Divorce
Discussion of the separation (read paragone, or war) between verbal and visual ways of knowing seems to have ossified in the modern era. Tom has the perfect quote on the subject from Matisse: “He who wishes to devote himself to painting must begin by cutting out his tongue.” W.J.T Mitchell has written about the great divide obsessively, and lately I’ve been digging into Barbara Stafford’s work regarding the rise and fall of “rational recreations” meant to tickle the ocular nerve. The separation seems to be a given, the possibility of its impermanence is not discussed nearly as often.
Along with the “persistence of vision” there are a number of key particles that simply drift about and reemerge in new ways. Morphemes like -graph, -type, -scope and -horama may hibernate for brief spans, but they always seem to come back into the lexicon to do the bidding of culture. Alan Trachtenberg has claimed that photography emerged as a keyword in the mid-nineteenth century which carries with it connotations that were ill-defined and contradictory at first, before they resolved into the cluster of properties we associate with “photographic realism.” I think he’s right. But I think I’d like to push that further. Not only have individual coinages fit some sort of cultural need, but the particles themselves are pressed into service to describe reconfigured modes of practice.
The divorce of visual and verbal is always temporary. They usually remarry with varying degrees of success.
