The first half of the week was intended to open the question of visual studies’ histories. The opening seminar, led by Gustav Frank, proposed a two-part history of visuelle Kultur (an expression he used to designate several traditions of the cultural study of the visual) as an alternative to existing models of visual studies and Bildwissenschaft.1 For this seminar participants read a range of texts by Walter Benjamin and others; the excerpt here follows on from the discussion of one of the readings, Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study.2 The general notion was to ask about visual studies’ sense of its own past. During the week there were six main models on the table: (1) a generally accepted model in which a predominantly English-language visual studies derives from English cultural studies; (2) a model that augments the first with Scandinavian and Latin American visual studies and their emphasis on visual communication and semiotics, and with German-language Bildwissenschaft; (3) a model polemically proposed in October, which demonizes Anglo-American visual studies as an ally of anthropology set against art history; (4) one set out by Horst Bredekamp, which traces German Bildwissenschaft to Wölfflin, Warburg, and Riegl; (5) a genealogy for art history proposed by Thomas Puttfarken, which sees Riegl, Wickhoff, Warburg, and others as more central than Vasari and Winckelmann; and (6) the model set out in this seminar, which divides the study of visuelle Kultur into two phases, before and after the Second World War.
GUSTAV FRANK: I would like to gather some ideas about the histories of the field, especially the German background. The fact that we have come together to talk about the history of visual studies indicates that we’ve reached a certain point in the development of the movement. Visual studies has now begun to write its histories. At the moment this means three things: first, we are looking for the longue durée, the deeper history, and perhaps even Plato and Aristotle as practitioners of visual studies; second, there is a desire to connect to authoritative discourses both past and present, such as neuroscience; and third, we are invested in unveiling the primal scene, where the discipline constituted itself in a foundational act—ideally, the pregnant moment in which the founding father coined the field’s name.
This first session could therefore be used to do some justice to this moment in visual studies and Bildwissenschaft, and close the gap between these newcomers and the history of thought by saying, “Visual studies is not that new at all.” A lot of people do so. About the founding father there is a wide consensus, with little dissent. Ask Horst Bredekamp, Tom Mitchell, or Georges Didi-Huberman, and you will be told it’s Erwin Panofsky or the Aby Warburg of the Mnemosyne project. Both are said to have shown art history’s openness to visual culture.
That, in short, is how the story used to be told. I want to discuss another story. Mine follows from three hypotheses. First, that the emergence of visual studies is not centered on art; that visual studies depends on developments in the experimental sciences, the study of perception and the psyche; and that what makes such scientific projects visible in a broader cultural context is experiments in media and perception around 1900. Second, that what I am calling visuelle Kultur is a tentative depiction, a first theorization, of a set of phenomena; it intermingles such things as the first photographic reproduction of the shroud of Turin by Secondo Pia, made in 1898, with William Röntgen’s first X-rays of his wife’s hand, taken in December 1895. In regarding such examples, those who work in visuelle Kultur augment, fragment, appropriate, and otherwise reimagine the scientific traditions I have mentioned along with traditions of philosophical aesthetics from the century of Lessing’s Laocoön onwards. Third, a broad selection of these phenomena was successfully treated under the umbrella of mass media studies from the 1940s to the 1980s. This period of media studies predominance came to an end that is indicated, for example, by Friedrich Kittler’s turn to the hardware devices used in technical media; and in parallel visual studies then re-emerged in the mid-1980s, this time as a solution for a crisis of art history, on the one hand, and for society’s self-perception as dominated by visual media, on the other. We need to be aware that this second attempt is driven by the logic of disciplines that make use of an external, public desire to come to terms with a new media landscape.
So there is a great discontinuity in visual studies. The first attempt failed to constitute a study of visuelle Kultur. It came to an end in the 1940s, with Rudolf Arnheim’s “Laocoön,” or Panofsky’s “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” or Kracauer’s “From Caligari to Hitler” of 1947.3 Visuelle Kultur in the 1920s had shrunk, by the 1940s, to a monomedia study of film. I am not interested in the primal scenes of visual studies, and I am not advocating that we continue what the “founding fathers” began. But the first effort to establish visuelle Kultur should interest us because it was a failure. Part of my concern, therefore, is to reconstruct the problematic of this first period of visual studies, because it appears that similar problematics have been implemented in contemporary visual studies and Bildwissenschaft. I recommended Münsterberg’s essay, first published in 1916, to show that the central, problematic object in the initial phase of visuelle Kultur was film; perhaps we can discuss why film was central then, and photography has become central in visual culture studies after Barthes. Münsterberg was a disciple of Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first laboratory of experimental psychology at Leipzig University; and Wundt was a student of Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz, two of the foremost researchers of the physiology of the senses: Münsterberg can be seen as the culmination of the nineteenth-century tradition of philosophical, and then medical, and then physiological, and finally psychological study of sight.4 It is with this background that Münsterberg created a new place for the psychology of film in aesthetic theory, and so he is an apposite exemplar of what I am calling the initial phase of visuelle Kultur.
