Visual studies - Feature

Research and pedagogy combine to fuel the current interest in "visual studies." Less defined than the contested territories of "cultural," "critical," or other "studies," the activities that fall within the range of things "visual" depend on whose scope is trained on the field. Practitioners conceive of visual studies as a rubric under which the work of artists and designers can be legitimately understood as research in its own right, informed by historical study and theoretical precepts while functioning primarily through creative activity. Within a scholarly frame, visual studies suggests critically rigorous examination of image artifacts that don't fall within the canonical strictures of art history. Works produced across the broadest possible reach of human activities--the natural and speculative sciences, mathematics, engineering, medical imaging, cartography, circuit design, information science, logic, and the many zones of graphic production in commercial and public sectors--all are valid objects for such examination. But ways of thinking about visual representation also constitute a significant aspect of visual studies work. These fall everywhere on the ekphrastic spectrum that stretches between language-based assertions about the primacy of linguistic thought and those that suggest the full autonomy of visual cognition as a field functioning independently on physiological, psychological, and perceptual levels. Maybe the most important claim for visual studies is that ways of thinking can be effected in visual media.

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With these aspects in view--practice, history, criticism, pedagogy, and epistemology--how should visual studies insert itself into critical discourse? Where in the academy should it reside if it is to find a foothold? Does the field exist as handmaid to other disciplines? (A means of providing historians and critics with an intellectual skill set adequate to assess visual materials?) Does it belong with the larger, also-emerging field of media studies? Can a field that struggles to put practice on the same level of authority as critical studies function to the benefit of both? Who needs a new field anyway? Can't we go on just letting visual media insinuate themselves into individual areas of contemporary life according to discipline-specific needs? Maybe answering these last questions is the most important way to begin.

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The pervasive presence of desktop capabilities for production in graphics, video, animation, and other visual modes has heightened awareness of the need for visual fluency, including critical skills. "Decoding"--as we used to quaintly call it--of "messages" received in visual form is so fundamental that it should be taught in primary schools. The analysis of representation is bound up with the rapid production, dissemination, and absorption of experience in visually mediated form. Images are the ruling trope and stuff, matter, and metaphor, of a "society of the spectacle," a "simulacral" culture, where the work of the vision-machine perceptron threatens to subsume us in a totality of "surveillance technology" and imagery regimes. How can we intervene in such domains without some critical purchase on the systems that produce us so skillfully as interpellated subjects of contemporary culture?

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Middle school and high school students reach for their digital cameras and iMacs with a casual ease. More kids entering college have videos in their portfolios and production careers in mind than ever before, if I can take the incidental evidence offered by my undergraduates. The means of creating visual artifacts are so generally available in a first-world middle-class and professional context that the industries of design, journalism, film, animation, and entertainment have been radically transformed. In more esoteric or specialized domains, technological advances at the micro, macro, and meta-visual realms process all manner of data, information, or experienced phenomena into images for cognitive perception. Visuality is a primary mode of understanding, but also of our production as social and cultural beings. Identity and authority are constituted through the systems of knowledge production embodied in visual forms. We know this. But how seriously does this centrality of vision translate into a theory of visuality? Not just the "reading" of visual representations, but an understanding of the cultural-cognitive foundation of visuality as a way of knowing? A challenge indeed.

Confronted with such challenges, we have to wonder how it is that visual studies has been so long in coming. Oh, it's not that nobody ever had a thought about images, representation, visual forms, and their communicative power before now. Hardly. The biblical Second Commandment is a meta-visual commentary of the highest order, fully cognizant of the need to discipline the seductive potency of representation and the delusions it can produce through material means. The idea of a face of God that cannot be looked on, a name that cannot be written--these are theoretically cogent articulations premised on insights about visual representation. But taboos exist to constrict, not expand, understanding. The mechanisms by which practices are excluded are also those by which reflection on the structure and efficacy of such practices is banished from consideration.

