journal of visual culture

2003; 2; 5 Journal of Visual Culture Mieke Bal
Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture
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Mieke Bal
Here and there, programs of study that carry the name ‘visual culture’ are emerging, but to my knowledge no departments. Is this because ‘visual culture’ is an (interdisciplinary) field? To call ‘visual culture’ a field is to treat it like religion: religion is the field, theology its dogmatic intellectual circumscription, and ‘religious studies’, or better, ‘religion studies’, the academic discipline. To confuse those terms is to be sucked into the very thing you need to examine, whereby it becomes impossible to examine your own presuppositions. You cannot pull yourself out of that marsh by your own hair.
Is ‘visual culture’ a discipline? The first, obvious answer is ‘no’, because its object cannot be studied within the paradigms of any discipline presently in place. It is certainly not the province of art history. On the contrary, it has emerged primarily because that discipline has largely failed to deal with both the visuality of its objects – due to the dogmatic position of ‘history’ – and the openness of the collection of those objects – due to the established meaning of ‘art’. To take visual culture as art history with a cultural studies perspective (Mirzoeff, 1999: 12) is to condemn it to repeating the same failure. While not ignoring art history altogether, visual culture as I conceive it badly needs to draw upon several other disciplines: well-established
journal of visual culture
journal of visual culture Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 2(1): 5-32 [1470-4129(200304)2:1;5-32;031926]
Abstract The double question whether visual culture studies is a discipline or an interdisciplinary movement, and which methods are most suited to practice in this field, can only be addressed by way of the object. This article probes the difficulty of defining or delimiting the object of study without the reassuring and widespread visual essentialism that, in the end, can only be tautological.
Key words art interdisciplinarity literature methodology museums popular culture
visual culture
ones like anthropology, psychology and sociology, or ones that are themselves relatively new, like film and media studies.
But a second answer to the question of whether visual culture is a discipline has to be ‘yes’, because unlike some disciplines (e.g. French) and like others (e.g. comparative literature and art history), it lays claim to a specific object and raises specific questions about that object. It is the question of that object that interests me here. For, although visual culture studies is grounded in the specificity of its object domain, lack of clarity on what that object domain is remains its primary pain point. It is this lack that may well determine the life span of the endeavour. So rather than declaring visual culture studies either a discipline or a non-discipline, I prefer to leave the question open and provisionally refer to it as a movement. Like all movements, it may die soon, or it may have a long and productive life.
Perhaps it is bad form to begin a programmatic reflection on an allegedly new endeavour with a negative note, but then, critical self-reflection is an inherent element in any innovative, progressive academic endeavour. It is from within this self-critical perspective, that is, from within the aim to contribute to visual culture but not as a firmly believing acolyte, that I wish to submit that the term, or would- be concept, of visual culture is highly problematic. If taken at face value, it describes the nature of present-day culture as primarily visual.1 Alternatively, it describes the segment of that culture that is visual, as if it could be isolated (for study, at least) from the rest of that culture. Either way, the term is predicated upon what I call here a kind of visual essentialism that either proclaims the visual ‘difference’ – read ‘purity’ – of images, or expresses a desire to stake out the turf of visuality against other media or semiotic systems.2 This turf-policing is visual culture’s legacy, its roots in the paranoid corners of the art history to which it claims, in most of its guises, to offer a (polemical) alternative.3
Indeed, my first reason for hesitating to endorse the notion of visual culture wholeheartedly is its direct genealogy and the limitations that entails. As a term for an academic and cultural discipline or approach, ‘visual culture’ carries over – from one of the dogmatic elements of its predecessor and antagonist – the ‘history’ element of art history. Important as it otherwise is, this element can lead to the collapse of object and discipline that so often becomes an excuse for methodological dogmatism or indifference, or, at the very least, for a lack of methodological self-reflection. In this article, I argue both for and against what must be called ‘visual culture study’ or ‘studies’, and attempt to draw, from my initial critical note, a productive entrance into a discussion on the point of the movement after which the present journal is named.
I will attempt to circumscribe the object domain of this movement in terms which both avoid and critique visual essentialism, that purity-assuming cut between what is visual and what is not. Through that search for the object, I will discuss a few, but by no means all, of the main issues that present themselves once that object domain is taken as a field of study and analysis. Finally, I will conclude by touching on some methodological consequences.4
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The death of the object: interdisciplinarity
The object, then, comes first. In an academic situation, where disciplines as well as interdisciplinary fields are defined before all else by their respective object domains (art history, literary studies, philosophy, regional studies, period studies), the first question that any reflection on the objects of ‘visual culture studies’ raises is that of such a movement’s status within academic thought and organization. For the answer to the question of whether this is a discipline or interdiscipline depends on the answer to the question of the object. If the object domain consists of consensually categorized objects around which certain assumptions and approaches have crystallized, we are dealing with a discipline. Literary studies is a clear example, even if in the Anglo-Saxon world it either goes under the name of ‘English’, is concentrated here and there under the heading of ‘Comparative Literature’, or is dispersed (in large, classical universities) according to regional or even national boundaries.
