APRES COUP An Introduction to Visual Studies
On the occasion of the publication of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology in French translation as Iconologie. Image, Texte, Idéologie (Prairies ordinaires), Mark Alizart will host an introduction to visual studies with the translators of the book, Maxime Boidy and Stéphane Roth.
At the crossroads of art history, aesthetics, literary theory, and cultural studies, a discipline literally unheard of has appeared across the Atlantic: visual studies.
W. J. T. Mitchell has been one of its main instigators. With his Iconology, the author leads us to consider the image as partaking of the social sphere as a whole, but also as pervading any discipline through its very epistemology – from literature to sciences – and any politics, from the image-making of politicians to their discourse – from manufacturing a certain image to the art of having people believe in the reality of that image, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt.
Mitchell thus questions the power of discourses bearing on images or instrumentalizing them, and the performativity of these discourses on the visible. His re-readings of Burke, Lessing, or Marx show in what way the image is the seat of a specific power, which stirs up disputes between iconophiles and iconoclasts. The image becomes a fetish, an object of pride and veneration, or becomes the sign of a racial, social, or sexual « other, » an object of aversion and fear.
Looking for a critical theory that would not stop at the comfort of iconoclasm, Mitchell gets down to a deconstruction of ideologies of the image – a deconstruction that goes as far as to reconsider the very notion of « ideology. » Besides, even though the historicity of the look was taken into account by art history as early as the nineteenth century, and the social construction of the look can no longer be ignored these days, the idea of a visual construction of ideology, of philosophy, of language, and of the social as a whole remained to be formulated. Several books resulted from Mitchell’s thought on the subject, Iconologie being the inaugural genealogical inquiry.
Mark ALIZART is the assistant manager of the Palais de Tokyo. He has co-edited the three volumes of Fresh Théorie with Christophe Kihm (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer/Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, 2005, 2006, 2007) as well as the exhibition catalog for Traces du Sacré with Jean de Loisy and Angela Lampe (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008). He has also published an interview with Stuart Hall (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2007).
Maxime BOIDY (b. 1981) is a sociology student at the Université de Strasbourg. A graduate in linguistics and art history, he has done research on the epistemology of social sciences and on the relations between art and language. He is preparing a dissertation on the theme of the artistic and visual construction of sociological knowledge.
Stéphane ROTH (b. 1981) is a fellow and graduate assistant in the music department at the Université de Strasbourg. He holds degrees in linguistics and art history. His ongoing musicology dissertation on oculocentrism in western musical thought examines the image as it structures and contaminates discourses on music, musical works and theories (19th-20th centuries). His forthcoming publications are his translation of texts by Raymond Monelle, Un Chant muet : essais sur la signification musicale [« A Silent Song: Essays on Signification in Music »] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); Kaija Saariaho’s Écrits sur la musique (Paris: Éditions MF, 2010), a collection of texts he edited and translated; and Dire la musique: à la limite…, which he co-edited with Isabelle Soraru (L’Harmattan, 2009).
