Responses to Bal James Elkins2003

7/28/2019 Responses to Bal James Elkins2003

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Journal of Visual Culture

DOI: 10.1177/147041290300220062003; 2; 232Journal of Visual Culture

James Elkinsof Interdisciplinarity for Visual StudiesResponses to Mieke Bal's `Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture' (2003): Nine Mode

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On the other hand, if it is in fact the case that the emergence of visual culture as an

object of knowledge corresponds to or is part of the tentacular and capillary

advance of a generalized regime of visibility, there is no reason to suppose that

absorption or capitulation need be the only outcome. As Bals essay argues, visual

culture is an area of critical negativity and negotiation: because seeing is an act of

interpretation, interpretation can influence ways of seeing, hence of imagining

possibilities of change. The study of the structure and operations of visual regimes,

and their coercive and normalizing effects, is already one of the defining features of

visual culture as distinct from traditional art history; and to the extent that this is

so, it is an area in which sites and occasions for cultural analysis, resistance, and

transformation are bound to proliferate and multiply, in tandem with the regimes

own expansive tendencies.

Reference

Van Winkel, Camiel (2003) On Visibility, presentation to the Jan van Eyck Academie,

Maastricht, The Netherlands, 24 March.

Norman Bryson

Slade School of Art, London

Nine modes of interdisciplinarity for visual studies

Visual studies, visual culture, image studies,Bild-Anthropologie, Bildwissenschaft:

the unnamed field is expanding very rapidly, and it is growing differently in

different parts of the world. GermanBildwissenschaft, as that term is used by Horst

Bredekamp (forthcoming), refers to an outward expansion of art historys resources

to encompass the full range of images. Bild-Anthropologie, the title of a book by

Hans Belting (2001), is an experimental blending of anthropological, philosophic

and art-historical concerns. In Mexico City, visual studies is growing from

semiotics and communication theory.1 In Copenhagen, visual culture is a

combination of American art history and English cultural studies, with a near-

absence of French influences.2 Visual culture, postcolonial studies, film studies, and

cultural studies are blended in courses in places as far-flung as Bergen, Taipei,

Delhi, Buenos Aires and Bologna (Elkins, forthcoming). Given the multiplicity ofclasses, courses, departments, names and languages, it is effectively impossible to

keep track of the emerging genealogies of the discipline if that is what visual

studies, as I will call it, turns out to be.

In this very productive cacophony I think there are several discernible voices. Let

me put these in a schematic form at first: afterward I will deepen the argument.

1. There are those art historians who would prefer to go on researching and teaching

the established periods and works, however those might be construed in any given

instance. In my experience, art historians will not say this openly: after all, in the

current political climate they would only sound conservative. At the same time, I

doubt that among the art historians who are content with their specialties there are

journal of visual culture 2(2)232



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too many who would mind if the discipline expanded. Most are not actively

conservative, but immersed as specialists in all fields properly are in their

subjects. Such historians are like stylites, perched on pinnacles of sheer knowledge.

I would propose Charles Dempsey as an example: he is, for practical purposes,

unapproachably well informed on several canonical artists of the Renaissance in

central Italy, from Botticelli to the Carracci. It wouldnt be possible for a generalist

ever to approach what a scholar like Dempsey (2000) has accomplished.

2. There are those who wish, as Horst Bredekamp has proposed, to make use of art

historys methodological resources to illuminate a range of new objects, usually

beginning with film and photography. In this model, art history asBildwissenschaft

moves outward, bringing its expertise and the density of its contextual analyses to

bear on increasingly broad ranges of material. Bredekamp is primarily a specialistin 17th-century art, but he has written widely on the history of science, on the

historiography of art history, and on art from the Renaissance to the present. From

an historiographic point of view, German art history in particular has long had an

interest in the subjects that now preoccupy visual studies beginning with Riegl

and Warburg, and including both Benjamin and Panofsky. It follows that a

productive path for the future is to continue to expand art historical inquiry to cover

new kinds of objects.

