Sehen lassen : die Praxis des Zeigens

Abstract

A possible translation of the German title of Lambert Wiesing’s new book is the oddly repetitive ‘Showing: The Practice of Showing’. Such a gloss, however, would miss a distinction that is central to Wiesing’s argument. As he emphasizes (21), the German verb zeigen designates a genus of which both acts of showing and acts of pointing are species: I may show you Eleanor Catton’s new novel by holding it up before your eyes, or use my stretched-out finger to point in the direction of some bookcases. In the first instance, you are visually confronted with the novel, while in the second, I only confront you with my index finger, which may direct you to a best-seller that is itself hidden from sight. Armed with criteria borrowed from phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy, Wiesing argues that distinguishing these practices of zeigen (showing and pointing) is necessary for an adequate explication of statements like ‘this image shows my home town’ or ‘the postcard shows the Eiffel Tower’. The book has three parts. In the first, Wiesing explains what it is to show something, and how showing differs from pointing. Following Heidegger, he insightfully lays out how phenomenological analysis limits itself to what is unproblematically manifest; what, metaphorically, ‘shows itself’ in experience. In the second part, Wiesing criticizes three closely related theories of depiction: illusion theories, phenomenological theories, and a family of views scathingly labelled ‘the new image mythology’ (78). In the final part he motivates his own double-edged view, which combines perceptual and semiotic elements. He moreover raises and answers several thought-provoking questions about visual perspective, museum exhibition, and the special ‘indexical’ status of photography. Sehen lassen makes a significant contribution to ongoing philosophical discussions about depiction. It offers a development and a sharpening of a view Wiesing has argued for in recent years, most notably in his Artifizielle Prasenz (2005; trans. Artificial Presence, 2010). The current monograph differs from the earlier work in its emphasis on vision and on how things are shown or made visible by people, and in its fierce criticism of a dominant interpretation of phenomenological image theory. Wiesing denies that depiction can be analysed as a purely perceptual phenomenon, but at the same time argues that this does not undermine its status as a truly visual kind of representing. The work offers careful analysis and witty polemic, and almost every chapter foregrounds arguments that even to experts will have a refreshing and novel ring. Most of Wiesing’s examples and case studies are mundane, ranging from images found on eBay to the postcard from a friend. This is on purpose. Wiesing is not primarily interested in what hangs in museum galleries, because he wants to say something perfectly general about depiction. Fortunately, this also absolves him from the kind of amateur art history so common in recent philosophy of depiction. What does Wiesing think we mean when we say that an image shows some object or scene? He offers a compound analysis. Someone claiming ‘this postcard shows the Eiffel Tower’, implicitly means that: (1) on the postcard’s surface one can see an object that can only be seen—an ‘image object’ that to some extent visually resembles the Eiffel Tower—and that (2) some person used or intended this object to point us to the famous lattice tower in Paris, perhaps intending to suggest that the visual appearance of the image object we see matches the way the Eiffel Tower looks April

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