CHAPTER THREE

COMING TO TERMS WITH IMAGES:

VISUAL STUDIES AND BEYOND

KREŠIMIR PURGAR

1. Visual studies as a place for the theory of images

At the very beginning of the first chapter of his seminal book Iconology,
W.J.T. Mitchell asserts that “there have been times when the question
‘what is an image’ was a matter of some urgency”, referring to the differ-
ent levels of importance that images had in different historical periods as
well as pointing to the unequal kind of power that images exerted over
people (Mitchell, 1986: 7). What we came to understand from all the sub-
sequent Mitchell books, especially from Picture Theory (1994) and What
do Pictures Want (2005), is that the question of image/power is today
more “urgent” than ever before and “even if the stakes seem a bit lower in
asking what images are today, it is not because they have lost their power
over us, and certainly not because their nature is now clearly understood”
(Mitchell, 1986). It is very well known that the pictorial turn represents for
him not the final stage of spectacularized societies, where everything has
come to be measured as in favor of or against images (as was the case dur-
ing the iconoclasm in eighth– and ninth–century Byzantium), but more a
kind of uncertainty as to how pictures should be properly understood today
and, basically, what is to be done with them. That is why he did not assign
to images a newly established paradigmatic status according to which all
contemporary phenomena would then normally have to be assessed, but
gave them an air of uncertainty and put them somewhere between what
Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm” and “anomaly” (Mitchell, 1994: 13),
similarly to Boehm. But, it is not just the discourse on images as such that
is “somewhere between”, in need of a structurally and ontologically more
plausible theory; such an uncertainty applies also to visual studies as a
new discipline insofar as it is more and more apparently going to refute
positions of critical theory and situate itself “somewhere between” ideo-
60 Chapter Three

logical norms and the politics of identity.

What is this “in between” position, why would we need a special kind
of theory for whatever happens in this interim area and how can the
changes in urgency and the constantly shifting notions of the image be
accounted for in the form of a discipline? Here we are dealing with two
different but equally fundamental topics: images as objects of cultural
production and visual studies as a place for the theory of images. In spite
of drawing our attention to the predominance of images and the reborn
interest in them shown by “non–visual” disciplines like philosophy, soci-
ology and narratology, the pictorial turn has brought to the fore the fact
that we basically do not have a clear account of what an image is to begin
with and that disciplines historically bound to images, like art history and
semiotics, either relate only to what is believed to be a specific kind of
images or deal with them necessarily as signs and representations. The
indisputable cultural importance of the mentioned disciplines notwith-
standing, the term “art” has proven to be too narrow a denominator for art
history to retain its status as the master of visual disciplines in contempo-
rary times, while the semiotic concept of “representation” is of very prob-
lematic theoretical value when it comes to, for instance, images that are
signs of “nothing” in virtual reality.
We must keep in mind that none of the disciplines is aware of its own
“shortcomings” or perceives them as an obstacle to maintaining theoretical
rigor. Art history, with its fully developed tools of formal analysis and
consistent meta–language, is perfectly capable of dealing with both Cara-
vaggio’s Deposition of Saint Paul and an advertisement for Versace’s new
line of women’s shoes. Of course, having adequate tools to deal with par-
ticular phenomena most likely leads to an increased sensitivity to discrim-
ination between the particularities of their purposes, qualities and ontolo-
gies. It is a common thing within the humanities to believe that whenever
a certain set of images fails to fit into existent disciplinary frames, it is
because the social, political and cultural constructedness of the visual field
has played a decisive role in this game of power.
While it is impossible to deny this ideological framing, in the follow-
ing pages I will argue that the recent interventions and theses related to
visual studies proposed by Nicholas Davey, Barry Sandywell, Antonio
Somaini, Hans Bredekamp, Sebastian Egenhofer, Klaus Sachs–Hombach,
Emmanuel Alloa and several others either come from unconvincing prin-
ciples for which visual studies allegedly stand (ideological framing includ-
ed) or recognize its strengths exactly in what is believed to be a lack of
firm ideological and disciplinary demarcation. Proposed by authors be-
longing to Anglophone, German and Italian tradition and exposed through
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 61

a variety of argumentative and theoretical claims, these positions show, on

the one end of the spectrum, the still troubled relationship of visual studies
to art history and, on the other, belief in the transformative power of its
shifting methodologies. In the already established field of visual studies, a
discussion on the very ontological foundation of the discipline is still
open. While there is an unequivocal agreement that it should deal with
visual phenomena, primarily representations, there is still an air of inde-
termination as to the scope it should have and the methodology to be
adopted. At the same time, for some researchers, the more than two-
decade–long dispute visual studies had with art history and the objects
(artworks) that the older discipline traditionally claimed is still a funda-
mental topic. This article will analyze a few of the most recent interven-
tions related to the new discipline, which might reveal old controversies in
a new light or open the way for a “new visual studies” altogether.

2. What art has to do with visual studies:

an ontogenetic fallacy?
A notable difference among various kinds of visual object that consists not
so much of how they look as of what they mean to us, Nicholas Davey
explains as “ontogenetically” motivated: according to this thesis, the artis-
tic image would be a paradigmatic image, while everything visual outside
the realm of art qualifies as a non–paradigmatic image – an anomaly to the
norms of value and distinction. Nicholas Davey recently presented the
concept of the “ontogeny of the visual”, which should, in his opinion, be
fundamentally accounted for in the “turn to the ontological which causes
problems for the methodological inclusivity of visual studies” (Davey,
2013: 132). In this way he joins the debate on the archetypal question what
should visual studies do? and thus enters into a more general discussion on
the sense people make of particular kinds of image, a discussion that will
later in our survey prove to be symptomatic of both the value of images
and the disciplinary status of visual studies at large.
While acknowledging visual studies for its “clear strength” in the de-
mystification of artwork, looking for dialogical interactions with it and
striving towards “a wider consensus of judgmental norms”, Davey claims
that it “has neglected a fundamental distinction between the ontogenetic
characteristics of the designed object and the artwork”, which is a failure
that “not only threatens the variety of study within visual culture but also
disrupts the possibility of radical critique within aesthetic experience”
(132). On the other hand, “hermeneutical aesthetics is of strategic impor-
tance for bringing to light what is at stake within the study of visual cul-
62 Chapter Three