In that somewhat substantial lapse of time between Old Testament origins of Judeo-Muslim-Christian law and attitudes towards icons and the present state of academical-critical-creative debate, a few important milestones can be marked in the progress towards a theoretical scaffolding mounted on the face of the visual. Practical treatises and guides for production in graphic, cartographic, or other technical applications are full of information about the nature and use of visual knowledge. Leonardo's notebooks or Geoffrey Tory's Champfleury or Albert's treatise on perspective are hardly slacker contributions. They flicker between the realms of visual and meta-visual discourse. Monumental testimonials to visual intelligence, they do not, however, step out of their own pursuits, turn to the reader and say--to paraphrase what phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty would suggest considerably closer to our time--how do you know what it is you think you see?

Approaches to the study of visual epistemology from cognitive, as well as aesthetic, applied, and imaginative domains, have only recently come into focus. Similar comments could be made about the study of language from philosophical perspectives. Not by accident is twentieth-century philosophy distinguished by its "linguistic turn"--as attention shifted to the very means by which thought seems to be formulated and apprehended by the mind. The twenty-first century may come to be characterized as that in which the "visual turn" comes to the fore--as the debate about the possible primacy and autonomy of visual epistemology unfolds.

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The groundwork is in place for such an approach. A sketch of the historical development of the field of visual studies would begin with those paragons of intellectual self-consciousness such as Gyorgy Kepes, Paul Klee, and William Ivins, whose intellectual training gave credibility to the study of visual forms as presentations of knowledge. The same late nineteenth-century impulse that led to coupling the term "sciences" to inquiries once less clearly rooted in claims to empirical or rigorous systematicity pushed awareness among practitioners of the visual arts and its critical pursuits. The notion of a "language" of visual form, itself bearing all the hallmarks of derivative relation to the attempt on the part of linguistic study to "scientificize" its own premises, became popular in early twentieth-century writings and curricula. In the process, the real peculiarity of this idea was eclipsed by the habitual use of the phrase and what it is taken to mean. Languages are only a little better suited to systematization than images. The distinctions between these two domains are frequently contested and debated in the realms of semiotics, structuralism, poetics, and aesthetics. In the present, struggles over artificial vision and language recognition intensify such contrast as the attempts to organize the critical understanding of visuality proceeds along the same lines as those that emerge from the study of language. Late twentieth-century cognitive studies, particularly those derived from information-processing models (I'm thinking of Alan MacEachren), are putting forth new parameters for understanding visuality. But the legacy of earlier twentieth-century systematic approaches, of which Kepes and Klee are representative, have bequeathed a mix of useful constraints and concepts into the intellectual discourses of visuality. The very idea that marks, forms, tones, or values might be understood as the material constituents of images--that imagery was not merely a record of vision but a primary means of meaning creation and production. These alternatives for understanding images are an essential foundation for the examination of cultural relativism or ideological readings. But the idea of a "language of form" imprisons visual epistemology in a model of logocentric discourse formation antithetical to its means of expression and its content formation.

Twentieth-century thinkers capable of creating a meta-language of visual form certainly had their own precedents to overcome and build on. Writings in nineteenth-century beaux arts, even such works as the elaborate Grammar of Ornament produced by Owen Jones, edge towards that horizon of self-consciousness in which visuality is not only a means, but a method of thinking about thinking. An historical survey of the many richly varied ways in which visual knowledge has been produced would stretch into the remotest period of human memory, to star charts and cave paintings. But the history of frameworks for understanding visual epistemology itself is strikingly brief. The contrast I am trying to make here is the one that distinguishes between the description of maps and mapmaking and the discussion of what it means to make a map, to think topographically, and to organize the perception of the physical space of the world according to specific conventions rooted in the cultural conventions according to which a perceptual model assumes visual form. The very notions of surveying and surveillance essential to map production, for instance, assume subject and object relations of a sort that may be refracted through a host of critical lenses--some of which would radically reject topographic visualizations on phenomenological grounds.

What better time than now to extend our intellectual reach? The field of visual studies has lain latent. A loophole in the curriculum when I was doing graduate work at Berkeley in the 1980s, it was a kind of vestigial intellectual organ atrophied almost out of existence in the College of Environmental Design. An apt place, in fact, remnant as it was of that influence of latter-day Bauhaus sensibilities that had brought into being the Carpenter Center at Harvard (established in 1963), the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (1968), along with other institutional sites whose existence was as much testimony to the cultural migrations of artist-intellectuals out of a Soviet and European context in the middle of century, as it was of a bourgeoning interest cultivated on American soil. The Anglo-American spirit has never quite trusted the visual senses or aesthetic knowledge, one feels, and only within the realms where imagery can appear to serve empirical investigation does its credibility begin to arise. Science, as we know, is the salvation of visual knowledge in secular arenas.

