Interpreting Visual Culture

Explorations in the Hermeneutics of Vision

Ian Heywood, Barry Sandywell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134729227
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Interpreting Visual Culture brings together original writings from leading experts in art history, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Ranging from an analysis of the role of vision in current critical discourse to discussion of specific examples taken from the visual arts, ethics and sociology, it presents the latest material on the interpretation of the visual in modern culture.
Among topics covered are:
* the visual rhetoric of modernity
* the drawings of Bonnard
* recent feminist art
* practices and perception in arts and ethics.

Part I
RETHINKING THE VISUAL IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY

1
THE HERMENEUTICS OF SEEING

Nicholas Davey

Vision is always a task, a task of promise.

David M.Levin, The Opening of Vision

On hermeneutics and seeing

With its roots stretching deep into biblical and literary interpretation, what does hermeneutics have to do with the question of seeing and with the experience of coming to see what is in a work of art? In response to this question, we will argue that hermeneutical aesthetics does not entail a ‘philosophy of art’ but a philosophical meditation upon what happens to us in our experience of art. Our argument will be presented in six stages. The first will propose that rather than dwelling on the ‘subjectivity’ of our experience of art, hermeneutical aesthetics seeks to illuminate what philosophical and existential determinants shape our perceptions of art. Rather tellingly, the German word for perceive is wahrnehmen, to take or receive as true. Hermeneutic aesthetics focuses on how our experiences of art occasion the appearance of certain truths. A major leitmotif of hermeneutic thought is that certain truths can only be experienced subjectively but that fact does not render them subjective. That what we come to see in art cannot be reduced to mere subjectivity depends upon historical and cultural ideas which transcend the subjective and yet achieve personal perceptual instanciations within aesthetic experience. We shall argue that both art and aesthetics reside in the generative tension between sight and in-sight. The second part is devoted to ‘Hermeneutics, Language and Visual Understanding’. Hermeneutics’ deep concern with language does not subordinate image to word but applies the sensitivities we acquire from linguistic exchange to reveal how our experience of art is no isolated monologue on personal pleasure but a complex dialogical achievement involving the fusion of the horizons surrounding artist, subject-matter and viewer. Part three engages the theme of ‘Perception, Meaning and Art’. For aesthetic experience to have a content which can lay claim to being (in part) objective, it must have an ideational content which transcends the subjective limitations of the circumstance and scope of individual perception. Hermeneutics insists that in any reflection upon our experience of art, we must focus on the question of meaning. Part four approaches the question of ‘Art and Its Subject-Matters’. What does a work of art direct us to? Though it might be seen by the mind’s eye, what we come to see in a work is not necessarily an object which is visually present. Hermeneutic aesthetics emphasises that art works do not merely re-interpret and re-present subject-matters but extend and alter their being. It is in the notion of subject-matter that hermeneutic thought gains an insight into how an art work can transcend the temporal restriction of its historical origin and affect the contemporary world. Part five attends to the question of ‘Hermeneutics, Art and Eventuality’. One of the most important contributions which hermeneutics makes to aesthetics involves the argument that in the experience of art, seeing and understanding are not merely passive. To the contrary, the spectator is a condition of what is held within a work coming forth and, furthermore, that revelation can effectively change the subject-matter it discloses. This permits hermeneutic thought to draw a crucial distinction between an artistic representation (Vorstellung) and an artistic presentation (Darstellung), a distinction which, in turn, completely radicalises traditional conceptions of the relationship between art and reality. To initiate our case, then, let us consider what is held in the two words which mark out our terrain; namely, hermeneutics and seeing.

The history of hermeneutics may be divided into three distinct phases. Prior to the late eighteenth century, hermeneutics was primarily concerned with matters of biblical and theological interpretation. Chladenius’s works represent the high-water mark of this tradition and its endeavours are far from redundant as the works of Louth and Pannenberg show.¹ Terms which have a critical role in hermeneutic aesthetics—the transcendent and epiphanic—have their derivation in biblical interpretation. Theological hermeneutics still underwrites the basic concerns of contemporary hermeneutics. How does one breathe life back into an ancient text? How is the living spirit to be released from the dead letter? It is perhaps not merely coincidental that Alexander Baumgarten, the father of modern philosophical aesthetics, was also practised in theological hermeneutics.² Hermeneutics entered its second phase when Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey guided it towards a universal method of cultural and social understanding. Schleiermacher’s ‘technical’ and ‘psychological’ theories of understanding were directed towards grasping a text’s meaning both in terms of its formal structures and as an expression of the author’s specific intentionality. Dilthey developed Schleiermacher’s work into a general theory of cultural understanding which viewed all social acts as the outward expression of a distinctive inner Weltanschauung which, once identified, would provide the key to rebuilding and re-experiencing an artist’s outlook. Although the psychologistic elements of Dilthey’s empathetic theory of understanding are largely discredited, his work continues to be enormously influential. The writings of Anthony Giddens and William Outhwaite still express Dilthey’s basic philosophical ambition—to outline what is distinctive about artistic, literary and aesthetic modes of understanding.³ The third and most contemporary phase of hermeneutics concerns the existential hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and the closely related philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, idioms of thought which are reflected in the more recent works of Manfred Frank and Odo Marquard.⁴ Heidegger insists that hermeneutics is not a matter of interpreting pre-given works. Understanding is not what we aim at, it is what we do. Its categories define what we are: creatures who have a sense of who and what we are because of what we understand. Thus, only because we implicitly understand what it means to be placed in a world, can we come to interpret a work being placed in its world. For Dilthey, a general theory of interpretation led to understanding the specifics of a work. For Heidegger it is the reverse. It is understanding (the categories of our being) which is the precondition of interpretation. In Being and Time he argues,

