visual culture, art history and the humanities

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2009 8: 41Arts and Humanities in Higher EducationIván Castañeda

Visual Culture, Art History and the Humanities

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Visual Culture,Art History and the Humanitiesi v á n casta ñ e da

University of Idaho, USA

ab st rac t

This essay will discuss the need for the humanities to address visual culture studiesas part of its interdisciplinary mission in today’s university. Although mostlyunnoticed in recent debates in the humanities over historical and theoreticalframeworks, the relatively new field of visual culture has emerged as a correctiveto a growing disciplinary territorialism on the part of art history. A study of thetheoretical purview of visual culture reveals that it in truth encompasses a continu-ation of art history’s initial interdisciplinary humanist project of cultural critiqueinitiated by Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. This article will argue that arthistory’s inability to fully appreciate visual culture’s relevance in today’s researchand pedagogical settings has given the humanities the opportunity to address afield which is rooted in the humanities’ project of interdisciplinary inquiry.

keyword s art history, critical theory, cultural studies, humanities, visual culture

A lth ou g h th e f i e l d of v i sual c ulture , along with the peda-gogic and methodological strategies that it suggests, has emerged as one ofthe most stimulating new intellectual fields of inquiry in recent years invarious academic and theoretical contexts (Dikovitskava, 2005), the specificsof visual culture itself – its object of study, its methodological philosophy, itsacademic and theoretical aims – remain highly debated and contested (Crary,1990; Darley, 2000; Elkins, 2003; Evans and Hall, 1999; Krauss, 1996; Mirzoeff,2000a, 2000b; Mitchell, 1993, 1995c; Sturken and Cartwright, 2001).1 As aninherently interdisciplinary field (Mitchell, 1995a), and one that promises tomake inroads across college curricula in direct and indirect modes, the impli-cations and provocations of the field of visual culture need further investi-gation and analysis. In what follows I want to outline the short, schizophrenic

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history of visual culture as a bastard child of art history, highlighting whatthis history reveals through its own problematics, contradictions, and conflicts.It is within these conflicts that one can locate visual culture’s roots within thehumanities and liberal arts. Throughout, I wish to make a cluster of obser-vations that can hopefully provide insights into some aspects of the relevancyand import of visual culture for the humanities. In short, although this is toa great extent a product of its own making, art history has failed to takeadvantage of visual culture’s ramifications, leaving the field for the taking –perhaps by the humanities. As we shall see, although its roots are quin-tessentially grounded in the broad interdisciplinary project of the humanities,art history’s continued focus on specialization has made the field ironicallypolemical towards its own creation, the transdisciplinary discipline of visualculture.

My points of departure are two recently argued historical notions: first,W.J.T. Mitchell’s observations on the historical ramifications of what hetermed the ‘pictorial turn’. As an extension of the rubric of Richard Rorty(1976, 1979), where the ‘linguistic turn’ is seen as the final stage of westernphilosophy (following materialistic and idealist turns), Mitchell posits thepictorial turn as the latest historical paradigm shift. If this shift were to berecognized and addressed, Mitchell argues, it would constitute the possiblecollapse of the academic parameters of art history, cultural studies, anthro-pology, visual studies, and film and media studies, among others (1992, 1995c:11–34). Concomitant with this development is what Fredric Jameson hascalled ‘the cultural turn’ (Dikovitskava, 2005; Jameson, 1998): another,possibly wider paradigm shift that describes an overall focus on culture, ormore specifically, the widespread commodification of culture as the quin-tessential condition of our contemporary society. Under this notion, cultureis defined as broadly encompassing all forms of global media, informationnetworks, service industries, entertainment, design and fashion, popularculture, and most importantly, the economically driven and thus increasinglycommercialized and aestheticized political realm.2 The traditional notion ofculture as art and literature, religion and so on, is not excluded but rathersubsumed under this powerfully ubiquitous condition. Throughout itsburgeoning history, visual culture has been patently interwoven with both ofthese historical narratives. In light of this, it is important to discuss a constel-lation of related issues and problems that visual culture raises: issues andproblems highly relevant to the future of the humanities and the liberal artsin general.

