Part IV

Seeing Across Time

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Understanding Visuality
Claire Farago

For decades now, critics have charged that autonomous histories of the “visual
arts” as “histories of vision” first proposed in the late nineteenth century are
grounded in formalist and “essentialist” perceptual categories that are no
longer tenable.1 Art, defined on the Western model of optical painting, viewed
as a “natural” sign because it is compatible with our actual visual experience
of the world, is itself not a natural but a conventional way to identify what
“art is.” Yet at the same time, the notion that the “visual” has its own history,
preserved in works of human material culture broadly defined to include
print culture, photography, digital imaging, film, video, multimedia, even
performance art, has also taken root. “Visual culture” studies, journals,
departments, and websites have given this category a material presence far
beyond the disciplinary debates that originated the terminology. One recent
development that is directed to art history, and merits acknowledgment in the
context of this volume, is the new emphasis accorded to “global art history.”
Global art history today arguably offers an escape from the deadlock of art
versus artifact, West versus the Rest, the hegemony of modernism defined
on Euro-American terms, and many other disciplinary headaches. Current
discussion about the possibility of constructing a global art history raises the
question anew: how universally regarded is the visual?
Before the beginning of “visual culture” studies, in his 1988 anthology,
Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster distinguished between sight as a physical action
and “visuality” as “a social fact,” calling for efforts to “historicize modern
vision” in ways that do not privilege the “purely optical in visual art.”2 Often
cited as the origin of the term “visuality,” Foster’s anthology appeared at a
time when a generation of recently minted PhDs were absorbing the (post)
structuralist concerns of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other continental writers working in a variety
of other disciplines. By 1982, when Henri Zerner edited a special issue of Art

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Journal devoted to “the crisis in the discipline,” art history’s epistemological

foundations and interpretive aims were a matter of widespread, inter-
generational debate. As Zerner articulated the problem then, the history of
art told as a history of style “embodies profound contradictions.” Instead of
assuming the existence of “human universals,” we should be searching for
“the historical determination of mental attitudes.” The chief difficulty is in
fitting anything considered to be a permanently available aesthetic experience
into a historical framework:

On the one hand [art history] holds on to an idealist theory of art according
to which art is an absolute autonomous value that transcends history,
that is not subject to the constraints of time and place, so that, strictly
speaking, there can be no history of art. On the other hand it is attached
to an optimistic form of nineteenth-century positivism, to a belief in
facts that can be ascertained as the basis of definitive explanation.3

At present, “visual culture” and “visual art” are ubiquitous terms widely
applied to all kinds of cultural production as neutral, inclusive language,
even a fitting sequel in an expanded field of interdisciplinary scholarship
to the more restrictive category “art” of European origin. Much is owed to
understanding the category “visual art” as a historically and culturally
specific construct. Yet as this volume attests, we are still addressing the vexed
question of what it means to historicize vision.
Foster’s own understanding of “visuality” was informed by the writings
of Theodor Adorno, as he discussed the issues in another edited collection
of essays, The Anti-Aesthetic (1983). In this earlier volume, Foster promised a
similar “critique of origins” of the aesthetic, citing Adorno’s counter-notion
of the aesthetic as a subversive action. “The anti-aesthetic,” wrote Foster in
emulation of Adorno’s call to “de-aestheticize” art, “signals that the very
notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question.”4
Between Adorno and Foster, connotations of the term “visuality” changed
considerably in ways that bear directly on studies of visual culture. For
Adorno, the problematic origins of “visuality” were quite specific: Kant’s
Critique of Judgment, 1790, section 9, where Kant describes “the beautiful [as]
that which pleases universally without … a concept.”5 Adorno used the word
Anschaulichkeit, which his 1984 translator rendered as “visuality,” in direct
reference to Kant’s term Anschauung.6 Anschaulichkeit, according to Adorno,
is a “normative” term that denies the “implicitly conceptual nature of art.”
“Visuality” is “an idea of art that dispenses with intellectual effort” at a
time when “art has long since relegated the pleasant to the dustbin of dated
ideals.” Yet, Adorno laments, aesthetics had not done the same—it still has
not rendered “visuality” useless.
Kant had first set himself the task of explaining how the supersensible
“mediates” between nature in itself and nature as it appears to us by

