Download Lecture Notes – Stein DO NO QUOTE OR Distribute Visual and

Lecture Notes – Stein
DO NO QUOTE OR Distribute
Visual and material culture
(introduction – myself ; then Jonathan ; then myself to wrap it up and put
it in context of module).
Today we are going to look at the way historians dealt with visual and
material objects as historical evidence. I will focus a bit more here on
visual culture as I have worked on that quite a lot in regard to the history
of posters (Aids posters)
It must have gone not as unnoticed to you that until now visual and material
culture has not really played a role in this module.
We have been focusing – almost exclusively and with few exceptions such as
Roland Barthes – on the written word and printed texts and archival sources.
This is what historians have traditionally felt most comfortably with. And that is
reflected in our teaching too here at Warwick.
We mostly teach you text and written sources; images and material culture
comes in in some modules but that is only since the 1990s really – I will tell you
why in the second half of my lecture after Jonathan why this is the case in the
1990s. If you think about a ‘normal’ history text, we find rather few images –
partly this is still due to the fact, that many publisher are still hesitant to reproduce them.
How have images been traditionally treated by historians – if they have been
used at all?
Images as illustrations
When historian used images – until the 1960 and on a massive scale only in the
1990 really -- they tended to use treat them as mere illustrations to the written
text. (an exeption is the Annales school which already used photos in the 1920s –
but that was also a reaction against ‘normal’ history). By which I mean, the image
will not be explained for itself but is reduced to serve a particular logical
argument, made in the text.
(slide) – use of syphilis poster for illustration
Until the 1960s historians were virtually accused – of a certain ‘condescension
towards images’ – by art historians, for example (Fyfe/law, Picturing Power,
1980) – the same is true for the study of any kind of material objects (images are
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of course part of a visual culture AND material culture –remind them)
But it is only in the 1960s due to all the theoretical influences we have already
discussed in the module that historians began to admit – or better, to ‘see’ for
themselves – that they were virtually ‘visually illiterate’ (Ralph Samuel). The
were masters of the text but speechless in front of an image
There are intellectual and institutional reasons for this visual illiteracy of
histrians until the 1960s
Let me talk you through them: the intellectual reasons first
I have to go back to an old friend Leopold von Ranke
(Slide)
We remember that Ranke’s created this historical method, which he coined
‘critical method’ which took the world of history writing by storm. We have seen
that he largely ‘borrowed’ from a colleagues who worked on ancient Rome and
Greek and who were working mainly on editions of Latin and Greek texts. Ranke
famous critical method, we have seen, was at the core a philological method. It
aimed at interpreting texts, to demonstrate their origin, to clarify words, identify
falsities of later edition etc. Accompanied by an often enormous apparatus of
footnotes, historians following this method were trying to reconstructed the Urtext and only from that, so Ranke made them belief, was it possible to write the
correct and truthful history.
So, since its modern beginnings if you like, history writing is about ‘texts’ and the
training of historians traditionally focuses on the interpretations of texts.
Of course, we have seen this too, traditionally history focused on particularly
kind of texts: Ranke and followers considered only political texts worthwhile.
Anything else – texts that would point to economic, social or cultural issue –
were deemed beneath the genius of a proper historians
(historians and books)
This confidence that historians had in their role as interpreters and writers of
‘texts’ and only texts’, was also based on the role history was supposed to play IN
and FOR the wider public since the Enlightenment. We have already learned that
since the Enlightenment history writing was considered of great importance for
the creation and celebration of a civilized nation. Enlightenment thinkers wished
trace the rise and progress of European civilization, to offer a civilizing success
story to their European readers that also helped them and to offer some moral
and ethical lessons for the educated reader.