If the object domain is not obvious, indeed, if it must be ‘created’, perhaps after having been destroyed first, we may be heading towards the establishment – by definition, provisional – of an interdisciplinary area of study. Long ago (1984), Roland Barthes, one of the heroes of cultural studies, that other direct ascendant of visual culture, wrote about interdisciplinarity in a way that distinguished that concept sharply from its more popular parasynonym ‘multidisciplinarity’. In order to do interdisciplinary work, he cautioned, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (theme) and group several disciplines around it, each of which approaches the same subject differently. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object that belongs to no one.5
In this view, enumerating participating disciplines is not good enough, even if these lists include other contemporary (inter)disciplines. Yet this is common practice in recent publications that claim visual culture as new. In contrast, I align myself here with the more intellectually challenging studies, which neither have nor claim the status of textbook, but which carry on with their business of analysing cultural artifacts that are primarily visual, from a theoretically informed and savvy perspective that demonstrates its relative novelty in the quality of the analyses.
One such study is Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (2000). In the first chapter of this book, on the imbrication of museum studies between visual and material culture study, she makes the case for what each participating discipline has to contribute. Her point is not that the disciplines she invokes constitute a comprehensive list, but that her object requires analysis within the conglomerate of these disciplines. Within this conglomerate each discipline contributes limited, indispensable and productive methodological elements, which together offer a coherent model for analysis, not a list of overlapping questions. This concatenation may shift, expand or shrink according to the individual case, but it is never a ‘bundle’ of disciplines (multidisciplinarity), nor a supradisciplinary ‘umbrella’.6
But how does one create a new object? Visual objects have always existed. Hence, creating a new object that belongs to no one makes it impossible to define the object domain as a collection of things. In order to consider what is ‘visual culture’ as that
Bal Visual essentialism 7
new object, the elements ‘visual’ and ‘culture’ need to be re-examined in relation to each other. Both must be taken out of the essentialisms that have plagued their traditional counterparts. Only then can this object be considered ‘new’. It is not engraved in stone that such a reconsideration is best served by definitions. Suspending my aversion to visual essentialism, then, I now try to see how such a creation can come about on the basis not of a collection of objects or categories of objects, but of visuality as the object of study.7
Of course, there are things we consider objects – for example, images. But their definition, grouping, cultural status and functioning must be ‘created’. As a result, it is by no means obvious that ‘visual culture’, and hence, its study, can be set apart, let alone consist of images. At the very least, the object domain consists of things we can see or whose existence is motivated by their visibility; things that have a particular visuality or visual quality that addresses the social constituencies interacting with them. The ‘social life of visible things’, to recycle Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) phrase for a segment of material culture, would be one way of putting it.8
The question here, then, is, can the object domain of visual culture studies consist of objects at all? In her contribution to visual culture studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill draws attention to the ambiguity of the word ‘object’ itself. According to the Chambers Dictionary (1996), an object is a material thing, but also an aim or purpose, a person or thing to which action, feelings or thoughts are directed: thing, intention and target (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 104). The conflation of thing with aim does not imply attributing intentions to objects, although to some extent such a case could be made (see Silverman, 2000, esp. ch. 6). The conflation, instead, casts the shadow of intention of the subject over the object. In this guise, the ambiguity of the word ‘object’ harks back to the goals of 19th-century object-teaching and its roots in pedagogical positivism. ‘The first education should be of the perceptions, then of memory, then of the understanding, then of the judgement’.9
This order is clearly meant as a recipe for progressive education in which the child is empowered to form its own judgments based on perception. This was a much- needed emancipation of the young subject at the time. However, it is also precisely the reversal of what visual culture studies ought to disentangle and reorder. For, in the then-welcome attempt to counter the newly ‘invented’ ideological brainwashings produced by the primacy of opinion, the sequence established proclaims the supremacy of a rationality that represses subjectivity, emotions and beliefs. It is an attempt to objectify experience.10 However, the idea of the ‘real’ thing suppresses the constructed nature of ‘reality’. The ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai: 1986) cannot be grasped by grasping an object in your hands.
Just as there is a rhetoric that produces an effect of the real, so there is one that produces the effect of materiality.11 Authenticating an interpretation because it is grounded in acts of seeing or, more strongly, in perceptible material properties, is a rhetorical use of materiality. On the one hand, meeting the material object can be a breathtaking experience: for students of objects, such experiences are still indispensable to counter the effects of endless classes where slide shows instill the notion that all objects are of equal size. Yet there can be no direct link between matter and interpretation. The belief that there is, which underlies this pedagogy,
journal of visual culture 2(1)8
resorts to the authority of materiality, which Davey (1999) sees as the thrust of such rhetoric: ‘The “thinginess” of objects, the concrete “reality,” gives weight, literally, to the interpretation. It “proves” that this is “how it is,” “what it means”.’12
This rhetoric can, of course, be countered or – to the extent that it is not entirely useless in the face of still-rampant idealism – revised and supplemented in various ways. One of these is to give attention to the various framings not only of the object but also of the act of looking at it.13 But such a description of the object entails not only the much-advocated social perspective on things. If these things address people, the study also includes the visual practices that are possible in a particular culture, hence, scopic or visual regimes; in short, all forms of visuality.14 The regime in which the rhetoric of materiality was possible is just one such regime that is liable to be analysed critically.