ture” because “hermeneutical aesthetics insists on making an important

ontological distinction within visual discourse between a designed object
and an artwork” (132–133). Davey thinks that visual studies as a discipline
overrides this essential distinction, which eventually and regrettably leads
to a dissolution of the very concept of art. In his assessment, the case has
been made for two types of object: artistic objects and designed objects,
where the latter seem to have been deployed metonymically to represent
all non–artistic visual artifacts. Davey contends that although many visual
artifacts of different historical and cultural provenances may be perceived,
described and judged in aesthetic terms, it will do no justice to any of them
if we do not make a fundamental ontological distinction between art and
non–art, that is, we always have to take into consideration, prior to any
aesthetic judgment, the purpose for which something has been made and
not primarily the social interactions of (artistic and non–artistic) signs.
Davey makes a very good point, drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger,
who both believed that the function of art was to withhold something from
the viewer in a fashion not dissimilar to that of camouflage, where produc-
ing convincing effects of make–believe leads to a purposeful deception of
a higher degree: in military practice this higher degree consists of the suc-
cessful deception of an enemy on the battlefield, while in art this deception
is to be found in the concealed “message” of the artwork (137–138). There
is a huge difference, though, between ordinary and artistic camouflage
inasmuch as, according to Davey, “the visual logic of the hidden code
must be consistent with that of the surface code or else the implicit mean-
ing cannot announce itself from within the explicit meaning” (138). In
other words, the actual visual code of a painting connects explicit and im-
plicit meanings, serving as a sort of token for the meaning of the artwork
as a whole. The code is consistent with the artwork: if the visual code
changes, the whole artwork changes with it. So, the ontological position of
any artistic object is to be and to remain an artistic object, because its pur-
pose not to serve any other purpose than that of an artistic object is undis-
putable.
As far as visual studies is concerned, the ontogenesis of the work of art
as an object created for different purposes than, let us say, a photograph
for a book of culinary recipes, is undeniable. I cannot think of any scholar
of visual studies who would contradict this perfectly plausible argument,
which basically only confirms the ontological distinction between art ob-
jects and non–art objects as a historically and functionally inherited dis-
tinction of value and status. The problem that visual studies is particularly
focused on is what happens when artifacts at some point enter into a dif-
ferent kind of existence: for example, when culinary recipes become im-
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 63

portant formal and structural elements in an artistic performance, or in-

versely, when pictures like Mona Lisa or Warhol’s silk prints enter into
the vernacular context of global visual culture, when the use of a once
ontogenetically pure artifact gets “out of control”. At this point an art his-
torian loses his or her priority of overseeing the aesthetic value of a paint-
ing, because the time and space of social interactions have attached to it a
different sort of value altogether. This does not mean that the ontogenetic
code of the artwork has been lost, just that several of its “genes” (to make
an appropriate metaphor) have been passed on to different species of ob-
jects. The role of art history or hermeneutical aesthetics may be to either
create sub-disciplinary discourses capable of dealing with genetically im-
pure objects—as was much earlier envisioned by Aby Warburg, Erwin
Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich—or to create a new image theory, regard-
less of its name, that would deal critically with semiotically or commer-
cially inherited meanings and offer a counterposition to dichotomous
(art/non–art) systems of value.1
Mentioning the role of art history in a world dominated by non–artistic
images, W.J.T. Mitchel says that

if a pictorial turn is indeed occurring in the human sciences, art history

could very well find its theoretical marginality transformed into a position
of intellectual centrality, in the form of a challenge to offer an account of
its principal theoretical object—visual representation—that will be usable
by other disciplines in the human sciences. Tending to the masterpieces of
Western painting will clearly not be enough (Mitchell, 1994: 15).

Art history has lost its exclusivity over the interpretation of paintings
1
It is interesting to note that Keith Moxey attributes to Erwin Panofsky a different
role in the development of the contemporary study of visual culture than that at-
tributed to him by Antonio Somaini (2006) or Horst Bredekamp (2003), as we
shall see a little later. The paradigm shift, according to Moxey, can be discerned
much later, with art historians like Georges Didi–Huberman: “Whereas Panofsky
and Baxandall set the work against, or into, the context in which it was produced—
approaching the object of analysis as if it were inert and in need of ‘explanation’
through reference to circumstance that are more stable and less opaque—Didi–
Huberman regards the work as an active principle, one capable of generating its
own significance” (Moxey, 2008: 135). To this end, Moxey quotes Didi–Huber-
man, from a passage where the French philosopher clearly takes on what we may
call “visual studies attitude”: “One must not claim that there are historical objects
relevant to this or that duration: one must understand that in each historical object,
all times encounter one another, collide, or base themselves plastically on one an-
other, bifurcate, or even become entangled with one another” (Didi–Huberman,
2003: 131).
64 Chapter Three

and sculptures because, during the second half of the twentieth century,
artworks started to become part of vernacular culture—of the domain for
which they were not intended. This happened not as a consequence of the
problematic methodologies of visual studies or any other established or
emergent theory, but because art history dealt with historically important
objects that popular culture could not or would not do without. Even if
Davey did not come to the conclusion that it was not for visual studies to
undermine the ontogenetic specificity of artistic objects,2 I think his in-
sight that artwork needs to speak hermeneutically for itself while address-
ing the fact that the spectator deserves attention. I also find interesting his
admonition that visual studies may fall victim to its unconstrained faith in
the power of subjectivity. He writes:

In the case of the artwork, the spectator is subject to its address. In con-
trast, the designed object if treated as a sign or symptom of visual culture is
subject to the methodological regime of the spectator. The question then
arises as to how critical of reflexive methodology visual studies can be?
(Davey: 146).

