ABSTRACT
The new fascination with modes of seeing and the enigmas of visual experience evident in a wide variety of fields may well betoken a paradigm shift in the cultural imaginary of our age. What has been called “the pictorial turn” bids fair to succeed the earlier “linguistic turn” so loudly trumpeted by twentieth-century philosophers. 1 The model of “reading texts,” which served productively as the master metaphor for postobjectivist interpretations of many different phenomena, is now giving way to models of spectatorship and visuality, which refuse to be redescribed in entirely linguistic terms. The figural is resisting subsumption under the rubric of discursivity; the image is demanding its own unique mode of analysis.
