Emmanuel Alloa

Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre:

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726–842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental ‘iconic identity’, iconophile philosophy defends the idea of ‘iconic difference’. And while the reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, re-examining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today’s ‘pictorial turn’ reveals its striking modernity.

Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw

ABSTRACT In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive.

Could Perspective Ever Be a Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer

ABSTRACT Erwin Panofskys essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form” from 1924 is among the most widely commented essays in twentieth-century aesthetics and was discussed with regard to art theory, Renaissance painting, Western codes of depiction, history of optical devices, psychology of perception, or even ophthalmology. Strangely enough, however, almost nothing has been written about the philosophical claim implicit in the title, i.e. that perspective is a symbolic form among others. The article situates the essay within the intellectual constellation at Aby Warburgs Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg, and analyzes the role of Ernst Cassirers philosophy of symbolic forms for the members of the Warburg circle. Does perspective meet the requirements for becoming a further “symbolic form,” beyond those outlined by Cassirer? The article argues that, ultimately, perspective cannot possibly be a symbolic form; not because it does not meet Cassirers philosophical requirements, but rather, because that would uproot Cassirers overall project. While revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer unearths the wide-raging philosophical implication of the essay, revisiting Cassirer with Panofsky means to highlight the fundamentally perspectival nature of all symbolic forms.

Architectures of transparency

My vision is so clear, my perception so pure, my knowledge so awkwardly complete, my representative power so unfettered and precise and my understanding so perfect that I can enter myself from the extremities of the earth and reach my silent word; and rising from the formless thing that is the object of the search I follow myself along known fibers and ordered centers, I answer myself, I reflect and resonate myself, I tremble before the infinity of mirrors?I am made of glass. ?Paul Valery, The Glass Man (An Evening with Monsieur Teste), 1903

Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the emergent field of Critical Transparency Studies. Moreover, it traces some genealogical lines of how, from the eighteenth century onwards, what was known in Antiquity as an optical and aesthetic phenomenon—diaphaneity—came to stand for central concerns in self-knowledge, morality and politics. Such an analysis of the historical semantics of transparency highlights the irreducible plurality of the phenomenon. Against tendencies of seeing transparency as a means of achieving self-coincidence, unicity and self-stability, the chapter sketches an alternative understanding of transparency as diaphaneity and fleshes out the dynamic, transversal and often conflictual nature of sense, making way for a more comprehensive understanding of the contradictions of social existence.

Transparency: Thinking Through an Opaque Concept

Introducing the topic, presenting transparency and its discontents, and offering an overview over the volume and its three sections “Transparency in the Making,” “Under the Crystal Dome,” and “From the Panopticon to the Selfie and Back.” To think through transparency means to think through an opaque concept.

El poder de visualizar. La "phantasia" según Aristóteles

espanolTraducir phantasia por “imaginacion” induce a un peligroso anacronismo: interpretar el concepto griego a partir de un marco moderno, post-kantiano, que la considera una facultad subjetiva que mediaria entre la sensibilidad y el entendimiento. El analisis textual de las fuentes aristotelicas muestra que la phantasia no puede identificarse con una facultad separada, y designa mas bien un poder transversal comun a los actos del alma. El articulo defiende que phantasia se traduciria mas adecuadamente por “visualizacion” EnglishWhen translating phantasia as ‘imagination’, one commits a dangerous anachronism: interpreting the Greek concept from the vantage point of a modern, post-Kantian framework which sees imagination as a faculty mediating between sensibility and reasoning. A close reading of the Aristotelian sources shows why phantasia cannot be identified as a distinct faculty, but rather designates a transversal power common to all psychic acts. The article argues that a more adequate translation of phantasia would be ‘visualization’.

Differences in Becoming. Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze on Individuation

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with (or even subsumption under) Deleuzian categories. While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference.

Vom Stachel der Bilder

Wissenschaft, so könnte es scheinen, ist bloße Formsache. Wer den Dingen auf den Grund gehen und wiederkehrende Gesetzmäßigkeiten feststellen will, muss die Kontingenz der jeweiligen Erscheinungsweise wegrechnen, damit das gleichbleibende Formgerüst in aller Deutlichkeit hervortritt. Wissenschaft gilt nicht dem Akzidens, sondern der überprüf baren, belastbaren Grundstruktur der Dinge, und diese äußert sich in der Form. Idea ist Platons Name hierfür, Eidos bei Aristoteles, Wesen bei Hegel, und ihr Ausdruck ist die Form. »Form, forma« erklärt Heidegger »entspricht der griechischen morphè. Sie ist die umschließende Grenze und Begrenzung, das, was ein Seiendes in das bringt und stellt, was es ist, so daß es in sich steht: die Gestalt. Das also Stehende ist jenes, als was das Seiende sich zeigt, sein Aussehen, eidos, wodurch und worin es heraustritt, sich dar-stellt, sich öffentlich macht«1 Wissenschaft, so ließe sich argumentieren, ist somit in erster Linie Eidetik. Aus dieser Betrachtung fielen Bilder entsprechend lange heraus, galten sie doch aufgrund einer anhaltenden Tradition der Bilderskepsis, wenn nicht gar der Bildfeindschaft, als unbeständige, alogisch-unvernünftige Erscheinungen, die nur als Reizauslöser, nicht aber als Wissenslieferanten dienen können. Nur konsequent war es da, dass die Rehabilitierung des Ikonischen über das Formproblem verlief, und nicht über die Frage nach den Mächten und Wirkungen. Panofsky, der Begründer der ikonologisch-ikonographischen Methode, führte diese bekanntlich auf die neuplatonische Idea-Lehre zurück,2 während die Erforschung der Wissenschaftsbilder heute wiederum damit begründet wird, dass Bildanalyse zunächst Formanalyse sein muss.3 Selbst der heute oft bemühte Aby Warburg,

The ‘Do It Yourself’ Paradigm: An Inquiry into the Historical Roots of the Neglect of Testimony

In contemporary social epistemology, the claim has been made that there is a traditional “neglect of testimonial knowledge,” and that in the history of epistemology, first-hand self-knowledge was invariably prioritised over secondary knowledge. While this paper acknowledges some truth in these statements, it challenges the given explanations: the mentioned neglect of testimonial knowledge is based not so much on a primacy of self-knowledge, but that of self-agency. This article retraces some crucial chapters of this ‘do-it-yourself’ paradigm: it considers the imperative of autopsia in early Greek epistemology, history and medicine, and the early modern refashioning of the privilege of self-generated and self-taught (autodidactic) knowledge. A new picture emerges of how the emphasis on (self-)agency progressively shifted towards a focus on the self as the source of ultimate knowledge.