The term ‘visual culture’ is of relatively recent lineage. The history of thenotion has two roots. The term was probably first used by Svetlana Alpers inher 1984 study of Dutch art. There,Alpers gave credit for the notion of ‘visual

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 8 (1 )

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culture’ to Michael Baxandall, whose influential Painting and Experience inFifteenth Century Italy (1972) is cited as the term’s inspiration throughBaxandall’s notion of the Italian fifteenth century’s ‘period eye’. AlthoughBaxandall never used the phrase ‘visual culture’, his interest in the culturaldimensions of Renaissance ‘seeing’ proved to be the stimulus for Alpers’ laterstudy of Dutch painting as part of Dutch ‘visual culture’. It is not merelycoincidental that Alpers first used the term ‘new art history’ in the same year(Alpers and Alpers, 1972), for that term would eventually signify a new incli-nation in art historical research (concomitant with the development of NewHistoricism in other fields) towards the study of the social and economiccontexts of works of art. The most famous practitioner of this methodo-logical focus would be T.J. Clark (Clark, 1973a, 1973b, 1984; see also Alpersand Alpers, 1972; Harris, 2001; Kaufmann, 1992, 1996; Mitchell, 1989).3

Along with these roots within art historical contexts, visual culture alsodeveloped out of intellectual and theoretical discussions between filmstudies, media studies and anthropology, on the one hand, and feminist studiesand various sub-disciplines within English literature departments, on theother. From this second set of roots visual culture has expanded into a highlymutable and adaptable field of study that is intersected, cross-influenced, andreciprocally penetrated by various critical and theoretical positions andmethodologies. Most consequentially, in terms of the discipline of arthistory, visual culture (within this latter framework) has embraced continen-tal critical thought as its principal theoretical method. The critical toolsdeployed include most prominently what some art historians might wish tocall the theoretical axis of evil: Marxist critique as embodied in the FrankfurtSchool project of cultural critique, French poststructuralism, and psycho-analysis. What this amounted to was the adoption of the critical apparatusof the hermeneutics of suspicion: a critical strategy that understandsinterpretation as an uncovering of deeper structures of meaning (Ricoeur,1970). Usually these meanings are understood as agents of ideology, theunconscious, or a combination of both.

It is of crucial importance to realize that Baxandall’s and Alpers’ moreindigenous (in terms of art history) conceptions of visual culture were moreor less incorporated into the art-historical literature precisely because theywere not seen as a threat. However, the cross-disciplinary conception ofcritical theory has been met with much apprehension by the art-historicalcommunity. Indeed, to say ‘some apprehension’ risks underestimating thereaction that many art historians felt and continue to feel towards the incur-sions of continental theory into their discipline (Belting, 2001, 2005; Hollyand Moxey, 2002; Westermann, 2005). The exasperation and anger thataccompanied Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal’s 1991 article ‘Semiotics and Art

Castañeda:Visual Culture,Art History and the Humanities

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History’, a tour de force of art history bashing, has not significantly dissipatedin the art-historical community. The hostility of art historians towardssemiotics in particular, was crystallized in such relatively simple ideas as‘images are not words!’ or ‘pictures are not simply linguistic “signs”’, attitudestowards poststructuralism that would find refuge in the term ‘linguisticimperialism’ (Summers, 1986). This was a salient critique, one that should bevoiced by students of visual images today. But the broader suggestion of thisposition is the more ideological critique of what is seen as at least supplemen-tary, and at the extreme superfluous, to art history. In terms of this logic it isno surprise that the critique of the encroachment of critical theory in arthistory had as its battle cry ‘the return to the image’. The argument went thatthe incursions of continental critical thought into the discipline of art historyhad ruptured our focus on the image itself. The work of art itself, the obviousobject of the discipline of art history, had been left behind in search of suchtheoretical problematics as ‘signification practices’, ‘discursive practices’, ‘thepolitical’ and other external, non-aesthetic theoretical concerns.

