Mapping Turns: From the Linguistic Model to the “Metaphysics of Presence”

The proliferation of turns in recent decades makes it necessary to map them in a more comprehensive way than an intentionally chaotic list a la Borgesian Chinese encyclopedia (an example of such an intentionally disordered list is presented by British sociologist Mark Carrigan, who called for the turn to end all turns). The article takes a non-skeptical view of the proliferation of turns and identifies certain patterns behind the seemingly chaotic swarm of turns. The article takes as its starting point the mapping of cultural turns as an extension of the linguistic turn by the German anthropologist Doris Bachmann-Medick. To refine this mapping, we identify a pattern of movement from the linguistic model (by which we refer, following Jim McGuigan, to the generalization of the concept of verbal language based on structural linguistics) to the rehabilitation of presence (here we use somewhat polemically the term “metaphysics of presence”, a hobgoblin from the heyday of postmodernism). Our main case is a visual turn initiated in 1994 by the American scholar W. J. T. Mitchell and the German scholar Gottfried Böhm, who, independently of each other, began to talk about the image in a way that was quite different from previous visual scholars who saw images as an inferior version of verbal language. On the contrary, Mitchell and Böhm called for the liberation of images from the tyranny of language and rehabilitated their excessive presence. The movement toward a “metaphysics of presence” is not limited by the visual turn. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence (2003) is one of many examples of this tendency. We suggest that identifying a number of recent turns in negative terms as “anti-linguistic” turns (in other words, by what they turn from rather than what they turn to) helps to organize the seemingly chaotic proliferation of turns in recent decades. The article calls for a non-skeptical attitude toward the proliferation of turns, suggesting that the work of mapping helps to avoid falling prey to the latest intellectual fashion, which is not necessarily better (or worse) than that of the past.