Lecture Notes – Stein
DO NO QUOTE OR Distribute
Visual and material culture
(introduction – myself ; then Jonathan ; then myself to wrap it up and put it in context of module).
Today we are going to look at the way historians dealt with visual and material objects as historical evidence. I will focus a bit more here on visual culture as I have worked on that quite a lot in regard to the history of posters (Aids posters)
It must have gone not as unnoticed to you that until now visual and material culture has not really played a role in this module.
We have been focusing – almost exclusively and with few exceptions such as
Roland Barthes – on the written word and printed texts and archival sources.
This is what historians have traditionally felt most comfortably with. And that is reflected in our teaching too here at Warwick.
We mostly teach you text and written sources; images and material culture comes in in some modules but that is only since the 1990s really – I will tell you why in the second half of my lecture after Jonathan why this is the case in the
1990s. If you think about a ‘normal’ history text, we find rather few images – partly this is still due to the fact, that many publisher are still hesitant to reproduce them.
How have images been traditionally treated by historians – if they have been used at all?
Images as illustrations
When historian used images – until the 1960 and on a massive scale only in the
1990 really -- they tended to use treat them as mere illustrations to the written text. (an exeption is the Annales school which already used photos in the 1920s – but that was also a reaction against ‘normal’ history). By which I mean, the image will not be explained for itself but is reduced to serve a particular logical argument, made in the text.
(slide) – use of syphilis poster for illustration
Until the 1960s historians were virtually accused – of a certain ‘condescension towards images’ – by art historians, for example (Fyfe/law, Picturing Power,
1980) – the same is true for the study of any kind of material objects (images are
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of course part of a visual culture AND material culture –remind them)
But it is only in the 1960s due to all the theoretical influences we have already discussed in the module that historians began to admit – or better, to ‘see’ for themselves – that they were virtually ‘visually illiterate’ (Ralph Samuel). The were masters of the text but speechless in front of an image
There are intellectual and institutional reasons for this visual illiteracy of histrians until the 1960s
Let me talk you through them: the intellectual reasons first
I have to go back to an old friend Leopold von Ranke
(Slide)
We remember that Ranke’s created this historical method, which he coined
‘critical method’ which took the world of history writing by storm. We have seen that he largely ‘borrowed’ from a colleagues who worked on ancient Rome and
Greek and who were working mainly on editions of Latin and Greek texts. Ranke famous critical method, we have seen, was at the core a philological method. It aimed at interpreting texts, to demonstrate their origin, to clarify words, identify falsities of later edition etc. Accompanied by an often enormous apparatus of footnotes, historians following this method were trying to reconstructed the Urtext and only from that, so Ranke made them belief, was it possible to write the correct and truthful history.
So, since its modern beginnings if you like, history writing is about ‘texts’ and the training of historians traditionally focuses on the interpretations of texts.
Of course, we have seen this too, traditionally history focused on particularly kind of texts: Ranke and followers considered only political texts worthwhile.
Anything else – texts that would point to economic, social or cultural issue – were deemed beneath the genius of a proper historians
(historians and books)
This confidence that historians had in their role as interpreters and writers of
‘texts’ and only texts’, was also based on the role history was supposed to play IN and FOR the wider public since the Enlightenment. We have already learned that since the Enlightenment history writing was considered of great importance for the creation and celebration of a civilized nation. Enlightenment thinkers wished trace the rise and progress of European civilization, to offer a civilizing success story to their European readers that also helped them and to offer some moral and ethical lessons for the educated reader.
For Englightenment historians a civilized nation for them was a civilization that was able to write, to fix its present and the past in the written words. So, one of their measures of civilization since the Enlightenment was whether a culture was
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able to write or nor – pictures language like the Maya or Inka in south Amercian had, didn’t’ really count. This remained true for Ranke and his immediate followers all over the world. If you wanted to critique ‘history’ in the Rankean sense, which ruled the world until WWII, we saw this with the Annales school, then you used different sources, including visual and material objects– remember the areal photography of Marc Bloch, for example)
(institutional reasons…
But that is another reasons, which made it easy for historians to refuse to engage with the visual or material world. Important is the institutional one…
When history became an academic discipline with permanent jobs, departments, own journals, conferences etc during the 19 th century, other areas of human knowledge production also made underwent this change and ‘instutionalised’ themselves. While it had been normal for a scholar of the 18 th century to pursue his interests in history, art, archeology, or anthropology together, these areas were from the second half of the 19 th century increasingly pursued as independly from each other. Like history they had own professors, own research agenda, own theories and methodologies. So, while historians were specialists of texts, art historians – like one of the ‘fathers’ of modern art history Swiss Jacob
Burckhardt, for example, would see their territory and expertise in the study of objects of art (images and objects) in their historical and aestetic/stylistic contexts and development .
