of the tourist, visual culture has had a
deep and long-lasting effect on my professional development as a media theorist.
I share Gustav Frank’s doubts about whether visual studies has a “central
coherence,”2 and I am uncertain as to which of the five terms identified by James
Elkins to define visual studies’ disciplinary nature—“interdisciplinary,” “post-
disciplinary,” “indisciplinary,” “postdisciplinary,” or “transdisciplinary”3—is the
most appropriate, or whether, following a linear chronology, we are now in the
Visual Culture 3 stage.4 I can’t even say if the distinction between visual culture
studies and visual studies is just a question of emphasis.5 What I am rather con-
fident about is that although issues of self-definition are obviously important,
not least with regard to the power relationship established with the educational
institutions within which visual studies is taught, the emphasis on the “self ”
dimension leads to a degree of intellectual introspection that loses sight (no pun
intended) of what I would define as the more “worldly” aspect of images, their
“social ontology,” as Tom Mitchell puts it.6 Like Mitchell, I am more interested
“in the world that the image makes visible” and, following Elise Goldstein in
the same section, in “who visual studies serves,” in what is the “audience.” Also,
1. In Section 2 of the Seminars 5. See Tom Mitchell’s response to a point

2. In Section 3 of the Seminars. raised by Whitney Davis in Section 4 of the
3. In Section 3 of the Seminars. Seminars.
4. James Elkins in Section 3 of the Seminars. 6. In Section 4 of the Seminars.
a farewell to something so undefined/undefinable begs the question of what

exactly one is bidding farewell to, and thus exposes the inherent fragility of the
whole conceptual enterprise, unless that was exactly the intention. In this sense,
Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s understanding of the term “farewell” as “fare well”7 reveals
very early on that behind the discussion always already existed an aspiration
towards affirmation rather than loss.
After: The experience of visiting documenta (13) was one of visual/sen-
sorial saturation; the array of paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos, sound
installations—from the sublime to the silly—was stimulating, the common
thread being the ways in which art reflects and interacts with the world, par-
ticularly at times of conflict. It is difficult to pick up one single artist whose
practice more pertinently relates to any of the theoretical debates developed in
the transcript, and yet the name of Rabih Mroué kept recurring in my mind.
For documenta (13) Lebanese theater/visual artist Mroué presented the lecture-
performance The Pixelated Revolution (2012) and a multipart installation about
the documentation of death in the Syrian Revolution, made by the victims
themselves filming the act of shooting with their mobile phones.8 Although
Mroué has declared that he “is not doing any kind of activism,” it is obvious
that “the underlying argument . . . is the persistent belief in the power of the
image.” Crucially, while such footage is necessary and valuable, Mroué admits
that “images alone are not enough to achieve any victory—especially when the
other side has all the guns.” Ultimately, for him “the role of the contemporary
artist is not to make more images, of which there are already plenty,” but rather
“to make images that are already imposing themselves on our daily lives and are
keeping us from thinking, and use them as material to [make us] think.”9
Mroué’s simultaneous belief in the power of the image and the awareness
of its inadequacy “to achieve any victory” echoed, in my mind, the dilemmas
of ideological criticism as discussed in Section 8 of the transcript: the contrast
between political activism and reflection, the necessity for a countervisuality,
as Mirzoeff would have it, and the fundamental issue, raised by Keith Moxey
in relation to Nemerov’s and Bal’s texts, of whether the author’s politics should
remain implicit rather than explicit. Above all, I remain convinced—and Mroué’s
work has reinforced my conviction—that the question that opens Nemerov’s
essay—“what do artists and poets and critics do in the face of catastrophe? How
do they register it in their work, or should they even try to do so?”10—has lost
none of its pregnancy since it was first formulated in 2005. Following Paul Frosh,
I also would like to use “the notion of an engaged witnessing,” in the belief that
“images can be testimony” which “will ultimately promote action.”11
To conclude these few scattered reflections, I would argue that for visual
studies / visual culture to survive and thrive in a media-saturated age, it needs
7. In Section 1 of the Seminars. -pixelated-revolution-at-the-warhol (accessed

8. See Rabih Mroué’s entry in the docu- August 28, 2012).
menta (13) catalogue (Ostfildern, 2012), 354–55. 10. See Section 8 of the Seminars.
9. www.pghcitypaper.com/ProgramNotes 11. See Section 8 of the Seminars.
/archives/2012/02/06/rabih-mrous-the
257 Assessments
to put aside the historical “ideology versus aesthetics” divide in the acknowledg-
ment that, although the study of the visual cannot be conceived merely in terms
of politics, yet, as Gustav Frank notes, “[v]isuality is political because of the
many social and cultural spaces and intricate practices it organizes” (emphasis
mine).12 Rather than agonizing further on issues of definition and genealogy,
contemporary visual studies would do better to focus on the “making of images”
and “on the activities that images perform,” as Keith Moxey puts it.13 When it
comes to images, “if there’s a ping, there has to be a pong”; truth and falsity
need to be bypassed in favor of a conception of the discipline as a conceptu-
ally flexible “connection enabler,” capable, that is, of exploiting to the fullest
its cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary combination potential. In this light, media
studies, among other subjects, will not be regarded anymore as an adversary of
Bildwissenschaft,14 but as one of its most formidable allies.
12. In Section 8 of the Seminars.

13. In Section 10 of the Seminars.
14. In the Bildwissenschaft tradition dis-
cussed in Section 5 of the Seminars.
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Emmanuel Alloa is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Gal-

