Ritorno alla comparazione. Senso di connessione e conflitto negli studi di cultura visuale

Abstract

Conflict is the fundamental trope of W.J.T. Mitchell’s critical iconology. The relationships between texts and images are configured as theatres of war; in particular, they are conceived as ideologemes in which social, gender and racial conflicts are represented. With regard to this dialectic, the practice of comparison takes on an ambivalent status in Mitchell’s work. On the one hand, it represents a form of resistance to the universalising and essentialising tendency of discourses that aim to make a rigid verbal and visual distinction; on the other hand, insofar as it makes use of general standards on the basis of which similarities and differences are identified, it itself participates in this tendency. The thesis put forward in this paper is that, far from foreshadowing a dismissal of comparative practice, in Mitchell it is possible to find – particularly in the notion of metapicture – the seeds of a theorisation of comparison as a “differential” practice, in tune with the most recent epistemological and methodological reflections on the discipline.