WHITNEY DAVIS: I find this genealogy deeply attractive and important, not just historiographically, as it pertains to the ways visual studies understands its histories, but on its own terms. The rhetoric, the conceptual apparatus, the political and cultural concerns, of this first phase of visuelle Kultur seem to me to warrant being taken very seriously. Therefore I would like to ask what in it should be described as a failure: what led to its shrinking or weathering away such that we would need to engage in reconstructing it?
GUSTAV FRANK: There are two answers, I think. The easier answer is institutional: since the 1940s, the entire field of visuelle Kultur has been absorbed by media studies—film, advertising, and all the things that interested Benjamin in One-Way Street. I am not the sort of researcher who knows exactly how that worked institutionally. Normally you would argue that there was a break in 1933, which resulted in emigration, and so forth. Visuelle Kultur could not survive without an academic basis. Balázs and Benjamin, for example, were linked to very special conditions of publication. I would prefer a second and more complicated answer, which is that there was something immanent in visuelle Kultur that was highly problematic: it was too smart, as it were, and it relied on a vitalism.
What strikes me about Bildwissenschaft and visuelle Kultur in the 1980s and 1990s is that they have a semblance of the arguments of Balász and Benjamin, without developing them; but they do not have the organizing ideology, the vitalism, that lay behind Benjamin’s and Balázs’s positions. So when the arguments pop up in Gottfried Boehm’s writing, or Hans Belting’s writing, there is a lack of understanding of the pertinent ideological background.
I would like to know: What is the underlying theory of Bildwissenschaft or visual culture which organizes their arguments? What is the underlying structure now, if the originating vitalism is gone?
FLORA LYSEN: Gustav, before we pursue that, is there a body of critique on Bildwissenschaft (as proposed by Boehm, Belting, and Bredekamp) in German-speaking countries? I wonder, for example, to what extent discussions of postcolonial studies and gender studies are being taken up by proponents of Bildwissenschaft vis-à-vis visual culture studies. There are, for example, scholars who critique Bildwissenschaft for systematically excluding female scholarship and also the approaches developed by gender and queer studies.5
INGE HINTERWALDNER: Gustav, for me this question is problematic because it suggests that we are speaking of homogeneous blocs. Even if we ignore all the other approaches in the German-speaking area besides the most prominent ones of Bredekamp, Belting, and Boehm, we are confronted with a huge variety regarding their influences; they wouldn’t even necessarily agree on the notion Bildwissenschaft as a label for what they practice.
GUSTAV FRANK: I guess one could answer Flora by developing Inge’s remarks. Diversity is definitely a characteristic of the second and third generation of scholars who graduated from the Karlsruhe program Bild/Körper/Medium: Eine anthropologische Perspektive (which began in 2000), from the Humboldt University program Das technische Bild (which began in 2000), or from Eikones: Bildkritik, Macht und Bedeutung der Bilder in Basel. And the book market has meanwhile adopted the terms Bild, Bildwissenschaft, and Bildtheorie (picture theory), whatever theoretical or methodological orientation the book in question may follow. But if we want to know what the standard references are, the field is not as wide open as recent studies like your book on iconicity in IT-based real-time simulations might suggest.6 Hence diversity and certain limitations go hand in hand. These projects mostly exclude the majority of the interests of UK visual studies and the gender perspective in Bildwissenschaft’s anthropology.7 No surprise, then, that in 2007 we saw a relaunch of the art history journal FKW, founded in 1987, as Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur.
MICHAEL HOLLY: Gustav, I remember Georges Didi-Huberman saying that the problem with these thinkers, such as Münsterberg, Benjamin, and Balázs, is that they were killed twice. First they were slain by their enemies; and then the fragments of their thought that reached this country were destroyed by the authors’ heirs in American art history and cultural studies. During the 1950s and 1960s, in the Cold War, when their ideas arrived in the United States, their theoretical force went into a deep freeze. In his Anglo-American period, Panofsky became a very different thinker. He had to be.
