Visual Theories
and
Construction of
Nature
A M.A. Seminar
By Prof. Chen Chi-szu
Lecture 1-1: Introduction
The Study of
Nature after
The Visual Turn
2006, 02, 19
Research Area: Subject/Object of
the Visual Study of Nature
• 1. Perception of Nature: Visibility 有什麼可以看？
– Phenomenological study of bodily experience
– Dialogical “interrogation” of visual experience and oral story
• 2. Conception of Nature: Visuality 如何看？
– Epistemological research on how Nature is conceived through
logos and mythos
• 3. Reception of Nature Discourse: Textuality (narrative
and discourse)
– Archeological interrogation of nature discourses with reference
to gender, race
– Toward an ecological ethics (practice) 看了之後該/不該做什麼?
Historical Overview of the
Turns of Theories
• Ontological Turn: Plato vs. Aristotle
• Epistemological Turn: Idealist vs. Empiricist Kant’s
three critiques
• Archeological Turn: Hegel’s journey/dialectics of idea
• Linguistic (structuralist) Turn:
–
–
–
–
Saussure: signifier/signified, arbitariety
Darwin’s evolution theory: apehuman
Freud’s phychological theory: unconsciousconscious
Marx’s material determinism
• Postmodern Turn: Derrida’s deconstruction subverts the
Western metaphysical biases (binary oppositions)
• Cultural Studies Turn: culture > humanities
• Visual Studies Turn: visual > textual
Idealists
The origin of knowledgeEmpiricists:
(Rationalism):
Hume, Locke
Plato, Leibniz
“a posteriori”
“a priori”
Kant’s Copernicus Revolution
• The Three Critiques
1. Critique of Pure Reason: Epistemology
2. Critique of Practical Reason: Ethics,
Politics, Sociology
3. Critique of Judgment: Aesthetics
S2 /
Reason
S1 /
(S /O )
Perception (Imagination)
Understanding
S2 /
S/
S1 /
O
Perception
Understanding
Reason
Somehow the mis en abyme self-reflexive process must be suspended in
order to act.
To act, one must engage in a dialogue, not immerse oneself in monologue,
and respond to the demand of the Other.
Kant’s influence on visual studies
•
•
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. Visual
Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991); Visual Culture: Images
and Interpretations (1994).
They are interested in import postsrusturalist theories into their
studies of the visual texts.
“Holly asserts that visual culture should study not object, but
`subject caught in the congeries of cultural meaning’ (1996b, p40)”
“Self-reflexive visual studies reveal the ethical and political
commitments of those who study them (Moxey 1994b, 1999b)”
Quoted by Magaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the
Visual after the Cultural Turn, 14.
My Diagram
Economy: sustainable
Ethic: Ecological
Spiritual need
Physical need
Science: non-mechanical
Spiritual need: 生成於形而上，落實於形而下(生活，物質)
Physical need: 生成於形而下，結果於形而上(文化、政治、社會、宗教，精神)
Research Area: Subject/Object of
the Visual Study of Nature
• 1. Perception of Nature: Visibility
– Phenomenological study of bodily experience
– Dialogical “interrogation” of visual experience and oral story
• 2. Conception of Nature: Visuality
– Epistemological research on how Nature is conceived through
logos and mythos
• 3. Reception of Nature Discourse: Textuality (narrative
and discourse)
– Archeological interrogation of nature discourses with reference
to gender, race
– Toward an ecological ethics (practice)
Q1: What is the relation between conception of
Nature and action toward nature?
• What comes first?
• Is the changing construction of nature
motivating social changes (economy,
culture, science)?
• Or, changing social system conditions
citizen’s perception and conception of
nature?
• Eg. SARS, Bird Flu, 921 Earthquake
Q2: What is the correlation between visual theories
and the construction of nature in arts and literature?
• “As a result of the cultural turn, the status
of culture has been revised in the
humanities: It is currently seen as a cause
of—rather than merely a reflection of or
response to—social, political, and
economical process. The importance of
the concept of cultural context in the
humanities has added further momentum
to the rise of visual studies. Perception
has come to be understood as a product
of experience and aculturation, and
representations are now studied as one
among the other signifying systems that
make up culture.” –Magaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The
Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, 2-3.
Dikovitskaya’s defining the scope
of visual studies
1. “It is a research area and a curricular initiative that regard the visual images
as the focal point in the processes through which meanings is made in a
cultural context.” Dikovitskaya,1,
2. “My project provides a new perspective on the interdisciplinary nature of
visual studies through its interrogation of how art history and cultural studies
intersect as they are practiced and taught in the academic communities in the
United States.” Ibid. 2.
