Journal of Visual Culture
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Journal of Visual Culture http://vcu.sagepub.com Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture Mieke Bal Journal of Visual Culture 2003; 2; 5 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/1/5 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Journal of Visual Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at SIMON FRASER UNIV on August 13, 2007 © 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. journal of visual culture Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture Mieke Bal 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 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 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] Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at SIMON FRASER UNIV on August 13, 2007 © 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 6 journal of visual culture 2(1) 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 Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at SIMON FRASER UNIV on August 13, 2007 © 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Bal Visual essentialism 7 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.