Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pictorial turn in its simplistic way can be defined as a turn towards pictures.
Pictorial as the name suggests is something relating to pictures and the term turn
here, suggests a new dimension or a development in the earlier understanding ,
therefore, pictorial turn in Humanities and contemporary culture registers a
renewed interest in pictures and images, their growing power and realm of visual
being recognised as important and worthy as the realm of language. Our culture is
more a product of what we watch rather than what we read, images can be seen as
a medium distinct from print . We live in a culture dominated by images,
simulations, copies. This turn, hence, focuses on changing modes of representation.
And when we talk about a culture of reading and a cultural of spectatorship , the
difference is not just the mode of representation, but as a result, different forms of
individuals and institutions are formed by culture e.g. the culture of reading is an
elite culture of proffesionals whereas the culture of spectatorship is a culture of
masses, a public culture so to say.
This essay Pictorial turn is from the book entitled Picture theory written by William
John Thomas Mitchell. He is a professor of English and Art History at the university
of Chicago and the editor of Critical Inquiry. In his book Picture theory , Mitchell
argues that there has been a basic problem with the thoeries of pictures as such,
because, theories master visual representation with a verbal discourse. So, what is
required now is to revert these power relations and to attempt at picture theory and
not a theory of pictures.
#Mitchell starts his essay with the mention of Richard Rorty , who in his book
Philosophy and the Mirror of nature, characterized the history of philosophy as a
series of turns in which new set of problems will emerge and the old ones begin to
fade away and the final stage is what he calls the lnguistic turnin which
philosophy was concerned with words. So, now, Mitchell questions this Almighy
power of the linguistic turn and argues that another shift is taking place, now, in
the disciplines of Human sciences and in contemporary culture and calls this shift
the pictorial turn. He traced the variations and developments of this turn in both
Anglo American philosophy and In European context as well. In Anglo American
philosophy, he mentions Charles Peirces Semiotics and Nelson Goodmans
Languages of art. He writes that these two works explore nonlinguistic symbols and
do not fall in the assumption of language being the ultimate paradigm for meaning.
These two earlier works suggested the possibilty of other symbolic forms as well
other than language that can represent reality for us. Then, in Europe , there is
Derrida who de-centres the phonocentric model of language , Frankfurt school
concerned with mass culture and visual media. And Foucault who claimed that
every strata or historial formation is a combination of ways of seeing and ways of
sayings , that is the visible and the articulable. Other than these traces that
suggests a turn from language towards visual representation , there can be traced
an anxiety about images , a kind of iconophobia . Ludwig Wittgenstein whose career
began with a picture theory ends with a critique of the same and to quote ludwig
. As George Bush claimed in his controversial interview with journalist Dan Rather
The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert lands of Arabian
peninsula. The aim of Gulf war, thus, to erase the body from the picture Media
coverage of funerals and flagdraped caskets was strictly censored. Since, it was a
belief that Vietnam war was lost because it lost the support of American public, this
war was presented as an antidote to Vietnam war. Rather, on the other hand,
juxtaposed file footage of last US helicopter in Vietnam with a live footage of a
whereas the
concept of infinity was brought in the renaissance times. Infinity as a new
conception of space came in Renaissance . It represented an imagined space on
as well
What remained unfinished in his essay is the question of spectator , that who is the
subject of history. Panofsky discussed at large the ways in which these forms of
visual arts were conceived but he never discussed about the ways in which these
art forms were perceived in different times. He mentioned no spectator , no
observer.
Mitchell claims that vision, space , art pictures and other symbolic forms synthesize
the kunstwollen (artistic will or prevailing structural principals of an artistic
surrounding on a screen.
He used Camera obscura more as a metaphor for objective vision detach from the
body.
But in the 19th century , with the outset of new optical devices like stereoscope and
phenakistoscope this observer was given a body
physiological principals governing the human eye and they produced a subjective
and autonomous observer. Hence, there was a shift in the understanding of visual
experience. And these devices are used a mataphor of subjective vision. These new
devices deals with the techiques working with Retinal Afterimage. An afterimage is
the presence of sensation in the absence of a stimulus. So, the image produced by
and within the subject. In these devices, the mind extracts the collision and merging
of images. Hence, there was not actually any image but an effect of observers
experience, the illusion . And the observer was the agent of this synthesis. The two
Crary wrote about the rupture between the classical vision and the modern vision.
Earlier, the presence of observer was thought to be not affecting the
representation . Object and subject were different but now,the boundaries between
One way of dealing with this problem of this reductionist conclusion by images
would be to give up the notion of metalanguage, metapictures, pictures
representing pictures which Mitchell explored in the next chapter of the book. And
the other way to deal with this problem is to move for a revised iconology in which
there is a mutual encounter of iconology with ideology.
Mitchell proposed a revised iconology , on the foundations of Science put down by
Panofsky, in which a valid picture theory could be established. Panofsky has given
us a primal scene in his Studies in Iconology . The scene is an acquaintance
greeting on the street by removing his hat. Here, Panofsky gives his threedimensional model of interpretation.