Visual Literacy

James Elkins, James Elkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135905323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate, " what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding "the visual, " exploring national and regional ideas of visuality and charting out new territories of visual literacy that lie far beyond art history, such as law and chemistry. With an afterword by Christopher Crouch, this groundbreaking collection brings together the work of major art and visual studies scholars and critics to explore what impact the new concept of "visual literacy" will have on the traditional field of art history.

Contributors: Matthias Bruhn, Vera Dünkel, Jonathan Crary, Christopher Crouch, Peter Dallow, James Elkins, Henrik Enquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Richard K. Sherwin, Susan Shifrin, Jon Simons, Barbara Maria Stafford, William Washabaugh

CHAPTER 1
Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy?

W. J. T. MITCHELL

Visual literacy has been around for some time as a fundamental notion in the study of art history, iconology, and visual culture. It is a strong and seemingly unavoidable metaphor, one that compares the acquisition of skills, competence, and expertise (quite distinct levels of mastery) to the mastery of language and literature. Seeing, it suggests, is something like reading. But how exactly? And how is seeing different from reading? What are the limits of this metaphor? Even more interesting, what would happen if we reversed the positions of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor, and treated reading as the “tenor”—the thing to be explained—and vision as the vehicle that might help explain it? What would happen, in other words, if we thought of our task as one of research and teaching in reading, based in models drawn from seeing and the visual system?

First, the limits of the metaphor. If seeing is like reading, it is so only at the most rudimentary and literal levels. Reading strikes us immediately as a much more difficult acquired skill. Normally, before one can even begin to learn to read a language, one must already have learned how to speak it. If the writing system is phonetic, one will have to have learned the alphabet that coordinates the spoken with the written word: in this sense, we might note, the skill of reading is already a visual skill, since it involves the recognition of the distinct letters of the alphabet, and the linking of them with appropriate sounds. If the writing system is not phonetic, but ideographic or pictographic, then the demands on the visual system are

More on the endless lexicon of visuality and vision. It is not just the dozens of root terms and their etymologies that determine the valences of visuality in different languages: it is also the thousands of compounds, expressions, and slang terms derived from them. Multicultural studies of visuality face this daunting task: to approximate translation by taking account of the matrix of uses that surround the fundamental terms. This is just the beginning of the entry for see, in A New Chinese-English Dictionary (1981).

even more profound. Chinese has over two thousand characters that must be memorized before one can begin to read, much less write.

Seeing, by contrast, seems like an easily and naturally acquired skill, at least at some basic level. I’m not talking about the highly developed competencies of, say, an Aboriginal hunter-gatherer in her environment, or the paleontologist scanning an excavation, or the connoisseur in front of a painting, or even the fairly rudimentary ability to see that a drawing is a perspectival projection in three dimensions, but the acquisition of a basic threshold of competence in the visual-spatial world: the abilities to distinguish objects from the space in which they are located, to track a moving object, and to distinguish foreground and background, figure and ground. These are skills that we share with most primates, and that are the fundamentals of what Bishop Berkeley called “visual language.” He called this the “universal language of nature,” to contrast it with the spoken and written “natural languages,” which are, as we say, cultural constructions based in arbitrary, symbolic conventions. But he did insist on calling it a language because he recognized, correctly, that even though it is “universal” and “natural,” it is not innate, not hard-wired into an organism, but must be learned. To use a computer analogy, the visual system is like a soft ware application. It must be installed properly, and at the right time in the development of the mature “mechanism.” If one is blind from birth, for instance, and then is given eyesight at age twenty or thirty, it is very unlikely that one will be able to use that eye-sight to see anything. It will be too late to learn the “language of vision,” perhaps in something like the same way (but much more radically) that it is difficult to acquire a new verbal language late in life. The installation procedure for the visual system, Berkeley notes, is similar to that of language acquisition in that it is what linguists would call doubly articulated: that is, it is not enough to have light impressions fall on the retina and stimulate the visual cortex. One must learn to use and understand the visual impressions by coordinating them with tactile impressions. Thus, normal seeing is, in a very real sense, a form of extended, highly flexible touch. There is no “pure” visuality, or, as Gombrich pointed out long ago, “[T]he innocent eye is blind.” And innocent here means, quite precisely, untouched.

There would be much more to say on these matters, and I hope that so far everything I’ve said is quite uncontroversial, and in fact generally taken for granted. What I have described to this point is what Barbara Stafford has suggested we call “visual competence,” a kind of baseline skill (like the ability to read) that is a necessary, but far from sufficient, condition for the more advanced and specialized skills we might want to call visual literacy—that is, connoisseurship: rich, highly cultivated, and trained experiences and techniques of visual observation. What I want to propose now is the reversal of field in the concept of visual literacy that I suggested at the outset. To what extent, in other words, does verbal literacy involve, and perhaps depend on, some sort of visual competence or even visual literacy? Does one need to be able to see to understand a language? Obviously not. One has to possess visual competence in order to read a text (unless it is written in Braille), but hearing is perfectly adequate as a threshold for normal competence in a natural language.

Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science*

When I published Iconology twenty years ago, I had no idea that it would be the first volume in what has turned out to be a trilogy (Picture Theory and What Do Pictures Want? in 1994 and 2005 would turn out to be the sequels). In the mid-1980s, notions such as “visual culture” and a “new art history” were nothing more than rumors. The concept of “word and image,” much less an International Association for the Study of Word and Image (IAWIS), was hardly dreamed of. And the idea of “iconology” itself seemed at that time like an obsolete subdiscipline of art history, associated with the founding fathers of the early twentieth century, Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, and Erwin Panofsky.

Now, of course, the terrain looks quite different. There are academic departments of visual studies and visual culture, and journals devoted to these subjects. The new art history (as inspired by semiotics, at any rate) is yesterday’s news. The interdisciplinary study of verbal and visual media has become a central feature of modern humanistic study. And new forms of critical iconology, of Bildwissenschaft or “image science,” have emerged across the fields of the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences.

Iconology played some part in these developments. Exactly what its influence has been would be difficult for me to assess. All I can do at this point is to look back at the ideas that it launched in relation to their further development in my own work. In the last twenty years of working through problems in visual culture, visual literacy, image science, and iconology, four basic ideas have continually asserted themselves. Some of these were already latent in Iconology, but were only named in later writings. I hope this preface will help readers obtain an overview of the consistent themes and problems that grew out of Iconology, and that have now become what I think of as “the four fundamental concepts of image science.” I call them the pictorial turn, the image-picture distinction, the metapicture, and the biopicture.¹ Here, in very schematic form, are the basic outlines of these concepts.

* This second, independent, essay was delivered by the author, shortly after the first, at the 2005 conference in Ireland.

1. The pictorial turn: This phrase (first developed in Picture Theory) is sometimes compared with Gottfried Boehm’s later notion of an “iconic turn,” and with the emergence of visual studies and visual culture as academic disciplines; it is often misunderstood as merely a label for the rise of so-called visual media such as television, video, and cinema. There are several problems with this formulation of the matter. First, the very notion of purely visual media is radically incoherent, and the first lesson in any course in visual culture should be to dispel it. Media are always mixtures of sensory and semiotic elements, and all the so-called visual media are mixed or hybrid formations, combining sound and sight, text and image. Even vision itself is not purely optical, requiring for its operations a coordination of optical and tactile impressions. Second, the idea of a “turn” toward the pictorial is not confined to modernity, or to contemporary visual culture. It is a trope or figure of thought that reappears numerous times in the history of culture, usually at moments when some new technology of reproduction, or some set of images associated with new social, political, or aesthetic movements, has arrived on the scene. Thus, the invention of artificial perspective, the arrival of easel painting, and the invention of photography were all greeted as “pictorial turns,” and were seen as either wonderful or threatening, often both at the same time. But one could also detect a version of the pictorial turn in the ancient world, when the Israelites “turn aside” from the law that Moses is bringing from Mt. Sinai and erect a golden calf as their idol. Third, the turn to idolatry is the most anxiety-provoking version of the pictorial turn, and is oft en grounded in the fear that masses of people are being led astray by a false image, whether it is an ideological concept or the figure of a charismatic leader. Fourth, as this example suggests, pictorial turns are often linked with anxiety about the “new dominance” of the image, as a threat to everything from the word of God to verbal literacy. Pictorial turns usually invoke some version of the distinction between words and images, the word associated with law, literacy, and the rule of elites, and the image associated with popular superstition, illiteracy, and licentiousness. The pictorial turn, then, is usually from words to images, and it is not unique to our time. This is not to say, however, that pictorial turns are all alike: each involves a specific picture that emerges in a particular historical situation.

Fifth, and finally, there is the meaning of the pictorial turn that is unique to our time, and is associated with developments in disciplinary knowledge and perhaps even philosophy itself, as a successor to what Richard Rorty called “the linguistic turn.” Rorty argues that the evolution of Western philosophy has moved from a concern with things or objects, to ideas and concepts, and finally (in the twentieth century) to language. My suggestion has been that the image (not only visual images but verbal metaphors as well) has emerged as a topic of special urgency in our time, not just in politics and mass culture (where it is a familiar issue) but also in the most general reflections on human psychology and social behavior, as well as in the structure of knowledge itself. The turn that Fredric Jameson describes from “philosophy” to something called “theory” in the human sciences is based, I think, in a recognition that philosophy is mediated not only by language but also by the entire range of representational practices, including images. For this reason, theories of imagery and of visual culture have taken on a much more general set of problems in recent decades, moving out from the specific concerns of art history to an “expanded field” that includes psychology and neuroscience, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and theories of media and politics, toward what can only be described as a new “metaphysics of the image.” This development, like Rorty’s linguistic turn, generates a whole new reading of philosophy itself, one that could be traced to such developments as Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism in favor of a graphic and spatial model of writing, or Gilles Deleuze’s claim that philosophy has always been obsessed with the problem of the image, and thus has always been a form of iconology. Philosophy in the twentieth century has not just made a linguistic turn; “a picture held us captive,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, and philosophy has responded with a variety of ways of breaking out: semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, systems theory, speech act theory, ordinary language philosophy, and now image science, or critical iconology.

2. The image-picture distinction: If the pictorial turn is a word

image relation, the image-picture relation is a turn back toward objecthood. What is the difference between a picture and an image? I like to start from the vernacular, listening to the English language, in a distinction that is untranslatable into German: “you can hang a picture, but you can’t hang an image.” The picture is a material object, a thing you can burn or break. An image is what appears in a picture, and what survives its destruction—in memory, in narrative, and in copies and traces in other media. The golden calf may be smashed and melted down, but it lives on as an image in stories and innumerable depictions. The picture, then, is the image as it appears in a material support or a specific place. This includes the mental picture, which (as Hans Belting has noted) appears in a body, in memory or imagination. The image never appears except in some medium or other, but it is also what transcends media, what can be transferred from one medium to another. The golden calf appears first as sculpture, but it reappears as an object of description in a verbal narrative, and as an image in painting. It is what can be copied from the painting in another medium, in a photograph or a slide projection or a digital file.

The image, then, is a highly abstract and rather minimal entity that can be evoked with a single word. It is enough to name an image to bring it to mind—that is, to bring it into consciousness in a perceiving or remembering body. Panofsky’s notion of the “motif” is relevant here, as the element in a picture that elicits cognition and especially recognition; the awareness that “this is that”; the perception of the nameable, identifiable object that appears as a virtual presence; and the paradoxical “absent presence” that is fundamental to all representational entities.

One need not be a Platonist about the concept of images, postulating a transcend...