3. There are those who want to recast art historys sense of itself by projecting onto

it methodologies that come from the outside. One of the most interesting recent

examples of this is Georges Didi-HubermansLimage survivante, a monograph on

Warburgs sense of images.3 The book can be read as an inquiry into the ways that

psychoanalytic readings, coupled with Warburgian obsessions, can re-animate arthistorys sense of the history of images. Warburgs Pathosformel, the concept of

Nachleben, and Freuds interest in the relation between the unconscious and

images, combine to form an alternate model for the genealogies and patterns of

influence that continue to justify art historical interests. Didi-Hubermans book has

not yet been translated into English, and it is not clear what kind of influence it will

have on a community of scholars whose methodological preoccupations are

increasingly diverse. In making this abbreviated schema, I am trying to name only

contemporary art historians: but if this were an historical listing, E.H. Gombrich

would be preeminent in this category if only for his lifelong interest in

psychology, and his consistent assertion that he was not an art historian.

4. There are those whose work entails a re-imagining of art history in the light of a

more powerful explanatory principle. Ellen Dissanayake is an example: she is

interested in finding the biological bases of art, and to the degree that she succeeds,

she re-explains art historical phenomena with the same subsumptive effect that B.F.

Skinners (1995) theories had on earlier models of animal behavior. A similarly

powerful and entirely different program was pursued by Pierre Bourdieu (1994). In

theory, his Marxistsociological interpretation of the desire to own and trade in art

would provide a master narrative for art history, turning the existing art historical

literature into a secondary phenomenon, an inadequate reflection of incompletely

realized desires. As far as I know neither Dissanayake nor Bourdieu ever had it in

mind to subsume art history as a discipline, but for those who find their writing

persuasive, art history is necessarily an epiphenomenon of more fundamental ideas.

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5. There are those who want to bring together several fields to create a meeting

place of disciplines, a kind of bazaar or collage of simultaneous and kaleido-

scopically alternating disciplinary fragments. If visual studies were constituted in

this way, art history would be one among several disciplines (or pieces of

disciplines), with no special preeminence. Bruno Latours recent exhibition and

book Iconoclash (2002) is a good example. Latour is interested in finding an

inclusive, democratic space for what he calls iconophilic scholars of all kinds. The

intellectual space ofIconoclash is somewhere between and among religious studies,

science studies, and art history. Ill call this the Magpie Theory of

interdisciplinarity, because it works at least initially by hoarding. It is generous,

unruly and optimistic, and its only enemies are those iconophobes, icon fetishists,

or iconoclasts who cannot bring themselves to participate in a broad iconophilicforum of ideas.

6. From here things become more complicated. There are those who want to bring

together fields, but without producing anything that could be called a new discipline

or even a set of known disciplines. There are many different hopes for this more

elusive interdisciplinarity. In one version, the interdisciplinary space is exactly that:

a void between disciplines. Bits of darkness from the darkness of

interdisciplinary space, according to the literary theorist Robert Hodge, can be

introjected into the white of mixed disciplines.4 For visual studies, a central

example here would be Jacques Derrida, in the sense that his forays into visuality

have been made intentionally without recourse to a home discipline. Derridas

Memoirs of the Blinddoes not interrogate disciplines, or even make its incursions

explicit: but a full listing of the fields Derrida assays in that text includinglinguistics, phenomenology, classics, ontology, art history, conservation, religious

studies, and literary theory would show that much of the work takes place

between such nameable locations.

7. Another conceptually challenging version of the desire for genuine

interdisciplinarity has been articulated by Stephen Melville. It is not clear to me,

he wrote in the 1996 Octoberquestionnaire on visual culture, that visual cultural

studies is in any interesting sense interdisciplinary, nor that it can give rise to

anything I would take to be interestingly interdisciplinary (p. 53). A true

interdisciplinarity in Melvilles sense could occur if the new field will allow its very

conceptual order or disorder to locate the object it studies. To think of things the

other way around, where visual studies is a new configuration of existing

interpretive methods bent on objects that are already identified (as in my number 5),is to seek the safety of conventional interdisciplinary thinking.5 If Im reading

Melville right, it would also not be genuinely interdisciplinary if visual studies

constituted itself as a moving void between known disciplines, because the very

existence of a conceptual map colored white and black for disciplines and voids

would vitiate the genuine conceptual interest that could only come from an ongoing

uncertainty regarding the force and purpose that disciplines might be said to

possess.

