符号学Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, Semiotics and Art History

Semiotics and Art History Author(s): Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson Reviewed work(s): Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 174-208 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045790 . Accessed: 16/02/2012 00:22 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org Views and Overviews Semiotics and Art History Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson The basic tenet of semiotics, the theory of sign and sign-use, is antirealist. Human culture is made up of signs, each of which stands for something other than itself, and the people inhabiting culture busy themselves making sense of those signs. The core of semiotic theory is the definition of the factors involved in this permanent process of signmaking and interpreting and the develop- ment of conceptual tools that help us to grasp that process as it goes on in various arenas of cultural activity. Art is one such arena, and it seems obvious that semiotics has something to contribute to the study of art.' From one point of view, it can be said that the semiotic perspective has long been present in art history: the work of Riegl and Panofsky can be shown to be conge- nial to the basic tenets of Peirce and Saussure,2 and key texts of Meyer Schapiro deal directly with issues in visual semiotics.3 But in the past two decades, semiotics has been engaged with a range of problems very different from those it began with, and the contemporary encoun- ter between semiotics and art history involves new and distinct areas of debate: the polysemy of meaning; the problematics of authorship, context, and reception; the implications of the study of narrative for the study of images; the issue of sexual difference in relation to verbal and visual signs; and the claims to truth of interpretation. In all these areas, semiotics challenges the positivist view of knowledge, and it is this challenge that undoubtedly presents the most difficulties to the traditional practices of art history as a discipline. Because of the theoretical skepticism of semiotics, the relationship between contemporary semiotics and art history is bound to be a delicate one. The debate between the critical rationalists and the members of the Frankfurt school, earlier on in this century, may have convinced most scholars of the need for a healthy dose of doubt in their claims to truth; nevertheless, much "applied science"-in other words, scholarship that, like art his- tory, exists as a specialized discipline-seems to be reluctant to give up the hope of reaching positive knowledge. Whereas epistemology and the philosophy of science have developed sophisticated views of knowl- edge and truth in which there is little if any room for unambiguous "facts," causality, and proof, and in which interpretation has an acknowledged central position, art history seems hard pressed to renounce its positivistic basis, as if it feared to lose its scholarly status altogether in the bargain.4 Although art history as a whole cannot but be affected by the skepticism that has radically changed the disci- pline of history itself in the wake of the "linguistic turn," two fields within art history are particularly tenacious in their positivistic pursuit: the authentication of oeuvres- for example, those of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Hals, to name just a few recently and hotly debated cases-and social history.5 As for the former, the number of decisions that have an interpretive rather than a positive basis- mainly issues of style-have surprised the researchers themselves, and it is no wonder, therefore, that their conclusions remain open to debate.6 In section 2 ("Senders") we will pursue this question further. But, one might object, this interpretive status concerns cases where positive knowledge of the circumstances of the 'We would like to thank Michael Ann Holly for her very pertinent comments on this paper. 2 See C. Hasenmueller, "Panofsky, Iconography, and Semiotics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxxvI, 1978, 289-301; M. Iversen, "Style as Structure: Alois Riegl's Historiography," Art History, II, 1979, 66-67; and M.A. Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca, 1984, 42-45. The semiotic nature of an apparently "natural" device like linear perspective is masterfully demonstrated in Hubert Damisch's seminal study, L'Origine de la perspective, Paris, 1988. 3 See, e.g., M. Schapiro, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs," Semiotica, I, 1969, 223-242. 4 The clearest and most convincing overview of epistemological cur- rents in the 19th and 20th centuries is Habermas's Erkenntnis und Interesse of 1968 (Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro, London, 1972). Habermas's work has been challenged by psychoana- lysts who believe that his idealized view of psychoanalytic practice as a constraint-free communication misunderstands their discipline. See, e.g., J. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London, 1986. Habermas's oeuvre is also under pressure from the side of postmodern philosophy, most pertinently by J.-F. Lyotard, in, e.g., The Postmodern Condition, New York, 1980. These challenges do not, however, address Habermas's argument against positive knowledge, but his hope for a rational society. If anything, the authors are more skeptical than Habermas. S For the "linguistic" or, rather, rhetorical turn in history, see H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, 1973, and especially, for a brief and convincing account of the fundamental rhetorical and semiotic nature of historiography, idem, "Interpretation in History," in Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore, 1978. The most detailed and incisive analysis of the rhetoric of historiography remains S. Bann's remarkable The Clothing of Clio, Cambridge and New York, 1984. 