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positing that the laws of nature are not derived from reason alone—they
are also discovered through experience.7 For example, in the mathematical
subject of geometry, judgments describe the world we experience, yet
geometry is derived from logic. The only way this can be possible is if we
have a priori knowledge of spatial relations that we use in experiencing the
world. Anschauung refers to this mediation between mind and world. Thus,
Anschauung, translatable as “visuality,” also entails “intuition,” and a better
translation of his term, as Frances Ferguson suggests, might be “the intuitive
experience of objects.”8
Anschauung is actually the linchpin in Kant’s Critique of Judgment
(1790) because it connotes the “purposiveness” of nature perceived as
“the beautiful” in the act of aesthetic judgment.9 This is the foundational
argument of “formalism” that anchors the modern, Western idea of art as
the timeless (ever-accessible) object of perception. This is also the argument
to which Adorno objects, first of all because he rejects Kant’s assumption of
the artwork’s underlying unity or integrity, perceived as being in harmony
with nature. Thus he re-aligns Kant’s understanding of Anschauung with the
merely phenomenal, meaning the purely visual. For Adorno, as art becomes
progressively more intellective, it loses its phenomenality. The Hegelian strains
of this argument are audible when he writes that “the immediate sensuousness
which used to be the basis of pure visuality in art works diminishes.”10 For
Adorno, the “bourgeois mind” clings to pure visuality (Anschaulichkeit) as if
art’s only virtue were to copy reality, rather than respond to it. He complains
that this is not authentic, spiritual art.11
It is important to note—a lot is at stake—that Foster folded Adorno’s
criticism of Kant into the term Anschaulichkeit itself, thereby changing the
previous, historical meaning of “visuality” into something like its opposite.
Foster wrote about “visuality” critically, as if it meant something akin to
Foucault’s discussion of “visual field,” or film critic Christian Metz’s discussion
of “scopic regimes,” or other terms in use at a time when art historians were
becoming aware that writing histories of art as if all art were the object of
perception might be a problem. “Ocularcentrism” and “perspectivalism”
are two more closely related coinages to designate the hegemony of vision
in modern life.12 And we are still talking about the dynamics of gazing, the
proliferation of surveillance, the production of spectacle, and other ways of
exerting institutional, social, and political control that extend the province of
seeing far beyond images.
At present, there remains a disturbing lack of clarity about the relationship
between the historical term “visuality” leading up to Kant and its recent
appropriation as a critical term. Seeing Across Cultures is an important
contribution to this as-yet poorly understood history. A volume like the
present one aims to dislodge the continuing status quo, to encourage that we
put into question European understandings of visuality and our “stereotypes

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of the Other” as they are connected to political actualities. The imposition of

European values on extra-European cultural objects did not become central
to art historical debates immediately after the appearance of Edward Said’s
groundbreaking Orientalism (1978), even though critique within the discipline
was indebted to the same developments in continental philosophy (the
writings of Foucault in particular were influential in both arenas) as was Said’s
challenge to contemporary scholars to re-examine the European construction
of the Orient. Perhaps the critique of disciplinary practices fell short because
it was led by modernists with an interest in Euro-American art, for whom the
grounding of issues in Kant was sufficient; or perhaps the critique fell short
because it was absorbed into the broader critiques of modernity that I have
just mentioned regarding the hegemony of vision in modern life. In any case,
the deleterious effects of Kantian definitions on extra-European, pre-modern,
and colonial forms of cultural production were slow to receive attention.13
Ironically, Foster and his colleagues were in personal contact with Edward
Said, and Said even contributed a chapter to Foster’s Anti-Aesthetic anthology.
Said’s argument is therefore interesting to consider in retrospect because he
did not focus on the Eurocentric historical practices central to his own critique
(as might be expected); instead, he discussed the isolation of academics from
political power and social issues, as in this opening statement: “Who writes?
For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances? These, it seems
to me, are the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients
making for a politics of interpretation.”14 Said’s essay in Foster’s anthology,
originally published in the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, decried
the diminished role of intellectuals during the Reagan era in the following
terms:

The present moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a
totality felt to be benign (free, apolitical, serious), uncharacterizable as a whole (it is
too complex to be described in general and tendentious terms) and somehow outside
history. … The challenge posed by these perspectives is not how to cultivate one’s
garden despite them, but how to understand cultural work occurring within them.15

A large part of Said’s essay was devoted to analyzing the harmful effects of
subdisciplinary specializations, particularly the inability of academics who
write “advanced criticism” to examine social issues, or even to understand how
their own scholarship participates in commodity production and marketing.
Said’s closing words were: “One must refuse to believe, however, that the
comforts of specialized habits can be so seductive as to keep us all in our
assigned places.” Today, Said’s critique of the inability of specialists consumed
with guarding their home turf to engage in methodological and disciplinary
self-questioning is more relevant than ever.16 And the consequences of
privileging modern European epistemologies in our curricula are still not at
the center of disciplinary concerns.

