Anybody who is familiar with word-image problems knows that images do things that words cannot. It is very hard to use language to try to account for the specificity of the visual. There is clearly a big difference between these two ways of understanding. Donald Prezziosi, in an interesting turn of phrase, speaks of modernity as the main product of art history. If we understand modernity as the cultural period that is informed by a notion of teleological development inspired by the Hegelian notion of history, then clearly art history is deeply indebted to this philosophical attitude and this way of understanding the world.
Art history has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it is always going somewhere.
These are the foundations of art history, and it seems to me that art history is deeply indebted to the 19th-century ideas that are basis for modernism. I would like to associate postmodernity with poststructuralism. If this is the way postmodernity is understood, then it poses a challenge to all the assumptions made in modernity - the notion of history as teleological, the notion that there is a way of basing knowledge on foundational principles, the idea that language may be transparent to the world. On this basis, it would be possible to think of visual studies as both produced by and producing postmodernism. It would recognize different subject positions, insisting that subjectivity is always embedded in history.