In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself… Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood: it is rather the working out of possibilities projected in understanding.⁵

The essential dynamic of Heidegger’s early hermeneutic thinking moves from an analysis of the objectivities of existence (facticity) through to how we subjectively respond to our ontological condition. Partly because of his admiration of Hegel, Gadamer reverses, but by no means refutes, the direction of Heidegger’s thinking. Whereas in an almost Kantian manner, Heidegger constructs an existential analytic before considering matters of subjectivity, Gadamer starts from the immediacies of experience in order to ascertain the ‘substantiality’ behind them:

All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, with what we call with Hegel substance because substance underlies all subjective intentions and actions… This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics…to discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.⁶

As we shall see, Gadamer becomes intensely preoccupied with understanding how that historical and cultural substantiality makes itself visible in an art work. What underwrites both Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s concern with art is its ability to disclose an understanding of both ourselves and of our being in the world in an immediate, unique and revelatory manner altogether distinct from, but as defensible as, propositional knowledge. How seeing brings us to the intensities of such insights is a leading motif of this chapter.

Nevertheless, rarely do the formalities of historical detail nurture a feeling for what lies within a word. The etymological endeavour so characteristic of Heidegger and Gadamer strives to reaquaint us with the feelings and dispositions a word can contain. Heidegger’s conceptual archaeology seeks to recover the pre-Christian meaning to metaphysical categories in order that we might ‘think’ anew about the nature of our existence. Gadamer’s etymological talents remind us that embedded within words are world-views capable of supplementing and extending our own. Yet whatever particular nuance these thinkers give to the etymological stratagem, its general value is plain. Against the subtler residues of previous speech-created worlds, any contemporary language horizon is advantaged by the force of immediacy and thereby possesses the distorting capacity of ideology. That force can not only blind us to the possibility of alternative meanings (and hence to alternative modes of feeling and being) which flow from the past into our contemporary world but it can also shroud us in the illusion that the world contained within our speech-world is the world and not one of many other possible speech-worlds which, as etymology reveals, we are demonstrably connected to. Once we develop an ear for what lies within words, the spell of immediacy’s force can be broken. The importance of the philological tactic is not merely that it attempts to retrieve past meanings but that in so doing it frees us from the restriction of having to feel and think solely in terms of our present speech-world. The potentially liberating aspect of this tactic is the recovery or uncovering of other logically possible ways of thinking, of looking at and, hence, of feeling about an issue. What then does the term ‘hermeneutic’ connect us to?

The word ‘hermeneutic’ clearly invokes Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods whose allotted task was to interpret what the gods wished to convey and to translate it into terms mortals could understand.⁷ Hermes’ predicament addresses all who work with expression, for what is given to us through insight, intuition or revelation has to be understood and then translated into forms permitting others to grasp what we have come to understand.⁸ Hermes presides over the tension between the ‘seeing’ of a truth and the task of communicating it. It is not inappropriate then that he was also the god of those who travel dark and difficult roads.⁹ He frequently appeared in the form of modestly phallic stone wayside markers (herms) which portrayed him in the company of Aphrodite who had evidently aroused his interest. Hermes was revered for disclosing things at night. How argues that night is indeed his proper provenance, for it is darkness that reveals our need for guidance and thereby allows ‘things [to] be seen in a new light’.¹⁰

The experiences which the myth of Hermes relates concern that strange relation between understanding the nature of our engagement with art and coming to understand the character of our predicament as human beings: our perpetual need for understanding and guidance, our sense of trying to find, follow and keep to a path, the experience of ‘being-drawn-on’, of ‘being-excited-by’ the anticipation of where a dedicated route might take us and, finally, the realisation that as human beings we too are not unlike Hermes who is always on the way somewhere but with no place of his own to finally dwell in.

It is not inappropriate that in order to convey his message to mortals, Hermes used words which, like the gods, are notoriously difficult to define. Both extend and change their meaning through time and, for some, that ambiguousness is the precondition of literary accuracy. Pannenberg’s comment that ‘it is only because the words of a language are incompletely defined that propositions can be formulated with precise definition’ encapsulates a potential philosophy of poetry.¹¹ The realms of vision offer analogous instances of this fertile relationship between the clear and the opaque.