The reaction from the theoretical community to what it saw as art history’srefusal to face the theoretical music, so to speak, its inability to keep up withthe times, was precisely the focus of much of Bryson and Bal’s essay. In bothexplicit and implicit terms, Bryson and Bal argued that in art history’s refusalto acknowledge the ‘advances’ and ‘discoveries’ of poststructuralism and other critical maneuvers, it has resigned itself to outmoded practices such asiconography, patronage studies, provenance, and others. The critique of arthistory along these lines continues to this day. Art historians would counterthat lurking beneath the idea of linguistic incursion is the attempt to masterthe fields of visual representation through a verbal discourse. But this is nota new phenomenon. As Rosalind Krauss has pointed out (1996), the visualarts have always battled the onslaught of a verbal production: from ekphrasisto allegory, rhetoric, ut pictura poesis and iconography, visual art has always hadto do battle with literary and linguistic paradigms. Krauss suggests thatmodernism itself has fought this battle all along. Clement Greenberg’sformalist project could then be seen as an attempt to purify modern paint-ing from extra-visual concerns (Gibson, 2003; Greenberg, 1986–1993a,1986–1993b; Harrison, 1997, 2003). No doubt a great component of theannoyance of art historians towards these theoretical inroads has to do withthe overtly language-bound positions and terminology that are adopted bycritical theory to interpret the visual: linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, discourse,textuality. Through these assessments, art history is instructed to recognizesociety as a ‘text’, culture as so many ‘discourses’. Jacques Derrida’s procla-mation that there is nothing outside the text is only the most comprehensiveof such notions (Culler, 1983; Owens, 1992).


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Along these lines it has been posited that the possible discourse of visualculture inevitably entails the liquidation of the category of art as we knowit. The crux of this problem is the issue of what differentiates ‘art’ from othercultural products. No doubt the unmaking of the traditional category of arthas played, and continues to play, a prevalent role in discussions of modern,postmodern and contemporary art. After all, the concept of art has alreadybeen dismantled and contested from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol(Danto, 1981, 1997). The field of postmodern art practices is in many wayscentered on the contestation and rupture of the category of art itself. Butthis is an issue of concern for all periods. If art history becomes ‘visualculture’, what effect will this have on the more essential practices of arthistory: appraisal, connoisseurship, inventory, authentication, and archivalpractices; the study of patronage, provenance; and issues of reproduction,copyright, censorship? (Ginzburg, 1995; Neer, 2005).

It is from these debates that visual culture, as it is putatively defined today,emerged. So it is no surprise to find the field of visual culture most vital,pedagogically and academically, in fields and contexts outside traditional arthistory. The unfortunate consequence, for art historians, is that the mostfruitful discussions are relegated to interdisciplinary, critical, and theoreticalpublications and conferences rather than taking place within the art-historical community itself. Although this is changing, within the Americanacademy the refuge of visual culture remains mostly in English departments,design and communication departments, the sub-fields of material culture,popular culture studies and media studies, or simply within the broader fieldof cultural studies. The situation no doubt is fuelled by the current voguewithin the academy for the interdisciplinary. The polemic between art historyand theory in general might be better understood in the context of whatAndreas Huyssen (1986) has called the anxiety of contamination: themodernist tendency to fight against the excursions of mass culture.Accordingto this position, it might be posited that a significant component of arthistory’s hostility towards visual culture is but another moment in the longbattle between modernism and mass culture – the paradigm of differentiationbetween the high and the low. What this debate reveals and, more import-antly, how such a conflict is manifested in relevant contexts today, is extremelypertinent for the humanities and liberal arts in general. Huyssen describes thisas sometimes located in the polemic of modernism v. mass culture and/oravant-garde v. culture industry. In the former, modernism is seen as con-servative by the left, which views modernism’s attitude as condescending andfull of contempt for popular, mass culture as low. In this rubric, mass cultureyearns for ‘serious’ appreciation. The latter battle sees avant-garde productionas the only means to circumvent and disrupt an increasingly affirmative


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culture industry. Interestingly both sides claim the other suffers from extremebourgeois tendencies (the modernist claim through the filter of a kind ofAdornian critique; while the opposing voices critique modernism from apostmodern position as so much ‘truth and beauty’ aestheticizing). Irony is notmissing here. This narrative has been made possible through the uncouplingof culture from the political and economic systems after c. 1500, beginningthe shift from the public to the private sphere (Bambach, 1995; Hardt andNegri, 2000; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002; Huyssen, 1986). Postmodernismseeks to elevate mass culture, or to bring theory low, thus opening the doorsto visual culture in the academy, but there does seem to be a cost andcontroversy associated with this operation (Armstrong, 2000).

