The Pictorial, Iconic, and Visual Turns in Contemporary Humanities and Cultural Studies
From the Semiotics of the Image, Picture Theory, and Image Science (Bildwissenschaft) to Erwin Panofsky’s “critical iconology” and Philosophical Attempts to Answer for the Question “What is an Image?”:
Abstract
This essay is an attempt to outline the issues of the visual turn which is a mirror reflection of the linguistic turn. In humanistic reflection, the “visual turn” functioning under two names the pictorial turn by W.J.T. Mitchell and its German equivalent, the iconic turn (Die ikonische Wende) by Gottfried Boehm, can be defined as a kind of theoretical-methodological shift from the linguistic to the pictorial and visual paradigms, which falls within the area of Visual Culture Studies or Visual Studies. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the “pictorial turn” and the “iconic turn” led to the development of three scientific disciplines: the semiotics of the image, the American Picture Theory, and its German equivalent of Image Science (Bildwissenschaft). These scientific disciplines arose around the same time. American considerations on the pictorial turn were largely conditioned by opposition to the domination of language, mastering the icon by logos, and boiled down to the interpretation of the image and its philosophical connotations. In the case of Boehm’s iconic turn, inspiration from inter- and transdisciplinary image research takes the initiative, unlike American visual culture studies, from philosophical art historians and aesthetes who (beginning with Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky) were interested in various forms of visuality. In the meaning proposed by Mitchell, the pictorial turn goes far beyond the models of “textuality” and “discursiveness” towards Erwin Panofsky’s critical iconology. In turn, Boehm in his concept of the iconic turn, similarly to Mitchell, refers to the concept of the linguistic turn, looking for the logic of an image different from the logic of language but first of all, he asks the question “What is an image?” and points to an extremely wide range of its philosophical connotations.
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