len, Switzerland. His publications include La résistance du sensible (Paris, 2008); Penser
l’image (Dijon, 2010); Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: Eine Anthologie (Munich, 2011);
Das durchscheinende Bild (Berlin, 2011); Du sensible à l’oeuvre: Esthétiques de Merleau-
Ponty (Brussels, 2012); and “Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la
lettre,” Journal of Visual Studies 12, no. 1 (2013): 3–29.
Nell Andrew teaches modern art, dance history, and early film at the University of
Georgia. Her publications include “Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-Garde,”
Art Journal 68, no. 2 (2009): 26–49, and “The Medium Is a Muscle: Abstraction in Early
Film, Dance, Painting,” in Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls?, edited by
Angela Dalle Vacche (Basingstoke, UK, 2012), 57–77. She has contributed criticism to
contemporary art exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, and the Weston
Art Gallery, Cincinnati, and is currently writing a book titled The Medium Is a Muscle:
Dance, Film, and the Origins of Abstraction.
Linda Báez Rubí is a Research Fellow in the History of Ideas and Art at the Insti-
tuto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM). Her publications include Die Rezeption der
Lehre des Ramon Llull in der Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579) des Franziskaners Fray
Diego de Valadés (Frankfurt, 2004); Mnemosine novohispánica: Retórica e imágenes en
el siglo XVI (Mexico City, 2005); “La imagen y los imaginarios en la visualidad retó-
rica de Fray Diego de Valadés,” in Mitteilungen der Carl-Justi Vereinigung (Frankfurt,
2007), 81–102; “Der schauende Körper im mystischen Erkenntnisprozess des Primero
Sueño (1690) von Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” in Topologien der Bilder, edited by Carsten
Juwig (Munich, 2008), 285–302; “Vehículos de visión en la representación de lo sagrado:
El diagrama, la memoria corporal y el pneuma visual,” in Tópicos del seminario: Los lími-
tes del texto sagrado 22 (2009), 131–56; “Quasi in speculo et in anigmatae: Die figura
paradigmatica im Ersten Traum der Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” in Coincidentia, nos. 1/2
(2010): 383–428; “Et remotissima propre: Das Fernrohr als Gerät des Sehens und Träger
der Vision im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Techniken der Bilder, edited by Beat Wyss
and Martin Schulz (Munich, 2010), 165–82; “Ecce homo: El cuerpo, los sentidos y la
imaginación en los ejercicios de meditación mística,” in Los itinerarios de la imagen:
Prácticas, usos y funciones, edited by Linda Báez Rubí, Emilie Carreón, and Deborah
Dorotinsky (Mexico City, 2010), 103–23; “Reflexiones en torno a las teorías de la imagen
(Bildtheorien) en Alemania a partir de la contribución de Klaus Sachs-Hombach,” Anales
del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 97 (2010): 157–94; El Atlas de imágenes Mnemosine
de Aby Warburg, 2 vols. (Mexico City, 2012).
Martin A. Berger is Professor and Chair of History of Art and Visual Culture and the
founding director of the Visual Studies graduate program at the University of California
at Santa Cruz. His publications include Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction
of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkeley, 2000); Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual
Culture (Berkeley, 2005); and Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Pho-
tography (Berkeley, 2011).
Hans Dam Christensen is Dean of Research at the Royal School of Library and
Information Science, Copenhagen. His recent publications include “Plus de figures!,”
Periskop 15 (2012): 79–97; “Informativ affektivitet,” Ekfrase 1 (2012): 4–22; “Roland
Barthes: On Semiology and Taxonomy,” in Critical Theory for Library and Information
Science, edited by Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, and John E. Buschman (Santa Bar-
bara, 2010), 15–28; “The Repressive Logic of a Profession? On the Use of Reproductions
in Art History,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 4 (2010): 200–215; and “Thorvaldsen’s Shadow:
Silhouette Portraits Revisited as Visual Culture, 1800–1850,” in Mind and Matter, edited
by Johanna Vakkari (Helsinki, 2010), 100–109.
Isabelle Decobecq is pursuing a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies at the Uni-
versité Lille Nord de France. Her research focuses on the history and theory of visual
culture studies in the Anglo-American world. Her publications include “Visual Studies:
Un état des lieux,” in Visual Studies: Les nouveaux paradigmes du visuel, edited by Daniel
Dubuisson and Sophie Raux (Dijon, forthcoming).
Bernhard J. Dotzler is Chair of Media Studies at the University of Regensburg.

His publications include Diskurs und Medium I–III (Munich, 2006–11); Papiermaschi-
nen: Versuch über Communication & Control in Literatur und Technik (Berlin, 1996);
L’Inconnue de l’art: Über Medien-Kunst (Berlin, 2003); and Bild/Kritik (Berlin, 2010).
Johanna Drucker received an MA in Visual Studies in 1982 and a PhD in Ecriture:

Writing as the Visual Representation of Language in 1986, both from the University
of California, Berkeley. She has lectured and published extensively on topics related
to visual knowledge production in poetics, graphic design, digital humanities, art his-
tory, and book arts. Her recent volume Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production
(Cambridge, MA, 2014) is a summary and guide to the approach to visual studies that
she has long championed.
James Elkins focuses on writing on the history and theory of images in art, science,
and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is: How to Think
About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy [New York, 1999]; Why Are Our Pic-
tures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity [New York, 1999]). Others
include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain
of Images [Ithaca, 1999], On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them [Cambridge, 1998]),
and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes [New York, 2008]). His most
recent books are What Photography Is (New York, 2011), written against Roland Barthes’s
Camera Lucida, and Art Critiques: A Guide [Washington, DC, 2012].
Michele Emmer works in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Rome

La Sapienza. His publications include The Visual Mind 2 (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Aes-
thetics and Mathematics: Connections Through History, edited by Paul Fishwick (Cam-
bridge, MA, 2006); Bolle di sapone tra arte e matematica (Turin, 2009), awarded best Ital-
ian essay 2010; Imagine Math 2: Culture and Math (Berlin, 2013); “Minimal Surfaces and
Architecture: New Forms,” Nexus Network Journal 15, no. 2 (2013): 227–39; “The Idea of
Space in Art, Technology, and Mathematics,” in Applications of Mathematics in Models,
Artificial Networks, and Arts, edited by Vittorio Capecchi (Dordrecht, 2010), 505–18.
Yolaine Escande is Director of Research at the French National Research Center

(CNRS). Her research field is Chinese aesthetics, graphic arts, theory of arts (calligra-
phy and painting), and comparative aesthetics. She has translated fundamental treatises
on Chinese calligraphy and painting from Chinese to French: Guo Ruoxu, Notes sur
ce que j’ai vu et entendu en peinture (Brussels, 1994), and Traités chinois de peinture et
de calligraphie, 2 vols. (Paris, 2003–10); and has presented Chinese aesthetic principles:
L’art en Chine (Paris, 2001), and Montagnes et eaux: La culture du shanshui (Paris, 2005).
Her research concerns the artistic, philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural interactions of
Chinese and Western art: L’esthétique: Europe, Chine et ailleurs, coedited with Jean-Marie
Schaeffer (Paris, 2002); Frontières de l’art, frontières de l’esthétique, coedited with Johanna
Liu (Paris, 2008); Culture du loisir, art et esthétique, coedited with Johanna Liu (Paris,
2010). She is a member of the editorial board of Universitas: Monthly Review of Philoso-
phy and Culture (refereed A&HCI journal), for which she has coedited special issues
with Johanna Liu in English and in Chinese. She is a former Vice President and Presi-
dent of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy (ISCP).
Gustav Frank lectures in the German Department of Munich University. His field is the
intersections of visual, aural, and verbal artifacts in media and popular cultures and their
contribution to the social and medial organization of discourse and knowledge. Recent
publications include Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft: Bilder in der visuellen Kultur, with
Barbara Lange (Darmstadt, 2010); an edited volume, Modernism and the Beginnings of Visual
Culture (Bielefeld, 2013); Das Laokoon-Regime: Ästhetik und visuelle Kultur (Cologne, forth-
coming); and Benjamins Holzschnitt: Visuelle Kultur und Moderne (Bielefeld, forthcoming).
Theodore Gracyk works in the Philosophy Department at Minnesota State Uni-

versity Moorhead. Since February 2013 he has been coeditor of the Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism. His publications include The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Music, coedited with Andrew Kania (New York, 2011); The Philosophy of Art: An Intro-
duction (Cambridge, 2011); Listening to Popular Music (Ann Arbor, 2007); “The Sublime
and the Fine Arts,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy
Costelloe (Cambridge, 2012), 217–29; “Valuing and Evaluating Popular Music,” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 205–20; and “Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics
of Popular Music,” Musical Quarterly 76 (1992): 526–42.
Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Sci-