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This is not the place or the space to offer a full account of the current, often
contentious, debates to consider art and art history as “global” phenomena
in need of a universal foundation.17 Yet it is also not an idle question to ask
in a volume of essays devoted to “visuality across cultures” whether the
category “visuality” can avoid falling into the Eurocentric trap as long as
the signifiers “art” and “visual” remain intact. The earliest efforts to arrive
at a world art history date back to German scholarship of the 1880s and
1890s, although these schemes were justifiably forgotten after World War II,
writes Ulrich Pfisterer in a recent overview of German art historiography.18
After 1945, the topic of world art was too controversial to maintain in an art
history curriculum; but now it seems that “visual studies” is promoted as
evidence of human universals and of “the psychic unity of mankind.”19 What
surely should be the object of investigation is treated once again as an a priori
assumption. The editors of the present volume stress that what is potentially
new is the critical and historiographical dimension of visuality; in the present
telling, “visuality” is a hermeneutic project that studies the history of the
category “visual” along with its contents. The possibility that “other cultures”
(however they are defined) do privilege the visual is an important question to
investigate when considering whether and how the “visual” is a legitimate
analytic category for writing history.
The study of art broadly defined to include all forms of human manufacture
might help us conceive how the integration of self and space works in a
less ethnocentric way than European histories of art have done. If this is a
theoretical desideratum, it is one that casts its net wider than the disciplinary
formation of art history. As the editors note, the present volume builds directly
on an earlier collection of essays edited by Robert Nelson that, while largely
grounded in the Western tradition, also looked beyond the sources of Western
thought—for example, to Senegal and Sufism, two cultural sites that the
present volume also includes. Indeed, Nelson emphasizes that encountering
visual practices and theories of vision different from “ours,” helps us to
avoid projecting unexamined assumptions of normality or universality on
prior practices in science and art, both of which are “prone to teleology and
presentism.”20
There is an inherent relationship between the two volumes in seeking
out other cultural formations that privilege the visual register, recognition
of which enables new lines of investigation within the broader field that
can operate as alternatives or correctives to traditional art history. But the
primary problem has not been the neglect of other peoples’ visualities
(however that is defined); rather, the problem has been the imposition of
European understandings of art as primarily visual on world culture. “Visual
studies offers equal treatment of all visual production irrespective of their
origin,” argues Kitty Zijlmans in a volume devoted to new approaches
to “world art.”21 I am not so sure that this does more than sidestep the

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problem for historians. As several contributions to this volume emphasize,

the “visual” is not exclusively a European prerogative. By the same token,
another culture’s “visual” is still not European. It requires careful analysis of
images, material objects, and broader cultural contexts of use to see processes
of inscription, accommodation, resistance, reframing, and so on at work in
the “event” of cultural interaction. Such attention to the complex processes
of cultural interaction is the project of understanding “visuality” that the
present volume undertakes—in opposition to contemporary world art history
schemes that have either forgotten or discounted the problems with earlier
efforts to encompass all forms of cultural production under the one umbrella
of “visuality.” By contrast, one of the main advantages to treating “visuality”
and categories associated with it as specific cultural constructs, and not as
universals valid for all space and time, is that such exercises raise awareness
of how cultural values are projected onto whatever subject matter is at hand.
The contribution on Mesoamerican relief sculpture by Patrick Hajovsky to
the present volume is a case in point. Another advantage is the possibility
of understanding art-making as an exemplary manifestation of what some
linguists and anthropologists call “multimodal integration of the body and
the environment.”22
One advantage of a shared research agenda is the creation of a community
of scholars. Discussing problems with scholars from different subfields
with different knowledge bases often leads to framing research that is more
systemic or more structural in nature. Initially, poststructuralist approaches
to knowledge production emphasized individual experimentation with the
new methodologies, rather than any identification of shared research agendas
that would come to terms with untenable racialist assumptions, taxonomies,
categories. Individual experiments with new interpretative strategies
such as “semiotics” were considered more important than collaborating
on substantive research agendas collectively defined. Should we proceed
differently now, collectively pursuing issues in common, or are we running
the risk of remaining divided along the lines that Said and others identified
over 30 years ago as endangering society in general and jeopardizing the
continued existence of the humanities in particular? The main themes of the
present volume emerge along the interstices between individual case studies
that the editors selected partly for their geographical distribution. The rest of
my comments focus on the commonalities that present themselves as elements
of a new, non-totalizing “big picture.”