2
The concept of ontogenetic difference between artistic objects and non–artistic
objects comes eventually down to the most elementary and the most difficult ques-
tion, “impossible” to answer: what is art? An even more complex question is what
is contemporary art? Moreover, how do we make aesthetical distinctions between
different types of object, not just inside and outside the realm of art, but between
various objects that unequivocally qualify to carry that label? The criterion of “in-
tended purpose” that Nicholas Davey proposes is certainly universal and one of the
most accepted distinctions between art and non–art objects. One improvised defini-
tion might then be: If it is created to be art, then it is art. If it is created to be some-
thing else, then it can’t be art. But the institutional theory of art, with George
Dickie, for example, as one of its most important representatives, puts the defini-
tion of art differently: “A work of art in a classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a
set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for
appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institu-
tion (the art world). The second condition of the definition makes use of four vari-
ously interconnected notions: (1) acting on behalf of institution, (2) conferring of
status, (3) being a candidate, and (4) appreciation.” (Dickie, 2007: 431). Dickie’s
definition does not disqualify the criterion of the intended purpose, but shows that
the status of art can be institutionally established just as it can be individually pro-
claimed. But it can be neither established nor denigrated disciplinarily. Discipli-
nary analysis of an object as artwork (in art history, feminist theory, postcolonial
studies, visual studies, etc.) comes only after any particular object has already been
accredited with the status of art object. Therefore, its status as art object cannot
depend on how it is valued within or by any single discipline. In other words, the
intended purpose—accepted as the classificatory term—cannot be undone.
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 65

For one thing, Davey has certainly helped practitioners of visual stud-
ies to reflect more on the ontological fundamentals of their own discipline,
or at least to be acquainted with what never really seemed its most con-
testable ground. Let us deal with the possible consequences of his last as-
sertion: it implies that it is a regular procedure in visual studies, firstly, to
dismiss the difference between incommensurable types of visual artefacts
(“the ontogenetic fallacy”); secondly, once that has been done, every visu-
al object becomes part of (a presumably indiscriminating) visual culture
and thirdly, having entered into the domain of visual culture, artifacts are
being subjected to the free will of the spectator. Accepting the possibility
that different scholars may and will have different understandings of what
visual studies is or should be, my opinion is that this emerging discipline
can account for the second stage of the mentioned process only, namely
that every visual artifact is inevitably part of visual culture conceived in
the broadest sense.
The problem with the third stage, the primacy of the spectator, is not
that it is wrong as such, but that it does not apply to visual studies insofar
as the new discipline specifically questions what Keith Moxey calls the
“politics of identity” (2011: 121), positioning itself between the artifact
and the scopic regime understood as ideological construct. It was the in-
tention of poststructuralism to equate subjectivity, identity and gaze in
order to empower specific groups within contemporary societies so that
they could reject normative or prescriptive theories and behaviors. The
pioneering work in different areas of thought performed in this respect by
Michel Foucault, Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler and many others is all too
familiar. The question is whether visual studies subscribes to the politics
of identity and spectatorship as a presumption of the ideological, sexual or
geographical determination of the given artifact or differs from critical
theory inasmuch as it is very “visual studies” to reject such presumptions?

3. Can visual studies become a new philosophy

of the visual?
Now we necessarily arrive at the point when some disciplinary, methodo-
logical and even ethical terms of visual studies should be explicated. Barry
Sandywell, a British scholar of visual culture, has recently proposed the
very extensive “Seven Theses on Visual Culture: Towards a Critical–Ref-
lexive Paradigm for the New Visual Studies”, in which he elaborates the
possibility of some kind of philosophy of visual studies as an already sea-
soned discipline, which may seem to some to be a follow–up to the more
“practical” insights offered by W.J.T. Mitchell in his “Showing Seeing: A
66 Chapter Three

Critique of Visual Culture” (Sandywell, 2013; Mitchell, 2005). Even tho-

ugh they are not a direct answer to any of them, in Sandywell’s theses we
may find a reflection of many of the “fears and fallacies” that have ac-
companied visual studies from its institutional inception to the present day,
as well as the philosophical pillars on which he thinks the new study of the
visual should be based.3 In doing so he very generally but recognizably
draws upon the research and heritage of authors from numerous disci-
plines within the humanities, like Jonathan Crary, Martin Jay, Jacques
Derrida, Norman Bryson, Walter Benjamin and Marshal McLuhan, cover-
ing altogether seven fundamental topics that “the new visual studies”
should depart from: history, artifact, language, technopoiesis, social cul-
ture, politics and reflexive praxis. When he speaks of “the historicity the-
sis”, he offers counter–contestant opinions in what seems to be an answer
to the decades–old question of whether visual studies is “ahistorical” and
how its supposed contention of “the radical presence” can be accounted
for.4 Because “each act of perception depends on prior contexts of mean-

3
To understand fully the scope of what is apparently a very lengthy text, it may be
helpful to note that Sandywell’s theses appear as the final text in a book he himself
coedited with Richard Heywood and in which Davey’s article also appears. In this
way we may read Sandywell’s thesis not just as individual assertions on the fate
and future of the discipline of visual studies, but also as a sort of a game inspired
by sometimes more implicit and other times less implicit commentaries to the the-
ses of other authors presented in the collection.
4
The context of Sandywell’s “historicity thesis” has certainly contributed to the
vivid discussion of some time ago on whether art history and accompanying sub-
disciplines (like the traditional “discursive” variant of iconology) should be held
responsible for what has been happening in the field of visual culture or the newly
recognized field should have its own dedicated theory. Together with certain firm
beliefs that insisted on visual studies remaining linked with art history in some
respects (Hal Foster, in Smith, 2008a), it was almost unanimously claimed (Mitch-
ell, 1994; Elkins, 2003a; Bal, 2003, among others) that leaving art history out of
visual studies has led to a kind of visual essentialism—the primacy of the visual in
itself—that has consequently drawn particular attention to many non–artistic ob-
jects and therefore dismissed the importance of (art) history. The consequences of
such a move, though, remained open, with differing conclusions. Mieke Bal, in her
text “Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture”, says that “rather than
describing concrete artefacts and their provenance, as art history would do, or de-
scribing whole cultures, as anthropology would, visual culture studies must criti-
cally analyse the junctures and articulations of visual culture and undermine their
natural persistence” (Bal, 2003: 18–19). At the same time, she argues against “vis-
ual essentialism”, or the tendency in visual culture studies “that either proclaims
the visual ‘difference’—read ‘purity’—of images or expresses a desire to stake out
the turf of visuality against media or semiotic systems” (Bal: 3).
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 67