For example, visual culture has become an increasingly acute point ofcontention for art educators. The arguments are centered on the role that‘popular culture’ should play in art pedagogy. Hardly politically neutral, thepolemics hinge on whether popular culture should be legitimized as a fieldof study for K–12 as well as college students. The conservative position viewsvisual culture as at best a distraction, at worst a dangerous threat to theappreciation of ‘the great masters’ in its embracing of television, film, andother ‘low’ forms of culture. Conversely, the liberal wing sees visual cultureas an important way to forward a politically aware ‘visual literacy’. This wasthe atmosphere at the National Art Education Association Annual Con-vention held in Boston on 4–8 March 2005. The main proponent for theconservative position was Michael Day from Brigham Young University,while Elliot Eisner, from Stanford, forwarded the pro-visual culture argument(Cheney, 1988; Mitchell, 1995c: 1–8; Reese, 1995). This essay is not the place to articulate all the broader political and cultural issues entangled with this debate – for example, the encroachment of popular culture, ofsecular/liberal/Hollywood-driven mass culture into education; the de-preciation of traditional western/American values with the advancement ofpostmodern ones; the tacit affirmation of a commercialized culture industry through an objective study of it as a legitimate subject. (The last,interestingly enough, is identified as a threat by many on both sides of thepolitical spectrum.) The important point is that visual culture is no longer aquestion about art precisely because its theoretical operative functions on thepremise that the high and low realms have now collapsed into one hom-ogenous field of highly complex, technologically savvy and increasinglyeconomic and political visual culture. The failure to identify and address thissituation is endemic of the problem, and here we should return to our pointsof departure, the ‘visual turn’ and the ‘cultural turn’, for it is in these notionsthat we might identify both desirable and overdue opportunity for thehumanities.


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What is shared as a crucial component of both Mitchell’s notion of‘pictorial’ and Jameson’s ‘cultural’ turns, is a radical reassessment of therelationship between the high and the low. Perhaps mirroring the cultureindustry’s growing homogenization of culture under global capitalism, bothnotions specifically describe a form of cultural study where the hierarchy ofcultural artifacts is collapsed into a horizontal spectrum of cultural products,whether they are works of fine art, literature, videos, television shows, comicbooks, films, or soap operas. Moreover (and this would be Jameson’semphasis), this spectrum would also need to embrace more socio-politicalproducts such as news, information media, and politics. Jameson’s (and others’)point here is that what was heretofore called news or politics has become asaestheticized and ‘produced’ for a market as any other product. Conversely,what we have heretofore called ‘art’ needs to be examined in the same manneras any commodity, propaganda, or promotion (Compton, 2004).4 These areall cultural products, Jameson argues, functioning in a highly commodifiedsystem of cultural promotion and exchange. Thus, ostensibly, it is necessarythat visual culture approach all cultural products as value-neutral, at leasttheoretically. This does not imply that we should ignore hierarchies – or thecritique of such hierarchies. This has been a strategy within art history andsome English literature sub-disciplines, for example, the so-called ‘institutionalcritique’ where both institutions and ‘the canon’, for example, are critiquedand deconstructed. Although this is a component of visual culture, its importhas sometimes been exaggerated in both the primary and secondary litera-ture. Moreover, visual culture adheres to descriptive rather than prescriptiveanalysis, a procedure rarely seen in the polemics of ‘culture wars’, which areimbedded in institutional critiques (Holly et al., 1994; Jay, 1994). However,such a purview does necessitate the disprivileging of some cultural productsover others. While it has been crucial that art historians understand theimportance of the issues and provocations emerging from the field of visualculture (provocations that are revealed precisely through the issues of artisticand cultural hierarchies), art history has failed to do so, arguably tout court. Byrefusing to reassess the modern notion of ‘art’, art history has betrayed (inboth senses of the word) its own history. Herein lies the germ of the oppor-tunity for the humanities to take up the project of visual culture. An analysisof the history of art history’s project yields its thoroughly humanistic roots,roots that in many ways are echoed in contemporary visual culture studies.

