The “I” and the “Eye” : The Verbal and the Visual in Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics

The paradigmatic moment of the opposition between the verbal and the visual arts may be seen in Lessing’s treatise on the Laocoön sculptural group, written in 1766; a moment that is identified within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins with Lessing, goes through Pater, and then culminates in Greenberg. The author delineates the opposition as a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division. The paradigmatic moment of the opposition between the verbal and the visual arts may be seen in Lessingâs treatise on the Laocoén sculptural group, written in 1766; a moment that is identified within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins with Lessing; that goes through Pater; and then culminates in Greenberg. I delineate the opposition as a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division. From the vantage point of my argument, the reader can experience a watershed in a critical tradition that has emerged in Williams' The Long Revolution (1961), Culture (1963) and Keywords (1976); Thompson's Working Class (1963) and Customs (1993); Schweizer's Ut Pictura Poesis (1972); Berger's Theory (1984); Wellbery's Lessing's Laocoön (1984); Mitchell's Iconology (1986); Summers' Judgement of Sense (1987); Rancière's Nights of Labor (1989) and Politics (2007); Eagletonâs Ideology (1990); Jay's Downcast Eyes (1994); Kirby's Telling Flesh (1997); Barnard's Art (1998); Jameson's Postmodernism (1999); Edgar's Key Concepts (1999); Schoroederâs Visual Consumption (2002); Eldridge's Philosophy of Art (2003); Kelly's Iconoclasm (2003); Malshe's Aesthetics (2003); Hall's Subjectivity (2004); Stallabrass' Contemporary Art (2004); Heffernan's Museum (2004) and Cultivating Picturacy (2006); Szerszynski's Nature (2005); Cottington's Modern Art (2005); Day's Class (2007); Hawkes's Ideology (2007); Gillespie's Theological Origins (2008); and Crawford's Shop Class (2009) The paradigmatic moment of the opposition between the verbal and the visual arts may be seen in Lessing's treatise on the Laocooen sculptural group, written in 1766; a moment that is identified within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins with Lessing, goes through Pater, and then culminates in Greenberg.