ence and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, where he is also founding director of
Nomadikon: The Bergen Center for Visual Culture. Among his most recent publications
are Ethics and Images of Pain (New York, 2012) and Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics
and the Moving Image (New York, 2014), both coedited with Henrik Gustafsson. Grønstad
is also a founding editor of the journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture.
Stephan Günzel is Professor of Media Theory at the Berlin Technical University

of Arts. His publications include Texte zur Theorie des Raums (Stuttgart, 2013); Ego-
shooter: Das Raumbild des Computerspiels (Frankfurt , 2012); Lexikon der Raumphilosophie
(Darmstadt, 2012); Logic and Structure of the Computer Game, coedited with Michael
Liebe and Dieter Mersch (Potsdam, 2010); “Space and Cultural Geography,” in Travel-
ling Concepts for the Study of Culture, edited by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning
(Berlin, 2012), 307–20; “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Bildtheorien aus Frankreich, edited
by Kathrin Busch und Iris Därmann (Munich, 2011), 299–312.
Charles W. Haxthausen teaches art history at Williams College. He is the author of

Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York, 1981), coeditor (with Heidrun Suhr) of Ber-
lin: Culture and Metropolis (1990), and editor of the The Two Art Histories: The Museum
and the University (Williamstown, MA, 2002) and Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid
(Williamstown, MA, 2012). Among his recent publications are “Carl Einstein, Daniel-
Henry Kahnweiler, Cubism, and the Visual Brain,” Nonsite.org 2 (June 2011), and “Art,
agentivité, et collectivité,” in “Dossier Carl Einstein et les primitivismes,” Gradhiva 14
(November 2011): 78–99. He is currently completing a book on the art criticism of Carl
Einstein, with selected translations.
Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the

University of Murcia, Spain, and formerly Director of the Centro de Documentación y
Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo (CENDEAC) in Murcia. His publications
include Materializar el pasado: El artista como historiador benjaminiano (Murcia, 2012);
Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture, coedited with Mieke Bal (Amsterdam, 2011);
Robert Morris (San Sebastián, 2010), “Contradictions in Time-Space,” in The Global
Art World, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2008), 136–53;
2Move: Video Art Migration, with Mieke Bal (Murcia, 2008); El archivo escotómico de la
Modernidad: Pequeños pasos para una teoría de la vision (Madrid, 2007); and La so(m)bra
de lo real: El arte como vomitorio (Valencia, 2006).
Tom Holert works as an independent scholar in Berlin. Since 2012 he has been a found-
ing member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne; he is also an honorary
professor in the Department for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine
Arts Vienna. His publications include The Exploratory Fallacy: Contemporary Art and the
Political Economy of Knowledge (Berlin, 2014); Übergriffe: Zustände und Zuständigkeiten
der Gegenwartskunst (Hamburg, 2014); Deadwood (Zurich, 2013); Das Erziehungsbild:
Zur visuellen Kultur des Pädagogischen, coedited with Marion von Osten (Vienna, 2010);
Regieren im Bildraum (Berlin, 2008); Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Celebration? Realife
(London, MA, 2007); Imagineering: Visuelle Kultur und die Politik der Sichtbarkeit,
edited (Cologne, 2000); and Künstlerwissen: Studien zur Semantik künstlerischer Kompe-
tenz im Frankreich des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1998).
Kıvanç Kılınç works in the Architecture Department at Yasar University in Turkey

and is associate editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. His publica-
tions include “Homemaker or Professional? Girls’ Schools Designed by Ernst Egli and
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Ankara, 1930–1938,” New Perspectives on Turkey 48 (2013):
101–28; and “Imported but Not Delivered: The Construction of Modern Domesticity
and the Spatial Politics of Mass-Housing in 1930s Ankara,” Journal of Architecture 17,
no. 6 (2012): 819–46.
Charlotte Klonk is Professor of Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

She studied in Hamburg and Cambridge, where she received her doctorate in 1993. From
1992 to 1993 she worked as a curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent.
In 1993 she was appointed Research Fellow at Oxford and in 1995 Lecturer in the History
of Art Department of the University of Warwick. She has received several fellowships,
e.g., at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown,
MA. Her publications include Science and the Perception of Nature (New Haven, 1998);
Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000 (New Haven, 2009); and, with
Michael Hatt, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester, 2005). She
currently researches the history of images in acts of terror.
Tirza True Latimer is an Associate Professor and Chair of the graduate program in
Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. Her publications include
the anthology The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, coedited with
Whitney Chadwick (New Brunswick, 2003); Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits
of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick, 2005); and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, with
Wanda M. Corn (Berkeley, 2011).
Mark Linder is Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of

Architecture at Syracuse University, and was Max Fisher Visiting Professor at the Taub-
man College of Architecture at the University of Michigan (2009). His publications
include Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture After Minimalism (Cambridge, 2004);
“Images and Other Stuff,” Journal of Architectural Education 66, no. 1 (2012): 3–8; “Lit-
eral Digital,” in Architecture in Formation: On the Nature of Digital Information in Digital
Architecture, edited by Aaron Sprecher (New York, 2013), 69–71; and “Banham’s Mieses,”
in Chicagoisms, edited by Alexander Eisenschmit and Jonathan Mekinda (Zurich, 2013).
Sunil Manghani is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory and Deputy Director

of Doctoral Research at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK).
He teaches and writes on various aspects of critical theory, visual arts, and image studies.
He is the author of Image Studies: Theory and Practice (London, 2013) and Image Critique
and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Bristol, 2008), and editor of Images: A Reader (London,
2006) and Images: Critical and Primary Sources (New York, Bloomsbury, 2013).
Anna Notaro is Programme Leader and Lecturer in Contemporary Media Theory

at Dundee University (UK). Her eclectic publications cover urban/visual culture, the
blogosphere, issues of (digital) authorship, urban consumption, and the future of the
book.
Julia Orell is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute (2014–15),
where she is conducting research on the historiography of East Asian art history with a
focus on German-language scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries and its methodological implications. She completed her PhD in Chinese art history
at the University of Chicago in 2011, has taught Chinese art history at the University of
Zurich, and is revising her dissertation on twelfth- and thirteenth-century depictions of
the Yangzi River into a book manuscript titled “Landscape Painting and Geographical
Knowledge in Song China.”
Mark Reinhardt is Class of 1956 Professor of American Civilization in the Depart-