(slide) of Burkchardt but also archaeology Schliemann (slide) and anthropology
There was a clear-cut distinction between these different disciplines and academic history writing in terms of what object but, at least with art history and archaeology history also shared something. Art History and to a large extend that is also true for the developing discipline of archaeology dealt with the European cultures, or, at least with the past of civilised nations, nations who had ‘histories’
– by which was often meant ‘written’ histories. They dealt with civilisations that were of importance for the history of 19 th century European nations -- we remember that there was this enormous celebration of antiquity in the 19 th century.
For practitioners of these subjects, academic history, art history and archaeology, the term ‘culture’ meant something very specific:
 Namely the study of the elite culture: in the case of Ranke it was the study of elite political culture – no social or cultural hsitory; in the case of art history it was the study of great painters and paintings ; that were deemed extraordinary treasure of the civilizing history of Europe (all these painting which were hung form the 19 th century in public museums
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
– Erwin Panofsky is part of this tradition. In the case of archaeology it meant the study of ‘classical’ civilisations. In short academic history, art history, and archeology studied the history of the European ‘self’, the history of the elite expression of ‘cultural people’ (Kulturvölker).
‘One must’, Ranke wrote about the task of history, for example, exclude questions about societies from which we possess no written documents and leave their study ‘to natural science and to religious viewpoints.’
 The study of this elite cultural people (Kulturvoelker), of the own
European past was neatly separated from the past of ‘the other’, the non-
European. This task was left to the developing discipline of ethnology/ethnography or anthropology. Practitioners of these disciplines would deal with so-called ‘natural people; (Naturvölker), those who did not possess written documents. The research material of these disciplines were mainly material objects.
This story how the world of human thinking and production was distributed at the end of the 19 th century among different developing academic disciplines that developed separate and competing theories in which they trained their young ‘offspring’ is incredibly interesting, and it is important.
The term ‘interdisciplinarity’ which is so much in fashion today and you read it many history articles is trying to overcome this distribution of study this
‘disciplinarity’ that came into being during the 19 th century and that had a lot of do with imperialism – that is another story.
I’ve said earlier that it is only in the 1960s that academic historians – and with them academics from the other disciplines too – admitted that they were had no clue about the study of objects or visual material.
It is not – this mini-intro claimed, because historian were stupid but it due to the history of their field. It has specific intellectual and institutional reasons; academic disciplines in the human sciences do have specials jobs to do – and that is what their students are told and taught.
Now from this little introduction we will now hand over to Jonathan…..move to
(Jonathan’s section _
Le me take over again from Jonathan: I shall focus in the following on material/visual culture in history writing:
 now we have talked about that in the 1960s/1970s the call for the
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focus on ‘experience’ of the little people
(slide)
‘experience’ of the past becomes an important endeavor. We saw the turn away from rigid Marxist history writing – statistics etc. – to a
Baxendall is certainly influenced by this more general move in the
1960 to explore the experiences of the lower classes, and his attempt to bring social history to stuffy elite fixated art history is a reflection of this I would argue. (still not wide spread)
So, we discussed that this move to the lower class experience makes historican turn to new sources from which they could learn these ‘experience’ (Ginzburg with court record).
And this is where images come in: Images became an important mans to learn about the lower classes, who were largely illiterate.
So, it is when these new social historian – as Raphael Samuel whom I quoted in the beginning, began to be interested in these visual sources, that they realized that they were utterly illequipped to deal with them; they were visually ‘illiterature’
(brief mentioning of Baxendall)
Now, we all know by now that the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s was paralleled by another movement we now call – postmodern. We’ve learned that this movement – coming predominantly from France was characterized by the increasing questioning of intellectuals of heritage of the Enlightnement and its values and ‘meta-narratives (the meta narratives which modern society had followed until then such as progress; human action based on reason, permance of structures, reality, objectivity and so on but also distinctions such as cultural peoples and natural peoples).
We talked about the ‘lingustic turn’ and its central tenets:
 turn to language – first in philosophy but then this affects all of academia (differently in each country of course)
Saussure and his semiotic theory; broke the link – uncritically accepted so far between a word and the object it denoted; this destabilized the relationship between ‘knowledge’ and ‘langauge’
(used to discuss ‘reality’ in the various disciplines);
We remember, I hope that scholars started to doubt that what they read in a text or how they ‘read’ an image or paiting was so straightforward.
No, longer did talk about ‘reality’ but only about ‘representations’ of reality.