8. Another kind of interdisciplinarity for visual studies would be one that sinks

below disciplines, and occupies a kind of subbasement outside of normal

intellectual habitation. Tom Mitchell (1996: 178) has suggested as much by




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proposing that visual culture be a kind of de-disciplinary operation. We need to

get away from the notion that visual culture is covered by the materials of art

history, aesthetics, and media studies, he writes. Visual culture starts out in an area

beneath the notice of these disciplines the realm of non-artistic, non-aesthetic, and

unmediated or immediate visual images and experiences. It is about everyday

seeing, which is bracketed out by the disciplines that conventionally address

visuality. It is an intriguing idea; if there is such a thing as a demotic de-disciplined

way of thinking about everyday seeing it will have to emerge very gently between

the many disciplinary, anti-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary initiatives that

currently constitute the field.

9. The last few of these are mobile models, where visual studies would have to be in

continuous motion, Deleuze-fashion, in order to find its subjects. A final and mostradical position is the disavowal or critique of borders as such. Richard Johnson

(19867) argues this way when he complains about the codification of knowledge,

which runs against some main features of cultural studies including its openness

and theoretical versatility, its reflexive [and] even self-conscious mood, and

especially the importance of critique (p. 38). One of the things Mieke Bal argues in

Visual Essentialism is that some borders, and some of those who want to keep

them closed, need to be removed if visual culture is to develop in the most

interesting possible way. Hers is an exemplary position, as fully thought through as

any so far in the field. It is also an endgame text, because beyond it beyond the

practices she exemplifies in her own writing, which negotiate borders in several

different ways there could be nothing but shapeless writing, formed according to

choices made independently of disciplines and their borders.Now the very interesting thing about theorizing disciplines, I think, is that putting

any one of these theories to work involves inhabiting other options both those I

have named and the many others I havent. It is not possible to take up any one of

these without also working from within at least one of the others. The restriction on

theorizing interdisciplinarity applies not to the coherence of the theories themselves,

but to the possibility of actually enacting any one of them except the first, which

continues to exist as a defining term, in isolation from this problematic. Even Bals

approach, which I think is the most concerted and vigilant critique of the very concept

of disciplinarity, depends as she herself knows on the persistence of disciplines.

It follows that it is impossible to makes choices from this list, or from any similar

list. This is the only sense in which I disagree with Bals essay, and it is just a

question of the emphasis she puts on avoiding essentialism. I do not want to police

disciplines, or keep art history pure (far from it!), but I find that the existence of

texts that depend on disciplinary purity is itself crucial for the possibility of a truly

innovative interdisciplinarity. Without resistance, resistance is useless.

A perfect example, too often neglected in current debates, is Barbara Stafford. For

decades she has been writing between, among, and around a large number of

disciplines, and yet her work never settles for a single approach to disciplinarity. At

times she writes as if disciplinary police are the most annoying impediments to

good work, and at other times she writes from deep within specializations. There is

resistance, within her work, to the de-skilling that so often accompanies the

relaxation of disciplinary boundaries, and she writes happily and with confidence




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on the most arcane subjects. At the same time, there is a sense that out of the

constellation of shards of obdurate specalized knowledge, a pattern will emerge a

sign, as Mallarm says, projected on some vacant surface. Stafford was one of my

dissertation advisors, and as a student I spent the better part of two years puzzling

over her writing and its sources of coherence (Elkins, 1992: 51720). Leopardi once

described his own scholarship as peregrine. It is an even more wonderful

metaphor than Leopardi knew, because falcons have two maculas in each eye: one

for focusing forward, in stereo, and a second for sharp-eyed looking to either side.

Four maculas, three points on the earth in focus in quick succession. Why not write

in such a way that it takes years to find the foci? What is good writing, if it isnt a

concerted challenge to the reader?

So I agree with Bal that disciplinary policing is inimical to what visual studiesmight hopefully achieve, but I would also like to conserve some borders, some

purities, and some competencies, just in order that they can provide hard-edged

resistance to the acid of the open spaces of interdisciplinarity. Even the most

conservative retrenchment into disciplinary skills such as the one I named first on

the list is necessary and desirable for the theoretical and practical development of

visual studies.