For Englightenment historians a civilized nation for them was a civilization that
was able to write, to fix its present and the past in the written words. So, one of
their measures of civilization since the Enlightenment was whether a culture was
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able to write or nor – pictures language like the Maya or Inka in south Amercian
had, didn’t’ really count. This remained true for Ranke and his immediate
followers all over the world. If you wanted to critique ‘history’ in the Rankean
sense, which ruled the world until WWII, we saw this with the Annales school,
then you used different sources, including visual and material objects–
remember the areal photography of Marc Bloch, for example)
(institutional reasons…
But that is another reasons, which made it easy for historians to refuse to engage
with the visual or material world. Important is the institutional one…
When history became an academic discipline with permanent jobs, departments,
own journals, conferences etc during the 19th century, other areas of human
knowledge production also made underwent this change and ‘instutionalised’
themselves. While it had been normal for a scholar of the 18th century to pursue
his interests in history, art, archeology, or anthropology together, these areas
were from the second half of the 19th century increasingly pursued as independly
from each other. Like history they had own professors, own research agenda,
own theories and methodologies. So, while historians were specialists of texts,
art historians – like one of the ‘fathers’ of modern art history Swiss Jacob
Burckhardt, for example, would see their territory and expertise in the study of
objects of art (images and objects) in their historical and aestetic/stylistic
contexts and development .
(slide) of Burkchardt
but also archaeology Schliemann (slide)
and anthropology
There was a clear-cut distinction between these different disciplines and
academic history writing in terms of what object but, at least with art history and
archaeology history also shared something. Art History and to a large extend that
is also true for the developing discipline of archaeology dealt with the European
cultures, or, at least with the past of civilised nations, nations who had ‘histories’
– by which was often meant ‘written’ histories. They dealt with civilisations that
were of importance for the history of 19th century European nations -- we
remember that there was this enormous celebration of antiquity in the 19th
century.
For practitioners of these subjects, academic history, art history and
archaeology, the term ‘culture’ meant something very specific:

Namely the study of the elite culture: in the case of Ranke it was the study
of elite political culture – no social or cultural hsitory; in the case of art
history it was the study of great painters and paintings ; that were
deemed extraordinary treasure of the civilizing history of Europe (all
these painting which were hung form the 19th century in public museums
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
– Erwin Panofsky is part of this tradition. In the case of archaeology it
meant the study of ‘classical’ civilisations. In short academic history, art
history, and archeology studied the history of the European ‘self’, the
history of the elite expression of ‘cultural people’ (Kulturvölker).
‘One must’, Ranke wrote about the task of history, for example,
exclude questions about societies from which we possess no
written documents and leave their study ‘to natural science and to
religious viewpoints.’

The study of this elite cultural people (Kulturvoelker), of the own
European past was neatly separated from the past of ‘the other’, the nonEuropean. This task was left to the developing discipline of
ethnology/ethnography or anthropology. Practitioners of these
disciplines would deal with so-called ‘natural people; (Naturvölker), those
who did not possess written documents. The research material of these
disciplines were mainly material objects.
This story how the world of human thinking and production was distributed
at the end of the 19th century among different developing academic
disciplines that developed separate and competing theories in which they
trained their young ‘offspring’ is incredibly interesting, and it is important.
The term ‘interdisciplinarity’ which is so much in fashion today and you read
it many history articles is trying to overcome this distribution of study this
‘disciplinarity’ that came into being during the 19th century and that had a lot
of do with imperialism – that is another story.
I’ve said earlier that it is only in the 1960s that academic historians – and
with them academics from the other disciplines too – admitted that they
were had no clue about the study of objects or visual material.
It is not – this mini-intro claimed, because historian were stupid but it due to
the history of their field. It has specific intellectual and institutional reasons;
academic disciplines in the human sciences do have specials jobs to do – and
that is what their students are told and taught.
Now from this little introduction we will now hand over to Jonathan…..move
to
(Jonathan’s section _
Le me take over again from Jonathan: I shall focus in the following on
material/visual culture in history writing:

now we have talked about that in the 1960s/1970s the call for the
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‘experience’ of the past becomes an important endeavor. We saw the
turn away from rigid Marxist history writing – statistics etc. – to a
focus on ‘experience’ of the little people
(slide)
Baxendall is certainly influenced by this more general move in the
1960 to explore the experiences of the lower classes, and his
attempt to bring social history to stuffy elite fixated art history is a
reflection of this I would argue. (still not wide spread)
So, we discussed that this move to the lower class experience
makes historican turn to new sources from which they could learn
these ‘experience’ (Ginzburg with court record).