ment of Political Science at Williams College. His publications include The Art of Being
Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca, 1997); Kara Walker:
Narratives of a Negress, edited by Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark
Reinhardt (Cambridge, MA, 2003; New York, 2007); Beautiful Suffering: Photography
and the Traffic in Pain, edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne
(Chicago, 2007); and Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? (Minneapolis, 2010). He is cur-
rently working on a book titled “Visual Politics: Theories and Spectacles.”
Vanessa R. Schwartz is Professor of History, Art History, and Film at the Univer-
sity of Southern California, where she is also Director of the Visual Studies Research
Institute. She was a Getty Research Institute Scholar in Fall 2012, where she worked on
the advent of color news pictures and the history of photojournalism. She is the author
of Modern France: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2011); the prize-winning It’s So
French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago, 2007);
and Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998). She
has coedited three volumes: Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, coedited with
Leo Charney (Berkeley, 1995); The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, coedited
with Jeannene M. Przyblyski (London, 2004); and Getting the Picture: The Art History
and Visual Culture of the News, coedited with Jason Hill. She has edited special issues of
Études photographiques and the Journal of Visual Culture and has published articles about
Walter Benjamin, film history, and the French New Wave. An article about LAX from
her book project about the dawn of the jet age was recently published in the Getty cata-
logue Overdrive: LA Constructs the Future, edited by Wim de Wit and Chris Alexander
(Los Angeles, 2013).
Bernd Stiegler is professor of German Literature and Media History at the Univer-
sity of Konstanz (Germany). His recent publications include Theoriegeschichte der Photo-
graphie (Munich, 2006); Bilder der Photographie: Ein Album photographischer Metaphern
(Frankfurt, 2006); Montagen des Realen (Munich, 2009); Reisender Stillstand (Frankfurt,
2010); Belichtete Augen (Frankfurt, 2011); Randgänge der Photographie (Munich, 2012);
and Visual Culture / Visuelle Kulturen, with Marius Marius Rimmele (Hamburg, 2012).
Øyvind Vågnes is a postdoctoral fellow at Nomadikon, the Bergen Center of Visual

Culture. His recent publications include Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in
Visual Culture (Austin, 2011) and “The Unsettling Moment: On Mathilde ter Heijne’s
Suicide Trilogy,” in Ethics and Images of Pain, edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik
Gustafsson (New York, 2012), 144–58.
Sjoukje van der Meulen is affiliated with the Department of Media Studies: New
Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Publications include her dis-
sertation, “The Problem of Media in Contemporary Art Theory, 1960–1990” (Columbia
University, 2009); “Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory,”
New German Critique 37, no. 2 (2010): 180–207; “Witness and Presence in the Work of
Pierre Huyghe,” AI & Society (February 2012); and “A Strong Couple: New Media and
Socially Engaged Art,” Leonardo Journal (forthcoming).
Terri Weissman teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University

of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Realisms of Berenice Abbott:
Documentary Photography and Political Action (Berkeley, 2011), and coauthor of Ameri-
can Modern: Documentary Photographs by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White, with Sharon
Corwin and Jessica May (Berkeley, 2010). Her recent publications include “Berenice
Abbott’s Science,” in Berenice Abbott, edited by Gaëlle Morel (Paris, 2012), 142–51; “Free-
dom’s Just Another Word,” in Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, edited by Alexander
Dumbadze and Suzane Hudson (West Sussex, 2013), 311–21; and “Detroit’s Edible Gar-
dens: Art and Agriculture in a Post-Environmental World,” in “Contemporary Art and
the Politics of Ecology,” edited by T. J. Demos, online supp., Third Text (January 2013).
Lisa Zaher is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of
Chicago and an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her dis-
sertation is entitled “By Mind and Hand: Hollis Frampton’s Photographic Modernism”
(2013). Her article “Re-framing Photographic Subjectivity: Hollis Frampton’s The Secret
World of Frank Stella,” appears in “Re-__-ing,” edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and
Matthew Metzger, Shifter 17 (2011), and is reprinted in Rethinking Marxism 23, no. 2
(2011). She coedited (with Rachel Rossner) “Immediacy/Mediacy,” Chicago Art Journal
16 (2006).
Marta Zarzycka is an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Department, Utrecht

University. She teaches and publishes in the field of visual studies and feminist theory.
In her current research she focuses on the role of digital photography in shaping collec-
tive Western consciousness through its representation of trauma and atrocity. Her pub-
lications include Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, coedited
with Bettina Papenburg (London, 2012).
INDEX
acoustic space, 215–17 history of, 7, 43–55 on authors, 122

Adajian, Thomas, 182 images and, 67–68, 77, Bildwissenschaft and, 95,
Adoration of the Golden Calf 143, 144, 150 171–72
(Poussin), 67–68, 69, institutions and, 155–56 on books, 155
73–74, 75, 77 politics and, 45–46, 48–49 farewell to, 5, 19
Adorno, Theodor science and, 133–38, history and, 163
assessments of, 171, 208–9 141–42 on images, 15, 171–72
on politics, 120, 121, 127 seminar on, 43–55 on meaning, 104
visuelle Kultur and, 36, 41 studio practice and, 156–57 on photography, 15
aesthetics, 181–83 theory and, 49–51, on politics, 120, 121, 127
affect, 14–16, 18, 141–42 200–203 visuelle Kultur and, 31, 33,
Against Method (Feyerabend), visual culture and, 21–22, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39–40,
80 110, 114–17 210–13
agency. See also argument visuelle Kultur and, 39–40 Berger, Martin A., 162, 177–78
argument and, 150, 151 The Art Seminar, x Bild-Anthropologie (Belting),
assessments of, 222–24 art theory, ix–xi 85–87, 98, 185, 219,
Bildwissenschaft and, 17, 18 Auden, W. H., 120, 121–22, 124 242
culture and, 11, 16–18 Austin, J. L., 183 Bildgeschichte, 164, 218–21,
metapictures and, 68–72 234–35
politics and, 128–29 Báez Rubí, Linda, 98, 164, Bild und Kult (Belting), 219,
Alloa, Emmanuel, 161, 170–73 241–45 220
anachronism, 91, 92, 93, Bal, Mieke Bildvetenskap, 82
246–48 assessments of, 247, 256 Bildwissenschaft
Andrew, Nell, 161, 174–76 on history, 57, 62, 63 agency and, 17, 18
Anglo-American studies on politics, 22, 119, art history and, 91–93
art history in, 43–45 120–21, 125, 131 assessments of, 164, 170–
assessments of, 185, Balázs, Béla 72, 185, 186, 215–17,
186, 187–89, 246–48, assessments of, 210–13, 234–35, 241–45, 249,
249–51 222, 223–24 257
culture and, 10 on film, 15, 171 culture and, 10–11, 15–16
images and, 150 visuelle Kultur and, 34, 35, Eikones project and, 96,
politics and, 8, 125–26 36, 38–39, 41, 210–13 99–108
science and, 7 Banchoff, Thomas, 197 history and, 76, 78–79,
as type, 82 Barnes, Albert, 181 81–98, 215–17
visuelle Kultur and, 31 Barthes, Roland images and, 89–90, 100–
animism. See agency “From Work to Text,” 162 101, 102–8, 147–48
anthropology, 53–54 on images, 143, 147, 149 politics and, 101–2, 125–26
aporiae, 11, 18 Renault and, 65 science and, 84, 87–90,
architecture, 187–89, 192–93 on signification, 22 101–2, 105, 139
argument, 6, 14–16, 143–51. Belting, Hans semiotics and, 84–85, 86,
See also agency assessments of, 219, 220, 102–8
Aristotle, 32, 233n. 12 242, 247 studio practice and, 156
Arnheim, Rudolf, 216–17 Bild-Anthropologie, 85–87, visual culture and, 21
art, making of. See studio 98, 185, 219, 242 visuelle Kultur and, 31, 32,
practice Bild und Kult, 219, 220 33, 34–35, 36–38, 39
art history Bildwissenschaft and, 37, Bisanz, Elise, 10–11
assessments of, 174–76, 81, 83–84, 85–88, 96, body, 85–86, 103–5, 179–80
185, 187–89, 190–91, 98, 171 Boehm, Gottfried
200–203 on images, 146 assessments of, 214, 224,
Bildwissenschaft and, Benjamin, Walter 234, 242
83–84, 91–93 assessments of, 171–72, Bildwissenschaft and,
culture and, 11–12, 45, 207–9, 210–13, 220, 81–82, 84, 85, 88, 94,
48–49 221, 222–23 95, 96, 97, 98, 186
268 index
Boehm, Gottfried (cont’d ) art theory and, xi Elkins, James

