Visual Studies, or the Ossification of Thought

Abstract

This article interferes in the often all-too-smooth emergence of Visual Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry in the British and North American University system. It does so by drawing attention to some of the unacknowledged grey areas between ‘doing’ visual culture and what has become the ‘study’ of Visual Studies. Interested in the historical, conceptual, and morphological distinctions between ‘doing’ and ‘studying’, it confronts the implications of that difference for inter-, cross-, and in-disciplinary pedagogy, research, writing, and thought. (In so doing, it responds to W.J.T. Mitchell’s article ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’ published in the journal of visual culture, August 2002, by both welcoming Mitchell’s text as a necessary starting point for any serious effort to initiate and critically engage with studies of visual culture and Visual Studies, and draws attention to a lacuna in the argument therein.) While in general glad to see in research, writing, and teaching, an ongoing curiosity in and attention to our encounters with visual cultures that marks a sustained commitment to ways of seeing and looking and knowing as doing, as practice, this article claims that the accelerated professionalization and bureaucratization of Visual Studies is in danger of bringing about an ossification of thought.