Image Consciousness and Historicity: between Phenomenology and Art History

This essay concerns two distinct topics in Husserlian phenomenology. The first is “image consciousness” [Bildbewusstsein], which concerns the experiential nature of our encounters with pictures and other depictive objects. The second is “historicity” [Geschichtlichkeit], which refers to how human subjects, prior to any detailed knowledge of history, are in some sense always already temporally embedded and orientated. These topics come from quite different periods of Husserl’s career, and normally receive separate treatments, but I will show that they have rich connections. Drawing from phenomenology, aesthetics and art history, I examine phenomenological and interdisciplinary connections between image consciousness and historicity relating to visual perception, intersubjectivity and narrativization.