Eikones project, 21, 96, culture and, 13–14 on farewell, 3–9
99–108, 164 disciplinarity and, 63–64 seminar led by, 81–98
on images, 145 history, recent, 76 Theorizing Visual Studies:
“Indeterminacy: On the images and, 13, 14, 15–16 Thinking Through the
Logic of the Image,” in visual culture, 111–13 Discipline, 4, 6, 79, 132,
102, 107 culture. See also visual culture 154
on schema, 114 art history and, 11–12, 45, Visual Studies: A Skeptical
Bourdieu, Pierre, 55 48–49 Introduction, 4, 48, 59,
Brecht, Bertold, 15 Bildwissenschaft and, 63
Bredekamp, Horst 10–11, 15–16 Emmer, Michele, 162, 194–97
assessments of, 170–71, images and, 11, 13, 14–18, Escande, Yolaine, 164, 238–40
186, 195, 196, 219, 220, 72–76 Evans, Jessica, 61
234, 248 politics and, 13, 119–21,
Bildwissenschaft and, 81, 123–27, 251 farewell, concept of
84, 85, 87, 88–90, 96, visual studies and, gener- art history and, 46, 47, 50,
97, 98, 104–5, 105–6, ally, 5–6, 10–19 53, 55, 67–68
170–71, 186 The Culture of Film (Balázs), 15 assessments of, 161, 163,
Darwins Korallen, 89, 144, 164–65, 166–67, 170,
147 dance, 16 175, 185, 190, 198, 199,
on images, 145–46, 195 Darwin, Charles, 89, 90, 144 200–201, 203, 206,
politics and, 130 Darwins Korallen (Bredekamp), 214, 215, 217, 225, 228,
visuelle Kultur and, 31, 89, 144, 147 230–31, 232, 234, 247,
36–37 Davis, Whitney 249, 252–54, 256
Breton, André, 171–72 A General Theory of Visual history, recent, 62, 76–80
Bruegel, Pieter, 120, 121–22, Culture, 13, 22, 109–17, introductions to, 3–9,
129–30 131, 134 10–19, 20–23
Bruno, Giuliana, 133, 139–42 “Neurovisuality,” 133–38 politics and, 126
Bryson, Norman Replications, 134 visuelle Kultur and, 37, 39,
art history and, 43, 44, 45, seminars led by, 109–17, 40
46, 50–51, 55 133–38 Feyerabend, Paul, 80
assessments of, 176 Decobecq, Isabelle, 164, film
Buck-Morss, Susan, 14, 249–51 Balázs on, 15, 223
144–45, 146, 147 Deleuze, Gilles, 173 science and, 133, 139–42
Dewey, John, 72 visuelle Kultur and, 33,
Calvin Klein thought experi- diagram moment, 22–23 38–39
ment, 8–9, 38, 63–64, Didi-Huberman, Georges “Film, Aesthetics, Science”
65, 131 assessments of, 190, 191, (Bruno), 133, 139–42
Cartwright, Lisa, seminar led 234, 250, 251 “The Flight of Form” (Nem-
by, 139–42 Bildwissenschaft and, 82, erov), 119, 120–24
Ceci n’est pas un pipe (Mag- 91–93, 95, 106n. 15 Foster, Hal, 46, 48, 70
ritte), 23, 69 visuelle Kultur and, 35, 37, Foucault, Michel, 141, 253
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70 191 Frampton, Hollis, 212
Chinese studies, 83, 164, disciplinarity Frank, Gustav
238–40 assessments of, 161–65, on farewell, 10–19
Christensen, Hans Dam, 161, 166, 174–75, 185–86, seminars led by, 31–41,
166–69 190–93, 225, 254 81–98
Clark, Tim, 134–36, 137 history, recent, 57–65, the Frankfurt school, 207–9
Clark, T. J., 252 78–80 French studies, 10, 164,
Cloning Terror (Mitchell), 6, science and, 134, 138 172–73, 204, 249–51
126, 128–29, 184 documenta (13), 255–57 Fried, Michael, 72
College Art Association, 63 Dotzler, Bernhard J., 163, “From Work to Text” (Barthes),
Costa, Celso, 197 215–17 162
counterfactuals, 112–13 Dreamworld and Catastrophe
counterintuitivity, 109–10, (Buck-Morss), 144–45, Garfinkel, Harold, 141
111–13 146, 147 gender, 71–72, 74–75, 101,
Crimp, Douglas Drucker, Johanna, 163, 154–55
art history and, 37, 43, 44, 200–203 A General Theory of Visual
46, 48 duck-rabbit drawing, 67, 69, Culture (Davis), 13, 22,
On the Museum’s Ruins, 146 72, 74–75, 77 109–17, 131, 134
Critical Inquiry, 77, 131 German studies. See
criticality. See also ideological Eikones project, 21, 96, Bildwissenschaft
critiques 99–108, 164 Goldfarb, Brian, 48n. 6, 50
269 index
Gombrich, Ernst H., 114, 138, Image Critique and the Fall of history, recent, 57, 58, 60
146, 171 the Berlin Wall (Mang- importance of, 77
Goodman, Nelson, 103, 107–8 hani), 129, 144, 148–49 on visual culture, 22
Gracyk, Theodore, 162, 181–83 images journals, 4. See also Journal of
Greenberg, Clement, 210–11 affect and, 14–16, 18 Visual Culture
Gronstad, Asbjorn, 163, agency of, 11, 16–18, Jurassic Park, 67, 68, 75
225–27 68–72, 128–29, 150, Just What Is It That Makes
Günzel, Stephan, 163, 214 151, 222–24 Today’s Home So Dif-
argument and, 6, 14–16, ferent, So Appealing?
Haeckel, 109 143–51 (Hamilton), 156
Halberstam, Judith, 253–54 art history and, 53–55,
Hall, Stuart, 61 67–68, 77, 143, 144, 150 Kant, Immanuel, 90, 114,
Hamilton, Richard, 156 assessments of, 167, 181–82, 183
Haxthausen, Charles W., 163, 168, 171–72, 175–76, Kemp, Martin, 234
222–24 184, 195–97, 218–21, Kilinç, Kivanç, 162, 187–89
Hegel, G. W. F., 73, 75, 85, 170 222–24 Kittler, Friedrich, 85, 112, 218,
Heidegger, Martin Bildwissenschaft and, 220
assessments of, 216, 217 89–90, 100–101, Klonk, Charlotte, 164, 234–37
Bildwissenschaft and, 90, 102–8, 147–48 Kracauer, 163, 207, 208
94 criticality and, 13, 14, 15–16 Kress, Gunter, 22
visuelle Kultur and, 36, culture and, 11, 13, 14–18, Kulturwissenschaft, 10–11,
39–40, 41 72–76 37, 171
Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Á., history and, 145–46
164, 246–48 ideological critiques and, Lacan, Jacques, 69, 103, 139,
history 69–70, 148–49 248
of art history, 7, 43–55 making of, 8, 79, 150, Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 124
assessments of, 163–64, 156–57, 218 Latimer, Tirza True, 165,
170–73, 174–75, meaning of, 100–101, 252–54
181–83, 186, 187–89, 102–8, 145–46, 147–48 Latin American studies, 82,
204–6, 210–13, 215–17, metapictures, 67–76 164, 241–45
234–35, 246–48 politics and, 71–72, 74–75, Lauwrens, Jennifer, 187
Bildwissenschaft and, 101–2, 148–49 Lawler, Louise, 146