And this is where images come in: Images became an important
mans to learn about the lower classes, who were largely illiterate.
So, it is when these new social historian – as Raphael Samuel
whom I quoted in the beginning, began to be interested in these
visual sources, that they realized that they were utterly illequipped to deal with them; they were visually ‘illiterature’
(brief mentioning of Baxendall)
Now, we all know by now that the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s was
paralleled by another movement we now call – postmodern. We’ve learned that
this movement – coming predominantly from France was characterized by the
increasing questioning of intellectuals of heritage of the Enlightnement and its
values and ‘meta-narratives (the meta narratives which modern society had
followed until then such as progress; human action based on reason, permance
of structures, reality, objectivity and so on but also distinctions such as cultural
peoples and natural peoples).
We talked about the ‘lingustic turn’ and its central tenets:
 turn to language – first in philosophy but then this affects all of
academia (differently in each country of course)
Saussure and his semiotic theory; broke the link – uncritically
accepted so far between a word and the object it denoted; this
destabilized the relationship between ‘knowledge’ and ‘langauge’
(used to discuss ‘reality’ in the various disciplines);
We remember, I hope that scholars started to doubt that what they
read in a text or how they ‘read’ an image or paiting was so
straightforward.
No, longer did talk about ‘reality’ but only about ‘representations’
of reality.
Now a famous work that kicked off this postmodern debate was
Michel Foucault’s 1966 bestseller ‘the Order of things’. It is a book
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which is about texts – and his new archaeological method – but it
start off with an interpretation of a famous image. And this
interpretation became even more famous, because it captures the
postmodern quarrel with the representation of ‘reality’ and
problematizes the question of the ‘author – or painter in this case –
and the reader – viewer in this case
(slide Las menisnas)
Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) is a 1656 painting by Diego
Velázquez, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Long regarded as
most important picture
The painting shows a large room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid
during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several
figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured,
according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a
snapshot.
Some look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others
interact among themselves. The young Infanta Margaret Theresa is
surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone,
bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez
portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks
outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the
painting would stand.
In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies
of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the
picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although
some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from
the painting Velázquez is shown working on.
Interpreation: The work's complex and enigmatic composition
raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an
uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures
depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one
of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting.
Foucuault postmodern analyses of it aimed at showing that
language cannot describe what is going on in the picture.
(read quote on slide)
‘But the relationship of language to painting is an infinite
relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when
confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably
inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms:
And is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never
resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to
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show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we
are saying; the space where they achieve their splendor is
not that deployed by our eyes by that defined by the
sequential element of syntax.’
Again, the book just analyses text – however uses a very visual language but it is
the first major success of postmodern thinking in history (written by a
philosopher)
Important for the visual and material turn is:
History is the slowest discipline to take it up – others are faster such as
anthropology – which is important for t
We talked about this in the area of history/philosophy, in the area of texts
(literary critic Hayden white or Roland Barthes) but this linguistic turn also
affects anthropology and art history or . In fact we have seen that historians were
actually very slow to adopt it – other disciplines are much faster:
Clifford Geertz – applies it in anthropology – and historians
get it from him

(slide)
two major movements here which follow each other chronologically
structuralism: those intellectuals who believed like Saussure that
there is a structure beyond the representations
- we discussed here the prime example is Geertz and his
‘thick description’
-
this ‘thick description’ records the circulation of objects,
people and speech – but that is only the first step –you
remember – we want to get down to the level beyond
this ritual thi symbolic actions that binds, objects,
people, speech together and understand more about the
structure of the given society.