Visuality in the Early Modern Period: Making Knowledge, Seeing Culture

The contemporary critical term “visuality” has not previously been applied
to the study of cultural interaction in the early modern period, but it is an

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apt frame of reference, especially when used in conjunction with two other
terms: “modernity,” which, as I have discussed, is already integral to the
contemporary study of “visuality;” and “coloniality,” which can be briefly
defined as the logic of domination in the modern world. As described
by Walter Mignolo, coloniality and modernity are entangled concepts
working together to concentrate capital and power in increasingly fewer
hands while poverty increases all over the world.23 In exploring further the
convergence of indigenous American, European, African, and Asian cultures,
“coloniality” and “visuality” together emphasize the burgeoning commerce
in material culture. Not only are conventional labels of artistic identity often
rendered irrelevant in the face of such massive and impersonal cultural
collaboration, but as the introduction and many of the chapters in this
volume attest, the scale of trade and hierarchies of social power implicated are
mind-boggling.24
Even though the term “visuality” may be new to early modern studies,
the closely related terms “visibility” and “invisibility” have already entered
the discussion of coloniality to articulate the complexity of interactions that
develop in inherently heterogeneous cultural formations. The new material
presented in this volume complicates the existing topic of “visuality”
considerably. Peripatetic lifestyles and transcultural processes characterize
artists as well as their art, even if individual identities are difficult to document.
Nor does cultural mixing always result in visual features, as Carolyn Dean
and Dana Leibsohn emphasize in a recent essay on the terminology in use
to describe visual culture in colonial Spanish America.25 For example, some
forms of cultural interaction elicited no comments that have been preserved in
the historical record—such as an absence of textual responses by indigenous
people to patterns of mixing themselves. Meanwhile, other aspects, such as
collecting practices, have left varied and often contradictory traces in our
archives and museums. More complex than either of these possibilities,
Dean and Leibsohn emphasize, is what they call the “deceit of visibility”
that has effaced the presence of those dispossessed by colonial authority.
The effacement during the initial process of contact is repeated in modern
historical accounts that deny, ignore or overlook the existence of indigenous
activity altogether, for example, in architectural practices in the colonial world,
unless the result “looks” indigenous. Once masonry prepared according
to Andean methods was re-formed into European-looking structures, the
indigenous component was easily erased from historical accounts based on
“style.”26 “Visuality” as a category is thus well poised to include the study
of those traces of mixed ancestry that are not apparent on the surface, and to
articulate the historical processes of misrecognition that favor political and
social hierarchies of power.
First and foremost, the construction of knowledge itself—its production
and consumption—aligns this study with other interdisciplinary studies

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in the history of science that explore ways in which knowledge was more
holistically conceived before modern distinctions between art, science, and
religion emerged in the eighteenth century.27 One such project is the volume
of essays edited by Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt, Making Knowledge
in Early Modern Europe, which addresses many of the same basic questions
that the contributors of the present volume do, such as: how did people
go about obtaining knowledge and making it convincing? How did they
disseminate it to others? How was cultural difference understood—through
what practices, performances, and issues, such as the recurring question of
idolatry? How and why was sensory knowledge valorized and what effects
did this valorization produce? And most basic of all, who benefited and who
did not from these attempts? In the present volume, the visual components
of knowledge construction surface more insistently. The essays trouble those
existing accounts that imagine exchange as a one- or even a two-way street.
The recursive nature of exchange stands out as the main theoretical challenge
in all of these essays.