Alexander Baumgarten, a poet as well as a philosopher, demonstrated how the clarity of a foreground image is dependent upon a confusion, a bringing together, of ambiguous background elements.¹² Understanding or coming to ‘see’ what a work addresses is for Baumgarten a hermeneutical phenomenon in that such ‘seeing’ is made possible by a secondary field of pre-given understandings or contexts. Nietzsche and Gadamer, respectively, use the optical terms ‘perspective’ (Perspektiv) and ‘horizon’ (Horizont) when speaking of such fields. Optical science even refers to the capacities of peripheral vision to sharply delimit an object of attention. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty encapsulates the point eloquently when he comments, ‘The horizon…is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the exploration [of the gaze].’¹³

The analogous relationship between a word and its semantic field and a seen object and its visual horizon reflects the astounding double valence of words which describe perception and cognition. We see an object and yet see or do not see what a person is getting at. We strive to be as clear as we can. If an argument is dark and somewhat opaque, we might endeavour to throw some light upon it, hoping to achieve an illuminating or enlightening insight. A surface may offer a cloudy reflection whilst our reflections might be clouded by blind prejudice. We even speak of having our eyes opened to a problem so that we might subsequently arrive at another perspective or viewpoint. Yet, it might be objected, are we not confusing visually related metaphors with the reality of the visual? Should we not distinguish more rigorously between the speech-created world and the visual world which begins where the word breaks off?

There are certain elementary differentiations between sensible and mental phenomena. The seen physical object is a spatial phenomenon whilst that which I might visualise as a spatial object is not itself a spatial object. Beyond this, however, it is very difficult to demarcate visual-oriented language from that which is purely mental in reference. Though we might speak loosely of the seen-image, the image is never in fact the visually observed object. Canvasses may be destroyed but not images. Seeing an image is more an instance of recognising what is evoked by an art work, of having something brought to the mind’s eye. Ludwig Wittgenstein insists that perception contains a thought-element (we see something as) whilst thinking contains a perception-element (we imagine instances).¹⁴ Indeed, Wittgenstein’s remark reflects an ancient ambiguity.

In his analysis of Plato’s views of perception (aisthesis) and reflection (theoria), Waterfield argues that Classical Greek thought contains no definitive evidence to suggest that terms such as eidos (that which the mind sees) and theoria (reflection) were exclusively cognitive or perceptual in reference.¹⁵ Matters are no clearer in Latin. The term ‘vision’ is related to the verb videre (to see), but to see meant not just to follow with the eyes but also the seeing of something that becomes visible other than by ordinary sight—hence the terms ‘visionary’ and ‘seer’.

The impossibility of a strict division between perceptual and conceptual terminology might be anathema to those who seek the security of precise distinctions. However, in the case of aesthetics, as Baumgarten reminds us, confusion is of the essence not because aesthetic experience is a tiresome muddle but because it is a productive bringing together, a confusion of thought and perception which enables us to see the idea embodied in a work and to see the work as an instance of that idea. Without such a fusing-with, metaphoric transfer would be impossible. To see a set of scales as the symbolic presence of justice requires a capacity to see a given object as an instance of something that in itself it is not (i.e., a general notion). What damage would the illuminating capacity of art then incur if a strict demarcation between sight and insight were to be imposed?

Two things are clear. Art can neither be a matter of merely producing and looking at tactile sensible objects nor can it be turned into the science of ideas which the Cartesians dreamt of. If art were the former, it would be nothing other than a mindless process of material production and not art. For art to open our eyes to the world it has to do something other than remain in the purely sensible. It has, to borrow a hermeneutic metaphor, to speak, and it can only do so if it successfully enables us to understand that there is something more to be seen in it than what is immediately before the eye. Aesthetic understanding reveals just how correct Kant was when he argued, in another context, that perceptions, sensible intuitions and indeed feelings are blind(!) unless they can be brought under and illuminated by an appropriate idea. And yet, were art to deal with ideas alone it would also cease to be art; it would have become philosophy. For art to address us in the particularities of our embodied world it, like Hermes, has to translate the ideas it is concerned with into perceivable instances. Universals must be particularised. Aesthetic experience exemplifies once again the correctness of Kant’s insight that concepts and ideas which cannot achieve embodied instanciation remain abstract and empty. Hegel struck the mark with unerring accuracy when he said that art is not yet pure thought and, yet no longer purely material existence.¹⁶ That art comes to its proper provenance in the metaphoric translation and cross-wiring of ideas and sensible particulars indicates not only how indefensible and insensitively inappropriate are the continued rhetorics of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ within art and aesthetic education but also how appropriate hermeneutic thought is to achieving an intimate appreciation of how art resides within the procreative tensions and interdependencies of sight and insight.

Hermeneutics, language and visual understanding

Contemporary philosophical hermeneutics embraces the conviction that the ability of the said to point to and reveal the unsaid makes linguistic understanding a paradigm case for grasping the nature of artistic understanding. Heidegger’s On the Way to Language and Gadamer’s Truth and Method dwell in particular on language’s ability to ‘say’ things over and above the ‘said’. Such a thesis causes the hackles of many a practitioner to rise as it appears to cheapen the special...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Rethinking the Visual in Contemporary theory
• Part II: Rethinking the Visual in Art
• Part I I I: Towards an Ethics of the Visual
• Appendix
• Select Bibliography