ing, forms and rituals that are destined to be overtaken by future, hitherto
unanticipated acts of meaning” (Sandywell: 650), the notion of any kind of
unification of knowledge, let alone universalist epistemes based on the
traditional demarcation between disciplines, is highly problematic. In spite
of that, the modern history of humanities “reveals how every discipline
that has tried to conceptually delimit vision—philosophy, aesthetics, psy-
chology, sociology, poetics, phenomenology and so on—implicitly draws
upon particular images of imageing and thereby imagination” (651).
Sandywell argues, following very clearly the fundamental paths of the
social–critical wing of visual studies (Mirzoeff, 2002, 2011a, 2011b; Stur-
ken and Cartwright, 2006) that any critically engaged programme of visual
studies must recognize the “plurality and heterogeneity of practices of
seeing”; insofar as “individuals see with their senses, cultures ‘envision’
through their collective memories, metaphors and technical diagrams. Ra-
ther than naturalizing ‘seeing’ we should think in terms of changing ‘scop-
ic regimes’” (Sandywell: 651–2).
On the same path, but with the inclusion of the deeper historical time-
line, is the standpoint of Antonio Somaini, who thinks that study of visual
culture should not be confused with its imminent effects—spectacularization,
simulation, panopticism, control society—even though their discernment
and analytical elaboration are, not without reason, almost automatically
attributed to the disciplinary field of visual studies (Somaini, 2006: 27).
According to him, visual studies should be “a genealogical enterprise”,
because everything that enters into its analytical scope has a history of its
own, the contemporary transformations and epistemological ruptures that
inevitably occur in transhistorical enterprises notwithstanding. Pointing to
a historical timeline on which contemporary visual culture can be defined
as year zero, he traces the origins of the interdisciplinary study of the visu-
al as far back as modern art history—to an era when discourses on the
regimes of visibility had been established:

A significant aspect of researches of the art historians between the end of

the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, in fact, was dedicated to the
project of a history of styles conceived as directly correlated to a history of
perception and of vision in particular. The idea of the historical nature of
perception and vision is constantly reformulated within the writings of
Riegl, Wölfflin, Panofsky and Benjamin. By referring to the essay “The
problem of form” (1893) by Hildebrand, both Riegl and Wölfflin tried to
root their “art history without names” within the sphere of the conditions of
possibility of experience and of seeing in particular. Such conditions of
possibility, though, are not related to a Kantian, a–historical transcendental
subject but are a domain of constant transformation (Somaini: 29).
68 Chapter Three

In this respect, we must mention the assertion that Horst Bredekamp

made about a commentary by Erwin Panofsky, from his essay, written in
1930, about the difference between the original and a facsimile reproduc-
tion. Panofsky claims that reproductions are not to be judged in terms of
“right” and “wrong”, but that we must accept the reality in which many
more things—as reproductions—will become available. We must sharpen
our capacities to make meaningful distinctions between them as the line
that separates originals and reproductions becomes less and less visible
(Bredekamp, 2003: 421). Andrea Pinotti uses a similar disciplinary “re-
shuffling” to see the role of Alois Riegl in the contemporary understanding
of art. Pinotti says that Riegl was the first to conceive of artistic style not
in terms of something naturally given or intended to look natural (as in
realistic styles), but rather as an autonomous construction of reality in
which the painterly image is just a tool that makes any construction possi-
ble (Pinotti, 2008: 2).
The small but prominent group of fathers of art history to which So-
maini, Bredekamp and Pinotti make reference have transmitted their un-
derstanding of the unstable nature of the artwork to the present time,
which has helped to shape not just visual studies or Bildwissenschaft in the
narrow sense, but also what is known as Kunstwissenschaft in the Ger-
man–speaking world and “the new art history” in the Anglophone tradi-
tion. All this testifies to the fact that visual objects change over time, not
only by becoming naturally old but also by becoming “new” again through
numerous contemporary revisitings, reassessments, analytical reconsidera-
tions and clarifications.5 This is the reason why the world presents to us as
“always already been seen” and why, according to Sandywell, the new
visual studies promises to become an exemplary site of both the radical
social and hermeneutic turns, because “the systemic deconstruction of
institutional formations as ‘canonicity’, ‘genre’, ‘disciplinarity’, ‘normal

5
In the study of images, numerous attempts have been made in order to better
grasp their manifold nature. The “new art history”, as one of the pioneering efforts
made in that direction, provoked significant turbulence in the discipline of art his-
tory and proved to be a successful attempt to “modernize vision” within the estab-
lished politics of artistic value. Although never officially proclaimed as a distinct
sub-discipline within traditional art history, the inclusivity of its methods, which
embraced the emergent understanding that all visual phenomena influence art to
some extent, meant the new art history was far from not being recognized or meta–
theoretically acknowledged. The best approach to its differences and specificities
in comparison to traditional methods within the discipline is through individual
authors’ approaches, as in Baxandall (1972), Alpers (1983) or Moxey (1991, 1994,
2001 and 2013). Excellent attempts to conceptualize and delimit the field are to be
found in Bal and Bryson (1991) and Harris (2001).
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 69

inquiry’, ‘methodic perspective’ and the like now takes centre–stage as part
of a radically reflective hermeneutics of cultural orderings” (Sandywell:
655).
The crucial point, then, of understanding what visual studies is and
which epistemological direction it is going to take would be to try to an-
swer the question of on behalf of whom this new discipline is speaking, or
rather who is speaking through it: is it a spectator who is always, as Nicho-
las Davey contends, under the influence of various determinants that exist
independently of the object of study and therefore make it impossible for
him (the spectator) to grasp the artwork’s address (Davey: 147)? Is it
composed of social and cultural formations, that are historically unstable
and that ask us to constantly shift from the Cartesian belief in the power of
images and visibility at large to the contemporary fear of images and of
their power to control and monitor us (Jay: 1993)? Or is it the image or
artifact itself (whether “artistic” or “designed”) that we should mainly ac-
count for whenever there is a dispute over meanings and interpretations?
Concerning the last question, we should bear in mind that Mitchell’s ty-
pology of images, from his Iconology (1984), as well as the concept of
“metapictures” from Picture Theory (1994), were both attempts at paving
the way for the new hermeneutics of seeing, where images alone would
have the necessary abilities to not just address the spectator, but to “speak”
for themselves. The position that visual studies has eventually taken is
based on the assumption that images speak through themselves as well as
emanating meaning through the spectator and the culture that he or she is
immersed in. The project of visual studies aims at clarifying the radical
impossibility of either subsuming the shifting notions of contemporary
visual epistemologies in a single disciplinary frame or taking immutable
sides in the discussion of how images generate meaning.