New Representational Practices

The construction and operation of new representational practices is a concern

shared by several of the authors contributing chapters here. Bronwen
Wilson writes about a variety of intersecting practices in Bologna, where the
Carracci developed objectifying modes of visual description and Aldrovandi
assembled an unprecedented museum inspired by writings about wondrous
flora and fauna (and artifacts) in the so-called New World, as articulating a
new morphology of scientific illustration that isolates the object and focuses
on the surface of appearances, so that painting extends the visual register into
the realm of touch.28 Todd P. Olson writes in similarly complex terms about
the Protestant publisher Theodor de Bry’s illustrations of various voyages
of discovery in terms of mark-making as a feature of print technology that
distanced the object, breaking down the iconic resemblance between sign
and signified that was so important, for example, to medieval modes for
representing the sacred. Together, these chapters appear to offer glimpses
into processes that lead in opposite directions: on the one hand, to fix the
identity of strange new objects through representational practices that value
verisimilitude and, on the other hand, to break down the model of transparent
resemblance between sign and signified that provides the ontological ground
for scientific naturalism.
Attention to matters of “style” at the meta-critical level emerges as one of
the main preoccupations of individual case studies that go beyond the mere
fact of the global circulation of goods. Potentially, such issues foreground the
blurred boundaries between art, science, and religion in this time period. The

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issues also resonate with concerns raised by scholars studying the function of
sacred art in Europe during the same period.
This volume responds to the pressing need to revise disciplinary practices
at an epistemological level. The translation of physical objects into virtual
images that circulated to a wide range of audiences resulted in a remarkable
range of new representational practices. It is not surprising, therefore, that
the critical role of print technology is emerging as one of the most significant
areas of research in early modern studies inside and outside Europe.29
The point well made in this collection is that we cannot understand what
happened without considering the entire arc of translation from point of
origin to point of reception, unless we acquire deep knowledge of cultural
history on both the indigenous and European sides of the main cultural
divide. Visuality, historicized, is more complex than the re-use of print
sources, the transportation of objects, or the divide between Europe and
Other. By looking at the intersection of different cultural practices, stressing
the complex intersections, multiple filters, and numerous transfers resulting
in interpretation as “the beholder’s share” (to draw upon a phrase used by
John Shearman), we learn that nothing about Renaissance art studied in the
context of global networks of commerce is a binary operation. There is nothing
“purely” indigenous about the colonial subject or its European counterpart.
Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato and Mia Mochizuki make a similar point in their
co-authored chapter dealing with the translation of perspectival constructions
available through prints into a thoroughly Japanese idiom associated with the
mobile viewing positions and spatial illusionism of theater scenes.30 Saleema
Waraich, extending and complicating earlier studies by Gauvin Bailey, shows
that the Christian subjects of prints brought by Jesuit missionaries invited
to the sixteenth-century Mughal court of Akbar in southwestern India were
reinscribed into a dialogue with Muslim and Hindu factions: the Catholic
imagery provided an iconographic tradition that made aniconic Muslim art
capable of competing with the visually potent pantheon of Hindu deities.
Mary and Jesus as the ascetic prophet Esa legitimated the unconventional
Muslim ruler Akbar, who assimilated so many diverse religious practices to
serve his own purposes.

Diachronic Studies Replacing Period Studies

One way in which individual studies outplay the conventions that organize
the volume, such as the delineation of “early modern” as a “period,” is in
attaching importance to diachronic study and the need for understanding
global interaction beyond conventional period designations. The designation
“early modern,” while more generous than “Renaissance” in its time frame, is
still insufficient to track the historical fortunes of cultural exchange involving

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European art outside Europe. Much later, in the late nineteenth century, as
Waraich writes (this volume), the Italianate style introduced by the Jesuits to
the court of Akbar was branded “foreign,” symbolic of Rajput (that is, Hindu,
associated with “pure” Indian-ness) resistance to Muslim domination and
British rule. Natasha Eaton also emphasizes the need to maintain a diachronic
frame of reference when she considers the popularity of panoramic views
in north India that on the one hand allied tourism with colonization, but on
the other hand make it possible to understand the portable sets of views of
monuments that tourists carried home as akin to the legacies of Sufism in
which an eighteenth-century poet writes of existence through travel, and of
traveling as a form of home.
The importance of studying visuality in the longue durée with adequate
cultural grounding is essential, as Liza Oliver also demonstrates, taking to
task past interpretations of the monumental Description de l’Egypte, conceived
during the Napoleon expedition from 1798 to 1801, for paying too close
attention to specific engravings and not enough attention to the broader
intellectual landscape with its “entrenched political propaganda, military
failure, conflict, and disease.” Oliver’s study on the political context of the
“encyclopedic gaze” provides a telling complement to Wilson’s chapter. The
convergence between these two chapters is one point in this volume of essays
that approaches the recursive attention required of self-reflexive historical
writing that I discuss at the beginning of this essay.