81–98, 215–17 reflection and, 72–76 Leonardo da Vinci, 148
culture and, 18–19 science and, 7, 77–78, Linder, Mark, 162, 190–93
generations in, 3–4, 19, 40 101–2, 105 Lissitzky, El, 187–88
graduate students uninter- in texts, 143–51 The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien),
ested in, 4 use of, 6–7, 77 20
historiography for, 7, 77, visual culture and, 23, Luis Brea, José, 247n. 3,
170, 186 146–47, 148, 150 248n. 6
images and, 145–46 Images: A Reader (Manghani, Lynch, Michael, 141
politics and, 58–60, Piper, and Simons),
62–65, 153–55 59–60 magnetism, 18
recent, 57–65, 67–80 image studies, 20, 21 Magritte, René, 23, 69
visual culture and, 110, 115, Image Studies (Manghani), 23, Mandelbrot, Benoit B., 196–97
116–17 60–61 Manghani, Sunlil
of visuelle Kultur, 31–41, “Indeterminacy: On the Logic on farewell, 20–23
210–13 of the Image” (Boehm), Image Critique and the Fall
Hoffman, David A., 197 102, 107 of the Berlin Wall, 129,
Hoffman, James T., 197 institutions, 155–57 144, 148–49
Holert, Tom, 162–63, 184 interdisciplinarity. See Images: A Reader, 59–60
Holly, Michael Ann, seminars disciplinarity Image Studies, 23, 60–61
led by, 43–55, 67–80 International Association for seminar led by, 57–65
Visual Culture Studies, Marr, David, 133–34
ideological critiques. See also 77, 154, 163, 225–26, Massumi, Brian, 18
politics 228–29 mathematics, 194–97
assessments of, 166, McLuhan, Marshall, 215, 217
226–27 Jay, Martin, 172–73, 247 meaning. See also semiotics
Calvin Klein thought experi- Jones, Amelia, 153 assessments of, 168–69,
ment and, 8–9 Journal of Visual Culture 181
images and, 69–70, Anglo-American studies, 10 of images, 100–101, 102–8,
148–49 on argument, 14 145–46, 147–48
politics and, 119–21, 125, Bildwissenschaft and, 92 media studies, 32, 33–34, 39,
126, 131–32 on history, 206 85, 218–21
270 index
Meeks, William H., III, 197 Mroué, Rabih, 256 assessments of, 163–64,
Mercer, Kobena, 155 Münsterberg, Hugo 177–78, 226–27, 228–
metapictures, 67–76 film and, 33, 133, 139, 140, 29, 230–33, 235–37,
“Metapictures” (Mitchell), 67 142 250–51, 256–57
methodology. See also theory The Photoplay: A Psycho- Bildwissenschaft and,
art history and, 50–51 logical Study, 31 101–2, 125–26
assessment of, 200–203 visuelle Kultur and, 33, 35, culture and, 13, 119–21,
Bildwissenschaft and, 38, 210 123–27, 251
97–98 history and, 58–60, 62–65,
disciplinarity and, 80 Nemerov, Alexander 153–55
politics and, 125, 130 assessments of, 228, 256 ideological critiques and,
science and, 134–36, 138 “The Flight of Form,” 119 119–21, 125, 126,
in visual culture, 111–13 on politics, 120–24, 125, 131–32
Michelsen, Anders, 126 126, 127, 132 images and, 71–72, 74–75,
Mirzoeff, Nicholas “Neurovisuality” (Davis), 101–2, 148–49
assessments of, 205, 226, 133–38 science and, 101–2
228, 232, 237, 247, 256 “New Rules for Visual Culture” seminar on, 119–32
Bildwissenschaft and, 92 (Mitchell), 8, 127–29, theory and, 226–27
history, recent, 57, 58, 63 177 visual culture and, 22, 109,
politics and, 45–46, 119, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73, 170, 110, 113, 123–27, 130,
123–27, 129, 130–31, 153 212 131–32
“The Right to Look,” 119, Norway, 229 visuality and, 124–27
124, 127, 131, 184, 232 Notaro, Anna, 165, 255–57 Posner, Roland, 84–85
on visual culture, 20, 23, Poussin, Nicolas, 67–68, 69,
161–62 October “Visual Culture 73–74, 75, 77, 135–36
Visual Culture Reader, 21, Questionnaire” psychoanalysis, 110–11
23, 57, 59, 61, 123–24, art history and, 50, 52–54 Public Eye project, 6–7, 132
155 assessments of, 161, 172, Puttfarken, Thomas, 31, 36–37
Watching Babylon, 6, 58, 174, 185
123, 129 Bildwissenschaft and, 86 Quintilian, 18
Mitchell, W. J. T. visual culture and, 21
on argument, 14 One-Way Street (Benjamin), 33 race, 71–72, 74–75, 101,
assessments of, 161, 162, Onian, John, 133, 137, 138 150–51, 154–55
174, 180, 183, 191, 197, Orell, Julia, 162, 185–86 Rancière, Jacques, 190, 251
219–20, 229, 252, 255 Real Spaces (Summers), 87
Bildwissenschaft and, 82, Panofsky, Erwin reflection, 72–76
83, 91, 95–96, 105, 108 assessments of, 171, 186, Reinhardt, Mark, 163–64,
Cloning Terror, 6, 126, 219–20 230–33
128–29, 184 Bildwissenschaft and, 93, Replications (Davis), 134
history, recent, 57, 67–80 95, 171, 186 Research Institutes in Art His-
on images, 14n. 14, 23, images and, 54 tory, 156
219–20 visuelle Kultur and, 32, 35, rhetorics, 18
“Metapictures,” 67 37, 38 “The Right to Look” (Mirzoeff),
methodology and, 50, 51, Peirce, 103 119, 124, 127, 131
111 philosophy, 85, 172–73 in assessments, 184
“New Rules for Visual “The Photographic Message” assessments of, 232
Culture,” 8, 127–29, 177 (Barthes), 143, 147, 149 rigor. See criticality
Picture Theory, 144, 146, photography, 15, 33, 112, Rimmele, Marius, 11–12
147 210–13 Rogoff, Irit, 21, 57, 180
on politics, 8, 126, 127–29, The Photoplay: A Psychological Rose, Gillian, 22–23
131 Study (Münsterberg), Rosen, Michael, 236
on semiotics, 103 31, 33 Rublev, Andrei, 71
on visual culture, 20, 21, Picture Theory (Mitchell), 144,
174, 183 146, 147 Sachs-Hombach, Klaus, 85,
“What Do Pictures Really Pike, John, 6–7, 132 112
Want?,” 68–72, 74–76, Pinder, Wilhelm, 3 Salcedo, Doris, 120–21
139, 145, 151, 181 Plato, 18–19, 32, 183, 233n. 12 Sauerländer, Willibald, 37
Möbius strip, 248 politics. See also ideological Saussure, 103, 105, 167
Moxey, Keith critiques schema, 114, 146
seminars led by, 81–98, Anglo-American studies School of the Art Institute,
119–32 and, 8, 125–26 64, 156
“Visual Studies and the art history and, 45–46, Schwartz, Vanessa R., 163,
Iconic Turn,” 93–98 48–49 164, 204–6
271 index
science assessments of, 200–203, assessments of, 167–68,