Now a famous work that kicked off this postmodern debate was
Michel Foucault’s 1966 bestseller ‘the Order of things’. It is a book
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which is about texts – and his new archaeological method – but it start off with an interpretation of a famous image. And this interpretation became even more famous, because it captures the postmodern quarrel with the representation of ‘reality’ and problematizes the question of the ‘author – or painter in this case – and the reader – viewer in this case
(slide Las menisnas)
Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) is a 1656 painting by Diego
Velázquez, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Long regarded as most important picture
The painting shows a large room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured, according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a snapshot.
Some look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The young Infanta Margaret Theresa is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand.
In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.
Interpreation: The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting.
Foucuault postmodern analyses of it aimed at showing that language cannot describe what is going on in the picture.
(read quote on slide)
‘But the relationship of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms:
And is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to
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show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendor is not that deployed by our eyes by that defined by the sequential element of syntax.’
Again, the book just analyses text – however uses a very visual language but it is the first major success of postmodern thinking in history (written by a philosopher)
Important for the visual and material turn is:
History is the slowest discipline to take it up – others are faster such as anthropology – which is important for t
We talked about this in the area of history/philosophy, in the area of texts
(literary critic Hayden white or Roland Barthes) but this linguistic turn also affects anthropology and art history or . In fact we have seen that historians were actually very slow to adopt it – other disciplines are much faster:
Clifford Geertz – applies it in anthropology – and historians get it from him
 two major movements here which follow each other chronologically
structuralism: those intellectuals who believed like Saussure that there is a structure beyond the representations
we discussed here the prime example is Geertz and his
‘thick description’
(slide)
this ‘thick description’ records the circulation of objects, people and speech – but that is only the first step –you remember – we want to get down to the level beyond this ritual thi symbolic actions that binds, objects, people, speech together and understand more about the structure of the given society.
Reading on material culture of the 1980s and 1990 is very much inspired by this thick description and we shall discuss this in the afternoon. One of your readings of Prown, Jules is very much indepted to this kind approach: he believes that the study of material culture allows you to get at the systems of belief in a past or present culture. (written in 1982)
Structuralism and the study of pictures/images:
Structural approach – the search for the ‘meaning’ of hidden symbolic clues to understand the underlying ‘structure’ of culture – also inspires interpretation of pictures,
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(Barthes in his early phase as a a structuralist before he turns postststructuralist)
(2 slides)
 But we know that structuralism was not here to stay: structuralism turns in the 1980s into poststructuralism (that is what the angloamercian called it – unknown term in France). o Historians like Joan Scott began to critise the structural approach by people like Thomspns argueing against the ridid ideas of structure; they draw attention to the fact that
‘experience’ is not universal but historically specific. o o they bring in playfulness; a stronger focus on the text itself;
Walkowitz, has we have seen, adopts a new way of writing history; a history that avoids conclusion by the writer for the o reader; opens the text up to interpretation of the reader; o in fact, what we have seen is that poststsructurlist inspired historians destablise the idea of experience – we can never get there due to language and there is also no structure in which this experience is defined – all is always all in flow. o Particularly from the 1990s, historians also question the fixation on text: they began to argue that particiluarly as our world today is overfloaded with images; we as historians who make the past available to the present need to take this into account; We need to deal with images in the past because we in the present are defined by images NOT by text anylonger. o New aras of study emerge that deal with image in history:
‘visual culture’(mirzoff is one of the new zars of visual culture)
Power/knowledge: we also saw that historians became in the 1990s greatly attracted by Foucaults second methodological phase ; his genealogical method which is for the lack of a better word I will call poststructual – his method of geneology and his attention to knowledge/power.
(slide with orientalism)
We talked about it when we discussed Said and Orientalism; Again:
Said too focuses on text – caught in his own discipline of English literature of course –. But he mention mapmaking, painting etc.
Said is only the beginning of a fload of publications – you have read
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one for today – that pick up the foucaultia idea of power /knowledge and use material and visual culture to discuss postcolonialism
(slide)
No longer fitted into a narrative but the images itself – or the object itself becomes central to the seaking of meaning – very much like the text itself in Roland Barthes and the onlooker is part of this meaning making .
(mirzoff’s introduction is an interesting example._
This new way of perceiving the workd indeed to think that we live in a world that is not visual not textual anymore
 new discipline Visual culture ; Visual culture studies
Came together as an interdisciplinary field in the late 1980s after the discipline sof art history, anthropology, film studies, linguistics and comparative literature encountered poststructural theory and cultural studies
Now at the time Baxendall is suggesting that art historians – who usually only work on high art up to that time should take into account the social-cultural world of perception. Morover, he argues that when interpreting an image you need to take this into account – so, do not just focus on the painter but how the painter takes the public into account. So, here we can see a clear influence of a wider move – which also affected history writing. The move to
‘experience’. Dealing with different objects – here images – one could argue that Baxendall is very much in line with Thompson who was also after the
‘experience’ of the past. Thompson is after the experience of the poor people and Baxendall is about the experience of the onlooker of a picture – his are taking into account the lower classes as he reflects on how they would react to devotional images.