Sense Experience as a Culturally Specific Category

The studies included in this volume exemplify the manner in which the
geographical, cultural, chronological, and conceptual boundaries of the
Renaissance as it is usually defined need to be redrawn. Taken as a whole,
these in-depth exercises in cross-cultural analysis call into question the
complacency of the Western language of the senses, of mental images, and of
discursive knowledge. It turns out that mental images are equally important
for Sufi thought, though they participate in a different worldview. Perhaps
the outstanding example of the manner in which encountering theories
of vision different from our own puts into question assumptions about
the neutrality of our terms is the chapter by Patrick Hajovsky on colonial
interpretations of a pre-contact Mexica representation of a sacred ruler.
Hajovsky examines the incommensurability of signifying practices due to
culturally different ways of conjuring the relation of the visual to a worldview.
The sculpted likeness of a Mexica lord at Chapultepec is identified primarily
by his name glyph, which subordinates the category of individualism to
the ideal of deification. However, interpretations of the sculpture informed
by European ideas about portraiture, identity, and visuality treat the

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representation as a portrait based on physical appearance. Hajovsky argues

convincingly that “visuality” resonates differently across these intersecting
cultural configurations. The fundamental paradigm or model operating in
central Mexican thought acknowledges only one principle of being, thus
the concept that sight resembles smells, which in turn resemble sounds,
is intended to convey “phenomenological associations between cognate
essences” that can be accessed through language and visual art. Nahuatl
metaphors and metonyms go beyond the visual and aural registers to
convey a synaesthetic paradigm very different from Western conceptions of
the discreetly functioning special senses. Within a Mesoamerican context,
multi-sensorial experiences convey the fundamental principle of being,
which missionaries like Diego Durán and mestizo historians including
Fernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc (mis)understand in terms commensurate
with European notions of historical truth.

Multivalence of Visual Signs and Symbols

Many stories of misrecognition, often of the kind that James Lockhart calls
“double mistaken identity,” are emerging from the historical record now that
processes of identity formation through cultural interaction have become a
scholarly focus. Visual homologies signify differently across cultural divides.
Jeanette Favrot Peterson studies processes leading to polyvalence assigned to
something as simple (and loaded) as the color black, where its significance
is diametrically opposed on either side of the main cultural divide between
Europe and Mesoamerica. Similarly, although the data and situations
are different, Mark Hinchman writes about strategic redeployments of
signs, symbols, and even glass beads in an attempt to recover voices of the
underclass from the material record in West Africa. Imagining the subject
position of the culturally dispossessed missing from the archives leads the
historian to surprising new insights about the kinds of agencies that were
practiced in a heterogeneous colonial society. In the process, both authors
take past interpretations to task for not sufficiently interrogating inherited
cultural biases aligned with dominant cultural positions.
The multivalence of symbols, like the intersection of previously unrelated
systems of representation more generally speaking, is unfolding as a major
topic across a very wide range of studies of cultural interaction. Objects
previously unstudied because they were “prints” or “decorative arts objects”
turn out to be the key players in this new, globally connected practice of art
history, leading quickly beyond art history’s perennial desire to both preserve
and discard “canon formation.”

t t t

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From conversations with colleagues to conferences and session topics, we often