6 See, e.g., the Rembrandt Research Project, in J. Bruyn, B. Haak, S.H. Levie et al., A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, The Hague, Boston, London, 1982, 1987, 1989, review by L.J. Slatkes in the Art Bulletin, LXXI, 1989, 139-144. SEMIOTICS AND ART HISTORY 175 making of an artwork is lacking, not because such knowledge is by definition unattainable. Attempts to approach the images of an age through an examination of the social and historical conditions out of which they emerged, in the endeavor of social history, are not affected by that lack. The problem, here, lies in the term "context" itself. Precisely because it has the root "text" while its prefix distinguishes it from the latter, "context" seems comfort- ably out of reach of the pervasive need for interpretation that affects all texts. Yet this is an illusion. As Jonathan Culler has argued, But the notion of context frequently oversimplifies rather than enriches the discussion, since the opposi- tion between an act and its context seems to presume that the context is given and determines the meaning of the act. We know, of course, that things are not so simple: context is not given but produced; what belongs to a context is determined by interpretive strategies; contexts are just as much in need of elucida- tion as events; and the meaning of a context is determined by events. Yet whenever we use the term context we slip back into the simple model it proposes.7 Context, in other words, is a text itself, and it thus consists of signs that require interpretation. What we take to be positive knowledge is the product of interpre- tive choices. The art historian is always present in the construction she or he produces.8 In order to endorse the consequences of this insight, Culler proposes to speak not of context but of "framing": "Since the phenomena criticism deals with are signs, forms with socially constituted meanings, one might try to think not of context but of the framing of signs: how are signs constituted (framed) by various discursive practices, institutional arrangements, systems of value, semiotic mechanisms?"9 This proposal does not mean to abandon the examina- tion of "context" altogether, but to do justice to the interpretive status of the insights thus gained. Not only is this more truthful; it also advances the search for social history itself. For by examining the social factors that frame the signs, it is possible to analyze simultaneously the practices of the past and our own interaction with them, an interaction that is otherwise in danger of passing unnoticed. What art historians are bound to examine, whether they like it or not, is the work as effect and affect, not only as a neatly remote product of an age long gone. The problem of context, central in modern art history, will be examined further from a semiotic perspec- tive in section 1 here, and the particular problem of the reception of images, and of the original viewer, will come up in section 3 ("Receivers"), and again in section 8 ("History and the Status of Meaning"). In this article, we intend to conduct two inquiries simultaneously. On the one hand, we will examine how semiotics challenges some fundamental tenets and prac- tices of art history. Although this is intrinsic to the article as a whole, it will receive greater emphasis in the first three sections. On the other hand and perhaps more important for many, we will demonstrate how semiotics can further the analyses that art historians pursue (this point will be central to sections 6 and 7). The parallel presentation of a critique and a useful set of tools conveys our view that art history is in need of, but also can afford, impulses from other directions. Since semiot- ics is fundamentally a transdisciplinary theory, it helps to avoid the bias of privileging language that so often accompanies attempts to make disciplines interact. In other words, rather than a linguistic turn, we will propose a semiotic turn for art history. Moreover, as the following sections will demonstrate, semiotics has been developed within many different fields, some of which are more relevant to art history than others. Our selec- tion of topics is based on the expected fruitfulness for art history of particular developments, rather than on an attempt to be comprehensive, which would be futile and unpersuasive. This article does not present a survey of semiotic theory for an audience of art historians. For such an endeavor we refer the reader to Fernande Saint- Martin's recent study."0 Some of the specialized semioti- cians (e.g., Greimas, Sebeok) might see an intolerable distortion in our presentation. However, some of the theorists discussed here, like Derrida or Goodman, might not identify themselves as semioticians, nor might some of the art historians whose work we will put forward as examples of semiotic questioning of art and art history. In order to make this presentation more directly and widely useful, we have opted to treat semiotics as a perspective, raising a set of questions around and within the method- ological concerns of art history itself. The first three sections deal centrally with the semiotic critique of "context" as a term in art-historical discussion. From questions of context we move to the origins and history of semiotics, the ways in which these tools and critical perspectives have grown out of initial theoretical projects. The limits of space force us to consider just two early figures: Charles Sanders Peirce, the American phi- losopher (section 4), and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (section 5). In section 6 we present a semiotic view of psychoanalysis, demonstrating a variety of ways that psychoanalysis is bound up with semiotics and can be useful for art history, and then going on to discuss the most relevant concept, central in art history, that of the gaze. Psychoanalysis connects semiotics with an aware- 7 Culler, xiv. 8 Similar arguments within the social history of art, explicitly articulat- ing art history with semiotics, have been put forward in a number of places by Keith Moxey. See "Interpreting Pieter Aertsen: The Problem of Hidden Symbolism," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1989, 42ff; "Pieter Bruegel and Popular Culture," The Complete Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, ed. D. Freedberg, Tokyo, 1989, 42ff; "Semiotics and the Social History of Art," Acts of the 27th International Congress of the History of Art, Strasbourg, 1990 (in press). 9 Culler, xiv. 0 F. Saint-Martin, Semiotics of Visual Language, Bloomington, 1990. 