GUSTAV FRANK: Yes, that is part of the first answer I proposed: an institutional, historical explanation for the failure.
WHITNEY DAVIS: What exactly seems to you to have become unsustainable as an immanent feature of the early work? It seems to have something to do with the doctrine of expression: the expressive gesture, the transparency of the Innenwelt to visibility and the Umwelt, by way of nonverbal or extralinguistic expressivity.
GUSTAV FRANK: Yes, I think so, exactly. There is the hope that pictures allow us a unique immediate access to the essence of life, that they make sense not only in a semantic but in an ontological way.
JAMES ELKINS: Gustav, you once mentioned Kracauer as an author who is in some sense missing from our awareness of contemporary visual studies. Who else, aside from the readings we have done for this seminar, would you want to reread?
GUSTAV FRANK: Certainly Rudolf Arnheim; there is also Dolf Sternberger, who writes on the panorama.8 Also some pre-1900 sources, such as Wilhelm Wundt, who has corporeal arguments on philogenetic language theory; and some literary sources, such as Musil’s dissertation, in philosophy, on Ernst Mach (later he worked in the psychological laboratories in Berlin).
CLEMENA ANTONOVA: I would like to attract attention to a very little-known tradition from the period we are discussing, namely work on visual studies that was done in Russia by thinkers from a variety of disciplinary angles, but especially from the hard sciences. There were, for instance, exciting projects going on at the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences, an institution co-organized by Kandinsky and in existence between 1921 and 1929. What is of interest is the Russian reception of German authors, like Wundt and Ernst Mach, the huge emphasis on scientific images, as well as the impact of this work on fields as semiotics (the famous Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics). This Russian tradition belongs, too, to the history of visual studies. More importantly, many of the problems that plagued the Russian projects have resurfaced, in different guises, in more recent work in the West.9
KEITH MOXEY: What is wrong with the sources that are invoked by visual studies in the 1980s and 1990s—Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty? What has contemporary visual studies missed by not going back to Balázs and these other authors?
GUSTAV FRANK: It is the other way around: we should reflect on why the earlier generations failed to set up a core, stable, consensual visual studies program, and why their ways of setting arguments did not work after the 1940s. Your construction posits more of a continuity: Benjamin is in the mix, and we also have Heidegger. I would propose that the history is more discontinuous, but the arguments are reused, recycled: we are trying to continue a project that has already failed, for endemic reasons. I would prefer to understand how they argued, to achieve a sharper criticality in relation to their project.
KEITH MOXEY: What strikes me is that what intervened was the Second World War, and the related immigration. One of the consequences, in critical theory, was the condemnation of popular culture by Adorno, Horkheimer, and others. For a long time, that account colored how people approached popular culture.
GUSTAV FRANK: It is very useful to bring Adorno into the discussion in this context. Benjamin was too smart for the Marxist project: he introduces the concerns of writers like Balázs, recycled in a more reflective mode. I would like to use Adorno to ask why the visuelle Kultur project failed, because if it failed with people so close to it, then the project was insufficiently animated by the objects Benjamin brought forward.
JAMES ELKINS: Gustav, your bipartite history, broken by a “failure,” is a very provocative model. I would contrast it with two other revisionist projects: Horst Bredekamp’s sketch of the history of Bildwissenschaft, which traces it to Wölfflin, Riegl, and Benjamin; and one of the last essays Thomas Puttfarken wrote, which was intended to criticize the notion that contemporary art history descends from Vasari and Winckelmann as much as it depends on Wickhoff, Riegl, and others.10
Both of those accounts, Bredekamp’s and Puttfarken’s, gloss over the gap at midcentury. The virtue of your account is that it makes it possible to ask about the possibility that visual studies has a discontinuous history rather than a history that is adequately explained as a series of accumulations.
GUSTAV FRANK: The Danish scholar Anders Michelsen also sees this gap, but from a different point of view.11 And it’s true of Bredekamp that he talks away the discontinuity, in a very simplistic manner, developing a model that works by accumulation.
MARÍA LUMBRERAS CORUJO: Hans Belting has also spoken of failure, although from a completely different perspective both from yours, Gustav, and Michelsen’s. He talks about the “interrupted paths towards a Bildwissenschaft,” blaming art history for having put an end to, rather than expanding, Warburg’s project of a Kulturwissenschaft.12 What I find interesting and challenging in your proposal is that you see this failure as an endemic one. Belting, as maybe also Georges Didi-Huberman, sees Warburg’s project as failing from without, while you see visuelle Kultur failing from within. It is challenging because the very desire of reconstructing the history of that failure entails a question about where our own limits, today in the present visual studies project, might be. This makes me think of Douglas Crimp’s words “what history, whose history, history to what purpose.”13 In a way, your genealogy is more self-questioning.