Anglo-American studies 207–9, 210–13, 226–27, 184, 185–86, 200–203
and, 7 253–54 history and, 40–41, 54–55,
art history and, 133–38, Bildwissenschaft and, 57, 63, 76, 78
141–42 97–98 introductions to, 9, 12, 14,
assessments of, 191–92, disciplinarity and, 80 16, 22
194–97, 198–99 images and, 149 politics and, 124–27
Bildwissenschaft and, 84, overview of, 5 science and, 133–38
87–90, 101–2, 105, 139 politics and, 125, 226–27 theory and, 92, 109–17
film and, 133, 139–42 science and, 133–34 Visual Methodologies (Rose),
images and, 7, 77–78, Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 15 22–23
101–2, 105 Tolkien, J. R. R., 20 “Visual Studies and the Iconic
institutions and, 155 Tolstoy, Leo, 119–20, 123, 124 Turn” (Moxey), 93–98
politics and, 101–2 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick), Visual Studies: A Skeptical
seminar on, 133–42 64 Introduction (Elkins), 4,
visual culture and, 21–22 truth, 7, 13n. 6, 150–51, 257 48, 59, 63
visuelle Kultur and, 32, visuelle Kultur
35–36, 40–41 Ubl, Ralph, 99 assessments of, 185,
Sedgwick, Eve, 64 191, 210–13, 216–17,
“The Semiotic Landscape” Vagnes, Oyvind, 163, 228–29 222–24
(Kress and van Leeu- Valéry, Paul, 173 Bildwissenschaft and, 83,
wen), 22 van der Meulen, Sjoukje, 163, 85–86
semiotics, 84–85, 86, 102–8, 218–21 body in, 103–4
214. See also meaning van Leeuwen, Theo, 22 seminar on, 31–41
sensoriality, 179–80 Visible Man (Balázs), 15 Visuelle Kulturen/Visual
Shohat, Ella, 180 vision. See also visuality Culture zur Einführung
Smith, Marquard, 20, 58, 62, assessments of, 167–68, (Rimmele and Stiegler),
63 179–80 11–12
Sonesson, Göran, 103 history and, 40–41, 54–55,
Sontag, Susan, 236 76, 78 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 18
Spanish studies, 246–47 introductions to, 12, 14, 22 Warburg, Aby
Stam, Robert, 180 theory and, 92 assessments of, 186, 241,
Steichen, Edward, 212–13 Vision (Marr), 133–34 244–45
Steinberg, Leo, 148 visual culture. See also visuelle Bildwissenschaft and, 92,
Stiegler, Bernd, 11–12, 163, Kultur 186
207–9 art history and, 21–22, 110, images and, 146
Stone, Donna and Howard, xi 114–17 visuelle Kultur and, 32, 37
Stone Summer Theory Insti- assessments of, 174–76, Watching Babylon (Mirzoeff),
tutes, ix–xi, 20, 21, 207–9, 210–13, 6, 58, 123, 129
26–27 225–26, 238–40 weak theory, 64–65
Strand, Paul, 210, 211–12, 213 Bildwissenschaft and, 21 Weber, Samuel, 221
Strauss, Charles, 197 history and, 76, 78, 110, Weissman, Terri, 163, 198–99
studio practice, 8, 79, 150, 115, 116–17 Weston, Edward, 210–11
156–57, 218 images and, 23, 146–47, “What Do Pictures Really
“Studying Visual Culture” 148, 150 Want?” (Mitchell)
(Rogoff ), 21 introduction to, 20–23 in assessments, 181
Summers, David, 87 Journal of Visual Culture in seminars, 68–72, 74–76,
Surrealism, 171–72 on, 22 139, 145, 151
Syria, 235–36, 256 politics and, 22, 109, Wiesing, Lambert, 214
110, 113, 123–27, 130, Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Tagg, John, 188 131–32 duck-rabbit drawing, 67,
Das technische Bild project, science and, 21–22 69, 72, 74–75, 77
88–89, 130, 234 seminar on, 109–17 on meaning, ix
textbooks, 59–62, 143–51 Visual Culture Reader on problems, xi
Thatcher, Margaret, 148–49 (Mirzoeff) visuality and, 109
Theorizing Visual Studies: in history, recent, 57, 59, 61 Wolf, Gerhard, 244–45
Thinking Through the influence of, 21 Wolff, Janet, 17–18
Discipline (Elkins et al., on plurality, 23 Wölfflin, 110, 117, 167
eds.), 4, 6, 79, 132, 154 on politics, 123–24, 155 writing, 121–22, 125
theory. See also methodology Visual Culture: The Reader
art history and, 49–51, (Hall and Evans), 61 Zaher, Lisa, 163, 210–13
200–203 visuality. See also vision Zarzycka, Marta, 162, 179–80
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“In looking back at the whole field of visual studies, the collection offers
R. Schwartz, Bernd Stiegler, Øyvind Vågnes, Sjoukje van der Meulen, Terri Weissman, Lisa Zaher, Marta Zarzycka
Charlotte Klonk, Tirza True Latimer, Mark Linder, Sunil Manghani, Anna Notaro, Julia Orell, Mark Reinhardt, Vanessa
Asbjørn Grønstad, Stephan Günzel, Charles W. Haxthausen, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, Tom Holert, Kıvanç Kılınç,
Bernhard J. Dotzler, Johanna Drucker, James Elkins, Michele Emmer, Yolaine Escande, Gustav Frank, Theodore Gracyk,
Emmanuel Alloa, Nell Andrew, Linda Báez Rubí, Martin A. Berger, Hans Dam Christensen, Isabelle Decobecq,
a lively contribution to the history of the inter/trans/in/discipline. It is a
wonderful example of how understanding and new thinking are produced
by performing intellectual clarification and innovation on the page, giving
readers the sense of mediated participation in the Stone Center Seminars.”
—Jon Simons, Indiana University Bloomington
“Farewell to Visual Studies is astonishing and impressive. It opens the field

