ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an array of theoretical dispositions which facilitate a cultural formalist exploration of Image. The accent on the form of image is expounded by discussions that foreground sensuous reading of images. It draws on Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘obtuse meaning’ to evoke the obstinacy of visual forms in issuing affective experience. Walter Benjamin's treatise on the tactility of modern visual media is revisited to highlight ‘image’ as visual perceptual senses that partake in cultural formation. Referring to Michael Taussig's exposition of ‘mimesis’, the discussion then repositions the sensuous efficacy of visual material forms, thus complicating cultural criticism of which images are primarily read as signs or representations of reality. The chapter looks at how the formalist analysis of Image is part and parcel of cultural analysis. In light of Raymond Williams’ provocation for a social analysis of Formalism, the chapter engages with cultural theories that foreground sensual forms of experience. The discussion posits a methodological attention that looks at how visual material forms aid in tracing out cultural forms; or that the sensual form of images gets crystalised by reckoning with the sensual perceptual conditions of cultural experience. The chapter brings together sensual materialist reading of images and theories of cultural form with the aim of establishing the mode of visual cultural enquiry proposed in the book.