GUSTAV FRANK: Thanks, María, I couldn’t have summarized that better myself. I guess that’s why we have come forward with our “farewell” and why we’re drawing heavily from the field’s history. We think the problematic is deeply implemented in the makeup of current studies and in the references they frequently use as authorities.
MICHAEL HOLLY: Gustav, do you explain Panofsky’s uninterrupted history?
GUSTAV FRANK: That depends on how you understand the reception. Is there a lively discussion of the perspective essay, or is it quoted as a classic?
MICHAEL HOLLY: I think it is different in Germany and in the United States. Willibald Sauerländer was conscripted and went to graduate school in the 1940s; he told me once that he never heard Panofsky’s name when he was in graduate school. That is evidence of a dramatic interruption, but I don’t think it was the same here in the States.
MARÍA LUMBRERAS CORUJO: In Germany, that dramatic interruption also affected other important figures such as Warburg and, to a lesser extent, Benjamin.14 When you look at the Anglo-American world, you find that both the history of all these early twentieth-century thinkers’ reception and the various ways in which it connects with the emergence of visual studies in the nineties differ from what happened in German-speaking countries. So I agree with you, Keith, but I also see a difference. I have the impression that in terms of genealogies, Bildwissenschaft and visual studies might not share a common stem, even if their histories intersect or appear to be parallel at some points.
PAUL FROSH: Of the texts you set us, most are concerned with a hermeneutics of redemption, resurrection, or renewal. That has partly to do with the vitalist background, I think: the idea of reviving a gestural language that had been repressed in the Gutenberg era. In Benjamin, for example, there is an argument about messianic time. But there is also a hermeneutics of suspicion, and of unveiling, and that is ultimately about the war.
What’s refreshing about that now, I suppose, relates to the brief on the announcement for this event, which refers to the predictability of certain kinds of mass culture critiques.15 It also reminds me of your example, Jim, of the advertiser—
JAMES ELKINS: Calvin Klein.16
PAUL FROSH: Which is also a hermeneutics of suspicion. For me, Gustav, your history provides an alternative.
LISA CARTWRIGHT: Münsterberg and the other readings on film you assigned us are completely canonical. They were read in the late 1970s and 1980s, so if we are willing to take this study outside of art history proper, and into film studies, and to trace the texts through France and the United States, we will find a different, less discontinuous genealogy.
FLORA LYSEN: Panofsky’s essay on film has been quoted and reprinted throughout the twentieth century, but not so much for its argument (a rather iconographic reading of film), but much more because of the significance that the stature of Panofsky, as an eminent art historian, could lend to the nascent discipline of film studies.17
GUSTAV FRANK: Well, Lisa, Balázs is quoted in film studies, but he is quoted for his contribution to film studies. There is a complete ignorance of the fact that he is providing a fuller account of film: it is not a film studies text at all. It is not a monomedia text.
LISA CARTWRIGHT: There are studies that take up Balázs in that sense, for example Thomas Levin, who works on sound, or David Rodowick, whose work has never been situated in film studies per se.18 So I don’t think that it is accurate to say that Balász is not continuous with present interests.
JEANETTE ROAN: Gustav, I’m interested in the idea that film was the central object of the initial phase of visuelle Kultur. What do you see as the relationship between the history of film/media studies and the history of visuelle Kultur? What happens to film as an object of study? It is almost nonexistent, for example, in the readings we’ve been assigned for this week, with a few exceptions in your readings and Lisa Cartwright’s readings.
GUSTAV FRANK: When visuelle Kultur was shaped in the 1920s, it was one among several attempts to theorize an emerging field of media that were having an enormous impact on society. Some approaches foregrounded media’s ability to organize mass audiences. Some burgeoned along the obviously crucial line between the sayable and the invisible. Hence film was central to both of these emerging pathways of theorizing. For about four decades, the public and political interest in mass media dominated over the interest in the picture. When visual studies and Bildwissenschaft gained shape in the 1990s, they had to mark the older modernist line between the sayable/dead word and visible/vivid picture, as well as the later divide between picture and mass media. And let’s not forget about a third academic rival, art history, with its focus on painting as its privileged object. Visual studies has a certain logic in taking photography as its primary object: it’s in part to gain theoretical profile.