How does visual studies satisfy our physical need for an sustainable
economy, and our spiritual need for ecological ethics?
Dikovitskaya’s Problematics
Her aim is to show how visual culture can
avoid what she defines as the Scylla and
Charybdis that threaten it: the lack of a
specific object of study (given its
departure from the traditional hierarchies
of art history) and the expansion of the
field to the point of incoherence as it
seems to subsume everything related to
the cultural and the visual.
1. What is the visual studies and
what is its object?
2. What is the relevance of visual
culture for art historian?
3. What attitudes does art historians
adopt toward visual studies today?
4. What is the relationship between
the study of the history of art and
the study of the visual and the
cultural?
5. Does visual culture require
interpretative methodologies that
are distinctive from those
employed by art history and
cultural studies?
3.
TheseIbid.
questions/problems
are applicable
to the study of ecological discourses in
humanities departments.
藝術史注重「看什麼？ 」 (ontology) 、
「為何看？ 」(tautology)
視覺理論注重「如何看？ 」
(epistemology)
生態倫理注重「看了之後該/不該怎麼
做？」(ethics)
The Death of Nature :
Women, Ecology, and the
Scientific Revolution, 1980
Earthcare: Women and the
Environment, 1995
Reinventing Eden; The Fate of
Nature in Western Culture , 2003
Radical Ecology: The Search for a
Livable World (Revolutionary
Thought/Radical Movements),
1992
Ecology (Key Concepts in Critical
Theory) , 1994
The Columbia Guide to American
Environmental History , 2002
Carolyn Merchant’s problematics
• “But concepts of nature and women are historical and social
constructions. There are no unchanging “essential” characteristics of
sex, gender, or nature.”
• “The historian must ask,
`How have people historically conceptualized nature?’
`How have they behaved in relationship to that construction?’
`What historical evidences supports a particular interpretation?’
• “When the historian raises questions about the way nature was
viewed in another era, she is asking questions meaningful to her
own epoch.“
• --Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, xvi, xvii.
Merchant’s thesis
• “Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at
its center gave way to a mechanic world view in which
nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be
dominated and controlled by humans. The Death of
Nature deals with the economic, cultural, and scientific
changes through which this vast transformation came
about.”
• I am asking not about unchanging essences, but about
connections between social change and changing
constructions of nature.”
• --ibid. xvi.
From top to down, or down to top?
• What comes first?
• Is the changing construction of nature
motivating social changes (economy,
culture, science)?
• Or, changing social system conditions
citizen’s perception and conception of
nature?
• In the first book (1980), Merchant does not tell us why and how the
“organic” and “mechanic” images of nature come into being, nor
does she tell us why “organic” image is replaced by the “mechanic”
image. The hypothesis to support this replacement is “paradigm
shift.”
The relation between idea/action, essence/existence is intertwined.
• “The Death of Nature” is also an image of Nature. Based on this
image, she weaves the theories and his/stories of nature to
reconstruct the mythos of nature, to solicit ecologically ethical
practices.
• Earthcare: Women and the Environment (1995), Reinventing Eden:
The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (2003)
Merchant’s conceptual table 1
Merchant’s “Table 1
Conceptual Framework
fro Interpreting
Ecological Revolution,”
Earthcare, xx.
Merchant’s conceptual table 2
Horizontal view: synchronic structure
Vertical view:
diarhronical
narrative order
Merchant’s “Table 2.1. Reinventing Eden: Narratives of
Western Culture,” Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in
Western Culture (2003), 21.
What we can do in this course?
Economy: sustainable
Ethic: Ecological
Spiritual need
Physical need
Science: non-mechanical
Spiritual need: 生成於形而上，落實於形而下(生活，物質)
Physical need: 生成於形而下，結果於形而上(文化、政治、社會、宗教，精神)
As a literary researcher, what questions
should we ask for our epoch?
• What is the correlation between visual
theories and the construction of nature in
arts and literature?
Overview of this Seminar
• The course contains three sections:
1. addressing the problems (4 weeks),
2. introducing visual theories (7 weeks),
3. case studies (5 weeks).
Juxtaposing the reading of poetry with that of the
visual arts, we may get acquainted with the
aesthetical, ethical, and ecological
conceptualization of Nature at different periods
of Western arts and literature
Requirement
•
•
•
•
Class Discussion 20%
6 Short Response Entries 30% (5% x 6):
within one page
Oral Report 10%
Final Paper 40%: 10 pages, MLA format,
double space.
The subject of the final paper should
contain at least one literary work and
some works of one visual artist.
Major Textbooks and Reference
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought.
Edward S. Casey,
Getting Back into Place: Toward a
Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld