Transcript CH1. What is visual culture?

段馨君 Iris Hsin-chun Tuan
Associate Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
NCTU
CH6. HERMENEUTICS
This chapter begins with an attempt to
 define exactly what we mean by ‘culture.’
 American anthropologist Clifford Geertz
 we pay specific attention to
 Geertz’s famous study of cockfighting in Bali.
 The chapter concludes by arguing that
 we should be prepared to analyze our own
culture with the same insight that
 we use to interpret the cultures of others.
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Clifford Geertz
It is time now to try and reach some
conclusions
 about the interpretation of our visual culture.
 Culture is a word whose
 meaning has changed over the years.
 One had to be educated to be cultured, and
 one needed knowledge to
 understand it and to
 benefit from it.
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The 19th century saw
 the emergence of the discipline of anthropology:
the study of humankind.
 This ‘descriptive’ conception of culture is
clearly much broader than the classical,
 and its influence spread.
 T. S. Eliot
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T. S. Eliot
This is all very heartening for us,
 as we have essentially been making our own
list as this book has progressed.
 The paintings of John Constable to CD covers,
car advertisements and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
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Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
John Constable
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Our intellectual guide for
this investigation is the American
anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
According to Fred Inglis, Geertz is ‘the
foremost anthropologist of our day.’
Is concerned with culture,
and the way in which our cultural values and
concerns
are articulated in symbolic texts.
His examples may be both unfamiliar and
from distant parts of the world
Geertz will argue that
despite our superficial differences,
different peoples have similar needs in
creating ‘culture.’
Fred Inglis
Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco in 1926.
 His Ph.D. at Harvard and his reputation at
Princeton.
 Conducted fieldwork in such seemingly exotic
places as Java, Bali and Morocco.
 Geertz wants to know what culture means and
how it can be interpreted.
 Indeed, it is the concept of interpretation that is
key to his methodology.
 In the opening essay to his The Interpretation of
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Cultures
Culture, according to Geertz, is ‘an assemblage
of texts.’
 The component texts are symbolic forms,
 so it is important not to read them literally,
 just like the difference between twitches and
winks.
 Geertz is the first to admit that his methodology
is not scientific.
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To Geertz this makes no sense at all:
 it is not worth going round the world to count
the cats in Zanzibar.
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Zanzibar
The interpretive methodology is not unique to
Geertz, especially when applied to other fields.
 The term comes from the Greek hermeneuein.
 Christians, for example, will recognize the famous
‘sermon on the mount’ in which
 Christ (according to the gospel of St Matthew)
gives a long list of aphorisms by which to live,
including:
 “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.”
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St. Matthew
Last Supper, before Christ’s arrest and
execution,
 Matthew describes Christ blessing and
 offering bread to his disciples.
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Last Supper
Hermeneutics is not limited to religious study,
and — not unlike semiotics —
 is often practiced by people who are not even
aware of the term.
 For example, in 1995 the Manchester United
and French international
 soccer star Eric Cantona.
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Eric Cantona
Whether we are tabloid journalists or biblical
scholars,
 hermeneutics is riddled with ambiguity.
 Interpretive approach is the best way to try and
figure out the meaning of a cultural text —
 even if that text is a cockfight in Bali:
 Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.
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Link：Cockfight
The gambling is both serious and complex,
 and Geertz describes the process in full.
 The Balinese cockfight is a
 dramatization of status concerns.
 As W. H. Auden said, ‘poetry makes nothing
happen’,
 and Geertz draws the parallel with the cockfight.
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W. H. Auden
The Balinese is what King Lear or Crime and
Punishment do for us:
 it catches up important themes, issues and
concerns in our lives and
 orders them into ‘an encompassing structure’
which presents ‘a particular view of their essential
nature’.
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King Lear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrTUW8iz7Gc
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Vincent Crapanzano
has rounded upon ‘Geertz and especially his
essay on the Balinese cockfight,
 which he finds practically subversive.
 According to Crapanzano,
 the ethnographer is akin to Hermes,
 the message of classical mythology.
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Vincent Crapanzano
Crapanzano then embarks on a detailed and
almost surgical dissection of Geerrz’s essay, from
which two major criticisms emerge.
 First, ‘stylistic virtuosity’ to make his interpretation
more convincing than it ought to be.
 Second, for placing himself at the top of the
‘hierarchy of understanding’
 — above even the Balinese themselves.
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What we have here is not so much a
disagreement about Geertz’s conclusions,
 but about his methodology.