Thus formulated, the object of visual culture studies can be distinguished from object-defined disciplines such as art history and film studies, through the centrality of visuality as the ‘new’ object. This begs the question of visual culture studies’ object in a major way, however. My guess is that this is why ‘visual culture’ and its study remain diffuse and, at the same time, limited. Perhaps this is an effect of the attempt to define objects. And perhaps the temptation to make definition the starting point is part of the problem.
Instead of defining an allegedly newly created object, then, let me run through some aspects of the object from the starting point of the question of visuality. That question is simple: what happens when people look, and what emerges from that act? The verb ‘happens’ entails the visual event as an object, and ‘emerges’ the visual image, but as a fleeting, fugitive, subjective image accrued to the subject. These two results – the event and the experienced image – are joined at the hip in the act of looking and its aftermath.
The act of looking is profoundly ‘impure’. First, sense-directed as it may be, hence, grounded in biology (but no more than all acts performed by humans), looking is inherently framed, framing, interpreting, affect-laden, cognitive and intellectual. Second, this impure quality is also likely to be applicable to other sense-based activities: listening, reading, tasting, smelling. This impurity makes such activities mutually permeable, so that listening and reading can also have visuality to them.15
Hence, literature, sound and music are not excluded from the object of visual culture. This is nothing new, and art practice has made a point of driving home this impurity. Sound installations are a staple of exhibitions of contemporary art, as are text-based works. Film and television, in this sense, are more typical as objects of visual culture than, say, a painting, precisely because they are far from exclusively visual. As Ernst van Alphen (2002) has demonstrated in the April issue of this journal, acts of seeing can be the primary motor of entire literary texts that are structured by images, even if not a single ‘illustration’ is called for to drive the point home.
Visuality’s ‘impurity’ is not a matter of mixed media, as is suggested by Walker and Chaplin (1997: 24–5). Nor is the possibility of combining the senses my point here. But nor is visuality interchangeable with the other sense perceptions. More fundamentally, vision is itself inherently synaesthetic. Many artists have been
Bal Visual essentialism 9
‘arguing’ this through their work.16 Irish artist James Coleman is a case in point. His slide installations are remarkable in this regard because they are visually riveting, and because they are made with a perfectionism that in itself foregrounds the nature of visuality. That Coleman is acclaimed as a visual artist of great achievement is not surprising; nothing in his work questions its status as visual art. Yet his installations are just as absorbing because of their sound – the quality of the voice, including its bodily nature as evidenced in sighs – and because of the profoundly literary and philosophical nature of the texts spoken. Among the many things these works accomplish, they profoundly challenge any reduction to hierarchy of the sense domains involved.
Far from the photographs illustrating the text or the words ‘explicating’ the images, the simultaneity between the photographs and images and their appeal to the viewer’s entire body operates by means of the enigmatic discrepancies between these two main registers.17 Hence, any definition that attempts to distinguish visuality from, for example, language, misses the point of the ‘new object’ entirely. For, with the isolation of vision comes the hierarchy of the senses, one of the traditional drawbacks of the disciplinary division of the Humanities. ‘To hypostasize the visual risks reinstalling the hegemony of the “noble” sense of sight ... over hearing and the more “vulgar” senses of smell and taste’, wrote Shohat and Stam (1998: 45). Not to speak of touch.
Another instance of visual essentialism that leads to gross distortion is the uncritical embrace of the new media, presented as visual. One of the darlings among the objects usually enumerated in order to give ‘visual culture’ a profile of its own is the internet. This always astounds me. The internet is not primarily visual at all. Although it gives access to virtually unlimited quantities of images, the primary feature of this new medium is of a different order. Its use is based on discrete rather than dense signification (Goodman, 1976). Its hypertextual organization presents it primarily as a textual form. It is qua text that it is fundamentally innovative. In his very useful account of Lyotard’s ‘Fiscourse Digure’ (1983), David Rodowick writes:
The digital arts further confound the concepts of the aesthetic, since they are without substance and therefore not easily identified as objects. No medium- specific ontology can fix them in place. For this reason, it is misleading to attribute a rise in the currency of the visual to the apparent power and pervasiveness of digital imaging in contemporary culture. (2001: 35)
Of course, it is rather senseless to establish a rivalry between textuality and visuality in this respect, but if anything characterizes the internet, it is the impossibility of positing…