Vizualna kultura i kraj tumačenja slike. Ili: Kako predsubjektivna fascinacija postaje teorijom bez subjekta
Visual Culture and the End of Image Interpretation. Or, how Presubjective Fascination Becomes a Theory without a Subject

Summary/Abstract: The development of visual culture in the last two decades re-opened the question of visual representation in literary and cultural theory. Due to «linguistic turn» in humanities and social studies in the 1960s, the role and position of non-linguistic systems of representation seemed neglected as opposed to the role of linguistic representation. Nevertheless, such relativization of the demarcation between linguistic and non-linguistic systems of representation secured the centrality of visual representation. Up to that point, inquiry of visual representations was bound to individual disciplines, such as art history, philosophy, semiotics, aesthetics, their disciplinary borders being only seemingly clear. With gradual mutual opening of disciplines visual representation lost the position of a sovereign subject of singular disciplinary interest. Re-engaging in the study of visual representations and in the classical philosophical discussion of vision largely reshaped the pre-existing fields of semiotic inquiry such as psychoanalysis, deconstruction, discourse analysis, media theories, cultural studies etc. The paper intends to show that such relativization of the demarcation between linguistic and non-linguistic systems of representation has the effect of the privileging of visual representation. The privileging of the image in the disciplinary area of visual culture becomes substitution of theoretical interpretation for presubjective experience of being fascinated with the image.

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