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Bryson, Norman, Holly, Michael Ann, and Moxey, Keith, eds.
Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation. HarperCollins,
1991, 305 pp., 73 b & w illus., $35.00 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Visual Theory is a much better book than we have come to
expect from the process of turning conference proceedings,
especially interdisciplinary ones, into collections of articles.
The promoted reasons for such conferences are familiar:
to
bring together writers from a variety of institutional
perspectives, around some central problem(s) currently relevant
to them all, with the resultant commentary on each other's work
advancing the discussion, or at least representing the current
state of differing positions on the organizing issue.
And
equally familiar by now are the normal results of such
proceedings:
a disconnected series of predictable posturings,
followed by shouting across disciplinary boundaries, with
"commentary" reduced to either indictment and counter-assertion,
or the more genteel swerving of the subject round to the topic
of whatever new article, however irrelevant, one happens to be
working on at the moment.
Something with a certain interest as
spectacle, perhaps, but nothing to take home and actually read.
The current book is a welcome exception to this law of
academic discourse.
The contributors include people from
departments of Art and Art History, Philosophy, English,
Anthropology, History, and Psychology, and they actually talk to
each other.
The format of the book is that of seven papers,
each followed by one or two commentaries.
The papers are by
Linda Nochlin, Norman Bryson, Rosalind Krauss, Richard Wollheim,
Michael Podro, Arthur Danto and David Summers, and they are all
worth reading.
The commentaries are for the most part of an
unusually high order:
genuinely thoughtful and responsive to
the papers whose arguments they not only criticize, but carry
further in unanticipated directions.
(Particularly helpful are
the commentaries by Ludmilla Jordanova, Stephen Melville, Shelly
Errington, and the much-missed Flint Schier.)
In addition, the volume is more than just a disparate
collection of papers.
In one way or another, all the papers
concern themselves with the nature of visual representation, and
all of them register the pressure (whether by way or resistance
or embrace) of the various sign-oriented discourses of the
humanities following in the wake of structuralism, usually with
a historical/political edge to them, and which now go by the
hyper-generic name of 'theory'.
Not that this is cast as a
debate between various factions ranged either 'for' or 'against'
'theory' in the 'humanities'.
For in this particular context it
would be even more misleading than it normally is in a more
strictly literary one to think that it is the legitimacy of
theorizing as such that is at issue.
It is clear, for instance,
that although the papers by Wollheim and Summers reflect little
influence of recent Franco-American theoretical products, they
are nonetheless as fully 'theoretical' as any writing on these
subjects.
Instead, it is a concern with a particular
theoretical possibility, that is, the applicability of a
basically linguistic (or semiological) model of meaning as
applied to the visual arts, and the question of any wider
consequences thereof, that links most of the essays in one way
or another.
Bryson's article, for example, sketches "the
outlines of a semiological approach to painting",(p. 61) and
argues for the social and political importance of this choice as
against anything more naturalistic, cognitive, or psychological.
And the essay by Krauss is a diagnosis of couple of recent
instances of what she sees as the "co-optation of linguistics
with all its intellectual glamour and prestige [...] in the
service of the old humanist subject"(p. 80).
Wollheim, on the
other hand, offers a distinctly non-conventionalist account of
the nature of visual representation, while Summers writes
against what he sees as "linguistic imperialism" in the theory
of the visual arts.
Most of the other papers also make contact
with these questions, and the reader does come away with an
overall sense of what people see as being at stake in these
issues from different points in the current criticalphilosophical scene.
And indeed, the question of the linguistic model does seem
an especially useful place to locate several lines of
disagreement in recent thinking about literature, philosophy,
and the visual arts.
While it is true that philosophers raised
within a generally Anglo-Saxon framework may well find some of
the
articles here, particularly among the defenders of the
linguistic model, to be of more symptomatic than diagnostic
value, nonetheless their heuristic and documentary importance
should not be underestimated.
The influence of the linguistic
model for thinking about cultural phenomena generally is too
pervasive to be denied, and rarely will the reader find its
rationale, or the assumed stakes behind it, presented as clearly
and forcefully (if briefly) as it is in, for instance, the
essays of Krauss and Bryson.
