of genre, material, region, religion or timeframe. This conflict undermines
the possibility of art history as a conduit for cultural understanding. As
Foucault points out:“Order is, at one and the same time, that which is
given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the
way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except
in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language.”^72 Imposing its
grid, its glance, and its language over objects, art history risks voiding the
cultural substrate it claims to represent. Stable categories and semiotic
methods sever the mobile ligaments of similitude, immobilize bones iso-
lated as art, and reanimate them through the puppetry of history.(^72) Foucault, 2005 : xxi.
78 Seeing with the Ear