hear about the “return to the object” or of an opposition between a “theory”-
based approach and one based on objects. Yet, in the final analysis, there is no
such opposition: for the decision to focus on “the object” is itself a theoretical
choice, one historically grounded in the Western history of empirical science.
The nineteenth-century category “visual arts” was originally proposed as a
way of getting beyond the racial paradigm on which art history cut its teeth,
but it no longer serves this purpose adequately (if it ever did) because a lot
more is involved in historicizing vision than recategorizing objects, as the
present collection of essays makes eminently clear.31 The individual chapters
in this volume do a fine job of articulating “visuality” at the intersection of
incommensurable cultural practices; it is from individual case studies of the
complex mechanisms of cultural interaction that shared research agendas can
arise. The tendency in cross-cultural studies is to identify a series of shared
thematic subjects. However, if a coherent field of investigation is to emerge
from these new forays, then even more fundamental issues need to be identified
and collectively pursued, such as a shared critical concern with the ways that
art historians structure time, especially in comparative analyses, so that we do
not repeat the mistakes of the nineteenth century by naively recreating a field
of commensurable objects and events from a European perspective without
acknowledging the politics of granting privilege to that perspective, to cite
just one problem that keeps resurfacing in our new “world histories” of art.
The final gesture of this volume is not meant to be read as waving a white
flag in an expanded and de-centered field of study, but as throwing down the
gauntlet: visuality matters because it raises fundamental questions about the
incommensurability of signifying practices—from the short- and long-range
effects of translating objects and places into virtual images, to the various
kinds of resistance and accommodation to power dispersed across the global
networks, and the intersections of consumerism and desire manifested in the
visually, sensorily appealing material objects and images that circulated in
the early modern world.

Notes

1. The bibliography is too extensive to summarize here. For an introduction to the issues, see
Gombrich, 1963, 1984; Sauerländer; Summers, 1982, 1989.
2. Foster, 1988, pp. ix–x.
3. Zerner, p. 279.
4. Foster, 1983, p. xv. In fact, it was Jonathan Crary, who had contributed a chapter to Foster’s
volume Vision and Visuality, who later cited the source of the term visuality as Adorno’s
Anschaulichkeit (Crary, p. 11, n. 11, citing Adorno, 1984, pp. 139–140; cf. Adorno, 1970, pp. 145, 149–
150). Crary, who opens his book by stating that it is “about vision and its historical construction,”
glossed the connotations of visuality with additional reference to accounts of modernity by Jean
Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and others.

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 Claire Farago 251

5. Adorno, 1984, p. 139, citing Kant, 1951, p. 54.

6. See note 4.

7. Kant refers his concerns to David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which
claimed that a priori truths derived from logic can tell us nothing about the world, because the
world is accessed empirically, through experience. Kant refers to Hume as having awakened him
from his “dogmatic slumber,” in Kant, 1902, IV, p. 260, as cited by Werner Pluhar, p. xxxi. My
discussion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is indebted to Pluhar, pp. xxx–xxxix. Kant’s objection
that sensibility is different in kind from thought is the basis for his account of the aesthetic as
a separate faculty on the order of the reason or the understanding (Heidegger, Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, cited in Ferguson, p. 6). It would take us too far afield from contemporary
discussions of “visuality” to trace the model of vision that Kant’s theory of knowledge inherited
ultimately from formal optics; but see Summers, 1987.

8. Ferguson, p. 25. The context for her definition is as follows. Against deconstructive (that is,
Derrida, Lyotard, de Man) accounts of the Kantian aesthetic, Ferguson argues that the emphasis
on materiality misreads Kant as an empiricist, whereas Kant accounts for aesthetic form as a
“regulative structure” that treats aesthetic objects as versions of mental images (p. 3). Ferguson
is not concerned with “visuality per se, as many 18th-century accounts of the term have been
seen to do” (p. 6) but with interconnections between consciousness and matter, given that the
“externalized objects of the imagination” are neither pure replicas of objects nor pure projections
of pure consciousness. The autonomy of aesthetic objects, memories, dreams, and similar
imaginative states is due to their “ambivalence,” that is, our not being able to assign them
exclusively to either subjectivity of objectivity (p. 7).

9. Mirzoeff, without discussing Kant, traces the origin of this important Kantian category to the
Scottish historian and Abolitionist Thomas Carlyle, for first using the English-language term
“visuality.”

10. Adorno, 1984, p. 139 (1970 edn, p. 145).

11. Adorno, 1984, p. 139. For Adorno, alluding to the formalist criticism associated with Clement
Greenberg, the compartmentalized separation of the visual from the conceptual is due to the
“official curators of culture” who do not tolerate ambivalence and thereby create an “illusion
of unity” based on the “false, thing-like notion that in the aesthetic artefact tensions have been
synthesized into a state of rest, whereas in fact those tensions are essential to the work” (p. 143;
1970 edn, p. 150). A full account of Adorno’s complex attempt to retain something of Kant’s
emphasis on form while accounting for art’s social function in a capitalist society is beyond the
scope of this short essay; but see Zuidevaart, with further references.

