When Pictures Are Present: Arthur Danto and the Historicity of the Eye

Abstract

The is not historical, writes Arthur Danto, but are.' Since cannot readily imagine eye, human perception, without its historically being in and of us, it must be as difficult to evaluate this claim as its converse, cultural-relativist historicism-it urges that is historical-that Danto rejects.2 For a natural historian of human Lebensformen, it might be that historicity-the intraspecific variation of knowledge and systems for representing it-might partly be due to of eye. But for Danto, it is a condition of our that is not historical in any sense. For him, during historical period in which was not a function of socioculturally varying practices and styles of representation, it was also not evolving. As he puts it in a discussion of Heinrich Woelfflin's philosophy of art history, a history only in sense that visual representations belong to forms of life that are themselves related to one another historically.3 By contrast, of cognition, Wartofsky writes, with changes in modes of pictorial Human vision has a which goes beyond biological evolution of hominid system and is part of that activity of self-creation and self-transformation which call cultural evolution.4 In his bottom-line proposal, Wartofsky argues that canonical styles of representing seen world change . . . and introduce transformations of vision.5 In end, then, he would advance an art-historical theory of style-change for, or as, of vision.6 Both Wartofsky and Danto would solve problem of interconnecting histories of and of representational practices essentially by fiat. For Wartofsky, in end the eye simply is socioculturally varying representational systems and practices. And for Danto, in end we simply are that phase or product of hominid evolution in which mechanisms of eye-including its natural variation if any-are impermeable to those systems and practices as they vary historically. In both cases, these correlations have to be secured in part by tendentious natural histories: while Wartofsky must urge that is historically different wherever a representational system or practice changes historically, Danto must urge that evolution of eye-the of its natural selection-has stopped. Whether pigeons, sheep, or other nonhuman creatures can do more than exhibit recognitional dispositions upon presentation of as Danto concluded they can,7 is beside issue here. If they can see (what is depicted in) pictures, this competence must have an ongoing evolutionary history-which Danto denies for human beings. Or it must be directed by some culture or cultivation that they have-but which Danto denies for them. In their forms of life, such culture-revealing their competence-is not a natural-historical reality; it must be introduced to them artificially. It is a human form of life naturally to have languages and systems of representation. In turn, then, putative invariance of human perception might be precipitate of spreading of depictive culture (and perhaps even its modes or styles) throughout forms of life. But as this is just issue between Danto and Wartofsky, are back where started with little help from pigeons or sheep. I want to suggest that no matter what mode or style of pictures might be produced historically, depicting as such introduces new causal contexts for-an emergent new ecology of-vision as a longterm biocultural event spread out over many millennia, penetrating or pervading any individual form of life in variable degrees and with variable importance depending on historical presence of pictures therein. But to admit evolution of in our natural and as a possible factor in differences between Lebensformen, as I want to do contra Danto, is not necessarily to endorse an extreme cultural-relativist thesis. For Danto, any interaction between see-