176 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1991 VOLUME LXXIII NUMBER 2 ness of gender differentiation as pervasively relevant, indeed, as a crucial basis for the heterogeneous and polysemous nature of looking. Feminist cultural analysis has been quick to see the relevance of semiotic tools for its own goals. We wish to acknowledge that efficacy and we would have liked to demonstrate the inevitable "feminist turn" in semiotic theory itself by presenting the intersections between feminism's theorizing of gender, semiotics, and art history. But lack of space combined with the risk of overlap with an earlier survey article on feminism and art history published in this journal forced us, regretfully, to relegate feminism to the margins.11 Following the presentation of a psychoanalytically ori- ented semiotics, we go on to show the interpretive and descriptive, but also critical, value of a semiotically based narrative theory or narratology for the study of images- images that frequently have a narrative side that is not necessarily literary in background (section 7, "Narra- tology"). Instead of rehearsing the view of history paint- ing as basically illustrative of old stories, a view that privileges language over visual representation, we dem- onstrate the specifically visual ways of story-telling that semiotics enables one to consider. Section 8 offers a few reflections on the status of meaning in relation to the historical considerations so important for art history. One further question concerns the relation between the disciplines. Interdisciplinary research poses specific problems of methodology, which have to do with the status of the objects and the applicability of concepts designed to account for objects with a different status. Thus a concept mainly discussed in literary theory-for example, metaphor-is relevant to the analysis of visual art, and refusing to use it amounts to an unwarranted decision to take all images as literal expressions. But such use requires a thinking-through of the status of signs and meaning in visual art-for example, of the delimitation of discrete signs in a medium that is supposed to be given over to density.12 Rather than borrowing the concept of metaphor from literary theory, then, an art historian will take it out of its unwarranted confinement within that specific discipline and first examine the extent to which metaphor, as a phenomenon of transfer of meaning from one sign onto another, should be generalized. This is the case here, but not all concepts from literature lend themselves to such generalization. Rhythm and rhyme, for example, although often used apropos visual images, are more medium-specific and their use for images is therefore more obviously metaphorical. Semiotics offers a theory and a set of analytic tools that are not bound to a particular object domain. Thus it liberates the analyst from the problem that transferring concepts from one discipline into another entails. Recent attempts to connect verbal and visual arts, for example, tend to suffer from unreflected transfers, or they painstak- ingly translate the concepts of the one discipline into the other, inevitably importing a hierarchy between them. Semiotics, by virtue of its supradisciplinary status, can be brought to bear on objects pertaining to any sign-system. That semiotics has been primarily developed in conjunc- tion with literary texts is perhaps largely a historical accident, whose consequences, while not unimportant, can be bracketed.13 As a supradisciplinary theory, semiot- ics lends itself to interdisciplinary analyses, for example, of word and image relations, which seek to avoid both the erection of hierarchies and the eclectic transferring of concepts.14 But the use of semiotics is not limited to interdisciplinarity. Its multidisciplinary reach- as jour- nals like Semiotica demonstrate, it can be used in a variety of disciplines-has made semiotics an appropriate tool for monodisciplinary analysis as well. Considering im- ages as signs, semiotics sheds a particular light on them, focusing on the production of meaning in society, but it is by no means necessary to semiotic analysis to exceed the domain of visual images. 1. Context One area in which the semiotic perspective may be of particular service to art history is in the discussion of "context""5-as in the phrase "art in context." Since semiotics, following the structuralist phase of its evolu- tion, has examined the conceptual relations between "text" and "context" in detail, in order to ascertain the fundamental dynamics of socially operated signs, it is a field in which analysis of "context" as an idea may be particularly acute. Many aspects of that discussion have a direct bearing on "context" as a key term in art-historical discourse and method.16 When a particular work of art is placed "in context," it is usually the case that a body of material is assembled and juxtaposed with the work in question in the hope " See the important article by T.G. Peterson and P. Mathews, "The Feminist Critique of Art History," Art Bulletin, LXIX, 1987, 326ff. 12 For the distinction between discrete and dense sign-systems, see N. Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis, 1976. This theory is much indebted to Wittgenstein. See A. Thiher, Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago, 1984. 13The intimate connection between semiotics and linguistics is a problem in Saussurean semiotics, which developed out of linguistics rather than the other way around, and not so much in Peircean semiotics, which came out of logic. See sections 4 and 5 here. 14 Examples of analyses of word and image interaction or comparison can be found in W. Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Art, Chicago, 1982, and Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature, Chicago, 1988. See also the special issues of Poetics Today, x, 1 and 2, 1989, edited by Steiner. Also A. Kibedi Varga, "Stories Told by Pictures," in Style, xxII, 1980, 194-208, and "Criteria for Describing Word & Image Relations," in Poetics Today, x, 1989, 31ff. For a critical examination of the hierarchies implied in many of these attempts, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, 1985, and M. Bal, "On Reading and Looking," in Semiotica, LXXVI, 1989, 283-320. S The quotation marks around "context" ("text," "artwork," etc.) are meant to designate that at this place in our essay the word appears as an object of methodological reflection. 6 The points in