What I have read is a very thorough and important mapping of the history and ontology of visual studies. I could not help thinking that the reading list for the Seminars has produced a de facto canon of topics and texts.
The names and references missing here, however, spoke as loudly about the field as those that were frequently quoted and cited. What I would like to advocate for, in particular, is an expansion of the visual that engages broader issues in sensory perception. Visual studies have been referred to here as an “attitude,” a disciplinary field, an expertise, a paradigm, a methodology, a social commitment, even a set of skills. But the discussion has not openly tackled questions of perception and sensoriality. The “visual turn” seems to have happened in the absence of an idea that the visual studies could go beyond the matter of looking.
Moving beyond vision-oriented hermeneutics opens the possibility of other sorts of engagements. By investigating digital photography, painting, video, film, and multimedia art, we can find a variety of transgressive practices that significantly reconfigure the relationship between vision and other senses, and that disrupt and potentially transform the scopic regime.1 Many artworks and cultural artifacts today challenge the traditionally inscribed “hierarchy of the senses,” in which vision is dominant, which has prevailed in Western thought. These range from Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (an installation using humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air), through war documentaries on the Web incorporating still photographs, music, and voiceover, to the Disney World attraction It’s Tough to Be a Bug, which releases an unpleasant odor to match the species an audience is watching on screen. At the same time, the field of neurology has been giving much emphasis to cross-modal perception, including studies on synaesthesia (a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic experiences in a second pathway), stressing various forms of overlap between what were once thought to be clearly demarcated sensory stimuli. Following the cognitive and affective dynamics that emerge in the engagement with images, smells, textures, shapes, and sounds can offer a chance to reformulate some of the paradigms pertaining to the field of the visual studies.
This shift demands a greater focus on the figure of the embodied beholder. In my view, the conceptualization of the beholder implied by the Seminars, readings, and discussions is purely scopic—the gaze seems to be the only function the body performs. The body is discussed very briefly in Section 5 on Bildwissenschaft; yet it remains a fixed object rather than a “process-in-practice.” Consequently, I miss deeper engagement with the problem of embodied, multisensory awareness, where the viewer is no longer only a viewer, but rather the subject of an encounter involving spatial situating of the body, proprioception, temperature, skin contact, level of comfort, and aural and olfactory impressions. This encounter comes into focus through the lens of interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches considering how various categories of embodied difference such as gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, (dis)ability, geopolitical location, and (non)humanity determine our perception. Feminist scholars and theorists of affect have done important work in this direction,2 yet it is rarely acknowledged in the field of the visual studies.
Admittedly, there have been postulations for a sensory turn in the field: W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that visual culture compels attention to the tactile, the auditory, the haptic; Irit Rogoff has contended that images, sounds, and spatial delineations should be read onto and through one another; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have stressed that the visual is simply one point of entry into intertextual dialogism. However, these ideas remain unaddressed here or in the large number of anthologies and readers in visual studies. I believe these research concerns can open up fresh perspectives on artistic and cultural practices and challenge aesthetic apprehension, which has often been reduced to the visual only. Attention to the question of multisensory witnessing of today’s image culture contributes to efforts to revise an important terrain of inquiry: namely, which paradigms determine the relationship between images and their audiences?
1. Film studies scholars have done important work in that direction: see Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
2. While the consideration of alternative perceptual modalities is a topic that has only quite recently stirred the larger debate, the body has been a key focus in feminist theory and activism since the 1970s. The theme of the embodied encounter has been explored by, among others, Rosemary Betterton, Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996); and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
On affect see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn, eds., “Affect,” special issue, Body, and Society 16, no. 1 (2010): 7–28, Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 548–67.