Art history’s beginning was principally an attempt to crystallize thehumanistic project of studia humanitatis and artes liberales as the study of allcultural artifacts through the rigorous study of the customs and traditions ofhistorical epochs. In fact, the enterprise of art history was originally anattempt to return to the humanistic project of the Renaissance itself, the study


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of humanitas as being the most important of all academic and intellectualendeavors (Panofsky, 1983: 1–25; Summers, 1995). This was not a 19th-centuryinvention, but is deeply rooted in the history of the liberal arts and humanities since antiquity (Curtius, 1953; Kristeller, 1990). Since its inception,the study of humanitas was the study of a variety of human cultural artifactsas important indices of culture, a study intrinsically interdisciplinary. Thestudy of what today we refer to as ‘fine art’ was but one component of ahumanistic education. It is important to remember that the concept of thefine arts is a relatively recent notion, having developed out of the context ofpost-Renaissance art academies, institutions that were focused precisely onlegitimizing an autonomous institutional space for painting, sculpture, andarchitecture (Kristeller, 1990).5 The philosophy of visual culture is thus morein line with the roots of art history than with art history’s highly problematiccontemporary manifestation, especially in America – roots that share theinterdisciplinary project of studia humanitatis.

There is a long tradition of cross-disciplinary study of cultural productswithin art history. Kurt Forster (among others) has documented the deeprelationship between what we now call visual culture and the early prac-titioners of art history, in particular in the work of Aby Warburg and hisfollowers (Forster, 1996; Reese, 1995). Warburg’s project was centered on atrans-disciplinary study of culture through the examination of various levelsof cultural production, which he called cultural Urkunden, or documents.Anthropology and ethnography were always concomitant partners inWarburg’s ventures into marginal cultural regions. As he put it, ‘the extremesof pure and applied art should be studied, as documents of expression, on anentirely equal footing’ (Forster, 1996: 22). Warburg’s project was an extensionof Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of Kulturwissenschaft: the study of culture, whichwould entail the same rigorousness and respect as given to the naturalsciences. Along these lines, Warburg understood that the study of works ofart was but one component of the broader study of all cultural documentstowards the understanding of complex cultural and historical tendencies andstructures. Warburg’s famous library was conceived as a tangible expression ofhis notion that the study of the history of art was by nature labyrinthine andcross-disciplinary. In many ways, Warburg’s project culminated in his con-ception of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Left uncompleted at his death, the Atlas wasan idiosyncratic and labyrinthine tome that would have been quintessentiallytransdisciplinary in its final formulation (Forster, 1996: 19ff.). As he grew old,Warburg became increasingly disgusted with what he called ‘the aestheticiz-ing of art history’, that is, the growing concentration in art history onconnoisseurship and attribution to the neglect of richer cultural frameworks(Forster, 1996: 6; Gombrich, 1970). Warburg referred to those who would


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defend the boundaries of specialization as ‘guardians of Zion’ (Curtius, 1953:13). It should be noted that Baxandall and Alpers had close ties to the WarburgInstitute in London. Baxandall was in fact teaching there at the time of theconception of Painting and Experience while Alpers was a student of ErnstGombrich, a former director of the Institute and former student of Warburg.Alpers has been at the center of a polemic between Italian and NorthernRenaissance scholars over the function of narrative in Renaissance art.Alpersargued that Dutch art was grounded on a visual culture of descriptivenessrather than istoria. Alpers’ book was quickly criticized by Italian Renaissancescholars (and some Northern ones) while being simultaneously praised by‘new art historians’ as progressively ‘cultural’ in its methodology.