Now at the same time as Baxendall is writing we of course have this famous move to language, which we have talked about, we have called this interest that manifested itself differently in the academic disciplines – and was also
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nationally different – the ‘linguistic turn.’ -- brief examplanation and point out main areas --.
Now Saussure made another suggestions which I have mentioned but not explained in detail which is now getting important. He argues that spoken language is only one possible sign system. There are many others, flag systems, street signs systems etc. all of them requite language to express itself. There is no way that we g through which people communicate. He himself did not explore these systems but his enthusiasts of the 1960s – particularly scholars who worked in the visual domain (art historians) or with materials (anthropologists) were interested in it began to include try out linguistic theory for the analysis of the visual and material world. This turn has been called by historians of art the ‘pictorial turn’. In short, the ideas of the linguistic turn coming from linguistic theory and philosophy are applied differently to the different discipines – and produced different results due to the internal theory tool kid of the disciplines produced since the mid-19 th century.
But we also have a ‘material turn’ here, particularly in those academic areas which deal with material objects, such as anthropology but also art history if we think about design etc. We have seen for example that the structuralists
Clifford Geertz in his thick description – a semiotic reading of the balienese cookfight did not only look at written. Anthropology dealt with cultural expression outside of readings. No he basically descripted rituals which inclided a attention to humans and objects. So, for structuralists like Geertz or the early Roland Barthes human action, visual and material objects were engeaged in this symbolic interaction and what was required was to get at their underlying meaning.
(show barthes images again) myth
Draw on the text by prowne on material culture.
Now, I want to argue that all disciplines were much affected by the linguistic turn. And it lead in history not only to particular way of writing history but also to a tremendous looseing up. Historians became more aware of the other sign cultures of you like. They had made the move to lower classes – away from hight polticis and were interested in the experiences of the little people.
But they also became aware that these expereicnes were not only shaped by talking and writing or thinking. But experiences in the past were also produced by images and material objects. So, how can we take them into account
So, what this linguistic turn produced was a new interest of historians in these world of objects and the visual and an interest in communicating with other disciplines who were specialists in treating these objects.
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What we see emerging is an increasing interdisciplinarity. We saw that already: Darnton uses anthropology;
But not only that. Particularly the move from structuralism – so you believe that beyond what you see is an underlying structure that is responsible for what you experience – to structuralism produces an entirely new field in art history, film studies which is very influential to historians
Visual culture studie a new field for the study of cultural construction of the visuals arts medical and everyday life. It came together in the 1980s after the disciplines of art history, anthropology, film studies, linguistics and comparative literature encountered poststructural theory can cultural studies.
What these shifts in intellectual and academic discourse have to do with each other, much less with everyday life and ordinary language is not especially self-evident. But it does seem clear that another shift in what philosophers talk about is happening, and that once again a complexly related transformation is occurring in other disciplines of the human sciences and in the sphere of public culture. I want to call this shift “the pictorial turn.” In
Anglo-American philosophy, variations on this turn could be traced early on in Charles Peirce’s semiotics and later in Nelson Goodman’s “languages of art,” both of which explore the conventions and codes that underlie nonlinguistic symbol systems and (more important) do not begin with the assumption that language is paradigmatic for meaning. In Europe one might identify it with phenomenology’s inquiry into imagination and visual experience; or with Derrida’s “grammatology,” which de-centers the
“phonocentric” model of language by shifting attention to the visible, material traces of writing; or with the Frankfurt School’s investigations of modernity, mass culture, and visual media; or with Michel Foucault’s insistence on a history and theory of power/knowledge that exposes the rift between the discursive and the “visible,” the seeable and the sayable, as the crucial faultline in “scopic regimes” of modernity. Above all, I would locate the philosophical enactment of the pictorial turn in the thought of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, particularly in the apparent paradox of a philosophical career that began with a “picture theory” of meaning and ended with the appearance of a kind of iconoclasm, a critique of imagery that led him to renounce his earlier pictorialism and say “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably.” Rorty’s determination to “get the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphor out of our speech altogether” echoes Wittgenstein’s iconophobia and the general anxiety of linguistic philosophy about visual representation. This anxiety, this need to defend “our speech” against “the visual” is, I want to suggest, a sure sign that a pictorial turn is taking place.
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