But the establishment of these centers has not meant their continuity. And the fortunes of the Carpenter Center could be well-traced as a history of the spikes and downfall of attempts to integrate an intellectually substantive approach to visuality into an undergraduate institution. The difficulty, especially recently, has been to found visual studies on a basis that is independent of studio art, art history, film studies, and media studies of the now tired-feeling semiotic variety. To do this at Harvard at this millennial juncture would be exemplary, if it were possible to realize the project in terms that could demonstrate a combination of applied, theoretical, historical, and critical knowledge. My agenda here is not to launch a stealth plan for renewal of the dark spaces in program activity that currently haunt the only building by Le Corbusier ever built on the North American continent. But if visual studies was important enough to merit the construction of such housing forty years ago, why shouldn't it be worth considering the ways in which it might be reinvented to suit the next generation of students and scholar-practitioners?

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Early twentieth-century approaches, combining applied and theoretical approaches to visual form, arose in the curricula of institutions like those founded in the Soviet Union and elsewhere to experiment with combining research and technical applications in the arts. Vkhutemas (Moscow 1920-30) and Inhuk (1920-26) come to mind, though of course the Weimar Bauhaus is both the single outstanding example and a unique case of such experiments and the spirit of that era. In the 1920s the writings of Lissitzky sit alongside his practice as surely as the photographic work of Rodchenko dialogues with his proposals for curriculum development in debates with Kandinsky. Artists like Larionov and Goncharova, Burliuk and Itten, Baader and Hoch were theorists and poets like Ernst, de Zayas, and Lewis were artists. Critical practice in the political sphere was central to the Sternberg brothers, Dziga Vertov, and John Heartfield as they made aggressive deconstruction of ideological forms through the radically destablizing visual collage and montage activity. Nobody took a "theory class" in order to get the dose of crit-speak-vocabulary necessary to accessorize their "personal statements" with a sprinkling of the current lexicon. The gap is enormous--between the current consumer-style approach to education and training and the everything-at-stake attitude of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, whose work laid so much of the foundation for the legacy within which visual studies came into being.

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The passionate vision of these individuals brooked no compartmentalization. They would have had little use and less respect for the narrow professional specialities that plague contemporary academic or art programs, intent as they were on a Vision of the world as newly re-imagined form, wide open to radical re-conceptualization. The inversion of this project, the world of Vision, turns the telescope around, and only the two perspectives combined are adequate to the task of a parallax view--as necessary now as then to developing the conceptual and technical basis of visual studies.

But visual studies now can't be revived as a necrophilic tribute to the dead horse of historical artistic moments. These interdisciplinary practices, wholistically heterogeneous (if such a paradox can be tolerated), certainly provide a necessary model of artist-theorist-critic-activists, but the world of image technology and communication has changed. We are as much in need of critical purchase on the medical imaging that creates our illusion of the real body we inhabit as we are of ways to rethink documentary photography or graphic design. No single area of contemporary culture is without its visual forms. All, I would argue, fall legitimately within the scope of visual studies. But of course the field is not constituted merely by this expansive, exhaustive range of objects. Quite the contrary, it is necessarily brought into being by ways of thinking about these things. Visual studies has to think through the ways of thinking about what visuality is--not just to look around at the endless proliferation of images and artifacts. And here is where the plan for a curriculum or for research hits immediately against the most fundamental obstacle in contemporary life: we teach reading, writing, and mathematics skills as core skills. But drawing? Nothing is more important to the development of acuity in visual thought than drawing. Drawing is to visual epistemology what language skills have been to philosophy. The very absence of a solid authority for visual epistemology can be traced to this aporia. The primacy of language as a debated mode of absolute authority within philosophy up to the present is merely the demonstration of the fallacy, not the truth, of language as the medium through which knowledge must be constituted. I'm always and constantly surprised when a literary scholar--Barbara Stafford or Norman Bryson for instance--suddenly proclaims that "the visual" has its own authority. No artist would be surprised in the least, mute though they may be on the topic in response.