Along similar lines, Erwin Panofsky’s formulation of iconology centeredon a desire to articulate a theoretical framework to use within a broad fieldof investigation for art history, a project that he also developed under theinfluence of Dilthey’s hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1989; Holly, 1984; Podro,1982). It is no coincidence then that Panofsky specifically revised his notionof iconography as iconology: the former being the mere identification ofsubject matter, the latter the interpretation of the work of art as a historicaland cultural product indexical of its broader cultural dimensions and particu-lar historical context (Belting, 2001; Mitchell, 1993; Panofsky, 1983: 26–54).6

Concomitantly, Panofsky wished to make the distinction between arthistory as ‘archaeology’, that is, art history as focused on the recovery anddocumentation of historical objects, and art history as cultural history, that is,the study of works of art as cultural products to be interpreted regardless oftheir aesthetic or formal value. Panofsky inherited the latter notion from AloisRiegl, whose study of ornament and Late Roman art industry was crucial forPanofsky’s appreciation of art beyond the parameters of aesthetics or archae-ology (Holly, 1984; Mitchell, 1995b). Remembering Panofsky’s project,Hubert Damisch, a poststructuralist highly committed to the study of art asbut one component of culture, mentioned more than 25 years ago the failureof modern art history to fully recognize, appreciate, and revive the legacy ofWarburg, Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Max Dvorak, Panofsky and others. ToDamisch, these figures had always advocated embracing the most advancedinterdisciplinary and humanist fields of study for the assessment and interpret-ation of works of art (Damisch, 1975; Mitchell, 1995c: 14). What thesediscussions reveal is the latent humanist core of art history – a type of visualculture avant la lettre. Operating as the combination of two highly complexcritical terms, the term ‘visual culture’ itself maps the intersections betweenvisual culture and the humanities.

Hal Foster has tried to negotiate a distinction between vision and visuality(Foster, 1988).Vision might be understood as the physical operation of seeing


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while visuality stands for the more socio-cultural dimensions of seeing. Ofcourse there is no clear boundary between these operations, but that is besidethe point. What is important is that the ‘visual’ (sometimes denoted by theterm ‘visualization’) can then be described as a combination of vision andvisuality. In this rubric, the ‘visual’ in ‘visual culture’ can thus be regarded asthe reciprocal operation of seeing as a conduit of physical and cultural influ-ences. Within such a locus one could place Baxandall’s notion of ‘period eye’and Martin Jay’s history of vision (1994) on the one hand, with Panofsky’sPerspective as Symbolic Form (1997) and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the other.The point here is that the choice does not have to be either/or preciselybecause the term ‘visual’ incorporates a broad horizon of theoretical andmethodological notions and strategies that are both inclusive and exclusive oftraditional art history – approaches that ironically share more with the projectof humanistic study than with contemporary art history.

‘Culture’ is another matter. As Raymond Williams famously pointed out,culture is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the Englishlanguage’ (Williams, 1983: 87). For the academic and political contestationsover ‘culture’, one need look no further than the still burgeoning and stillundetermined discipline of cultural studies, where ‘culture’ is constantly beingdiscussed through its hybrid cousins, ‘alternative culture’, ‘pop-culture’,‘subculture’, ‘multicultural’, ‘subaltern culture’ and a myriad cognates (Baker,2003; During, 1999; Grossberg et al., 1991; Milner and Browitt, 2002; Storey,1998, 2003). What might seem to indicate an intellectual and pedagogicalquagmire as deep as poststructuralist theory itself is less problematic preciselybecause ‘culture’ is qualified by ‘visual’ in the notion of visual culture. Whenused in this context what we are involved in is the study of those products– including works of art – that are visual (that is, image-based) and culturalin their production and provocations, whether they reside in popular,material, economic, or political culture. Like it or not, the ‘visual’ is theconduit through which virtually all our cultural, political, and economicknowledge and information are filtered.Within this historical paradigm it willbe the structures of images, pictures, and visuality in general that will beidentified as the epistemological fountainhead from which the production,communication, and dissemination of culture will be generated (Florida,2002).7 In this culture of the image (as Mitchell calls it, in contrast to theprevious culture of the word), it will be students and scholars of visualproducts who lead cultural research and discovery. In this light, it is imposs-ible to overestimate the import of the humanistic study of images. Theinterest in articulating the implications and provocations of images is ofcourse highly relevant for art history, but given its failure to embrace theopportunities that visual culture presents, it is within the humanities


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themselves that visual culture needs to be addressed, critiqued, and otherwiseevaluated.