-
Reading on material culture of the 1980s and 1990 is
very much inspired by this thick description and we
shall discuss this in the afternoon. One of your readings
of Prown, Jules is very much indepted to this kind
approach: he believes that the study of material culture
allows you to get at the systems of belief in a past or
present culture. (written in 1982)
Structuralism and the study of pictures/images:
Structural approach – the search for the ‘meaning’ of hidden symbolic clues to
understand the underlying ‘structure’ of culture – also inspires interpretation of
pictures,
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(Barthes in his early phase as a a structuralist before he
turns postststructuralist)
(2 slides)

But we know that structuralism was not here to stay: structuralism
turns in the 1980s into poststructuralism (that is what the angloamercian called it – unknown term in France).
o Historians like Joan Scott began to critise the structural
approach by people like Thomspns argueing against the ridid
ideas of structure; they draw attention to the fact that
‘experience’ is not universal but historically specific.
o
o they bring in playfulness; a stronger focus on the text itself;
Walkowitz, has we have seen, adopts a new way of writing
history; a history that avoids conclusion by the writer for the
reader; opens the text up to interpretation of the reader;
o
o in fact, what we have seen is that poststsructurlist inspired
historians destablise the idea of experience – we can never get
there due to language and there is also no structure in which
this experience is defined – all is always all in flow.
o Particularly from the 1990s, historians also question the
fixation on text: they began to argue that particiluarly as our
world today is overfloaded with images; we as historians who
make the past available to the present need to take this into
account; We need to deal with images in the past because we in
the present are defined by images NOT by text anylonger.
o New aras of study emerge that deal with image in history:
‘visual culture’(mirzoff is one of the new zars of visual culture)
Power/knowledge:
we also saw that historians became in the 1990s greatly attracted by Foucaults
second methodological phase ; his genealogical method which is for the lack of a
better word I will call poststructual – his method of geneology and his attention
to knowledge/power.
(slide with orientalism)
We talked about it when we discussed Said and Orientalism; Again:
Said too focuses on text – caught in his own discipline of English
literature of course –. But he mention mapmaking, painting etc.
Said is only the beginning of a fload of publications – you have read
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one for today – that pick up the foucaultia idea of power /knowledge
and use material and visual culture to discuss postcolonialism
(slide)
No longer fitted into a narrative but the images itself – or the object
itself becomes central to the seaking of meaning –
very much like the text itself in Roland Barthes and the onlooker is
part of this meaning making .
(mirzoff’s introduction is an interesting example._
This new way of perceiving the workd indeed to think that we live in a
world that is not visual not textual anymore
 new discipline Visual culture ; Visual culture studies
Came together as an interdisciplinary field in the late 1980s after the
discipline sof art history, anthropology, film studies, linguistics and
comparative literature encountered poststructural theory and cultural
studies
Now at the time Baxendall is suggesting that art historians – who usually only
work on high art up to that time should take into account the social-cultural
world of perception. Morover, he argues that when interpreting an image you
need to take this into account – so, do not just focus on the painter but how
the painter takes the public into account. So, here we can see a clear influence
of a wider move – which also affected history writing. The move to
‘experience’. Dealing with different objects – here images – one could argue
that Baxendall is very much in line with Thompson who was also after the
‘experience’ of the past. Thompson is after the experience of the poor people
and Baxendall is about the experience of the onlooker of a picture – his are
taking into account the lower classes as he reflects on how they would react
to devotional images.
Now at the same time as Baxendall is writing we of course have this famous
move to language, which we have talked about, we have called this interest
that manifested itself differently in the academic disciplines – and was also
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nationally different – the ‘linguistic turn.’ -- brief examplanation and point
out main areas --.