I have tried several of the nine theories myself, sometimes as a believer and other

times as a visitor. The second theory, in which art history tries out its interpretive

tools on non-canonical objects, was largely the strategy of my book Domain of

Images. To the extent that that book made use of linguistics, archaeology, and

anthropology, it was also an example of the fifth theory (the Magpie theory). In the

context of that project I would defend both strategies. The reason why it continuesto make sense to think of art history as a source for a wider visual studies (as in the

second theory) is that art history has one of the richest and deepest histories of

encounters with historically embedded objects. That is why it is such a temptation

to throw it aside, and to critique some art historians interest in having a broader

visual studies grow from their own discipline. The reason why art history,

linguistics and other disciplines need to come together (as in the fifth theory) is

because their particular competencies produce a productive iconoclash, in

Latours term. And so forth: there are arguments, I think, in favor of each of the

nine and many others besides, and those arguments can be madefrom the point of

view of a radical experimentalism that has no allegiance to disciplinarity.

The genuine challenge for visual studies, I think, is to find itself in places where all

workable theories of interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity can still be enacted. I very

much agree with the tenor of Bals essay, and her exemplary insistence on the

lability of boundaries. I would just add that there is also good reason to mend the

fences between neighbors: the existence of borders, and the competencies they

enclose, are what give sense to our peregrine scholarship.

Notes

1. The Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (UNAM) is the principal source of

theoretical activity in cultural studies, but the Tec de Monterrey, a technical university

with a large humanities program, offers courses in visual studies, divided between the

Humanities Department and the Department of Communication and Technologies of the




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Image. A third university, the Universidad Iberoamericana, offers visual studies courses

in its Art Department.

2. In the fall of 2002, the University of Copenhagen began offering an MA in Visual

Culture. Niels Marup Jensens Billedernes Tid: Teorier og Billeder I den Visuelle

Kultur (The Time of Images: Theories and Pictures in Visual Culture), an unpublished

manuscript (c. 2000), stresses semiotics, theories of time, and Derridean meditations on

context and framing. Jensens course on Visuel Kultur includes readings by Raymond

Williams, Martin Jay, Rgis Debray (Three Ages of Looking), W.J.T. Mitchell,

William J. Mitchell, Svetlana Alpers, Jonathan Crary, Susan Sontag (In Platos Cave),

John Taylor (from Body Horror), Roland Barthes, David Freedberg, Robert Nelson

(Appropriation, from Critical Terms for Art History), Hal Foster, Claudine Is (To be

Primitive Without Culture), three essays from the Routledge Visual Culture Reader,

Paul Virilio, and Lev Manovic (The Automation of Sight).

3. Didi-Huberman (2002): a translation is planned by the Pennsylvania State University

Press.

4. Hodge (1995) also subscribes to the previous theory (my number 5) because he says it is

possible to create transdisciplinary fields by mingling discipline with discipline in a

promiscuous mix and at the same time mixing disciplinarity with non-disciplinarity.

He also mixes metaphors, talking about taking bits and bringing them back into

disciplines his Manicheism is arguably a little conflicted.

5. Melville puts this as the difference between the scientific (Panofskian) line and the

disciplinary line represented, for the sake of his abbreviated argument, by Wlfflin

and Riegl.

References

Belting, H. (2001) Bild-Anthropologie: Entwrfe fr eine Bildiwssenschaft. Munich:Wilhelm Fink.

Bourdieu, P. (1994) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard

Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bredekamp, H. (forthcoming) Art History as Bildwissenschaft, Critical Inquiry.

Dempsey, W. (2000)Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style. Fiesole, Italy:

Edizioni Cadmo.

Derrida, Jacques (1993) Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans.

Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Didi-Huberman, G. (2002)LImage survivante: Histoire de lart et temps des fantmes selon

Aby Warburg. Paris: Minuit.

Elkins, J. (1992), Review of Barbara Staffords Body Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1991), The Art Bulletin 74(3): 51720.

Elkins, J. (forthcoming) Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Hodge, R. (1995) Monstrous Knowledge: Doing PhDs in the New Humanities, Australian

Universities Review 2: 359.

Johnson, R. (19867) What is Cultural Studies Anyway? Social Text16: 3880.

Latour, B. (ed.) (2002)Iconoclash! Karlsruhe: ZKM.

Melville, S. (1996) Response to Visual Culture Questionnaire, October77, Summer: 53.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (1996) Showing Seeing: Response to Visual Culture Questionnaire,

October77, Summer: 38.

Skinner, B.F. (1995) Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: The

Free Press.

James Elkins

Art Institute of Chicago


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