ABSTRACT
According to Mitchell (1994), the linguistic turn has been followed by the pictorial turn. Pointing to the prevalence of and concern with contemporary visual culture, Mitchell nevertheless sees evidence of what he calls “the general anxiety of linguistic philosophy about visual representation” (1994, 12), by which he appears to be calling attention to the seeming paradox of fi nding a language to talk about our experience of the visual that does it justice and does not subordinate the pictorial to the linguistic. In his view what is required is a “broad, interdisciplinary critique . . . one that takes into account parallel efforts such as the long struggle of fi lm studies to come up with an adequate mediation of linguistic and imagistic models for cinema and to situate the fi lm medium in the larger context of visual culture” (15). Art history, he believes, could well play a central role here, if it rises to the challenge of offering “an account of its principal theoretical object-visual representation-that will be usable by other disciplines in the human sciences” (15).
