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James Elkins ends his article in the summer issue of Critical Inquiry on an enticing note: "The incoherence of pictures begins here, with the admission that things are very strange indeed" (James Elkins, "Marks, Traces, Traits,, Contours, Orli, and Splendores: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures," Critical Inquiry 21 [Summer 1995]). This attention to incoherence, and an interest in strangeness, indeed, strangeness as a primary heuristic tool, was the leading principle of my book Reading "Rembrandt," which advocated an approach to images as well as texts that would take vision and textuality as semiotic modes rather than ontological media.1 It would make sense to feel that this was a congenial essay with which I could productively engage since, I expected, it would productively engage with my work.
In the chapter "Recognition: Reading Icons, Seeing Stories" of that book, I discuss the art historical approach par excellence, iconography, and try to negotiate the disciplinary boundaries between art history and, say, a more semiotic approach to images by giving iconography maximal benefit of the doubt and reframing it as potentially useful for a semiotic analysis. My main concern in that chapter, as in the book as a whole, is to do justice both to semiotics's thrust toward interpretation-its project to articulate conditions of interpretability-and art history's placing priority-in theory if not always in practice-on the visuality of images.2 Indeed, the book firmly contends with the tendencies in each to turn its back to the other, art history by giving priority to recognition and similitude, semiotics by reducing visuality to language.
What Elkins takes to be dismissive of visuality because, reading too hastily, he fails to see my efforts to define visuality beyond figurative categories, is in fact a thorough investigation of what visual signs-subsemiotic, potential signs; discrete or replete signs; suprasemiotic clusters of signs ready to become texts-can be outside of the frequent conflation with linguistic categories that Elkins-just like Norman Bryson and me-rightly rejects.3
The first half of [Elkin's] long article takes issue with my work as a major example of semiotics's failure to theorize visuality as a meaning producing practice and images as meaningful "texts" (my word, not his). The question that I now wish to address is, Why is it that Elkins, who seems so clearly engaged with the same kind of questions-how to develop a visual semiotic-and who ends on a note that could almost be a quotation, if not of my words, then at least of my project, spends half of his lengthy essay attacking the very works that he is implicitly following? I am interested in this question not to get back at Elkins, not even to counter his criticism, but because it pertains to two important areas of academic work in general: that of modes of argumentation and their epistemological productivity, and that of the confusion between disciplines and paradigms.