4. The concepts of images: natural consciousness

and critical discourse
However, there is a much greater problem regarding the priorities and
types of the questions to be answered: the disciplinary question comes
only after the ontological question; not the one that would draw a distinc-
tion between “artistic” and “designed” objects, which (far from being ir-
relevant) seems not that complicated, but that of the nature of the image
itself. Even though I argue throughout this text that the study of images
and the notion of the image as a visual and cultural phenomenon are inex-
tricably linked, for methodological reasons it is necessary to presume that
the occurrence of a phenomenon precedes reflection on it. Drawing on
70 Chapter Three

Mitchell’s distinction between the meanings of the words image and pic-
ture, Sebastian Egenhofer states that a “picture exists or, rather, persists
through time. The image, however, is always only given in the present of
the beholder. It is the beholder’s gaze that awakens the phenomenon in the
existing material” which is the reason why images (in the widest sense)
are ontologically settled in a kind of twofold “scandalous” and constantly
shifting mode of being characterized by “nonsynchronicity” (Egenhofer,
2013: 190). This nonsynchronicity means that images can only be com-
prehended taking into account the historical and conceptual gap existing
between the time of the construction of the singular image and the time of
the perception of it. Since we are never able to grasp an image’s “immedi-
ate present” and its “sensual evidence”, this shifting character, this “in-
commensurability”, is for Egenhofer the true nature of the image, definite-
ly something more like a happening than “only” a being. Keith Moxey
points to the same thing, stating that

the experience of the image is distinct from the time that surrounds it. A
work can stop us in our tracks, so to speak, and insist that we acknowledge
a form of perception that differs from that of the context in which it ap-
pears. [the idea of] Difference thus attempts to capture the perceptual awa-
reness that temporalities precede our presence and depend on it (Moxey,
2013: 5).

The faculty of images to produce meaning for us now, as a dialectical

kind of knowledge created of both the terms of production and the terms
of perception, speaks for their heterochrony. In the same way, their capaci-
ty to always produce new meanings over time speaks for their historicali-
ty. The most important consequence of both Egenhofer’s and Moxey’s
insights is, in my opinion, threefold: firstly, that a possible understanding
of images lies in the deconstruction of this paradoxical shifting ontology;
secondly, that images cannot be defined as such, that is, as entities extrap-
olated from a complex entanglement of materiality, temporality and per-
ception; thirdly, and probably most importantly for the future assignments
of new visual studies, images are neither a reflection nor a product of any
kind of “natural consciousness” or metaphysics. Moreover, Egenhofer
contends that

even if we allow ourselves to think of the image’s relation to its world in

the most naïve and crudest sense—as a similarity based, for example, on
physico–physiological relations between surfaces of things and space, the
human retina, and a painted surface—this is no way a guarantee of some-
thing like the truth of the image” (Egenhofer: 188).
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 71

We may therefore understand his thesis not just as a critique of natural

consciousness, which is more often than not attributed to images on the
basis of their resemblance to natural objects or phenomena, but also as a
critique of the current sciences of images, especially of methodologies
based on semiotics and phenomenology.
In what follows I would like to extend the argument and point to some
other promising efforts that have recently been made (the differing theo-
retical widths of the single concept notwithstanding) in order to comple-
ment the traditional disciplinary structuring of images as sometimes natu-
ral and at other times consensual signs of visible phenomena, or, if we
prefer, as phenomenology and semiotics. In this respect, Neal Curtis ob-
served that despite the advances made in visual studies and in the more
traditional area occupied by aesthetics, in both academic and popular dis-
course, images are still valued as a resemblance or copy of something that
preceded them, something material that, by the sheer virtue of temporal
priority, gains an aura of authenticity insofar as the realm of images re-
mains a world of appearances of the second order, of copies that lack the
substance of the original thing or phenomenon (Curtis, 2011: 1090). This
is probably true not just in the Platonic sense of images as simulacra of
reality, but in the paradoxically opposite way as well: as has been shown
by Oliver Grau, in virtual reality we have to deal with images that are rep-
resentations of nothing, even if we may sense in them representational
qualities. The effect that they have over us in terms of both their produc-
tion as technically generated appearances and of the immersive quality of
the experiences they create is of a completely different order (Grau, 2003).
Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) and Jacques Lacan (1977a and
b), Curtis develops a triadic distinction of sorts of images, which are not to
be confused with typology of any kind, but are more like conditions of the
creation, production and consumption/circulation of visual things. Present-
ed with (admittedly Lacanian) linear logic, images, for Curtis, may be sub-
sumed under the notions of imagination, imaginary and imagery. Ontolog-
ical questions like those posed in a very diverse manner, as we have seen,
by Nicholas Davey or Sebastian Egenhofer, for instance, are left aside in
favor of a concept that should engage with a somewhat different set of
constituent elements in pictures.
What are these elements and in what way may they show us an exit
from paradigmatic discourses? For one thing, all of the three instances are
etymologically anchored in both material practice and phenomenal experi-
ence, connected to important moments in which images play a decisive
role in life, an idea similar to the causal structuring of the visual sense of
the world we saw earlier, in Sandywell’s thesis, according to which every
72 Chapter Three

human science conceptualizes its own “images of imaging and thereby

imagination”.
For Curtis, the first realm, imagination, refers to the single moment of
creation that differentiates all produced artifacts and enables them to be
discernible. This instance both refers to the moment of the singularity of
artistic revelation (instituting or radical imagination) and to the industrial
production of pre–established images (instituted imagination) (Curtis:
1097; Castoriadis, 1987). The second realm, the imaginary, is the space in
which imagination acquires a different meaning, leading to a different kind
of image altogether:

In some respects the antithesis of the instituting imagination, the imaginary

is the realm in which a particular social–historical or political form is
maintained. If the imagination is the realm of radical creativity in which
new images are continually being brought forth, the imaginary is the realm
in which they are ideologically reproduced” (Curtis: 1101).