Now Saussure made another suggestions which I have mentioned but not
explained in detail which is now getting important. He argues that spoken
language is only one possible sign system. There are many others, flag
systems, street signs systems etc. all of them requite language to express
itself. There is no way that we g
through which people communicate. He himself did not explore these
systems but his enthusiasts of the 1960s – particularly scholars who worked
in the visual domain (art historians) or with materials (anthropologists) were
interested in it began to include try out linguistic theory for the analysis of
the visual and material world. This turn has been called by historians of art
the ‘pictorial turn’. In short, the ideas of the linguistic turn coming from
linguistic theory and philosophy are applied differently to the different
discipines – and produced different results due to the internal theory tool kid
of the disciplines produced since the mid-19th century.
But we also have a ‘material turn’ here, particularly in those academic areas
which deal with material objects, such as anthropology but also art history if
we think about design etc. We have seen for example that the structuralists
Clifford Geertz in his thick description – a semiotic reading of the balienese
cookfight did not only look at written. Anthropology dealt with cultural
expression outside of readings. No he basically descripted rituals which
inclided a attention to humans and objects. So, for structuralists like Geertz
or the early Roland Barthes human action, visual and material objects were
engeaged in this symbolic interaction and what was required was to get at
their underlying meaning.
(show barthes images again) myth
Draw on the text by prowne on material culture.
Now, I want to argue that all disciplines were much affected by the linguistic
turn. And it lead in history not only to particular way of writing history but
also to a tremendous looseing up. Historians became more aware of the other
sign cultures of you like. They had made the move to lower classes – away
from hight polticis and were interested in the experiences of the little people.
But they also became aware that these expereicnes were not only shaped by
talking and writing or thinking. But experiences in the past were also
produced by images and material objects. So, how can we take them into
account
So, what this linguistic turn produced was a new interest of historians in
these world of objects and the visual and an interest in communicating with
other disciplines who were specialists in treating these objects.
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What we see emerging is an increasing interdisciplinarity. We saw that
already: Darnton uses anthropology;
But not only that. Particularly the move from structuralism – so you believe
that beyond what you see is an underlying structure that is responsible for
what you experience – to structuralism produces an entirely new field in art
history, film studies which is very influential to historians
Visual culture studie a new field for the study of cultural construction of the
visuals arts medical and everyday life. It came together in the 1980s after the
disciplines of art history, anthropology, film studies, linguistics and
comparative literature encountered poststructural theory can cultural
studies.
What these shifts in intellectual and academic discourse have to do with each
other, much less with everyday life and ordinary language is not especially
self-evident. But it does seem clear that another shift in what philosophers
talk about is happening, and that once again a complexly related
transformation is occurring in other disciplines of the human sciences and in
the sphere of public culture. I want to call this shift “the pictorial turn.” In
Anglo-American philosophy, variations on this turn could be traced early on
in Charles Peirce’s semiotics and later in Nelson Goodman’s “languages of
art,” both of which explore the conventions and codes that underlie
nonlinguistic symbol systems and (more important) do not begin with the
assumption that language is paradigmatic for meaning. In Europe one might
identify it with phenomenology’s inquiry into imagination and visual
experience; or with Derrida’s “grammatology,” which de-centers the
“phonocentric” model of language by shifting attention to the visible, material
traces of writing; or with the Frankfurt School’s investigations of modernity,
mass culture, and visual media; or with Michel Foucault’s insistence on a
history and theory of power/knowledge that exposes the rift between the
discursive and the “visible,” the seeable and the sayable, as the crucial faultline in “scopic regimes” of modernity. Above all, I would locate the
philosophical enactment of the pictorial turn in the thought of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, particularly in the apparent paradox of a philosophical career
that began with a “picture theory” of meaning and ended with the appearance
of a kind of iconoclasm, a critique of imagery that led him to renounce his
earlier pictorialism and say “A picture held us captive. And we could not get
outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us
inexorably.” Rorty’s determination to “get the visual, and in particular the
mirroring, metaphor out of our speech altogether” echoes Wittgenstein’s
iconophobia and the general anxiety of linguistic philosophy about visual
representation. This anxiety, this need to defend “our speech” against “the
visual” is, I want to suggest, a sure sign that a pictorial turn is taking place.
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