BRIDGET COOKS: I wonder if we can address the feeling of loss that I’m getting from this conversation. I’m getting this sense that we’ve lost something, that something about visual studies has failed. The entire title of our week makes me wonder if we’re asking: Are we getting it right? Are we doing something wrong? Are we paying proper homage to our forefathers? I think visual studies is a success.
JAMES ELKINS: Actually, if we adopt Gustav’s genealogy, we are saying farewell to a farewell, in the sense that obliviousness to a certain history is something we wish to address. We hope to reclaim or rethink something we have lost.
BRIDGET COOKS: I don’t feel loss. I don’t mean to sound defensive, but I don’t feel there is something in need of correcting.
MICHAEL HOLLY: Bridget, as an art historian writing on melancholy, I see loss as central. But there is something to be said about visual studies’ refusal to see loss. Through loss an opening might be created once again: there is courage involved in bringing certain theorists back in, because they make us see things in a new and brighter light. We juxtapose works with Heidegger, Benjamin, and others in ways that an older art history would never ever allow us to do. I would hope that is still part of the excitement, the reason why we do visual studies.
JAMES ELKINS: Certainly for me, one of the “farewells” I’d like to say would be to a kind of visual studies that is content with its received sense of its past. Opening that question will certainly involve a sense of loss, even if it is only loss of euphoria.
ANNA SIGRÍDUR ARNAR: My understanding of how we are using the term “farewell” does not entail saying “goodbye” to visual studies (that would be a loss!) but that the field can “fare well” by taking time to assess its methods, its assumptions, its gaps. In that sense, it’s not a loss but a gain.
ELISABETH FRIEDMAN: If there is a sense of loss, it may be for another sort of art history which was interrupted by Nazism and the war, and which congealed in such a way that we find challenging, whether or not we are art historians. Perhaps there is a sense that art history could have been visual studies if some of these traditions that you’re talking about, Gustav, could have been sustained.
WHITNEY DAVIS: Here is another possible difference between what we might call Visual Studies 1, up to the 1940s, and Visual Studies 2. When Benjamin, Adorno, Kracauer, Balász, Cassirer, Husserl, Heidegger, and other authors were writing, they were responding to what were for them live and credible theories of vision and visuality, which were contemporary to them. Visual Studies 2 seems to have no comparable engagement. If Visual Studies 2 is still referring to Benjamin and others, then it is excluding fifty or sixty years of scientific, psychological, and physiological work on vision and visibility. It is as if that work was of no consequence. Visual Studies 2 would be using a vocabulary that is scientifically defined, but without its context.
GUSTAV FRANK: Visual studies scholars see Benjamin as dealing with visuality and not so much with vision.
JAMES ELKINS: I think this is absolutely correct, but it is prone to a misunderstanding. We aren’t saying, I take it, that visual studies could discover the optical, cognitive, and neurological work of the last half-century in the way that the earlier practices, “Visual Studies 1,” had done. That’s because even if recent science were presented to contemporary visual studies, the field is currently predicated on an agnosticism about reality so pervasive that it would prohibit any sense of the pertinence of the science itself. There are strains within art history that aren’t constituted this way, and later in the week I think we’ll be talking about them in your seminar, Whitney. But visual studies as I see it practiced could not bring itself into a relation to vision science analogous to the relation earlier practices had. Contemporary visual studies can only see science as a social phenomenon, and see its claims as socially contextual.
KEITH MOXEY: It is actually harder, after the poststructuralist critique of linguistic referentiality and psychoanalytic critique of the autonomous subject, to view “scientific” theory as any more foundational than humanistic theory. We no longer have the same faith in the theoretical models offered us by the sciences.
GUSTAV FRANK: But the problem is the consequences that follow from taking as our point of departure Heidegger, Lacan, and others. I think you’re implying we should not trust this scientific stuff because it is culturally and theoretically naïve. But the scientific practitioners have also gone through Bruno Latour, and are aware of the problematics of what they are doing.
FLORA LYSEN: And from within the “visual turn” scholars are also increasingly aware of this. Martin Jay, for example, has argued (pointing to Latour) we might be overstating the cultural dimension of vision. The “visual turn” seems to have completely dismantled the idea that images could somehow have a universal capacity to communicate, though that critique is based on a simplistic reversal of the modern faith in natural universalism.19
1. See further Frank, “Layers of the Visual: Towards a Literary History of Visual Culture,” in Seeing Perception, edited by Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 76–97.