 We can imagine the disputes that would take
place
 if we were to leave Panofsky and Fry, Gombrich
and Berger and Geertz and Crapanzano
together in a restaurant.
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John Berger
Panofsky
Roger Fry
Gombrich
John Berger
As Graham McCann has said:
 ‘Critics claim to know better.’
 This is not to say of course,
 that the Hermeneuticist is always right.
 The political theorist John Dunn understood this.
 Jane Austen wrote in her novel Emma Link：
Emma film
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John Dunn
Jane Austen
Literary theorists Susan Suleiman and
 Inge Crossman admit that
 we need to be more humble about what we can
ever know.
 Roger Fry, who was rarely short of a wellexpressed opinion, was prepared to admit.
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Susan Suleiman
Inge Crossman
Roger Fry
Dunn admitted that ‘success is not guaranteed,’
but urged that lack of guarantee
 should not persuade us from trying.
 the Riddle of the Sphinx
 Geertz’s approach leads him to speak of the
‘intellectual armory’ and
 this is hugely important concept for us.
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John Dunn
Iconology, for example,
 was ideal for the analysis of a work by Dürer,
but not for one by Rothko.
 Erwin Panofsky,
 content and meaning in a visual text were one
and the same thing.
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Dürer
Rothko
Panofsky
Panofsky and Fry are still
 not one and the same,
 but there is sufficient agreement
 between them.
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Panofsky
The iconologist believed
 the ‘intrinsic’ level of meaning
 reveals something of the spirit of the age.
 Panofsky’s third or intrinsic level
 also has something in common
 with the interpretive anthropology of Geertz.
 Panofsky argues that the world-view or
Weltanschauung of a period or social group
 is unconsciously embedded in painting.
Roger Fry
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Clifford
Geertz
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Roger Fry was an aesthete and a curator.
To John Berger,
Roger Fry
he would surely have been another of
those dreadful ‘clerks’ to the ruling class in decline.
Berger is a polemical art critic.
In Ways of Seeing he goaded
the art-historical establishment and
attacked the traditional connoisseurship
of specialists
such as Seymour Slive and Ernst Gombrich.
John Berger
Seymour Slive
Gombrich
The connection between Berger and Barthes is,
of course, much clearer.
 Both had a loathing of bourgeois values which
they saw lurking in visual texts.
 Polysemic texts call for
 polysemic methodologies.
 ‘semiotic orchestra’
 television advertisement (for example) John
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Berger
Roland Barthes
Ended this theoretical section with Geertz last for
four reasons.
 First, as it turns out, that
Clifford Geertz
 the other theorists have most in common.
 Second, he reminds us that
 all other methodologies are to some extent
interpretive themselves.
 Third, the semiotic strain is the one
 that has run most consistently
 through the different approaches.
 Fourth reason is the most important in a book
 about visual culture.
 A bravura passage which provokes us
 to think not only of cockfighting in Bali.
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FURTHER STUDY
The notion of culture,
 with which we began this chapter,
 is a large and contentious one.
 Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
 was first published in 1869,
 but has been republished
 and edited frequently since.
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Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Arnold argued for
 civilizing potential of traditional notions of culture
 in the face of encroaching ‘barbarism.’
 By contrast, T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture
 may appear positively liberal.
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T. S. Eliot
RUTH BENEDICT IN
PATTERNS OF CULTURE
Ruth Benedict
LEVI-STRAUSS WENT SO FAR AS TO
PRODUCE A STRUCTURAL THEORY OF
MYTH.
Levi-Strauss
ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS OF CULTURE
TEND TO BE
LESS HIERARCHICAL AND JUDGMENTAL
IN APPROACH.
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Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz
His The Interpretation of Cultures
together with Local Knowledge
provide hugely readable and informative compilations
of hermeneutical theory and practice.
‘Hermes’ Dilemma’
Hermeneutics, of course, is not limited to anthropology.
Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger.
were taken up in part by the German philosopher
Hans-Georg Gadamer,
 whose Truth and Method and
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Philosophical Hernzeneutics
In France, Paul Ricoeur
Hans-Georg Gadamer
 Pierre Maranda combined anthropological,
literary and reception theory in his essay
 ‘The Dialectic Metaphor.’
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Paul Ricoeur
Pierre Maranda
John Dunn
John Dunn in Practicing History and Social Science
on “Realist” Assumptions.
 It is appropriate to end this chapter — and this entire
first section
 — on such an inter- and indeed
 multidisciplinary note.
 As visual culture touches so many different aspects
of our lives,
 so should the ways in which
 we seek to understand it.
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