12. Both terms are widely diffused, but on “ocularcentrism,” see Jay; on “Cartesian perspectivalism,”
see Crary. Both authors preview their arguments in their chapter contributions to Foster, 1988. For
an informed historiographical account, see Brennan and Jay; Cook.

13. Said and other critics regard the academic practices they associate with Eurocentrism as
misleading because they are based on the flawed assumption that “internal factors peculiar to
each society are decisive for their comparative evolution,” culminating in the achievements
of European civilization. See Amin, pp. ix, 85–117. What Karen Lang calls the “unabashedly
European” subject of Kant’s critical enterprise has entered into the discussion of analytical
philosophy even less. Kant stresses that the judging spectator, that is, the enlightened subject,
uses only his own faculty of reason to understand and change the world by working in
society. The spectator’s detachment from the natural world is a mark of his control of his inner
nature, making aesthetic and teleological judgment (of beauty and of the sublime in nature,
respectively) equally important markers of moral society. The humanity of non-European
peoples is frequently negated in Kant’s writings, whose best offer for inclusion is through
colonization. See Lang. On the cultural production of people who do not separate themselves
from nature, see Pietz; Connelly.

14. Said, 1983, p. 135.

15. Said, 1983, p. 137.

16. Said, 1983, p. 159.

17. See, further, Elkins, devoted largely to a critical discussion of the most intellectually ambitious
attempt to date, by Summers, 2003. Even the idea that space is a universal a priori “synthetic”
intuition, as proposed by Kant, is a cultural construction rather than an actual universal. See also
Inaga.

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 252 seeing across cultures in the early modern world

18. Pfisterer. See, further, Podro, 1972, 1982; Gombrich, 1984; Bakos, 1996a, 1996b; and Kaufmann,
who introduces dozens of new authors to consider in the historiography of German and east
central European art history in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Kaufmann
provides only brief descriptive epitomes, boiling each text down to a brief structural description,
so that anyone seeking an analytical account—integrated into the broader history of race science
for example—must supply their own gloss.

19. Pfisterer, p. 84, discusses the schemes of Hans Belting, David Summers, and John Onians as
examples of the new neuroscience that replaced the neo-Kantian psychological explanations of
Robert Vischer and other nineteenth-century writers who served as models for Wölfflin, Warburg,
and others. On which, see Rampley.

20. Nelson, pp. 1–21, where he addresses, among other things relevant to the present discussion of
visuality, the history of equating seeing with knowing in Indo-European languages, citing Tyler,
p. 27.

21. Zijlmans.

22. Green, personal communication, November 2, 2008. See, further, Green, 2009. Compare the
contribution to Zerner’s Art Journal issue by Preziosi: “… the psyche is historical—something
which is as difficult for it to admit as that the senses themselves are not per se natural organs but
are rather the results of long processes of differentiation within human history. We do not know
the senses except through their always-already-situated social and cultural frameworks; they
are inaccessible to us except in acculturated form, and our approach to them necessarily passes
through their prior cultural adaptations,” 1982, p. 321; see, further, Preziosi, 1986. The subject of
the interrelationship between mind and body is also of current interest in anthropology, on which,
see the excellent critique of the ways in which scientific theories of cognition might be useful to the
humanities and social sciences, in Marchand.

23. Mignolo, p. 11.

24. To give a quantified example, Gauvin Bailey estimates that as many as ten million Chinese
porcelains were sold in Brazil alone between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries—so plentiful
was Chinese pottery that in Brazil they were given to slaves, used as chamber pots, and their
shards were plastered on church steeples and domes.

25. Dean and Leibsohn.

26. Dean and Leibsohn, pp. 15–16, cite the case of the building of the Cathedral of Cuzco, which used
stones sacked from the ruins of nearby Saqsaywaman. Webster presents another case that can be
documented in archival records that demonstrate that the foremen as well as the laborers were
indigenous skilled craftsmen.

27. Daston and Galison; Smith; Daston and Park; Smith and Findlen.

28. Freedberg; Schiebinger and Swan.

29. For example, Zorach; Wilson; Pon; Barnes.

30. Leonardo da Vinci was also preoccupied with the movement of the spectator and the problem of
viewing perspectival constructions from offside; see Farago, 1994.

31. Farago, 1995.

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