2. For this seminar the participants read the following texts: Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1916); Béla Balázs, “Three Addresses by Way of a Preface” and “Visible Man,” in Visible Man, Or the Culture of Film, translated by Rodney Livingstone, edited by Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 3–15; Walter Benjamin, “Notes on a Conversation with Béla Balázs” (1929), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 276–77; Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 207–21; Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 507–30; Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 694–98; Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 720–22; Benjamin, “The Rigorous Study of Art: On the First Volume of the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 666–72; Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” excerpt (Filling Station, Imperial Panorama, Attested Auditor of Books, Optician, Toys), in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 444–75; Benjamin, “The Author as Producer, Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 768–82; Benjamin, “Problems in the Sociology of Language: An Overview,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 68–93; Benjamin, “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 94–95; and Erwin Panofsky’s essay on motion pictures, cited below.
3. The markers proposed here as end points of the first phase of visuelle Kultur are Arnheim, “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film (1938),” in Film as Art, edited by Rudolf Arnheim (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 164–89; Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 151–69; and Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947; London: Dobson, 1947). The markers proposed here as end points of the media studies interregnum are the classical writings at the beginning of visual studies and Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), translated as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
4. Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986); Johannes Müller und die Philosophie, edited by Michael Hagner and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt (Berlin: Akademie, 1992); Michael Heidelberger, “Philosophische Argumente in empirischer Wissenschaft: Das Beispiel Helmholtz,” in Interaktionen zwischen Philosophie und empirischen Wissenschaften, edited by Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Frankfurt: Lang, 1995), 211–24; Michael Heidelberger, “Beziehungen zwischen Sinnesphysiologie und Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Philosophie und Wissenschaften, Formen und Prozesse ihrer Interaktion, edited by Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Frankfurt: Lang, 1997), 37–58.
5. Sigrid Schade, “Bildwissenschaft: A New ‘Discipline’ and the Absence of Women,” in The Institutes of the Zurich University of the Art, edited by Hans Peter Schwarz (Zurich: ZHdK, 2008), 162–71.
6. Inge Hinterwaldner, Das systemische Bild: Ikonizität im Rahmen computerbasierter Echtzeitsimulationen (Munich: Fink, 2010).
7. This is a long-standing issue that will be addressed in more detail in Section 5 of the Seminars, on Bildwissenschaft.
8. Sternberger, Panorama, oder, Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Insel, 1981).
9. See the journal Experiment 3 (1997), especially my essay on Kandinsky’s “Work Plan for the Visual Arts Section of the Academy (Theses),” 157ff. I discuss some of the work at Kandinsky’s Visual Arts Section in my “Visual Studies and Iconology at the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences: Insights from an Unfinished Russian Experiment of the 1920’s,” in New Perspectives on Iconology: Visual Studies and Anthropology, edited by Barbara Baert, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, and Jenke van den Akkerveken (Brussels: Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2012), 80–89.
10. Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 418–28; Puttfarken, “Thoughts on Vasari and the Canon,” in Renaissance Theory, coedited by Robert Williams and James Elkins, vol. 5 of The Art Seminar (New York: Routledge, 2007). Thomas Puttfarken died on October 5, 2006; his incomplete essay was transmitted by his colleague, Neil Cox.
11. Michelsen, “Nothing Has Meaning Outside of Discourse? On the Creative Dimension of Visuality,” in “Art in the Age of Visual Culture and the Image,” special issue, Leitmotiv 5 (2005–6): 89–114. (Leitmotiv is an e-journal; see ledonline.it/leitmotiv.)
12. “Unterbrochene Wege zu einer Bildwissenschaft.” Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001): 14–18.
13. Douglas Crimp, “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text 59 (Summer 1999): 60.
14. Benjamin’s texts were widely read in the second half of the sixties, and this critical reception, along with an increasing interest in ideology critique, helped recuperate Warburg’s work. But that only happened in the seventies, after decades of oblivion. See Michael Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 59–73.
15. “Despite the appearance of new journals and online sites devoted to visual studies, and despite the continuously increasing number of departments worldwide, the field of visual studies remains a minority interest with an increasingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and subjects.” www.stonesummertheoryinstitute.org, as posted July 28, 2011. [—J.E.]
16. This is the “Case of the Calvin Klein Suit,” described in the first introduction to this book, under “Absences,” no. 7.
17. This argument is put forward at length in Thomas Levin, “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 1 (1996): 27–55.
18. See Levin, Resistance to Cinema: Reading German Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
19. Jay, “Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 274.