Post-Seminar Reflection
I am particularly interested in the Word and Image approach, as developed by WJT Mitchell, and in its applicability to my research project. Mitchell writes of the binary problematic in essentializing communication mechanisms to word or image, and, without providing a concrete solution, Mitchell invites a new way of being in the liminal space between word and image. Mitchell applies this to art history, writing of its contradictory nature:
…if, on the one hand, art history turns the image into a verbal message or a “discourse,” the image disappears from sight. If, on the other hand, art history refuses language, or reduces language to a mere servant of the visual image, the image remains mute and inarticulate, and the art historian is reduced to the repetition of clichés about the ineffability and untranslatability of the visual. The choice is between linguistic imperialism and defensive reflexes of the visual. (Mitchell 60)
In this essay, as is especially evident in this passage, Mitchell invites a new way of looking at, interpreting, thinking and communicating about art that valorizes the border space, the between-ness. In doing so, one might reconcile that “we can live neither with nor without, but must continually reinvent and renegotiate” (60). By mobilizing semiotics, one might see that words themselves, as constructed and accepted as “langue,” are icons––they are images that symbolize thought. In coding the written word (signifier) as image, but understanding the ways in which mental imaging simultaneously produces images of the signified. Thus, we rely on both word and image in our quixotic attempts to fully communicate, to comprehend and to fully imagine the holistic and integral constellations of meaning.
In my research on the Porteño Siluetazo of 1983, I will apply a Word and Image approach to the images themselves, in conjunction and conversation with other approaches surrounding the context/performative qualities of the event. The images provoke liminality: the tension between present/not present, visible/not visible. My questions, through interpreting image as word, as a form of communication, perhaps may reach toward transdisciplinary meanings.