Visuality

Visuality refers to the intersection of text and image, or more precisely, the relationship between the verbal and the visual within a social and ideological context. W. J. T. Mitchell, professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry since 1978, is strongly associated with visuality, its relation to cultural and social identity, and the emergent field of visual studies (or visual culture). His book Picture Theory (and other subsequent works) has been significant in establishing visual culture (a term often associated with, and perhaps analogous to, postmodernism) as a field of critical inquiry in the humanities. Because of his work, and the work of others of like mind, this field now has a recognizable institutional profile, with a number of associated journals and university programs functioning internationally. This entry provides an overview of the concept of visuality and the discipline of visual studies.

In Picture Theory, Mitchell proposes that a verbal image is a picture in logical space. This is a proposition that he explores over a wide range of visual material, including an analysis of Michel Foucault's significant 1968 essay on the relationship between words and image, “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” [“This is not a pipe”]. The essay considers the complexities of the appearance of words (language) in René Magritte's 1929 image Les trahison des images. Foucault's text can be interpreted as challenging the self-understanding and the social positioning of the autonomous and unified self in modern society. The picture, Foucault's text, and by association poststructural visual criticism, are interpreted as an attempt to destabilizes self-identity (the stable Cartesian self) and dominant ideology by exploring the complex and circuitous transaction between the picture, the text, and the observer. Mitchell explores this complex relationship, here and throughout his writing, as he attempts to expand the field of what constitutes visuality.

In 1995, Mitchell was invited to present his intellectual perspective in the journal Art Bulletin, the long-established, and some might say, the conservative voice of the College Art Association of America. An association that had already awarded Picture Theory, the Morey Prize for a book of special distinction; further, in 1996 in a special issue (No. 77), the poststructuralist writers associated with the journal October (Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Annette Michelson, and Benjamin Buchloh) initiate a discussion that brings to the surface the crucial tensions between the discipline of art history and the emerging discipline of visual culture. These writers suggest that visual culture avoids dealing with the aesthetic specificity of works of art, concentrating instead on images that are mediated by mass culture and, therefore, open to the processes of commodification and reification. This is a challenge to visual studies’ integrity that Mitchell responds to by proposing a cluster of arguments and neologisms.

Mitchell suggests that Western culture has consistently privileged the spoken word as the highest form of intellectual pursuit, and seen visual representations as mere “illustrations” of ideas. According to Mitchell, visual culture as a subject of study contests this hegemony, developing what he calls picture theory. In Mitchell's view, Western philosophy and science now use the pictorial, rather than the textual, for making models of the world. This marks a significant shift in understanding and presents a challenge to the notion of the world conceptualized as a written text. A position that has dominated contemporary intellectual discussion in the wake of the linguistic-based movements: structuralism and poststructuralism (Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, and others).

...