Finally, imagery, for Curtis, in spite of being linguistically no more

than a collective noun for images, is a metonymically charged word that
stands for the social interactions and political economy of the visual field.
The realm of imagery is the “place” where imagination as “radical crea-
tion”, under the influence of the social interactions of the imaginary, usu-
ally gets subdued and transformed into fetishes, brands and “symbolically
exchangeable” goods. It is the realm of confrontations, displacements and
ideological struggles. However, Curtis asserts that the realm of imagery
(that is, impure images contaminated by the political economy of the sign)
is “integral to both the dissemination of a specific ideology and the insti-
gation of a new distribution that is potentially transformative if not revolu-
tionary” (1096). While it goes without saying that (almost) every image
traverses all three realms in a linear fashion, necessarily acquiring differ-
ent meanings and statuses along the way from “imagination” to “imagery”,
it is highly disputable whether images could ever acquire a “revolution-
ary” potential, given the fact that this traversing is always irreversible and
exclusively one–directional, meaning that, for instance, an artifact created
as a fruit of “radical imagination” may, in the realm of imagery, easily find
itself transformed into a status different from that of radical imagination
(such as newly acquired political significance, iconic meaning, a better
price...) and, once the invisible line that separates individual realms is
crossed, the transformed artifact can never lose this new status and restore
itself to an unadulterated state of either pure imagination or pure image. If
we would like to retain the possibility of the revolutionary power of imag-
es, then their cultural meaning in the last stage of “imagery” must not fol-
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 73

low the path established by the linear logic from creation to consumption,
as consumption is a feature of “symbolic exchange”, in which the differ-
ence between objects (whether “artistic” or “designed”) is replaced with
their semiotic equivalents (Baudrillard, 1976). Signs cannot exit the semi-
otic order and regain the status they had prior to meaning generating pro-
cesses.
This linear development of the qualities of images is clearly absent
from the “Seven Theses on Visual Culture” proposed by Barry Sandywell,
making their fragmentary structure a more nuanced theoretical tool. How-
ever, what is shared by Curtis and Sandywell is their insistence on the un-
stable character of the artifact, its susceptibility to various determinants of
culture, geography and time. In both approaches, images and artifacts are
explained more like receptors of different influences than emanators of
specific intrinsic qualities, thus sharing a firm anti–essentialist stance. The
problem, then, is how we conceptualize and make use of these mecha-
nisms of transaction, which are capable of transforming any kind of visual
communication into politically charged utterances understandable to all.
One of the functions of visual studies should be precisely to uncover
“conditions of visibility [that] are not themselves visible” (Sandywell:
656), because knowing how cultural formations are made, how they trans-
form vision into visuality, how one has to deal with the everyday transac-
tions of images/artifacts, are all symptoms of the economy of pleasure and
should be dealt with in political as much as in artistic or aesthetic terms.
Sandywell shows a great deal of faith in visual studies’ ability to perform
precisely this kind of social anamnesis, where visual artifacts should take
the role of the main antagonist and allow us to know not primarily what
and how we see—as this has already been performed by other disciplines,
such as psychoanalytic theory, semiotics or cognitive sciences—but how
we come to see and not to see the realities of everyday life. The crucial
problem for visual studies, then, as I stated earlier, is the following: should
it let images and artifacts speak for themselves, or should it speak on be-
half of them? Do the images alone, or does the study of images, have the
potentiality for the new visual rhetoric that Sandywell envisions as one of
the key transdisciplinary domains within the new visual studies?

5. Images and the power of critique:

intensity instead of essence
In the context of the previous discussions to which I have made reference
in this text regarding historicity, (anti)essentialism, relation to other disci-
plines, the role of vernacular visuality and the like, once more the paradox-
74 Chapter Three

ical status of images and artifacts in visual studies comes to the fore: if this
discipline, as I argue, claims to have retained what Nicholas Davey calls
the “ontogeny of the visual”, and if images flow in a linear fashion from
the moment of creation to the moment of their immersion into the socially
determined realm of “imagery”, where they become open to every possible
interpretation—as Curtis contends—how exactly can “what has been made
socially and historically be ‘unmade’ through critique and social transfor-
mation”, as Sandywell would like it to? Is it not perhaps the case that the
process of the unmaking of the meanings and statuses of the image or arti-
fact can only be carried out by dismissing the ontogenetic difference be-
tween art and non–art, a difference visual studies should subscribe to un-
less it wants to be accused of the “ontogenetic fallacy”? The paradox is
contained in the following: on the one hand visual studies contends that
images should freely cross disciplinary boundaries, that popular TV series
and masterpieces of art should be explained in the same context of con-
temporary visuality (Elkins, 2003a) and that meaning is not intrinsic to
any visual artifact, and hence cannot be explained in terms of “natural
consciousness”, as Egenhofer has demonstrated. But at the same time, it is
not the artifact itself that can perform this multidisciplinary and transdisci-
plinary critique, hidden within the contingent power of images that visual
studies wishes to awake.
The meanings of images could maybe be undone, reversed, reformulat-
ed or situated in a completely different location within the fabric of social
interactions, but the operations required to activate these mechanisms can-
not come from within images themselves, as it is not they that are able to
start the operation of reformulation: it is the power of critique of images
that ignites the power of images. In my opinion, this statement is not just
the foundation of the new visual studies, but also of the pictorial turn and
several theoretical approaches that have gained prominence over the last
couple of decades. The only response to the admonition of Nicholas Da-
vey about the methodology of visual studies and its general neglect of dif-
ferences in the values and epistemological levels of images is to face visu-
al studies with its own genealogies and the ideologies that have shaped
over time what still seems to be contestable or at least unknown territory.
One of the recurring topics in relation to the self–legitimization and
self–reflection of visual studies is the question what is an image? The par-
adoxical nature of the discipline contained in the mentioned twofold paral-
lel process developed out of the attempt to demarcate the area of study on
the one hand, together with an attempt to define the principal objects of
study on the other. It was argued during the Stone Summer Seminar, orga-
nized by James Elkins in Chicago in 2008, that, in order to resolve this
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 75