The truth of the matter today is that visual culture calls for an approachthat is neither strictly visual nor strictly cultural, but in reality broader – apostmodern version of the humanities itself. What Mitchell called thepictorial turn and Jameson the cultural turn is in fact but one more chapterin the history of humanism, this time provoked by the ubiquity and importof the technologically reproducible and transportable image. A pedagogical,scholarly and theoretical marriage between visual culture and the humanitieswould engender a highly viable complement to the notion of what MichaelHardt and Antonio Negri have called the new global paradigm, whereproduction is biopolitical in nature. In this formulation, biopower (I wouldsuggest imagopower or imagepolitics) ‘refers to a situation in which what isdirectly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself ’(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 24).8 For Hardt and Negri, the bio of biopower is notsimply referencing its etymological root of ‘life’, but in fact involves a newunderstanding of the ontology of life, one that is not simply physical or chemical but linguistic, ideological and rhetorical. In these terms theproduction and reproduction of life is equated with the production andreproduction of meaning, discourses, and power.

But this would in truth entail, perhaps even necessitate, a new kind ofhumanism. Not an anti-humanism as much as a neo-humanism, wherehumanity, nature and (whether we like it or not) technology are examined,evaluated, contested, valued and interrogated as so many consequentialimages, as much imagi dei as imagi humani. This neo-humanism would thus bedefined as the task of tracking and interpreting the efficacy of the visual asparamount to evaluating and understanding our human condition, acondition that entails the realization that today culture is nothing less than‘the continuous project to create and re-create ourselves and our world’(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 92).

note s

1. The academic writing on visual culture is rapidly expanding. The classic texts on this newfield that have emerged out of various academic disciplines and contexts include Mitchell (1993and 1995c) and Crary (1990). The special issue of the journal October (77, summer 1996) is akey text as an early attempt to define the boundaries of the discipline through the interpret-ations of a distinguished and influential group of historians, art historians, film critics, culturalcritics and literary historians.

2. Although beyond the scope of this essay, there is growing expansion of visual culture studiesthat address fields such as optics, phenomenology, perceptual and neural psychology, andcognition.


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3. Baxandall and Alpers were both involved in the development of New Historicism at theUniversity of California, Berkeley; Alpers co-edited Representations with Stephen Greenblatt.See Kaufmann (1996).

4. An example from contemporary network and cable television: the CBS Early Showregularly includes in its ‘news segments’, ‘special reports and interviews’ on its own Survivorreality show, while the dramatic and aestheticized packaging of news on CNN and Fox Newsis so ubiquitous that it is seemingly taken for granted by the general public.

5. The earliest such institutions being the Accademia del Disegno in Florence founded in 1563and the Académie Française established in 1635. The term Beaux Arts, the precursor to Fine Arts,originated in the 18th century.

6. Mitchell (1993) and Belting (2001) are both attempts to expand on Panofsky’s method-ology in terms of, in particular, the incorporation of what Mitchell calls the ‘family of images’,that is, mental images, linguistic and poetic images, signs and symbols, dreams, maps anddiagrams, thoughts, and such like. In assessing images Belting emphasizes medium and body asthe most authoritative and efficacious of conduits through which images are produced andinterpreted.

7. The relationship between visual culture education and what has been termed the new‘creative class’, made up of designers, engineers, architects, artists and so on, has yet to beaddressed and assessed.

8. Many links between this and Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire have been expressed inrecent discussions on architecture and urbanism. See Tschumi and Cheng (2003) and Foster(2003).

re f e re nc e s

Alpers, S. (1984) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press.

Alpers, S. and Alpers, P. (1972) ‘Ut Pictura Noesis?: Criticism in Literary Studies and ArtHistory’. New Literary History 3(3): 437–58.

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b i og raph i cal note

iv á n casta ñ e da teaches art history, visual culture, and continental philosophy at theUniversity of Idaho. His main research interests are Italian Renaissance art and culture, criticaltheory, and continental aesthetics. He is currently completing a book on Michelangelo andneoplatonic aesthetics. Address: Department of Art & Design, University of Idaho, Moscow,ID 83843, USA. [email: [email protected]; [email protected]]


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visual culture, art history and the humanities

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