Page - 78 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

78 | sigrid schade www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 75–88 ies in visual culture seem to promote “[…] a kind of visual essentialism that either proclaims the visual ‘difference’ – read ‘purity’ – of images or expresses a desire to stake out the turf of visuality against other media or semiotic systems.”9 so the approaches of studies in visual culture(s) have to be aware and take into account that their subject is embedded in a wider field of cultural practices, not be- cause they have to reflect on other practices and their interrelations with other sig- nifying systems as well, but in order to include approaches appropriate for analysing the interrelated effects. Therefore, Silke Wenk and I refer in Studies in Visual Culture. Introduction into a Transdisciplinary Research Field10 to Mieke Bal’s criticism regarding the idea of a given methodology or of a methodological toolbox: “[…] by selecting an object, you question a field. […] its methods (are not) sitting in a toolbox waiting to be applied; they too, are part of the exploration. You do not apply one method; you conduct a meeting between several, a meeting in which the object participates, so that, together, objects and methods can become a new, not firmly delineated field.”11 For her, this procedure is adequate with regards to interdisciplinary approaches: “[…] interdisciplinarity in the humanities, necessary, exciting, serious, must seek its heuris- tic and methodological basis in concepts rather than in methods.”12 Thinking in and with Traveling Concepts in the Humanities – the title of her book,13 – offers the reflec- tive flexibility needed within such research: […] concepts can become a third partner in the otherwise totally unverifiable and sym- biotic interaction between critic and object. This is most useful, especially when the critic has no disciplinary traditions to fall back on and the object no canonical or historical status. Concepts can only do this work, the methodological work that disciplinary traditions used to do, on one condition: that they are kept under scrutiny through confrontation with, not application to, the cultural objects being examined, for these objects themselves are ame- nable to change and apt to illuminate historical and cultural differences.14 Mieke Bal’s concept of working with travelling concepts within cultural analysis in- stead of with methods takes into account that the approach is always affected by the object and its material and vice versa. Her and Norman Bryson’s plea for such an approach can be subsumed under “semiological inquiry” in which studies in visual culture participate.15 9 Bal 2003, 5–32. 10 schade/Wenk 2011. 11 Bal 2007, 66–67. 12 Bal 2007, 2. 13 Bal 2002. 14 Bal 2007, 4–5. 15 Bal/Bryson 1991, 176–208.