Critical-academic discourses, and the authority that inheres in them, are still so beholden to their logocentric foundations that they struggle with the sincere but hopeless effort of lapsed believers to see beyond their childhood training. Try talking a lit-crit person into the idea that an image communicates non-linguistically. Try convincing a poet that not everything exists in terms of language. The very terms on which "thinking" is conceived have been so stringently aligned with linguistic understanding that more than a bit of correction will be necessarily before visual studies can assert an independent authority. Julia Kristeva can detail Giotto's Joy and the sensuousness of color as a non-linguistic entity, or Mieka Bal delight in the fleshly pleasures of visual mark-making. But the Law of the Symbolic has a legislative potency that comes down with terrifying authority into these discourses. Why? Because language is the law we know, that knows us. Visuality is a form of knowledge still in need of its metacritical authority.

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Not to worry. Students and artists, younger people raised in the thick of popular culture and the consumer industries whose entertainment values are fostered through image and spectacle, are happy to make this leap. Their sound-bite, eye-byte sense of language and image--superficial in many ways, a "viewing" without "seeing"--is nonetheless primed for this paradigm shift. The difficulty will be in training the trainers, finding an educational and critical scaffolding for new thought that grasps the integrity of visuality as a problematic, not as a problem set to be resolved through interpretation (i.e. linguistic re-representation).

Certainly courses in visual theory can and will be taught. I've taught them myself in many forms--thought never as satisfactorily as I would like in terms of the integration of studio and scholarly practices. Much wonderful literature exists from fields of aesthetics, cognitive science and vision, cartographic theory, information design, and art history (mainly from its more lapsed practitioners). The work of James Elkins, W. J. T. Mitchell, Roland Barthes, Edward Tufte, Stephen Kosslyn, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Griselda Pollock--the list is long. Wonderful materials abound for creating a theoretical scaffolding. Our understanding of things visual, filtered through the medium of language, has advanced way beyond the "languages of form" notions and into a multifaceted field of intellectual study. But visual epistemology, not visual images, has to be the grail of this inquiry. Integrating this theoretical discourse with theoretical practice will still require considerable imagination.

A case study ends my discussion, one that shows the difficulty of overturning entrenched positions even in new fields of activity. Digital humanities, a field that has emerged with critical mass in the last decade from its origins in stylometrics, computational linguistics, and areas of information science and document management, has had little truck with the visual. Large-scale, highly successful projects, such as those mounted by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, typically consider graphic design to be a final phase in their production cycle. Even when visual materials are central to the project, part of the research and the design of visual display follows the modeling of content in a conceptual phase. Visual form is not considered a primary mode of thinking, but a way of presenting data in condensed, legible form. Systems engineers, in design of interface, shift this ground. My colleague Stephanie Guerlain refers to the process whereby a cognitive task is transformed into a perceptual one. This is a gesture towards recognition that visual means are not merely display modes, but functional methods for constituting a research investigation.

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In the last two years, my research associate Bethany Nowviskie and I have been involved in an Intel-sponsored project to produce a graphical interface for modeling temporal relations in complex humanities data. The idea was to create a responsive composition space, or "play space," for graphical analysis of the subjective experience of time--slow days, flashbacks, regret, anticipation, and other inflected representations of temporality typical of imaginative or humanistic documents. In so doing, we have had to make several arguments, most of which catch on the single thorny task of convincing humanities scholars that visual methods of interpretation can be an analysis, can enact an interpretation, not merely display it after the fact. Teaching humanists to trust the visual sometimes feels like teaching the Darling children to fly, and my own Tinkerbel! tendencies are sufficiently limited so that I'm not always convinced the effort will succeed. But by tiny incremental steps, and by demonstration of proof of concept, this project seems poised to make a dramatic contribution to the argument space of humanities scholarship. What lies ahead for visual studies? I'm optimistic to the extreme, if we can continue to gain a foothold in that most conservative of institutions, the Academy. The best way to do this? By example, demonstration, the production of intelligently made projects that give proof of the intellectual value of this unique approach to knowledge.

Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

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