parallelism, in which the discipline and its object may never come to terms
with each other, continuing to deal with strictly separate sets of problems,
it would be necessary, if not plausible, to answer the essential or essential-
ist questions about images, then at least to create a sort of taxonomical
grid in which different kinds of image would strive to find their ontologi-
cal ground.6 One of the assessors of the seminar’s discussions, Klaus
Sachs–Hombach, himself an author of different attempts to classify imag-
es and an initiator of the extremely influential German wing of the general
theory of images, commented that nobody would doubt that it is quite im-
possible to differentiate and classify images according to clear–cut met-
alevel categories and asked: why would we need such categories to begin
with? Sachs–Hombach points to what I consider to be a very symptomatic
issue in relation to the doubts existing around visual studies when he says
that “within art history we have different theories of art, but we do not
question the status of art history or art science”. The reason why the lack
of a consistent taxonomy of images is still considered to be a problem has
to do with the fact that “image science is not yet established as a proper
academic science” (Sachs–Hombach, 2011: 229). He then enlists “five
tentative theses” that may help to institute a viable image science (Bildwis-
senschaft) and which I give here in a very digested form:

1) The absence of taxonomy within the theories of images reflects “politi-

cal interests”, which at the moment insist on visual studies remaining
in the status of what Thomas Kuhn calls “preparadigmatic science”;
2) While there cannot be an equation between “art” and “image”, image
science is still dominated by art history, which inevitably favors the

6
One of the most recent attempts (one of enviable breadth) to tackle those issues
was the seminar organized by James Elkins within the activities of the Stone
Summer Institute in Chicago in 2008, titled interrogatively What is an Image?
Over seven days, the most prominent scholars from the theory and history of art,
philosophy and other related disciplines gathered to discuss the proverbial cluster
of questions on the ontologies and modes of being of images. The subsequently
published volume (What is an Image, edited by James Elkins, The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2011) gathered the standpoints of the participants (Mitchell,
Boehm, Mondzain etc.) and was accompanied by various assessments from theo-
rists who were not present at the seminar but later on made their commentaries on
topics raised during discussion and also presented additional theoretical opinions
on issues not always directly raised by the participants in the seminar. Incredibly
heterogeneous in viewpoints and scope, but still extremely informative, the volume
has proven to be a veridical reflection of the basic impossibility of answering the
question of the ontology of images and, in my opinion, remains a good example of
fluidity in theoretical conceptions within and about visual studies.
76 Chapter Three

analysis and interpretation of only one specific type of image;

3) Image science does not have to give answers to all possible questions
regarding images, but must possess “a conceptual determination” that
would be capable of making distinctions between different sets of ob-
jects;
4) There have to be two general directions within image science: one to
deal with historical issues, the other to deal with the functions, contexts
and specific uses of images;
5) A general science of images should start from the features of images
that are not “controversial” and therefore can be used as theoretical
common ground. Two of these features may be anti-essentialism and
representationalism.

Even though they are more elaborate in the original form, if still admit-
tedly “sketchy”, to use Sachs–Hombach’s own word, there is a line of
thought discernible in the five statements that points to the conception of
image studies as a kind of anti–theory, one that is left to be shaped and
paradoxically explained by what it studies instead of trying to conceptual-
ize its object in the tradition of critical theory and the identity politics that
flourished along its path. Few questions appear immediately: what theory
would not want to at least address, if not fully explain, every phenomenon
that it may find interesting? What epistemology would deliberately con-
fine its universe to the restricted horizon of knowledge only because a
more established discipline already claims some of the objects that a new-
er discipline wants to account for? What discipline would introduce itself
without a disruptive redefinition of existing theoretical and terminological
apparatuses? Or, are precisely these tactics of indetermination the only
way to establish a new structure of knowledge with the image as a consti-
tutive element, an element that every ideology, artistic style, fashion trend
and visual artifact whatsoever claims as its own?
To deal properly with what appears to be the ontological ground of im-
age science, we must recall the already foundational in–disciplinarity of
visual studies that Thomas Mitchell opted for in his text “Interdiscplinarity
and Visual Culture”, where he stated that we must make a distinction be-
tween “top–down” interdisciplinarity, a “comparative, structural formation
that aims to know the overarching system or conceptual totality within
which all the disciplines are related” and the kind of “compulsory” inter-
disciplinarity characteristic of studies in gender, sexuality and ethnicity
that is “improvised out of a new theoretical object and a political project
with its attendant urgencies. They are knowledge projects, but they also
have more or less explicit moral and political agendas” (Mitchell, 1995:
540–44). In his more recent, reassessed idea of it he stated that, no matter
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 77

which of the above one falls into,

interdisciplinarity turns out to be as nonthreatening to the disciplines as it

is to corporate capitalism. It just reinstalls the same old disciplinary values
of rigorous normativity, productivity, originality, and explanatory power at
a higher level. Fate turns into providential design, and the breakup of the
disciplines is rectified by their convergence at a higher level – the emer-
gent program, the conglomerate or consortium, or a humanities institute, a
kind of hothouse for testing out new hybridizations of professional and
disciplinary discourses (Mitchell, 2009: 1026).