to self-critical questions about its history, objects, and methods (in contrast
to art history and German Bildwissenschaft). The statements of the editors
at the beginning, the open-minded and self-critical discussion among the
participants in the Chicago Seminars, and the contributions of the experts
at the end deliver a deep impression of how such a self-assessment may
lead to new shores.”
—Martina Sauer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik (DGS)
Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the
seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars
who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome
of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable
conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fifth and
final volume in the series focuses on the identity, nature, and future of
visual studies, discussing critical questions about its history, objects, and
methods. In the Seminars and Assessments, the contributors question
the canon of literature of visual studies and the place of visual studies
with relation to theories of vision, visuality, epistemology, politics, and art
history, giving voice to a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives.
Rather than dismissing visual studies, as its provocative title might suggest,
this volume aims to engage a critical discussion of the state of visual
studies today, how it might move forward, and what it might leave behind
to evolve in productive ways.
James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History,

Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gustav Frank is Professor of German at the Ludwig Maximilian University of

Munich.
Sunil Manghani is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of

Southampton.
THE STONE ART THEORY INSTITUTES

cover illustration: Anish Kapoor, Cloud
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Gate, 2006. Photo: Michael Kappel.
UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA
WWW.PSUPRESS.ORG

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the stone art theory institutes : volume five

Edited by James Elkins, Gustav Frank, and Sunil Manghani

The Stone Art Theory This series is dedicated to

edited by james elkins , sunil manghani , and gustav frank

The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania

Howard and Donna Stone,

Series Preface 7 A General Theory of Visual Johanna Drucker

Special thanks, also, to Sunil Manghani and Gustav Frank, my coeditors

The Topics in This Series

(5) Visual studies should be engaged with the phenomenology of the mak-

of unmasking without saying why it is appropriate to stop after one example.

3. Cf. Interpiktorialität: Theorie und their article on the institutional limitations of

Because the problematics of visual studies lie somewhere in studying the

10. Susan Buck-​Morss, “Towards a Visual 14. W. J. T. Mitchell’s imperative to picture

The early theorists of visual culture, however, remained skeptical toward

experience of overwhelming sensual perception beyond the faculty of reason,

24. Cf. Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Houghton Library and on www​.cspeirce​.com​

dismisses the merits of the Enlightenment. By identifying animism with the

1. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: 4. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of

5. Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,”

The photos were taken by Elise

or Kracauer’s “From Caligari to Hitler” of 1947.3 Visuelle Kultur in the 1920s

5. Sigrid Schade, “Bildwissenschaft: A New 6. Inge Hinterwaldner, Das systemische

7. This is a long-​standing issue that will be

Moscow-​Tartu School of Semiotics). This Russian tradition belongs, too, to the

19. Jay, “Cultural Relativism and the Visual

Michael Holly: Right.

9. James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen

1. The readings included Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2. See Mitchell, “Metapictures,” in Pic-

18. Smith, “Visual Studies,” 245.

19. Elkins, Visual Studies, 200–1.

Here we discussed developments in Anglo-​American visual studies up to the pres-

5. Points made in Why Are Our Pictures

Lisa Cartwright: You seemed to make that answer in the text—

Here is an example of the question, Can an image die? Iconoclastic move-

11. See, for example, Taussig, “What Do

12. For a more extended argument on this

14. For Bildwissenschaft see the following

19. The full list is in the first introduction to

Georges Didi-​Huberman, Gottfried Boehm, and Tom Mitchell.3 The transcription

1. Anglo-​American visual studies, which has been theorized and prac-

5. The situation is entirely different in China, where a long tradition of art

So this session on Bildwissenschaft should ideally be the second in a longer

8. Belting, Bild-​Anthropologie. Amongst 9. The pertinent readings here are Matthias

concerned with nineteenth-​century historicist thought. Especially in the pas-

where it leads to theories that fail to connect to their scientific audiences—​

process.”31 I guess he understands the doodle as a medium that guides thought,

33. The participants read Didi-​Huberman,

Elisabeth Friedman: Didi-​Huberman’s concept of art as symptom might be a shock

34. Trivium is a French-​German online 35. Didi-​Huberman, Phasmes: Essais

38. Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic

he was wanting to respond to Horst Bredekamp’s essay, which he had published

“major art” status (ceramics, furniture, goldsmith’s work, or ordinary building

James Elkins: Macht—

Inge Hinterwaldner: Eikones has four-​year cycles: research topics—​Jim mentioned

function are embedded in a wide range of practice, including science, technol-

statement presupposing certain premises? The philosophical hermeneutics tradi-

9. Helmuth Plessner, “Zur Hermeneutik du Québec, 1987), translated as Semiotics of

in it a convenient metaphor for, or way of describing, phenomena that seem to

10. Susan Buck-Morss, “Towards a Visual 14. W. J. T. Mitchell’s imperative to picture

24. Cf. Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Houghton Library and on www.cspeirce.com

7. This is a long-standing issue that will be

Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics). This Russian tradition belongs, too, to the

Here we discussed developments in Anglo-American visual studies up to the pres-

Georges Didi-Huberman, Gottfried Boehm, and Tom Mitchell.3 The transcription

1. Anglo-American visual studies, which has been theorized and prac-

8. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Amongst 9. The pertinent readings here are Matthias

concerned with nineteenth-century historicist thought. Especially in the pas-

where it leads to theories that fail to connect to their scientific audiences—

33. The participants read Didi-Huberman,

Elisabeth Friedman: Didi-Huberman’s concept of art as symptom might be a shock

34. Trivium is a French-German online 35. Didi-Huberman, Phasmes: Essais

Inge Hinterwaldner: Eikones has four-year cycles: research topics—Jim mentioned

flight simulators that show the pilots-in-training completely synthetical sensu-

6. Boehm, “Iconic Knowledge: The Image as Medium zum Bild,” in Bild—Medium—Kunst,

force of or in art, German-language writing is devoted to the single artwork

14. See ia600204.us.archive.org/20/items 2nd ed., edited by Anneke Smelik, Pam Cook,

read Münsterberg’s texts or activate and use the instruments he used—as you

A second example, from the German-language tradition, is Horst Brede-

I will be responding here to Section 2 of the Seminars, “Histories: Anglo-

mathematics, architecture, and design (in the European system, second-year

Varela, Stephen Kosslyn—the list could go on an on, establishing a rich histori-