This alone would make this a
useful text in courses on contemporary aesthetics and cultural
theory.
That said, it must also be noted that the case for the
linguistic model in cultural theory is no stronger than it ever
was.
The Introduction by the editors leaves no doubt as to
their commitments here.
They contrast two approaches to visual
representation, the first of which "argues that representation
is always a matter of convention, not of essence", the second of
which appeals to, among other things, the psychology of
perception and thus (as they see it) tries "to define an essence
of art" (p. 1).
dichotomy:
Very much gets loaded on to both sides of this
the denial of the conventionality of all
representation amounts to the denial of the need for
interpretation, the absence of history and the downplaying of
social difference, and an endorsement of not only essentialism
about art but also of a timeless and universal scheme of human
psychology.
This is a tangle of very disparate issues, of
course, but a highly influential tangle, and sorting it out will
be made easier by the clear presentation much of it gets in this
book.
And, even if one thinks, as I do, that the debate invoked
by this dichotomy is dominated by confusion among separate
questions, this presentation makes it clear why the stakes have
been thought to be so high in the debate over something so
academic as the arbitrary nature of the sign.
It is, of course, not the case that the denial of the
conventionality of visual representation commits one to any of
the positions it is saddled with above.
A non-conventional
account of the nature of representation can be as historically
or politically oriented as any other in its account of the
operation of representations within society.
But it will not
construe all power relations as conventional (rather than
causal) power relations.
It may emphasize cultural disparity
and the need for interpretation of the visual, but it will not
see interpretation as anything like a process of de-coding.
The
rejection of conventionalism need not even embrace any
particularly psychological account of visual representation, for
it may find what is most crucial to its account at the level of
cultures and histories.
Only history will be construed as
something causal and contingent, rather than as the shifting of
arbitrary sign-systems.
The editors claim Linda Nochlin for the
conventionalists, and for all I know that may be her genuine
view of the matter.
However, her very clear and useful overview
of feminist issues in art history makes little, if any, appeal
to a linguistic model of meaning in painting, and the force of
her critique would lose nothing at all if it were couched in
explicitly non-conventionalist terms.
The subordination of
women, inside and outside of painting, is, after all, a matter
of genuine social relations, and these relations are contingent,
historical, and causal ones, quite unlike the arbitrary relation
between the word 'tree' and the objects it names in English.
Part of the attraction of the linguistic model is simply
that of hitching one's disciplinary wagon to something big and
systematic that promises some real results.
And in the case or
semiology, it is not hard to discern the fantasy of a science of
signs providing one with a Theory of Absolutely Everything:
since all knowledge is mediated by signs, any trained reader of
(literary or other) signs must be in a position to assess and
critique any and all knowledge claims.
But it is not clear that
any important consequences follow from the arbitrary nature of
the linguistic sign, or that it is even a particularly
interesting claim.
As Saussure himself noted early in the
Course in General Linguistics, "No one disputes the principle of
the arbitrary nature of the sign" (part one, chapter one,
section 2), and he was hardly the first person to point this
out.
And he also acknowledges that even linguistic
arbitrariness is a relative matter of degree.
signs are more arbitrary than others.
Some linguistic
And outside of language
he believes there are "completely natural signs", and claims
that "one characteristic of the symbol is that it is never
wholly arbitrary" (op. cit.).
Naturalism in the theory of visual representation is by
nature a theory committed to the contingency of the relations
and processes it studies, should never have been opposed to
attention to the historical or social.
By contrast, the very
commitments of conventionalism leave it with little to tell us
about the role of power and contingency in cultural relations
generally.
At this point in history it should not be possible
for one to assume that to call something natural (let alone
simply a causal matter) is to claim that it is not subject to
change, indeed, to intentional, politically directed change.
Neither should it be as easy as it seems to be to assume that
human conventions are somehow more subject to change, or their
contingent historical origins somehow easier to discern, or
their political motivations or implications somehow more direct
or readable.
Even when implicated in a debate whose terms need
to be replaced by different ones, the papers in Visual Theory
often provide ways for thinking our way into something better
concerning the relations of painting, philosophy and the rest of
culture.
Richard Moran
Department of Philosophy
Princeton University