In this light, the five tentative theses by Klaus Sachs–Hombach, which

may have seemed like an unexpectedly defensive theoretical agenda of
image science, clearly appear more like an admonition against the con-
struction of yet another “knowledge project” with “political agendas” that
is bound to be “as nonthreatening to the disciplines as it is to corporate
capitalism”. While it is not likely that any discipline within the humanities
will ever pose a threat to corporate capitalism, whether it is methodologi-
cally nomadic or politically instrumentalized, it cannot be utterly irrele-
vant who is in control of the regimes of visibility, who creates the ontoge-
netic predisposition for various types of artifacts and who is, in turn, “on-
ly” capable of discerning the paradoxical inextricability of images as ob-
jects of study and the study of images as such. If image science concen-
trated on both, the what and the how, then object and study would likely
become even more intertwined, as fundamental questions on the specific
nature of images would continue to be posed together with efforts to de-
marcate the still contestable ground of visual studies. In an attempt to an-
swer the question of what visual studies want, I think the most correct or
the least “controversial” answer would be that it wants to come to terms
with images. But in the circularity of ontological determination of both
object and discipline, it is still unclear which one will follow the lead of
the other. Maybe it is the fate of the discipline of visual studies to be con-
stantly haunted by the essentialist dilemma, prompted by images and their
particular “wishes”.
On the other hand, following the proposal made by Gottfried Boehm,
the whole essentialist idea that we believed existed around the secret of the
image may fall apart should we come to an understanding that “iconicity is
not a question of essence, but of degree” (Boehm, 2006: 248). By the same
token, if visual studies is still burdened by the ontology of image, might
we then envision image science too in terms of degree rather than essence?
First and foremost, this would signify the definitive failure of disciplinary
knowledge to provide an answer to what we believed were essential pillars
78 Chapter Three

of every traditional visual theory. Moreover, “intensity” as a theoretical

presumption has already begun appearing, in one form or another, in new
art history, “new iconology” and visual studies: if, following Mitchell, we
just take the pictorial turn as an example of different levels of “urgency” in
our relation to images, the whole epistemology of turns (linguistic turn,
pictorial turn, spatial turn etc.) can already be understood as a matter of
intensity due to the fact that, for instance, images were always present, to
some extent, within language and literary texts, in the form of metaphors
or ekphrastic descriptions. Intensity, in this case, may be a consequence of
two necessarily related phenomena that were among the fundamental “ev-
idence” of the occurrence of the pictorial turn: first, of our increased inter-
est in visual matters as a society as a whole (literature and cultural “texts”
included), and second, of the more and more prominent actual presence of
visually motivated concepts (Mitchell, 1986 and 1994; Derrida, 1978).
This shifted sensitivity to visual impulses provoked by both changes in the
material world—images, imagination, imagery (Curtis, 2011)—and our
recently acquired susceptibility to the neuro–cognitivist construction of the
visual field—mental images, matrixes, virtual realities—could also be
explained precisely in terms of the reborn popularity of phenomenological
reasoning.
Following the trail marked by Gottfried Boehm, Emmanuel Alloa is
among those authors who have pointed to interesting developments in the
field of visual/image studies, especially when he observes that the phe-
nomenological tradition, from Husserl and Sartre to Marleau–Ponty, must
be credited with the important insight that

iconicity is not a quality of the object, but of a way of looking at the world
which not only implies that any object can possibly become an image, but
also—inversely— that every image we are looking at can only be seen as
an image because it is rooted in a pervasive iconicity which serves as a ma-
trix for potential images to come (Alloa, 2011: 149).

If this is true, he adds, then the classical distinction that ruled western
ontology, the distinction between a difference in degree and a difference in
essence, will effectively collapse. From the point of such a “phenomeno-
logical turn”, this would not raise just the problem of philosophy losing its
foundation and firm theoretical ground; the whole modern project of im-
ages, informed by functions, meanings and concepts of representation,
would then lose its specificity, its “sovereign realm”, a domain where the
rules of iconicity alone once governed and where the idea of a universal
 Coming to Terms with Images: Visual Studies and Beyond 79

science of images once existed (Alloa: 150).7 Valuing images by degree

instead of essence, or, to put it differently, by how we come to see and not
to see the realities of everyday life, instead of based on their ontological
ground, would mean that neither “the new visual studies” proposed by
Barry Sandywell nor “the new image science” sketched by Klaus Sachs–
Hombach can have either firm disciplinary ground or a definite set of the-
oretical objects. The reason why it is more promising to look at when and
how images take place instead of what they are, then, is because “images
have no domain nor realm of their own, they are fundamentally pervasive
and always essentially out of their place [...] so the fundamental ‘atopia’ of
the image relation dismantles a logic of localization and opens up perspec-
tive of an iconic force field” (Alloa: 150–151).
Thinking in intensities would mean that, for example, images of art
were not to be judged in terms of exclusive belonging to the aesthetic do-
main, just as images of non–art would not be excluded from participating
in this domain. While in this case it might be more difficult to discern the
demarcation lines on which the ontogenetical difference between art and
other is based, thinking in intensities would certainly not erase them, just,
maybe, pose questions of aesthetics more urgently in the discussion of art
today. Visual studies would then easily find itself acquitted of the accusa-
tion of confusing objects with absolute value with those of relative or cir-
cumstantial value, but at the same time, it would find itself in a radically
new situation in which it would have to engage with the intensities of the
aesthetic value of images—the only thing it deliberately left to art history.
What any contemporary science of images can do in this respect is to try
to conceptualize intensities, levels, localizations, modalities and circum-
stances. Whether this might lead to a new kind of revolutionary interdisci-
plinarity of levels, statuses and topographies instead of disciplines and
how that would affect our visual communication and understanding of
images is yet to be imagined.

7
Emanuel Alloa has subsequently elaborated more on his thesis on “intensities” in
an article where this new theoretical urgency is explained in continuation of a dis-
course about three possible impulses inherent to the iconic turn: archeological,
poetical and epistemic. In this way, he suggests that the need for the re–working of
traditional concepts of the image has to be part of the parallel process of the re–
working of image theories as well. According to Alloa, such a process may consist
of the redefinition of iconology as “symptomatology”, and analysis based on the
disciplinary “extensity” of visual phenomena may become an exercise in “intensi-
ties”, while firm indications and values may be better explained as contingencies,
as in the relation of “indicative” and “subjunctive” (Alloa, 2012: 144–159).
80 Chapter Three

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